EDITORIAL: Eternal lament: Why did God do this?

Posted: 9/15/06

EDITORIAL:
Eternal lament: Why did God do this?

“Why did God do this to me?”

I don’t know how loudly James Polehinke asked that question, but his words reverberated around the globe.

Polehinke is the only survivor of Comair Flight 5191, which crashed in a private farm just past the end of Blue Grass Airport’s Runway 26 at 6:07 a.m., Aug. 27. Forty-nine other people died.

Polehinke, the co-pilot of Flight 5191, remained in serious condition in the University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital in Lexington. The Louisville Courier-Journal, which reported Polehinke’s question, said he did not specifically mention the crash. Still, contemplating his pain and loss, he asked the question that has sprung from the lips of suffering souls for millennia: “Why did God do this to me?”

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Polehinke asked the question of family friend Antonio Cruz, who responded: “It was not God. It was just an accident.”

The Courier-Journal cited human errors that led to the awful crash, the worst air disaster in the United States in almost five years:

• The air traffic controller who cleared Flight 5191 for takeoff had only two hours’ sleep between shifts. Immediately after giving the go-ahead, the controller turned to other administrative duties and did not visually monitor the airplane’s progress.

• The pilots had not taken off from the airport since the taxiway had been changed a week earlier. Although the flight recorder indicated they noticed their runway did not have working lights, they did not ask why.

• The plane’s compass should have indicated the aircraft was pointed in the wrong direction, yet the pilots continued.

• Ultimately, the plane took off from Runway 26, which is only 3,500 feet long—half the distance needed by commercial carriers that size. The pilots should have steered the plane the opposite direction down 7,000-foot Runway 22.

• The plane skidded on the grass at the end of the runway. Then it hit, in succession, a berm, the airport’s perimeter fence and the tops of trees before crashing in farmland.

The sole survivor asks: “Why did God do this to me?” A friend responds: “It was not God. It was an accident.”

Do you think God caused the crash of Flight 5191? Throughout time, people who have sought meaning in unspeakable horror have pondered God’s role in suffering. Devoted and thoughtful people of faith have offered answers that span a significant spectrum of possibility. On one end, people who defend God’s absolute sovereignty claim nothing happens aside from God’s design. So, whether we find this awe-inspiring or just plain awful, they believe God causes planes to crash and newlyweds, Habitat for Humanity volunteers, college professors and parents of small children to die. At the other end, people who defend God’s unconditional love insist such unjust suffering is contrary to God’s nature. So, as random and capricious as tragedy may be, they believe God has nothing to do with it.

No one fully knows or comprehends the infinite wisdom and logic of God. We who affirm God as Creator and Lord of all cannot fathom anything beyond God’s will and reach. We who affirm God’s limitless love as exhibited in the sacrificial death of his Son, Jesus, cannot imagine God would behave so willfully and destructively and take 49 lives just to make any kind of theological point.

Each of us who ponders God’s role in evil and suffering will come down somewhere along that spectrum. You must make your own evaluation. But count me as one who believes God would not propel a plane down a short runway and shove 49 people into eternity on a Sunday morning. God’s perfect will would not inflict such unspeakable suffering. God’s permissive will allowed it.

And why would God allow such horrible decisions? The same reason God has been allowing humanity to make bad decisions since the beginning: The Bible clearly indicates God created people so we could receive and reciprocate God’s love. In order to reciprocate, we must be free—free to love God, but also free not to love God. With that freedom comes the full scale of freedoms to make all kinds of choices—to drive drunk, abandon children, abuse our bodies, taxi the wrong way down a too-short runway.

The deaths of a planeload of people might seem like an awful price to pay for the freedom to make choices, including loving or not loving God. But it also ought to remind us how wild and furious and costly and precious is that freedom.

Lest we think God takes our freedom lightly, remember God sacrificed God’s only Son to redeem us from our wrong choice not to reciprocate divine love. God knows and bears our suffering.

Marv Knox is editor of the Baptist Standard.


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