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A Heartbreaking Letter From Indonesia

June 28, 2015     Time: 14:20
A Heartbreaking Letter From Indonesia

Summary

Dr. Craig receives a letter from a woman who is on the brink of losing her faith in the face of tragedy.

Transcript A Heartbreaking Letter from Indonesia

 

KEVIN HARRIS: Hi. Welcome to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m Kevin Harris. As you are probably aware, this past week the US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the United States. Dr. Craig has made some statements on it including this one:

Supreme Court Redefines Marriage.

Well, God has chosen once again to allow people to freely choose their own undoing rather than intervene to preserve righteousness. I fear that with this Supreme Court decision redefining marriage, America has past a watershed in its cultural and moral degradation. It beggars the imagination that our society allows states to prohibit marriage between first cousins despite their love for one another, etc., and yet will not allow states to prohibit marriage between two men or two women. Churches and religious institutions who refuse to redefine marriage in order to accommodate cultural pressures will now find themselves increasingly under duress.

Let me tell you that we are working on some podcasts about the court’s decision. Look for them. In the meantime, please listen to some past podcasts where Dr. Craig discusses some related topics. You can use the search function at ReasonableFaith.org for audio and some articles. But let me give you some podcast titles now that we recommend as you contemplate this court decision. Some of these you may have heard. They are worth going back over. One is “The West Wing Homosexuality Episode.”[1] Lots of people have commented on this podcast where we interact with that famous West Wing TV show episode on homosexuality. Another is “Can a Christian Be Homosexual?”[2] “Same-Sex Marriage.”[3] Another title is, “Issues of Same-sex Marriage.”[4] Look for those four and some more.

Again, some new commentary on this from Dr. Craig is forthcoming. But today we want you to hear a heartbreaking letter to Dr. Craig from a woman in Indonesia. You may remember the Indonesian flight QZ8501 tragedy several months ago. Dr. Craig and I were in the studio not long after it happened and got this letter.

Dear Dr. Craig, first of all I wish to thank you for all the tremendous work you have done to defend the Christian faith. Many of my Christian friends have been blessed by your ministry, especially in apologetics. Also your works have been what finally brought me (an ex-agnostic) to Christ three years ago. My question is regarding one of the latest news. I am an Indonesian living in Surabaya. The plane accident has had a huge impact on me. But most of all, it was a great shock for a friend of mine. She is a Christian attending Mawar Sharon Church with her parents. They were such wonderful persons as well as good Christians. But then they were traveling on this flight while my friend stayed at home. You know the rest of the story. She lost her faith, and more or less it had a destructing effect on my faith. She has been a Christian for years and one of those who brought me to Christ. It crushed my faith as well as my heart to see the empty seat in the church that she used to sit on. It has been more than a month and I don’t know what to do to bring her back to God.

DR. CRAIG: Let me just say something first. When we get an anguished letter like this about someone losing faith through seeing or experiencing some terrible tragedy in that person’s life, I think what we want to agree with is that this is something that crushes your heart as she says. That is entirely appropriate – that our hearts should be crushed to experience this sort of tragedy. But it shouldn’t crush our faith. I find it that we hear reports of these sorts of things daily in the news, and that doesn’t crush our faith. We think that God has morally justifying reasons for permitting the Holocaust or the tsunami or a terrible accident that has happened, and our faith isn’t crushed. But then when it happens to us personally it seems to be so crushing and there is obviously a disconnect there.[5] Just because it happens to me doesn’t make the intellectual problem any more difficult. What is going on here (and I think we need to realize this) is we are reacting emotionally. That is what makes the difference. When it happens to you personally the emotional impact – the crushing of your heart – makes this all the more difficult to bear. But it shouldn’t add to the intellectual difficulty of the question. We have long been aware of incidents like these and didn’t abandon faith. So when it happens to us personally we, I think, need to step back and say, There is no reason that this happening to me rather than to others should make me doubt my faith any more than those incidents did. I am just responding in an emotional way, and I need to feel the pain, embrace the pain, get through the pain, but not imagine that this sharpens in any way the intellectual problem at hand.

KEVIN HARRIS: Of course it is going to hurt. Knowing the intellectual answers will help with the emotional baggage that we are going to deal with as well.

DR. CRAIG: I think it can. But what I want to try to forestall is people thinking that because their hearts are crushed that somehow the problem of evil is now intellectually worse because they are involved. That just doesn’t follow. It is not an intellectual problem in that case; it is your emotions. So one needs to say, What can I do to provide a salve for my emotions to get my heart through this and to not let it produce intellectual doubts and abandon my faith as in the case of her friend.

