Nielsen’s Nook

Some of our friends turned us on to a promotion at an online dating service, that rates blogs along the lines of movie ratings. I do not recommend online dating, generally because it tends to emphasize physical quantifiable aspects of a human being over the more complex personal aspects that are better intuited than stored in databases for anonymous observation. That being said, it is funny to see my blog is rated PG, because it refers to “death” 6 times and “hurt” 1 time (on the front page at least).

If one rates the pages that come up under Nielsen’s Nook’s “Suffering and Grief” category, interestingly we go of the charts, receiving a NC-17 rating for the following words that appear on that page:

• pain (27x)
• death (18x)
• dead (4x)
• murder (2x)
• hell (1x)

This marketing gimmick is not able to discern between words and concepts, literal uses and figurative uses of words. No real surprises there. However, is it not at least worth stopping to consider the fact that most of us have the same aversion to suffering and grief “Don’t talk to me about ‘pain’ man!” We spend so many of our resources and so much of our lives seeking to ilk out a life less suffered. We like living in the matrix, as it were.

Then there is reality. Some will say, “You’re being morbid. We should not seek out suffering.” The former is false and the later statement is unnecessary, both being non sequitors. I am saying there is life in a world condemned in and corrupted by sin that is at the same time being renewed and reformed in the life of Christ. Sin has cosmic proportions as does the incarnate- crucified- resurrected- and- ascended Christ.

I am reading Justinian’s Flea, by William Rosen presently. In it he presents a rendition of the bubonic plague that hit Constantinople in 542 AD. He interacts with Michael Behe, an Intelligent Design (ID) advocate, though he himself takes an evolutionary approach. Behe argues that the flagellum, the rotary motor used by bacterium to propel themselves, is an irreducibly complex component that indicates it could not have evolved and must have been created. Rosen points out that the same proton pump used to propel the flagellum is used to pump the deadly endotoxins of Y. pestis, into its victims causing tortuous death. Rosen then admits that neither ID nor evolution have satisfying answers regarding why the Y. pestis bacterium is constituted this way. ID implicates God in evil in its irreducibly complex argument and evolution cannot explain why the bacterium would slaughter its host so rapidly that it extinguishes its own life.

We do have revelation; a point that neither ID nor evolutionary theory want to acknowledge. It does not give us pithy answers, but it does tell us of a Fall that had cosmic significance. This revelation, found in the bible, puts that awful consequence, squarely upon the shoulders of the human race and more profoundly in the context of a God who is bent at redeeming a world out of suffering and grief through taking that suffering and grief upon himself. While I would never in the least desire the plague on anyone for a moment, plagues come. They come like tidal waves and without warning. Some come through illness, others through oppressive circumstances. The good news and the real news of the gospel does give itself to hope in the midst of suffering that we see in the words of one who also suffered much, the Apostle Paul:

⁹Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. (2 Corinthians 1:9, ESV)