Justice on a 7 Billion Person Scale

I heard on the radio the other day that the world’s population has reached 7 billion people. That number exploded in my head. It led me to a YouTube video on some University’s website that showed population growth throughout history. I saw how the United Nations is projecting that by the year 2100 there will be over 10 Billion people in the world. Those are big, big numbers in a small, small world. (It is a small world after all, isn’t it?) Essentially more people are being born each day then are dying.

If this info makes your mind jump to where mine did, then you know what I’m going to say next. I looked it up and scholars estimate that anywhere from 150,000 to 180,000 die each day. That would be the equivalent of Guam being sucked into the ocean each and every day.

Turkey just had a horrible earthquake that has left families trapped in the rubble, and many are still sleeping in tents and in their cars out of fear of more aftershocks. Still, at last count, far less than 1000 people have died in the earthquake. I’m not saying that this catastrophe was not tragic or that it did not affect hundreds of thousands of people. It did however only represent about .6% of the deaths that occurred that same day. I don’t know how to put death on that scale into perspective.

A student recently shared with me the story of Herod killing all the babies around Bethlehem, found in Matthew 2. He said that he didn’t believe that there was a God, but if there was, he was obviously cruel. “How could a kind God allow other innocent babies die so that His own son could escape and live?” He commented. That was the first time someone had shared this story with me from that perspective.

A few days later I started reading through the book of Matthew again. It didn’t take me long to come across Herod’s horrible act, or as my student put it, God’s failure to act. It got my wheels turning again and so I decided to spend some more time wrestling with the reality we all live in.

What about Herod, or more importantly, what about the question of God’s goodness? Does God’s seeming lack of intervention in Matthew 2 mean He is cruel? It would be very easy to turn this into ethics debate. Do the deaths of a group of innocent children justify the eventual hope of salvation of us all? I worry that putting the conversation in these terms cheapens the value of life. I don’t believe God looks at life in those terms.

It would be just as easy to look at the culture and context of this story and begin teaching the problem away. Herod was a bad man you know. He had lots of people killed for lesser things. There are lots of accounts of Herod killing big groups of people and asking questions later. When you think about it Bethlehem was a small country town. Even if you included the infants in the surrounding villages like Matthew 2 describes, the number of children killed could have been less than 100. You could go on and on. That might all be important information to better understand what exactly happened in Matthew 2, but it still doesn’t make the big question go away. Is God cruel? Is this story proof of that?

My student really got me thinking. My faith didn’t change, but I knew this was something that I needed to wrestle with, so I did. I came to a few conclusions:

Death is an experience I don’t understand and I can’t avoid.

It is a reality that hits our planet on a huge scale every day. I read Matthew 2 and see God sparing Joseph, Mary, and Jesus from a corrupt ruler’s hands. I see children in Bethlehem being murdered at the hands of Herod. I think the author of Matthew shared this story because it really happened and the prophet Jeremiah prophesied that it would (See Jeremiah 31:15). I don’t see this as proof of God’s cruelty. In fact I don’t see God as cruel at all.

God loves justice and promises it.

(See Job 37:23 or Psalm 9:16//11:7//33:5)

A leader or ruler’s job is to maintain order and ensure justice. God entrusted Herod with that job and he abused it. That doesn’t mean that God stopped serving justice. Herod’s act of evil did not go unpunished. God saw to it that those children and their families were given justice. In fact, Josephus, a Jewish historian, records that Herod came down with a ‘loathsome’ disease. Josephus credits the manner of Herod’s death as ‘Judgment from God on account of his sins.’ Herod didn’t get away with anything, and God did not sit idly by and watch it happen.

We need to trust Him even in life’s cruelest of times.

He deals with life and death on a mind numbing scale. He watches injustice on a grand scale and still honors our free will. I do not entirely understand why God spared Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in Daniel 3, but let Stephen die in Acts 6 and 7. I do believe we are created to bring God glory and reveal His glory to others. Living and dying is all a part of that. God is above and beyond me, but at the same time he chose to come down and live alongside of me. I don’t know his thought process in every decision he makes, but He is far greater than me and I trust that He is good. The author of Revelation describes God’s final triumph over evil in Revelation 19. God is seated on a white horse. He has come to right the world’s wrongs and bring justice to us all. He is called Faithful and True and He brings Justice as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. All will be made right. This is a very good thing.