KEVIN HARRIS: Continuing the letter:

She started questioning every Christian, including me. Here is her question that I would like to ask you.

1. Is her parents’ death already predetermined by God? Suppose she had a nightmare the day before the flight and told her parents about it, and thus they decided not to fly at all, and of course still alive by now. Could their free will somehow cancel God’s predetermination? I’ve read your book The Only Wise God and it gave me insight on how to answer. I, however, feel that I need to ask you in case I missed some points.

DR. CRAIG: Good for her that she has read the book in advance, and so knew how to respond to this first question. The answer I would give is that no it is not predetermined by God. And if she had had a dream and told her parents about it so that they didn’t get on the flight then yes they would be still alive today. This all falls within the providence of God. He allowed them to get on that flight. He did not give a forewarning or a dream such that they would freely avoid it. We can with confidence know that God allowed that only because he had a morally sufficient reason for allowing this tragedy to occur. This can provide tremendous comfort to us. This isn’t all predetermined by God, but God in his providence allowed it to happen because he will bring some overriding good out of it and therefore allowed it to happen.

KEVIN HARRIS:

This second question I wish to ask you is less intellectual.

2. In dealing with the problem of pain and suffering, I know the victim doesn’t need any intellectual arguments. My friend needs Jesus as her source of comfort and peace. I know you are a philosopher and an apologist, but I hope you can tell me what I should do in dealing with her as well as my own failing faith. What can I say to a broken-hearted Christian who starts to turn away from God because he has taken her parents from her?

DR. CRAIG: In terms of her own faith, she needs to be constant in her personal devotional life, Bible reading and prayer, worship of God in a meaningful corporate environment, Christian fellowship, sharing honestly and openly with other Christians about the struggles that she is going through. She shouldn’t try to cut herself off from these resources in the way that her friend does who now apparently has ceased to go to church and is withdrawing from the Christian community that can be a source of emotional strength to get through this. The person who wrote this letter needs to keep in touch with the Christian community and to keep up her devotional and spiritual life in order to make it through this difficult trial.[6]

Then in dealing with her friend, I think she needs to be there as a friend, to listen to her, to be a good listening ear, not so much what she says to the friend as to be a sounding board for the doubts and the heartbreak that she expresses. Then especially, though, to say what is the best hope for your parents? It is Christian theism! If Christian theism is true – if Jesus is risen from the dead – then your parents are alive today with God and they await you there to meet you someday. This is the source of hope. Why would you cut yourself off from that in favor of atheism or Buddhism or some other sort of religion that offers no hope whatsoever? What would your parents want you to do right now? Are they in heaven praying for you now saying, Oh that she will endure! That she will keep her faith and be true to the Lord just as we were! Of course that is what her parents would want her to do.

So I hope that this woman will encourage her friend to do all that she can to cling to faith, to go to Christ. In my books where I’ve talked about the emotional problem of evil, I’ve suggested meditating upon the cross of Christ and his wounds because if anyone could complain of innocent suffering it would be Christ. Yet he has embraced it voluntarily for our sake and our salvation – to give us an eternal life of unimaginable joy beyond anything that we can comprehend. The pain and the suffering of this life is just infinitesimal in comparison with that life of joy that we will spend with him forever. So hold out to her friend this wonderful hope and prospect that Christianity gives.

If her friend says, Well, that is just pie in the sky. That is just wishful thinking, then go to the evidence of the resurrection, the arguments for God’s existence, and provide those intellectual resources to undergird that hope.

KEVIN HARRIS: Isn’t it wise of her to say, I realize that what she needs now is comfort. I realize it is not strictly intellectual arguments that she needs right now. Certainly to be what you just said, and that is to be undergirded by those. At the very end of the letter she says, “I know my last request sounds cliché but please pray for the two of us. Devina.” I’ll ask this audience to be in prayer for Devina and her friend and the others who were involved in this tragedy. And I know you share that, Bill.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I think it would be appropriate to pray now.

Father, we do bring before you our sister, Devina, and her friend and pray that you would sustain them by your grace and by your indwelling Holy Spirit. We pray that you would help them to work through the hurt and the grief that you understand and experience and know. We pray that you would fill them with courage and with faith and with endurance to get through this time in hope of eternal life. We pray that for both of these dear sisters this would be simply a dark valley through which they will pass and from which they will emerge victorious in this life. We commit them to your loving care through your Holy Spirit. In Jesus’ name, Amen.[7]