More and more scholarly and honest theologians are swinging from believing in the classical predeterministic God to what the Bible clearly portrays the Biblical Loving God. Oord is another one of those enlightened in Biblical Theology. While God's love is truly uncontrolling as love should be, he applies this kind of divine love too broadly and to a bigger scope than what the Bible record shows. He seems to propose what I think are non-sequitur arguments to defend this proposition. Whereas I agree with most of his openness positions as truly consistent with the Biblical record, I believe he gets into tunnel-vision the longer he dwells on his main propositions.
Problematic points where I disagree with:
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Comments are most welcome especially if you think that I might have misread or misunderstood any part of Oord's book.
Problematic points where I disagree with:
- Oord believes in theistic evolution and protects it in his propositions almost like a sacred cow. I will propose that Oord believes in a small god instead of a Big God and his hermeneutics fails to be Wesleyan on this point.
- Oord believes that theistic evolution is a necessary result of the fact that God ordained randomness, chance and risk (a proposition I emphatically agree with). Risk is one of the first concepts that made me accept openness theology being a mathematician and an aspiring actuary once in my life. It is THE ONE OBJECTIVE concept that supports and is actually the anchor of FREE WILL. Love on the other hand is more of a SUBJECTIVE concept that initiates free will. I will propose, however, that to conclude that theistic evolution is a necessary outcome of risk and randomness is a big non-sequitur argument.
- Oord believes that miracles are NOT unilateral acts of God and are NEVER coercive, and as a result...
- Oord believes that miracles arise from the "cooperation" of even inanimate objects to materialize or realize each miracle, and as a result....
- Oord's definition of miracles include events that are not miracles at all. He opens miracles to be a relative perception where he mentions more than once that somebody's "miracle" may just be an ordinary event to another's perception. In this treatise, I will propose that miracles are only those events that are not naturally or normally or humanly possible or that occur where their natural or normal probability of occurrence is almost nil or zero at the time it is expected to occur and such event is a perfectly timed divine intervention according to human expectation. If the perception of miracles is relative, as Oord proposes, then there may really be no miracles at all.
- Oord believes that God's uncontrolling love is unbiased; that God exercises the same kind, quality and intensity of love to the whole world regardless of whether they are Christian or not.
Finally, I will submit that the only resolution to the problem of evil and an Almighty God as well as a truly Loving (uncontrolling) God is the CrossCulture theological framework which is founded on God's purpose in history: To create a people of faith who willingly love Him the way He loves them risking the doom of the majority to gain His minority. If we do not have a clear answer to why God created us, we will be basing our theologies mainly on subjective personal speculation instead of the common sense clarity of the biblical record. Of course, we need to forget all those high-highfalutin language which don't mean much practically like "to glorify God (how?) and enjoy Him forever (how?)".
The framework that Oord used seemed to be chance and evolution to support the uncontrolling love of God. We at CrossCulture propose the following, not exhaustively but simply to address that there is an alternative logical, common sense and biblical view to explaining the problem of evil:
Theistic Evolution
Small God vs. Big God
Oord's God takes millions of years to create what our CrossCulture God can create in one day's work.
How do I know this? The Bible tells me so. So whose God is bigger? And can God be any bigger?
The Wesleyan Hermeneutic
Oord has forgotten the Wesleyan hermeneutic that takes a verse for what it says for as long as there is a biblically realistic way to obey it or to make it come to pass. For example, it was ONLY Wesley among all old-time-religion Bible teachers who believed that if God said, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God", then it is a blessing that is attainable in this life and not just in the life to come. Whereas most classical teachers would summarily dismiss this verse as a certain thing to see God only when we get to heaven, Wesley believed that the blessing did not make sense unless "seeing" God is attainable in this life. When Jesus declared in the last verse of Matthew 5 that we should "be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect", it was ONLY Wesley among the renown theologians and Bible teachers who explicitly stated that we can be "perfect" in this life, and not just in the life to come. Otherwise, it was a ridiculous command from Jesus.
What the alternative hermeneutics would do is come up with either ridiculous or ambiguous interpretations hidden behind highfalutin words. At its worst, these other Bible teachers revert to mystery as the catch-all interpretation. Now, if the Word of God is God's revelation of Himself and His values and standards to man, declaring any revelation as a continuous mystery tacitly admits that our Great Communicator God has utterly failed at revelation, and none can be farther from the truth!
