Today, when I came back from a work assignment in Wilsonville, I heard about the bombing of the Boston Marathon from our building’s security guard, an ironic way to find out about such a lapse of security. Ultimately, though, no matter how strenuously we may seek to protect ourselves from harm, if someone wants to hurt us badly enough or enough people want to hurt us or powerful enough people want to hurt us, there is little that we can do to protect ourselves. Often our best defense is either the divine protection of God, the goodwill of others towards us, or the good fortune of having a life that has largely avoided traumas and trials and difficulties and disasters. Most of us (myself included) would have trouble relating to such good fortune ourselves.

We live in an insecure world where trust is scarce. Rulers and authorities often fear being taken away from power because they will be held accountable for things that they cannot control, as well as for the corruption that they are involved in that is very much under their control, but all too often is undisciplined. Natural disasters and violence threaten us, it seems, from every quarter. Our jobs and statuses and often felt as being under threat with every piece of bad or uncertain news, and our families are often no more secure and safe than anywhere else in this deeply troubled world. No matter how many metal detectors and bomb detectors we go through in our jobs and travel and entertainment, we can never fully feel safe because there is always something that can be done by someone with enough resources and the evil desire to cause violence and destruction to further their aims. And yet we often prefer the illusion of security to the truth of insecurity because we wish to preserve such shreds of sanity as we have left to us and cannot bear to face the truth.

For a theist who believes in a personal God, there are three ways that we can look at the attitude of God towards our safety. First, we can consider ourselves as being believers under the care and protection of God. We must note, some more urgently and seriously than others, that God does not promise to keep us from any times of trials or difficulties in exchange for our goodness and faith. Nor should we be under any illusions that we all bring much trouble on ourselves through our folly and incompetence, just as surely as all of us face a lot of trouble through no fault of our own except for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, those of us who have a personal faith believe that God will work out everything in our lives for the good, and that neither death nor distance can separate us from the love and care of our Heavenly Father. We do recognize that these promises are only for those who are believers, those who are citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, and are covered by grace and mercy as a result of our repentance from sin and other dead works.

A second way that God can deal with the great mass of mankind that is not repentant nor obedient is to allow time and chance to take their effect without either direct assistance or direct punishment. This world is full of enough evils, and enough problems, that we quickly ensnare ourselves without any sort of divine assistance. Often we tend to first assume in the case of a disaster that the people who suffer must have been worse evildoers than the rest of the evildoers on the globe to have suffered from a given war or drought or volcano or earthquake or terrorist attack or building collapse or any of the innumerable other difficulties that we suffer with. The fact is that all of us live in danger, and threats are all around us, and sooner or later we find ourselves suffering as a result of time and chance, of circumstance and situation. In such a case, we are often not to blame except for having been in a place and situation with certain risks and those risk came true. Jesus Christ in the Gospels speaks of this sort of situation when he comments on the Gallileans who were killed in a crackdown by Pilate, whose blood was mixed with their sacrifices in the temple, as well as the inhabitants of Jerusalem who died when the Tower of Siloam fell. In both of those cases those who died were not righteous or redeemed people, but neither were they more wicked than the rest of their fellow human beings. Nonetheless, they died as a result of time and chance, as human beings have suffered since our beginnings through life in a sinful and fallen world.

The third way that God can deal with mankind is through direct judgment and punishment. At some level and at some point in time we have to realize that we are worthy of death for our sins. When we insist on treating people how we think they deserve to be treated, we set a dangerous precedent for ourselves, since we too are fallen and corrupt and wicked in the same ways as those who condemn us. If we desire pure and hostile judgment for others in the name of justice, we have to be very careful, as that same standard of justice will be merciless and pitiless towards us when our time for judgment comes. There are times when God provides judgment to the wicked, and those are not times that anyone ought to wish. As all are wicked and comparatively few show nay sense of sorrow at the sins of our wicked societies, there will be little joy to be found when our friends and families and neighbors face judgment, if we live to see those dark days. Even those who survive will not survive unscathed or unchastened or unscarred. We ought to appreciate the severity and the reality of divine judgment, but ought not to call upon it or to desire it too strongly, in ignorance of the judgment that we have merited for our own sins and faults.

How then are we to make sense of the difficulties and sufferings of this world, whether they are natural or manmade? We have to admit that we live in a dangerous world that is full of dangers, to live as sensibly and responsibly as we can in light of those threats in the knowledge that we can never banish risk and danger from our existence, and seek to recognize and appreciate the divine protection and providence we receive over the course of our lives. All too often we are reminded of our own mortality, of our own frailty, of our own insecurity. We ought not to run from these reminders, but neither ought we to despair of living worthwhile lives even given the uncertainties and risks that we face. A life spent in a dangerous world is a life that provides plenty of opportunity to learn from mistakes, to help and comfort others who are suffering, as well as to recognize the loving care and protection we receive from the Eternal. All things considered, that is a life worth living, and a life worth treasuring, even in spite of all the trials and dangers we face.