"My Christianity Sucks!"

“My Christianity sucks!”

It was a moment of supreme transparency, and I couldn't help but feel a kinship with my friend's sentiments. Several years have passed since that conversation, and that’s the only sentence I recall from it, but those words sunk down deep. Though I'm reasonably sure I've never expressed it quite that way, there have many days when translating my soul’s spirituality into electric impulses would have transmitted the weakest of vital signs. If there had been some device to electronically connect my heart to the keyboard of my laptop, Microsoft Word would have received very little communication. In fact, it probably would have typed just one sentence: My Christianity sucks!

Perhaps you've never felt that way, but I would be bold enough to guess that at some point, during some spiritual dry spell in your life, you were tempted to doubt the validity of your whole experience as a Christian. You know the time. Maybe you put on your church face and no one was the wiser, but when you peeled it off in the mirror at home after the sermon there was that vacuous stare from the eyes on your soul. You didn’t think your prayers would get past the ceiling, even if you could think of anything else to say. You didn’t voice, “My Christianity sucks.” But you felt it.

If you’re hoping for some cushy, feel-good , “this too shall pass” dénouement for the “My Christianity sucks” crisis, you will have to look farther than my blog. I don’t have that kind of solution to write for you because, when you are in that valley, some glib, poetic, philosophical resolution is almost entirely useless. “My Christianity sucks” rarely resolves with beautiful, dramatic closure.

One thing kept coming back to me, though, as I pondered my friend’s exclamation: “My Christianity sucks!” The word my. Is it your Christianity? Could that be the problem? My brand of Christianity could be lacking if I acquired, designed, and fitted it on my own. No wonder it sucks—I suck at creating beautiful things out of the unlovely. But wouldn’t you know…God doesn’t. He’s a master at that.

Does your Christianity suck? Maybe it’s time to exchange it for Christ’s brand of Christianity. Throw out all your failures to attain, all your notions of what you must do, and be an empty vessel for Christ to fill. After all, that’s what He is waiting on anyway.

Yes, it’s harder to do than it sounds. It’s humbling to plead with David through the darkness “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Thy presence; and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.” (Psalm 51:10) But it’s certainly better than wearing the façade of your Christianity, hiding behind some past spiritual high and hoping you can revitalize it before it withers. Just let go of it, and ask Christ to give you a new Christianity—His version of Christianity. It may actually be more demanding than yours was, but it will also be more rewarding and less fickle. Take His yoke upon you…and you will find rest for your soul.

The Stop Evil Button or Solution X

David looked at his class studying the issue of a good God and a bad world and added another point to the theodicy: If there was a "stop evil button" that you could walk up and push, making all the bad in the world cease instantly, would you do it?

I was watching Theodicy, a Scripture mysteries documentary by Anchorpoint Films. Among the interviews, David Asscherick and Clifford Goldstein's comments took me back to seminars of theirs that I had been in and books of theirs I had read that discussed this issue of the problem of evil. The "stop evil button" illustration particularly intrigued me. More than likely, any of us would do it. Yet, ironically, God--the only One who could push the button--hasn't. Why?

As David Hume so succinctly formulated the problem of a good God and a bad world, "Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?" (Hume). The youth class I teach at church discussed this question last week. We talked about the Biblical accounts, especially in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, of the perfect angel who chose to rebel and wreak havoc on the universe with his accusations against God and his thirst for power. All of that explained how evil originated, but it still didn't answer the question of why God didn't stop it.

Many people I have spoken with have used this as an impenetrable obstacle to any argument that God is good, fair, and just. There seems no intellectually honest avoidance of the question of what possible good reason could exist for why God has allowed horrific things to occur on this planet. Is there any way of justifying it?

Whether it is entirely new or valid theologically, the question and answer I put to the youth class was similar to the "stop evil button" illustration: Think of all the horrors and atrocities on Earth that you abhor, and imagine that there was one penalty that could be paid to end it all--forever. Nothing bad could ever resurface on the radar screen of human existence if you gave the "okay" to this one solution. But there is only the one solution. The solution, whatever it is, likely won't be pleasant in the performance, however it will be permanent. We'll call it Solution X.

Now try to calculate the cost of Solution X. You don't know what it is, so make it as terrible as you can possibly imagine it to be. Can you think of anything that would be too costly an exchange for the permanent eradication of evil? Philosophically I think the question is fairly easy to answer; selfishly, perhaps not. I'm not under the illusion that all, or even most, would honestly be willing to say "yes" to whatever Solution X might be because there are those who would not take a personal sacrifice for the ultimate good. However, many have done so and most, I hope, can appreciate that, logically, there could not be anything worse than eternal evil. Anything less to pay for a permanent solution would probably be better.

So the punchline is...that God did hit the "stop evil button." When He looked at the rebellion the devil had started and knew that destroying him would only eliminate the instigator, but not his rebellion and the issue of evil, the omnipotent and omniscient Creator already understood Solution X. The price was high--it meant letting evil mature so it could be destroyed completely. It meant allowing every horrific thing to happen in the great controversy that would forever convince the universe that the devil was wrong. It meant permitting a part of Himself, His own son, to leave heaven to live, suffer, and die on Earth to redeem humanity from sin. It meant allowing evil its day of power so that it could be eternally terminated. It was Solution X, the only remedy that wouldn't just treat the symptoms but would heal the underlying problem.

God said Solution X was worth it. He hit the "stop evil button," but sometimes, because Solution X requires more time than any individual lifetime, it's hard to appreciate the delayed effect. Someday we will, though, and I'm reminded of this when I read what John wrote in Revelation 21:4 of the end of sin and suffering: "And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away."

Note: This is the first part of a two-part post on the topic of theodicy.


Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Project Gutenberg. Web. 22 Jan. 2011. .