Non-Sequitur Argument
I completely agree with Oord on the observation that chance, probability and risk are all part and parcel of God's ordained set of natural laws that came with his total creation. However, this does not and should not mean that God would limit himself from creating anything in one day or even instantaneously or even by "the word of His mouth". I cannot see why Oord insists that God in the Genesis account can only create through an evolutionary process. This is unbecoming of God. The only way that God cannot create instantaneously in one's perception is because that person does not really believe in true miracles at all. This seems consistent with Oord's viewpoint as we shall see.
Moreover, on close scrutiny, the phrase theistic evolution is, in fact, an oxymoron. When God creates, he can create ex nihilo and instantaneously even by the word of his mouth. Evolution takes millions of years. I cannot see any logical synthesis between the two which either shows a small god or an indecisive god. Furthermore, even Medelian genetics has demonstrated time and again that most, if not all, mutated species or cross-breed species turn out to be sterile and have no ability to reproduce themselves. How many times has man tried to cross a horse and and a donkey to create a mule but the mule is always sterile and cannot reproduce. So God laughs at any hint of evolution as human attempts to be more naturalistic when in fact, the scope of work is entirely divine!
Miracles and Coercive Action
Miracles have to be Unilateral
Any event where there is human participation other than the exercise of faith CANNOT mostly BE a miracle. Otherwise, everything in the world is a miracle and therefore, there are really no miracles. Because Oord believes in the opposite, I cannot help but conclude that either he is a cloaked cessationist sincerely attempting to protect his faith but making sense of a world without true miracles, or he has never really witnessed a true miracle as we have defined it here.
Miracles have to be coercive
An action is coercive if it does not have the consent of the object or persons affected.
The parting of the Red Sea is almost unexplained by Oord as a non-coercive action by God. He uses it as an illustration but NOT on the important point of God's coercive action. The drowning of the Egyptions surely was not consensual and therefore must be coercive. The natural flow of the sea or ocean was altered and therefore was coercive.
If Oord seems to believe that God simply knew that it was the exactly the right time for the "natural" event to take place, then how about the timing of the parting of the Jordan river right after all that ritual and then Joshua stopping the sun in its tracks and adding a whole day unaccounted for in our astronomical timelines. How about the fire falling down from heaven at Mt Carmel after Elijah's prayer contest? All of these events have to be unilateral and coercive otherwise God is really not a God of signs and wonders. Instead He is simply a good seer and timer of events. But if that is the case, then he actually contradicts the openness of God since to be a perfect timer, God knows and has actually seen the future and the future is actually predetermined.
God's Uncontrolling Love has Bias
The central reason for Oord's fixation on non-coercion and non-unilateral actions of an uncontrolling God is because he seems to believe that God's love has no bias. This means that God is not partial in his treatment of anyone in the world regardless of whether or not they are children of the Kingdom or not. Herein is his biggest non-Biblical assumption mistake. The biblical record shows the exact opposite.
God has favorites and God play favorites. No wonder he stopped Abraham from being non-partial to Ishmael! No wonder God condoned Isaac playing favorite with Esau nor did he censure Rebekah whose favorite was Jacob! No wonder he blessed Joseph who was Jacob's favorite! Now do you not yet see a pattern here? Need we cite more Bible examples? Judah is God's sceptre and Moab is his washbasin! Jacob I loved and Esau I hated (all words have no other English translation possible)! John the apostle was John the Beloved because he was THE favorite of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. Paul liked Timothy but Barnabas liked Mark!
None who played favorites were censured by God and some who tried to be impartial were corrected by God!
The prophet Isaiah states God's favoritism for His people quite clearly in Isaiah 40:17, "All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as LESS THAN NOTHING and EMPTINESS (emphasis mine)". And this after he states in verse 11, "He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom...".
Now to apply this to those random tragedies and rape cited by Oord, please refer back to my discussions on the better theological framework to address these issues.
In conclusion, I know of only two Biblical reasons why God would make an exception to Oord's uncontrolling love of God. While I agree with most of Oord's propostions in his book except those I already listed above, the Bible is clear to me that the uncontrolling love of God would act unilaterally and coercively only in two cases:
A qualification of God's coercive action is in order. While God may resort to taking the life of an unwilling creature, he will still not violate free will by magically changing that unwilling person's heart against his will. Apparently, free will is God's sacred cow because God loves uncontrollingly.
