What is the first article?
“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.”
What does this mean?
“I believe that… he also gives me clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and children, land, animals, and all I have. He richly and daily provides me with all that I need to support this body and life.
He defends me against all danger and guards and protects me from all evil.”
With this second portion of Luther’s explanation of the First Article of the Apostles’ Creed, Luther moves from the person of the human creature to the things that adorn the human creature. And through this explanation we begin to understand and appreciate precisely how much God has adorned the human creature with. In the same way that God made everything, he also gives everything that his creation needs for the support of the body and life.
This immediately appears in stark contrast to those who would imagine God to be a God who is far off and distant, who merely set creation in motion, but then took a step back to allow creation to run on its own steam and man by his own will. Through the prophet Jeremiah, God asks the rhetorical question, “Am I a God at hand… and not a God far away? Can man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him?... Do I not fill heaven and earth?” God is a God at hand. He does fill heaven and earth. And it is impossible for man to hide himself from God’s sight. The prophet Job will likewise confess, “In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind.” Not only is God near and dear to his creation, by his nearness he gives life and sustains all things. As Oswald Bayer notes, without God in his word, there would be no world.
What is perhaps even more amazing is that the object of God’s care— the world— includes both believers and unbelievers. The table prayer of the catechism, citing Psalm 145, confesses this poetically, saying, “The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season. You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing.” The Gospel of Matthew makes this point with great force, saying, “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” God’s fatherly care extends to all, even to those who don’t acknowledge him, believe in him, or thank him for all his goodness! God provides the Atheist with the very reason he uses to deny him. God gives the very breath to the wicked with which they curse him. And altogether they neither recognize God’s gifts nor appreciate them.
But we Christians, knowing that God is the font and source of all good things, can recognize the fatherly gifts of God. We can recognize that God gives food and drink so that we can have good health and energy for the day. God gives clothing and shoes for our protection and modesty. He gives house and home for shelter, security, and hospitality. He gives family and friends to help us bear one another’s burdens. And he gives land and animals, work and livelihood, for our sustenance, labor, and edification. All this he gives by ordering all of creation— the angels, parents, government, land, weather, etc.— so that it serves and blesses us. God’s good gifts always come to us through means, and the means that he works through for our created good is creation itself.
This is what we confess by faith of God the Father, but as is always the case with faith, it is a faith against contraries, a fighting faith. What faith fights against in this case is the presence of evil. If God is good, the giver of every good gift, then why do suffering and death exist in the world? This question is an important one, and it leads us back to the question concerning what it means to be human. In the beginning, God created man in his image, male and female, perfect, righteous, and blessed and man lived as such because he lived by faith in the promises of God. However, this original righteousness, blessedness, and innocence did not persist because man did not persist in faith. Having been tempted by the devil, Adam and Eve sinned, and what was born from this was a new kind of humanity: a humanity not created after the image and likeness of God, but the image and likeness of Adam who sought to be God in God’s place. In Romans, Paul confesses that sin entered the world through one man, Adam, and death spread to all because all sinned. In his epistle, James likewise depicts the progression of sin from Adam, saying, “But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” Evil began in the desire of Adam, gave birth to the sin of rebellion, and brought forth the fruit of death just as God promised it would.
As such, neither man nor the host of creation have retained their original beauty but have been in a state of decay and rot since the reach of Eve. Both man and creation stand under sin and the curse of God which subjects everything to futility. As a result, earthquakes, storms, pests, disease, etc. ravage the earth and death and destruction loom large in our experience of worldly existence. This is one reason for suffering in the world. Another would be, quite simply, the natural consequences of our own sinful actions. Not only does the created world behave outside of God’s good order; we behave outside God’s good order. This order is a lifegiving and blessed order and when we rail against it, we rail against life and goodness itself. With all this said, we still haven’t really arrived at a satisfactory answer for the “why?” of suffering. This is in part because when people ask, “Why is there suffering?” typically the real question behind the question is, “Why am I suffering?”
Unfortunately, to this question there is no answer. We don’t know and God doesn’t say. In view of God’s silence, what can we do? First, we should not speculate and try to answer a question that God hasn’t given an answer to. As Moses says in Deuteronomy, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children…” The reason why we suffer is hidden in the secret counsel of God, and therefore, it doesn’t belong to us. What does belong to us is what is revealed, which is the “prayer of lament.” This means, second, that we should take our complaints and sorrow to God in prayer. What the scriptures reveal is that when Christians suffer, the thing they do is flee to God in prayer and voice their need and pain to him. The Christian is to wrestle with God in the crucible of life and, like Jacob at the Jabbok, not let go of God until he gives a blessing. In this spirit, Tertullian will call the prayer of the Christian, the “violence that God delights in” and in this same spirit we ought to think about our prayers in affliction. Some have piously worried that complaining to God isn’t a godly or faithful thing to do, but I would argue with Luther that it is precisely the most faithful thing a Christian can do. We can only complain to God that he is not taking care of us on the basis of his promise that he would. Therefore, the foundation of any lament is precisely faith in God the Father. This is why Luther imagines lament as “rubbing God’s promises in his ear.”
Perhaps a more fruitful question to ponder that we can answer in the midst of suffering is, “What is God doing about suffering and death?” Here, we have the mighty and sure word of God that does not and will not allow evil and suffering to have the last word. God sent his Son, Jesus, to take up our miserable and evil estate so that all suffering, evil, and death in the world might be taken and killed in his body on the cross and so that a new humanity might rise having been united to his resurrection through baptism. By the cross of Christ death is conquered and evil is crushed underfoot as God promised to do in the very beginning. With the cross of Christ, we furthermore have the promise that not only did God work the greatest evil— the death of his Son— for good, he continues to work all things for good, taking evil, suffering, and pain captive so that they produce blessing and good for those who believe. These blessings are not always apparent to our eyes in the very midst of life, but in the light of glory we will see with our own eyes the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord.
Prayer: Gracious Father, you open your hand to satisfy the desires of every living creature and provide me with all that I need to support my body and life. I thank you for the provisions that you have given me in clothing and shoes to wear, food and drink to nourish and refresh my body, a place to live, the love and companionship of family, and daily work. Give me the grace to acknowledge your goodness and live with gratitude and contentment, confident in your love for the sake of Jesus Christ, my Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
