Beginning today, December 1st, 2009, it becomes a traffic offense for any driver in Colorado to text while behind the wheel.  Why?  Well, it was one year ago when Erica Forney, a little nine-year-old girl from our church, was tragically killed riding her bike home by a driver distracted while using a cell phone.  Little Erica died on Thanksgiving Day 2008, just two days after the accident.  Remarkably, within only one short year the Forney family, dedicated to a cause which could save many lives, worked to pass the new Colorado law, making it illegal for any driver to text or enter data in a phone while driving.  So, what does this have to do with a reason to believe in God?

In his excellent book, The Reason for God, New York pastor Tim Keller observes a common response among families who’ve experienced a tragic loss of loved ones.  He notes that in the family’s desperation to bring some meaning out of the suffering, “They work to reform laws or change social conditions that led to the death.  They need to believe that the death of their loved ones has led to new life, that the injustice has led to greater justice” (p. 31).  Keller’s observation speaks to a universal human response to suffering.  We want to believe that the loved one’s death was not in vain.  We recoil at the idea that the heartrending loss was pointless.  And so we move to counteract the injustice so that a more profound justice will result. 

So, if we are hardwired to see greater justice come out of injustice, which worldview supports this ultimately happening with all life’s injustices?  The atheist or secularist worldview believes that with the death of our bodies goes the death of our hopes and dreams.  Therefore, there is no hope for ultimate justice after the death of humanity and the expiration of the universe.  Similarly, the Eastern or Pantheist worldview understands the final death of all humanity to be the loss of individuality, as we are absorbed back into an impersonal force.  And this impersonal force, or the All-soul, has nothing to do with justice. 

The biblical worldview, however, is the only take on reality which makes sense of our universal longing for ultimate justice.  Only if there is a transcendent personal God, who is the very grounding of justice, can this life’s suffering—especially the gratuitous or pointless suffering—be not only eradicated but redeemed.  Tim Keller points out that only the doctrine at the heart of Christianity—resurrection—provides hope for the ‘greater justice’ we universally long for.  In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the first century church in Rome, Italy, he depicts this hope with language of cosmic redemption (Rom 8:18-25). 

18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that[i] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

 22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

Only God can assure that our suffering is not in vain.  Only God can instill the powerful hope that we can have our heart’s deepest longings.