With God, There Is No "Them"

by Bob Setzer, Jr.
Those searing images of devastation in Indonesia and the Samoan Islands are hard to watch. They pop up on our television and computer screens, or in our newspapers, and we recoil in shock. Seeing so many people devastated by nature’s fury, leaves us shaking our heads in disbelief and sadness. Perhaps we breathe a prayer for the victims and their families. Perhaps we feel gratitude for the Christian service agencies, international organizations, and our own government working to aid in the recovery. But in very short order, most of us are back to wondering if our alma mater will win this Saturday and what’s for dinner.

While it may sound callous to admit, this is not altogether surprising. When we do not know the victims of a disaster personally, especially a disaster on the other side of the world, our capacity to feel the anguish of the victims is somewhat limited. Our most deeply felt sadness is reserved for people we know whose suffering is tangible, and touchable, and painfully close to home.

I wonder, though, what it must be like for the One to whom there is no “other side” of the world; the One for whom not even the sparrow’s fall escapes divine notice; the One whose tears we see on the face of Jesus; the One for whom the Samoan fisherman, whose family and home perished in a Tsunami, is not a statistic, but the intimately known and dearly treasured child of God?

After the earthquakes that spawned a tsunami in the Samoan Islands and brought death and ruin to Indonesia, my wife, Bambi, introduced me to a web app called “Google Earth.” One of the views this application provides is a series of red dots showing all the earthquakes presently occurring. It’s unbelievable. There are red dots everywhere. Of course, most of these seismic disturbances are not large enough to cause a problem, or shake the world in remote places or under the sea where nobody lives, so they escape notice. But when Jesus said 2,000 years before Google, “there will be earthquakes in various places” as the “birth pangs” of the new creation (Mark 13:8), he surely knew what he was talking about.

What if in heaven, there is a cosmic monitor with little red dots that shows all the earthquakes, metaphorically speaking, presently occurring upon the earth: joblessness, sickness, bereavement, divorce, depression, and all the rest? And what if the One looking at the red dots, does not look with detachment, but with anguish and with tears? Because this One has lived our life, walked our earth, plumbed our darkness and died our death, that he might live at the epicenter of the world’s pain and need? In other words, where you live. Where I live. And where that bereft and bewildered Samoan fisherman lives too.

That would be and is the Good News, that our God is Immanuel: God with us and with “them” too.