Why did God allow my loved one to die of COVID when others were healed?
Where is God in the midst of my lost job/chronic illness/heartbreak?
With so many bad things happening in the world, how can anyone believe in a loving God?
Dr. Michael Brown knew he didn’t have answer to these questions when he sat down to write the book an editor friend had asked him to write.
“This is not just some lightweight, ‘OK, here’s a quick answer,'” he tells Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of the Greenelines podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. “This is, ‘OK, this is a weighty objection. This is a painful objection; let’s really dig in together and come out with weighty answers from the heart of God.'”
When he speaks, writes a book or answers questions on his hard-hitting podcast, The Line of Fire, “It’s one thing where I have expertise in a subject,” Brown says. “I’m debating a rabbi about Jesus being the Messiah, I’m exegeting a passage from the Hebrew. But here, I thought, I don’t have the right to answer these people. I haven’t suffered some of the losses they have. I haven’t lived out what they’ve lived out.
“And I was on my knees with my laptop computer on my bed, praying as I was writing, ‘God, You have to help me; You have to give me the wisdom.’ And one of the things that struck me was that a doctor can treat all kinds of conditions, even if the doctor never had those conditions himself, because he knows what the solutions are. So I was saying, ‘Lord, You know the answers. You have what these people need, give me wisdom.'”
The result of his prayer and searching the Scripture for answers is his most recent book, Has God Failed You? (Chosen Book, 2021). Far from a book of “cheap theological answers,” he says, it presents what the back cover calls “a first-aid kit for seekers, strugglers and doubters.”
“We give people as I said, permission to doubt and encourage them to develop an honest relationship with God where they don’t hide how they fee,” Brown says. “And where they find other solid believers with whom they can honestly share their questions.”
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