About "losing faith"....

This afternoon my husband took me to see the Christian movie, “Miracles from Heaven.”  It was the true story about a little girl with an incurable illness who fell 30 feet into the hollow tree she was climbing, and she “went to heaven” and “talked with God” while she was unconscious.  God told her she would be okay and she woke up, smiling.  No broken bones, nothing.  It was a miracle.  Somehow this fall “re-set” her brain, which caused her body to function normally again, and she was miraculously cured from her illness.

I know miracles can happen because, just before I turned 21, I nearly died from a ruptured appendix that remained inside me for four days and put me into a 3-week coma.  (They couldn’t figure out what I had.)  What always gets me about Christian movies like this, though, is that people always “lose faith” because God didn’t answer their prayers; and their pastors can never seem to find an answer for the question:  “Why do bad things happen to good people.”   The mother in this movie lost her faith and asked several times why God would allow a little girl to suffer.  (And all the while, some hypocritical “holier-than-thous” at her church suggested she wasn’t“ praying hard enough” or perhaps the family, or the little girl had sin in their lives….)

Anyway, WHY CAN’T pastors answer that simple question?  What the heck do they learn in seminary besides how to give “fluffy” sermons ?   Do they not know that “bad things happen” because we are in a fallen world where bad stuff happens?  We are IN this mess because Adam and Eve disobeyed YHWH by “eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”  Whatever that really meant, we simply don’t know, but we DO know that, ever since then, we have ALL been reaping the consequences of that “knowledge!”  THAT is why “bad things happen to good people.  NOBODY is exempt!  Not you, not me, not little innocent babies…NOBODY!  The Garden of Eden was Utopia, but man blew it over a piece of fruit, and now we are left to deal with sickness and death and poverty and wars and earthquakes and tornadoes and fires and floods.  That’s just the way it is!

People who have a REAL and SOLID relationship with YHWH/Y’shua don’t “lose faith” whenever things don’t go their way” or their prayers aren’t answered.  They know they need to pull closer to God and simply trust Him in WHATEVER happens!  Yes, we must have faith and hope, and to pray for a good outcome to our situation, but if we or our loved ones don’t recover, it doesn’t mean YHWH “didn’t answer our prayers” or that He doesn’t like us, or that He’s forgotten about us.  It means, He had other plans, for whatever reason (reasons we don’t get to know until after we’re out of these earth suits).  We aren’t equipped to see into the future, but YHWH is.  He KNOWS the beginning from the end, and He has His reasons for allowing things to happen – good or bad.

Isaiah 46:9 "Remember things that happened at the beginning, long ago - that I am God, and   there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. 10 At the beginning I announce the end, proclaim in advance things not yet done; and I say that my plan will hold, I will do everything I please to do. (CJB)

In the case of this little girl, He truly performed a miracle – so that her story could edify others and, if nothing else, at least cause them to think.  THAT is surely why He decided to save her.  It wasn’t because she was such a “good little girl” who deserved a miracle.  It was simply HIS choice – the same as it was HIS choice to make the murdering Paul an Apostle who would ultimately witness to the Gentiles, or raise Lazarus from the dead…so that people could see or hear of His miracles which caused them to stop and go, “Wow!  Maybe this God really IS real!” 

There is no doubt in my mind that He allowed me to recover from that ruptured appendix and the resulting gangrene throughout my body that caused my hair to fall out and my fingernails to curl from the high fevers…which also resulted in acute pancreatitis, which was another thing that should have killed me, but didn’t.  Like that little girl in the movie, I wasn’t spared from death because I was such a good girl, believe me!  Had I died back then, I would surely NOT have been destined for eternal life….

The truth is, YHWH has obviously done everything in His power to reach us here on earth – including causing His “Son” to be born as a human so he could live to proclaim the Kingdom of YHWH and teach people Torah!  (Luke 4: 43, Luke 8:1)  He uses whomever He wishes to get the point across that HE IS (IAM! - Exodus 3:13-15).  He revealed Himself to that little girl in the movie we saw today.  He revealed Himself to Adam and Eve and to Cain and Abel and Noah and Lot and to Abraham, the pagan Chaldean who became our first Patriarch, and to myriads across the millennia….He revealed Himself through His own Son who performed many miracles while walking this earth, and who willingly went to the stake to martyr himself as our final Sin Sacrifice/Offering.

Please don’t ever turn your back on YHWH, no matter what happens in your life.  He IS there and He LOVES you…that’s why He allowed you to be born into this world…a world where you have the choice to belong to Him, or not. 

      Deuteronomy 30: 19  “I have called the heavens and the earth as witnesses today against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore you shall choose life, so that you live, both you and your seed, 20  to love יהוה your Elohim, to obey His voice, and to cling to Him – for He is your life and the length of your days – to dwell in the land which יהוה swore to your fathers, to Aḇraham, to Yitsḥaq, and to Yaʽaqoḇ, to give them.” (ISR)