Have you ever looked around the world and noticed that sometimes the wicked succeed and sometimes good people suffer? If you haven’t noticed, you are not living in the world I live in. I appreciate so much Job’s questioning (Job 21:7) because it will make us think about whether there is really a moral order in the creation. I always liked Job because he insists on looking at what actually happens in the world and is a practical sort of guy. Yet, this practicality leads to skepticism of the notion that people regularly get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Sometimes people bring trouble upon themselves; just as often it seems to be a random fate of suffering. Job seems to be right and there is no moral order in the world. However Job and his friends (and by the way, us too) have all been assuming that a moral order operates automatically. We think God is our cosmic “Bell Hop” who is supposed to produce a Walt Disney “happy-ending” story in every life. I call this the “Mickey Mouse Theology.”
God brings moral order to the world through His creation and continually sustains it. God commands persons to live morally but leaves humans free to obey or disobey. Yet, there is more. God brings moral order through His valuing the life of every person and his judgment that His creation is “good.” Thus each being is a center of value that must be treated with respect. Moral order requires relationships of “rightness” with others and especially with God. These relationships are in part a matter of mutual limits that secure a place for each being. As creatures endowed with freedom, human beings have to choose to perceive and embody such an order of rightness and respect in community. To covet, to steal, to commit adultery, to bear false witness, to kill—all such actions violate the integrity of a fellow human. To honor one’s parents and to respect God enhance the cooperative bonds that form community. To keep the Sabbath, the sign of God’s creation, is to recognize the close relationship between the order of rightness personified in creation and the order of rightness embodied in the moral law. We can’t have the “happy-ending” story because we have so often chosen to reject God’s moral order. Our only hope is that God will restore His creation. The sadness of it all is that God does give us a happy-ending story through the suffering of His Son on the cross because we can’t get the moral order right in our own lives.