A good example is God's action in Numbers 21:6 where THE LORD SENT fiery serpents among the people of rebellious Israel and many actually died because of it. God did not exert any effort to change the people's hearts but he did not hesitate at all to kill them! Where is Oord' definition of kenotic love and non-coercion in this story? Psalms 135:6ff both declares and demonstrates the coercive acts of God.
We reiterate that any theological deduction has to be fully supported by the Biblical record and should not contradict especially explicit exceptions to the theological proposition. Oord's position here is a case where the proposition seems to be based on a theological deduction and not on the synthesis (non-contradictory consolidation) of all the Biblical record.
Martyrdom and Christian Suffering
Martyrdom and Christian Suffering are issues that seem to go against divine intervention even when God's people "who are called by [His} name" pray truly and sincerely. Take the example of Job, or even the big list under Fox's Book of Martyrs.
In the case of Job, there was a "mindset" that God wanted to teach which Job had not learned all throughout his years walking with God, and precisely because (as Satan himself stated) God was sort of spoiling him or favoring him beyond what was normally expected God would do with others who might be in the same spiritual condition as Job. Although Job suffered through it all, he passed the test and God actually MORE THAN DOUBLED the blessings he used to enjoy. Even his three daughters were given inheritances not normally given to women all just because Job had just too much to divide among his children. But God only doubled Job's blessings after Job learned what God desired him to learn. Furthermore, this was consistent with God's purpose in history: to create His people of faith.
As for martyrdom, I refuse to call this a mystery. Instead, consistent with Psalm 116:15, God has simply decided that it is time to "harvest" his hand-picked saints. Martyrdom seems not to be the norm, in fact it is rare given the total population of true believers. Hence we can confidently conclude that every once in a while, God desires to display to the world, sometimes the whole world, how a true Kingdom child should behave in the face of situations that even threaten or even intentionally and deliberately take his life. He turns the other cheek, walks the extra mile, even prays for his enemies and gives his life for his friends. Compared to communists and activists, these are radical responses to a cursed and cruel world. Only Christians are empowered to have the will, reason and readiness to execute such a culture. We echo Fox's conclusion that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church". So far, it has been a 100% probability that martyrdom causes the church in the local environment of the martyrs to grow numerically and in quality of faith. Christians actually become SALT and LIGHT to their immediate world with phenomenal results. Furthermnore, this seems to be consistent and contributory to God's purpose in history.
Jim Elliot's martyrdom resulted in the whole tribe of Auca indians converting to Christ with the main murderer becoming both the main pastor and church leader and adoptive father to Jim's orphaned children! This just defies everything that is natural and can only be a miraculous act of God. However, Jim's martyrdom was and is substantially consistent with God's purpose in history even if it may perhaps have contradicted the Elliot family's prayer for safety and protection. Joseph's profound theological statement gives us the perfect unqualified answer to situations like this in Genesis 50:20: we might perceive the experiences as evil and most probably so, but "God meant it for good". This is also the BIGGER PICTURE to Romans 8:28 declaring that for God's people alone, ALL things work together for good!
The framework that Oord used seemed to be chance and evolution to support the uncontrolling love of God. We at CrossCulture propose the following, not exhaustively but simply to address that there is an alternative logical, common sense and biblical view to explaining the problem of evil:
- God took a risk in creation. Even Oord will accept this. From an actuarial viewpoint, any probability less than 100% involves or even demonstrates true risk. God creates man but with the omniscient knowledge that less than 100% will get to heaven. In fact, the OT and the book of Romans declare that only a remnant will be saved. Christ Himself in the sermon on the mount clearly stated that "narrow is the road that leads to eternal life and ONLY A FEW" will find it and even with that few, only even fewer will choose it.
- God is the creator and therefore INTENTIONALLY created evil (or at the very least, THE POTENTIAL FOR EVIL) to exist in His creation. The classical theologian will normally not accept this but it is really down-to-earth common sense. How can God create Black if He does not create White. How can God create and define Good if he does not create and define Bad or Evil? So, why did God create evil apart from this common sense contrast? Because His people of faith have to PROVE their faith. Faith not tested by adversity or negative experience is not genuine. Faith not tested by evil is just imagination. "He who PERSEVERES TO THE END shall be saved". What is there to persevere against if there is no evil?
