The Interruption of Blessing // Blessed to be a Blessing, Part 2

They say that God is a God of Blessing. Hmm. So how come there’s so much suffering in the world? What went wrong? How come I have to suffer? Where’s God’s blessing then?

The classic dilemma when we talk about God’s blessing is, "Well okay, so if God is a god of blessing, how come there is so much suffering in the world? How come I've had to go through this and this and that? How come there are natural disasters? Come on, how come?" And you know something, that's a very real and a very reasonable question. How come?

And it's something that's always in the back of my mind when I talk with people about God’s blessing because chances are someone who is listening is going to be suffering right at the moment. And that person may well find any notion of God being a god of blessing, pretty difficult to swallow just now. So let’s unpack that just a bit today. How come?

Right from the beginning God was a god of blessing. Yesterday on the program we had a look at the very, very first chapter in the Bible, Genesis chapter 1. And when God creates the first living creatures he blesses them and gets them to multiply and fill the earth. And when God creates us, male and female, he blesses us by handing over the whole creation to us. “Here, take all the birds and the fish and the beasts and have it all, it's yours to use, subdue them, fill the earth, multiply.”

And when you look through the Bible, the whole concept of blessing, the word bless, appears over 350 times but at the same time there's plenty of bad stuff that happens to people right through the Bible, and plenty of bad stuff that happens to people today, here and now.

Sometimes we look at them and quietly think, “Well, you know, he deserved that.” But other times they're innocent people – really bad things happen and we wonder, "Well, if God is a loving God like those Christians say that He is, this God who wants to bless us, supposedly, if that’s who He is, how can He let those things happen to people like that?" That is a really good question.

One of my favourite actors, (I grew up as a baby boomer) one of my favourite television shows of all time is MASH. It's an American program and it ran for, I think, 11 seasons. And the star of MASH is a man called Alan Alda, an actor whom I just enormously admire and respect. He played Hawkeye Pearce in MASH and played a whole bunch of things afterwards. I saw him recently interviewed on a program called, "Inside the Actors Studio". The interviewer was a man called James Lipton and he asks Alan Alda a question like this, he says, "If there is a God, what do you want to say to him when you get to heaven?"

Now, Alan Alda is a really friendly, warm, engaging kind of guy and it's been a really warm and friendly and engaging kind of interview until Lipton asks this question. And Alda's face goes black and dark and serious and he says something like this, "God. God, tell me about the earthquakes and the tsunamis and the suffering. Tell me all that was just a bit of a joke."

And a lot of people feel like that about God. Christians talk about a God of blessings, Christians talk about a God of love but there's a whole bunch of bad stuff happening in this world. How do you explain that away? Okay, why? If God is a god of blessing, how come all this suffering is going on?

So we've looked at God’s own account of his creation in Genesis, chapter 1. The very first living creatures he creates he blesses them and says, "Go and multiply and fill the earth." He creates us and he hands the whole thing over to us, enormous blessing. And here are you and I, joint owners in creation because God created us in his own image and he handed the whole thing over to us. And when you stop and think about that that was a huge blessing.

Right at the point of creation, God was in the blessing business. It's profound. It's a plan for us to live in relationship with him. But then somethi