Since the events in Pennsylvania on Saturday and the attempt on former president Donald Trump’s life, many in the Christian community have been praising God for God’s divine intervention. While I am not a fan of our former president, I am glad he wasn’t harmed any worse than he was. It doesn’t matter what your political affiliation might be: violence and murder are unacceptable and never the answer. But did God intervene to save the former president’s life? Some Christians believe God must have moved the bullet. This highlights one of the fundamental problems people have with the Christian faith today.
In missing its intended target, the bullet struck and killed an innocent bystander, Corey Comperatore. Do you see the problem? Did the hand of God save Donald Trump at the expense of another person’s life? Would a God of grace, mercy, and love act in such a way that one person would live and another would die? How do we, as Jesus-followers, reconcile something like this?
One of the foundational beliefs of the Christian faith is that “with God all things are possible.” For many Christians, this means if God chooses to do so, God can change the trajectory of negative events as easily as God could change the trajectory of an assassin’s bullet. When they happen for good, we call these divine interventions miracles. Our definition of a miracle is something good that happens that can’t be explained other than to say it was by divine or supernatural intervention.
We find these stories all over the pages of scripture, and if they happen in the Bible, they must also happen in human life, right? If that’s accurate, was it a miracle for the Comperatore family? If divine intervention saved Donald Trump, why didn’t it save Corey Comperatore? The idea of divine intervention breaks down in real-world circumstances. Why do bad things happen to good people? Or, maybe it’s better to say, if God is good, why do bad things happen? The Christian faith hinges on how we answer this question…and that’s what I’ll try to do in part 2 of this blog, which will be published tomorrow. Who doesn’t love a good cliffhanger, right?