- God plays favorites. God chose Israel only and NOT the rest of the world as his kingdom "seed". When the psalmists declare that God is our shepherd and we are the sheep of His pasture, this only makes sense if our shepherd does NOT exactly care as much or even at all about the sheep from other folds or pastures! If He does, then where is the value of being "the sheep of His pasture"? Oord's main mistake is trying to propose that God has no bias whether it be His sheep or other sheep. That point alone has no biblical basis. Yes, God loved the world but that love is limited to giving the opportunity for that WHOLE world to be redeemed from the curse. It is at this point that we agree that God will not coerce anyone to accept His gift of redemption. But to insist that God still loves those who reject Him in the same unbiased way that He loves those who do accept Him and make Him their Lord, flies in the face of the Biblical experience. Take for example the fallen angels, one third of those WHO WERE ALREADY IN HEAVEN IN THE FIRST PLACE fell from grace, nay, FELL FROM GOD'S LOVE, who have NO REDEMPTION PLAN even if they repent in dust and ashes and cry, and they have NO end other than eternal fire, and their condemnation and doom is written on stone, nothing will change that, even the LOVE OF GOD will not change that because God has spoken and He is FAITHFUL to His Word. OK, so where is the love there? Furthermore, how do we account for God's actions when He is in anger or full of wrath? Where then is the love there? Even uncontrolling love has to be qualified by the evidence of Scripture. The Church, NOT the whole world, is the Body of Christ. What is the point of being His church if His people do not get special treatment from God vesus the rest of the world? Of course, martyrdom and suffering have a special place in that treatment but we will touch on this later.
- Divine intervention is unilateral and many times necessarily coercive. The miracle of the parting of the Red Sea and the Jordan river is unilateral. It has no human participation at all. All Moses and Joshua and Israel did was behold and obey the next steps. God was coercive against nature and HE DROWNED and KILLED the Egyptians. Where is Oords contention that kenotic love is self-giving and others-empowering. It is there but ONLY as applies to Israel and not to the Egyptians. There is obvious favoritism and bias in the exercise of that kenotic love. Hence, the accidents and rape situations given in Oord's book may be random but had God been asked to intervene beforehand and perform an interceptive miracle, I believe He would do it. But the outcome is different and tragic. However, until we get evidence that there was sincere believing prayer involved prior to these tragedies, or if there is evidence that non-intervention will destroy God's project of creating His minority, then if God does not intervene, that is really what is expected for God to do or NOT do. PERIOD. Simple common sense logic based on a better theological framework.
- The final point. God created all actions to have consequences. Of course, Oord accepts this. However, if the action is a sin with consequences, God will lovingly forgive the sin when confessed or requested to do so but the consequences remain intact. Oord raised the point that there are what seems to be miracles of healing but the disease many times recurs even in worse form like cancer, for example. The answer to this has already been unearthed by alternative medicine. Cancer is a non-germ disease. It is part of the alternative medicine disease called "metabolic syndrome" of which diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, gout, etc are also within the scope of this disease. Metabolic syndrome diseases are now know to be statistically almost 100% caused by lifestyle which includes, the patient's food, sleep, exercise, environment, etc. In fact, it is quite easy to point out what is wrong in the lifestyle of ANY victim of any of these diseases after an honest interview with them. But that is not my point. My point is CONSEQUENCES! Even if one is a committed born-again favorite child of God who prays continuously for healing BUT does not change his lifestyle that caused the disease, the consequences remain and recur and recur, many times with fatal outcomes. That is God's law of consequences without which there is no fear of God, or His Laws, or His laws of nature. Furthermore, no healing is permanent in this world. While Lazarus was raised from the dead, he surely died a second time and he died physically for all time.
Theistic Evolution
Small God vs. Big God
Oord's God takes millions of years to create what our CrossCulture God can create in one day's work.
How do I know this? The Bible tells me so. So whose God is bigger? And can God be any bigger?
The Wesleyan Hermeneutic
Oord has forgotten the Wesleyan hermeneutic that takes a verse for what it says for as long as there is a biblically realistic way to obey it or to make it come to pass. For example, it was ONLY Wesley among all old-time-religion Bible teachers who believed that if God said, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God", then it is a blessing that is attainable in this life and not just in the life to come. Whereas most classical teachers would summarily dismiss this verse as a certain thing to see God only when we get to heaven, Wesley believed that the blessing did not make sense unless "seeing" God is attainable in this life. When Jesus declared in the last verse of Matthew 5 that we should "be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect", it was ONLY Wesley among the renown theologians and Bible teachers who explicitly stated that we can be "perfect" in this life, and not just in the life to come. Otherwise, it was a ridiculous command from Jesus.
