*said to Him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. So the Jews
were saying, “See how He loved him!” But some of them said,
“Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind man,
have kept this man also from dying?” (John 11:33–37)
The question asked is again hard to answer. Instead of preventing
the death of Lazarus, He allowed it to happen. And when
faced with the reality of his friend’s death, the Messiah wept.
He wept because of the pain and consequences of sin, moved
by compassion for those who lost a loved one and His own
personal grief. Though He could have come earlier to Bethany
and intervened, He chose to allow the consequences of the fall to
unfold. Whereas we do not know why God allows suffering and
death, we know He is not uncaring or untouched by the suffering
of His creation. If asked where God was during the Holocaust, we
can safely say that He was weeping with the very same grief He
manifested on the cross where He allowed the eternal weight of
sin and death to rest upon the shoulders of His Son. The Savior
suffers with us and for us!
Therefore, hard as it may be, we can still trust in a good, gracious
and unchanging God even though we might never understand the
depth of evil and hatred sinful mankind is capable of imposing
upon one another.
#2—WHERE WAS THE CHURCH?
C.S. Lewis, the eminent Christian author and apologist, once
observed, “When the Church has found its place in the world,
then the world has found its place in the Church.” Another of
history’s great mysteries is how a tiny sliver of Jewish faith,
existing under the dominion of the mighty Roman Empire,
became the preeminent faith of the Western world. As the Church
ceased to be a counterculture movement, it also became a
powerful political force that had a widespread, negative impact
on Jewish communities for many centuries.
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