God and poverty

I highly recommend reading Good News About Injustice by Gary Haugen. In the book Haugen takes a Biblical look at God's response to injustice and its implications for our response as Christians. It's been really helpful in giving me scriptural reminders that God HATES injustice and wants his people to do something about it. (there are tons of related passages; Isaiah 1:17 is an example - "Learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.") Here's a passage from Haugen's book that I really like. Quoting John Stott, he comments on God's familiarity with suffering:

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Of course, this notion of a lofty, unknowable God who sits beyond the reach of my objections strikes me as infuriating. In the context of human suffering, I find no love for a God who sits on some serene, detached cloud of mystery rolling his eyes and exchanging if-they-only-knew smirks with the angels.

But then I remember Jesus, and I recall what my God, the one true God, is really like - the God of the cross. Even in the midst of the deepest human anguish, I remember why it is that I love Jesus and trust what he says. John Stott expresses my own convictions most beautifully:

"I could never myself believe in a God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as "God on the cross." In a real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered into our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our suffering became more manageable in light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering. "The cross of Christ...is God's only self-justification in a world such as ours."

So when at times I flippantly challenge the Almighty as to why he allows horrendous suffering, I am pulled up in a shudder of humility as I recall that there is no measure of his creation's suffering that he has not been willing to bear himself. Indeed, I stand before a God whose thoughts - and sufferings - are too great for me.

-Gary Haugen; Good News About Injustice
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