What the alternative hermeneutics would do is come up with either ridiculous or ambiguous interpretations hidden behind highfalutin words. At its worst, these other Bible teachers revert to mystery as the catch-all interpretation. Now, if the Word of God is God's revelation of Himself and His values and standards to man, declaring any revelation as a continuous mystery tacitly admits that our Great Communicator God has utterly failed at revelation, and none can be farther from the truth!
Non-Sequitur Argument
I completely agree with Oord on the observation that chance, probability and risk are all part and parcel of God's ordained set of natural laws that came with his total creation. However, this does not and should not mean that God would limit himself from creating anything in one day or even instantaneously or even by "the word of His mouth". I cannot see why Oord insists that God in the Genesis account can only create through an evolutionary process. This is unbecoming of God. The only way that God cannot create instantaneously in one's perception is because that person does not really believe in true miracles at all. This seems consistent with Oord's viewpoint as we shall see.
Moreover, on close scrutiny, the phrase theistic evolution is, in fact, an oxymoron. When God creates, he can create ex nihilo and instantaneously even by the word of his mouth. Evolution takes millions of years. I cannot see any logical synthesis between the two which either shows a small god or an indecisive god. Furthermore, even Medelian genetics has demonstrated time and again that most, if not all, mutated species or cross-breed species turn out to be sterile and have no ability to reproduce themselves. How many times has man tried to cross a horse and and a donkey to create a mule but the mule is always sterile and cannot reproduce. So God laughs at any hint of evolution as human attempts to be more naturalistic when in fact, the scope of work is entirely divine!
Miracles and Coercive Action
Miracles have to be Unilateral
Any event where there is human participation other than the exercise of faith CANNOT mostly BE a miracle. Otherwise, everything in the world is a miracle and therefore, there are really no miracles. Because Oord believes in the opposite, I cannot help but conclude that either he is a cloaked cessationist sincerely attempting to protect his faith but making sense of a world without true miracles, or he has never really witnessed a true miracle as we have defined it here.
Miracles have to be coercive
An action is coercive if it does not have the consent of the object or persons affected.
The parting of the Red Sea is almost unexplained by Oord as a non-coercive action by God. He uses it as an illustration but NOT on the important point of God's coercive action. The drowning of the Egyptions surely was not consensual and therefore must be coercive. The natural flow of the sea or ocean was altered and therefore was coercive.
If Oord seems to believe that God simply knew that it was the exactly the right time for the "natural" event to take place, then how about the timing of the parting of the Jordan river right after all that ritual and then Joshua stopping the sun in its tracks and adding a whole day unaccounted for in our astronomical timelines. How about the fire falling down from heaven at Mt Carmel after Elijah's prayer contest? All of these events have to be unilateral and coercive otherwise God is really not a God of signs and wonders. Instead He is simply a good seer and timer of events. But if that is the case, then he actually contradicts the openness of God since to be a perfect timer, God knows and has actually seen the future and the future is actually predetermined.
God's Uncontrolling Love has Bias
The central reason for Oord's fixation on non-coercion and non-unilateral actions of an uncontrolling God is because he seems to believe that God's love has no bias. This means that God is not partial in his treatment of anyone in the world regardless of whether or not they are children of the Kingdom or not. Herein is his biggest non-Biblical assumption mistake. The biblical record shows the exact opposite.
God has favorites and God play favorites. No wonder he stopped Abraham from being non-partial to Ishmael! No wonder God condoned Isaac playing favorite with Esau nor did he censure Rebekah whose favorite was Jacob! No wonder he blessed Joseph who was Jacob's favorite! Now do you not yet see a pattern here? Need we cite more Bible examples? Judah is God's sceptre and Moab is his washbasin! Jacob I loved and Esau I hated (all words have no other English translation possible)! John the apostle was John the Beloved because he was THE favorite of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. Paul liked Timothy but Barnabas liked Mark!
None who played favorites were censured by God and some who tried to be impartial were corrected by God!
The prophet Isaiah states God's favoritism for His people quite clearly in Isaiah 40:17, "All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as LESS THAN NOTHING and EMPTINESS (emphasis mine)". And this after he states in verse 11, "He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom...".
Now to apply this to those random tragedies and rape cited by Oord, please refer back to my discussions on the better theological framework to address these issues.
In conclusion, I know of only two Biblical reasons why God would make an exception to Oord's uncontrolling love of God. While I agree with most of Oord's propostions in his book except those I already listed above, the Bible is clear to me that the uncontrolling love of God would act unilaterally and coercively only in two cases:
- When God's purpose in history to create His people of faith is being impeded, thwarted or destroyed with the only chance of recovery being that of overriding the free will of man, then God will intervene in the natural course of events to prevent that from happening or to alter the outcome so that God will not violate his irrevocable gifts of free will.
- When God's people ("who are called by my name") humble themselves and pray and turn from their wicked ways, then God Himself promised that He will intervene unilaterally and coercively. See 2 Chronicles 7:14
A qualification of God's coercive action is in order. While God may resort to taking the life of an unwilling creature, he will still not violate free will by magically changing that unwilling person's heart against his will. Apparently, free will is God's sacred cow because God loves uncontrollingly.
A good example is God's action in Numbers 21:6 where THE LORD SENT fiery serpents among the people of rebellious Israel and many actually died because of it. God did not exert any effort to change the people's hearts but he did not hesitate at all to kill them! Where is Oord' definition of kenotic love and non-coercion in this story? Psalms 135:6ff both declares and demonstrates the coercive acts of God.
We reiterate that any theological deduction has to be fully supported by the Biblical record and should not contradict especially explicit exceptions to the theological proposition. Oord's position here is a case where the proposition seems to be based on a theological deduction and not on the synthesis (non-contradictory consolidation) of all the Biblical record.
Martyrdom and Christian Suffering
Martyrdom and Christian Suffering are issues that seem to go against divine intervention even when God's people "who are called by [His} name" pray truly and sincerely. Take the example of Job, or even the big list under Fox's Book of Martyrs.
In the case of Job, there was a "mindset" that God wanted to teach which Job had not learned all throughout his years walking with God, and precisely because (as Satan himself stated) God was sort of spoiling him or favoring him beyond what was normally expected God would do with others who might be in the same spiritual condition as Job. Although Job suffered through it all, he passed the test and God actually MORE THAN DOUBLED the blessings he used to enjoy. Even his three daughters were given inheritances not normally given to women all just because Job had just too much to divide among his children. But God only doubled Job's blessings after Job learned what God desired him to learn. Furthermore, this was consistent with God's purpose in history: to create His people of faith.
As for martyrdom, I refuse to call this a mystery. Instead, consistent with Psalm 116:15, God has simply decided that it is time to "harvest" his hand-picked saints. Martyrdom seems not to be the norm, in fact it is rare given the total population of true believers. Hence we can confidently conclude that every once in a while, God desires to display to the world, sometimes the whole world, how a true Kingdom child should behave in the face of situations that even threaten or even intentionally and deliberately take his life. He turns the other cheek, walks the extra mile, even prays for his enemies and gives his life for his friends. Compared to communists and activists, these are radical responses to a cursed and cruel world. Only Christians are empowered to have the will, reason and readiness to execute such a culture. We echo Fox's conclusion that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church". So far, it has been a 100% probability that martyrdom causes the church in the local environment of the martyrs to grow numerically and in quality of faith. Christians actually become SALT and LIGHT to their immediate world with phenomenal results. Furthermnore, this seems to be consistent and contributory to God's purpose in history.
Jim Elliot's martyrdom resulted in the whole tribe of Auca indians converting to Christ with the main murderer becoming both the main pastor and church leader and adoptive father to Jim's orphaned children! This just defies everything that is natural and can only be a miraculous act of God. However, Jim's martyrdom was and is substantially consistent with God's purpose in history even if it may perhaps have contradicted the Elliot family's prayer for safety and protection. Joseph's profound theological statement gives us the perfect unqualified answer to situations like this in Genesis 50:20: we might perceive the experiences as evil and most probably so, but "God meant it for good". This is also the BIGGER PICTURE to Romans 8:28 declaring that for God's people alone, ALL things work together for good!
It was just God's harvest time.
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Comments are most welcome especially if you think that I might have misread or misunderstood any part of Oord's book.
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