Are you offended at God?

John Loux - Electric Guitar
John was raised in Mansfield, PA and moved to IHOP in June 2006. He is committed to living out the spirit of adoption in his family and to seeing orphans restored into the fullness of who they are called to be. 


 Are you offended at God?  Secretly mad at Him for something that has happened in your life?
The more I walk through this life, the more I realize just how much offense I carry in my heart. The scary part is that I think there is a whole lot more in me than I have realized. I am guessing that is true for most of us, whether we are aware of it or not. Though we desire to keep our hearts unoffended before God through the trauma life brings, the reality is that most, if not all of us, have offense toward God.

It's always the sucker punches that gets us isn't it? Those things that we never see coming until it is too late. They tear a hole in us so big we are not sure we will ever survive, or at best never be the same again. Our accusations go like this: “You could have done something God. You could have stopped that from happening, but you didn’t. How could you have let that happen?” The hard part is He could have done something. He could have stopped that event from happening or that person from doing the things they did to you. Those events cause us to question two things in our life. "Is God good?" and "Does He love me?”.

On December 23, 2009, my journey of working through offense would be taken to a new level. My wife woke me up at 4AM to tell me that my brother had been in a bad car accident. "They didn't have a pulse, but they got it back again,” she said. I remember sitting on the couch in shock, staring into the lights of the Christmas tree wondering if he would make it.  I figured his day might come. My brother was always living on the edge, even when he was little.

He had adopted 8 children within the last 8 years, five just within 2009, and he had 3 biological children.  He was the father of eleven, an advocate for adoption, the founder of the Orphan Justice Center, an amazing musician, and my best friend. He was coming home from a training on rescuing children caught in human trafficking when the accident happened.  I was standing in the hall by his bedroom when his wife Renee had gotten that fateful call from the hospital. She came out of the room, looked at me and said “He’s gone, Derek’s dead”.

Death hits you in the gut, it sucks out your strength and knocks the wind right out of you. It invades, violates, and overtakes you in a horrible way. I tell you there is nothing worse than holding a woman who has just lost her husband and hearing the wails and cries of 10 children as they hear of the news that they no longer have a Daddy.  How could this have happened? He was one of the “good guys”- the greatest man I have ever known, one of the few really making a difference.

Over the next few weeks waves of emotion would consume me.  Mostly anger. I was mad at God. Most of my brothers children had just recently gotten a Dad for the first time in their lives, and now he was gone. How could this be God’s perfect plan? I remember my anger reaching a peak when I got into my truck one morning and blurted out, “I can’t stand you and I hate your ways!”

It was then I heard the Lord say “Ok, now were getting somewhere.” I drove to the Prayer Room stood against the back wall, still really angry. It was then I had a face to face encounter with Jesus. He said, “John, it’s okay that your offended with me right now. I can handle it. You're offended because you can’t see the whole picture, and I understand that. “John,” he said, “I’m not just the husband to the widow or the father to the fatherless, I am also the brother to the brotherless.”  Then I had a vision of Jesus holding me and weeping over the death of my brother.  Though He could have stopped the accident, I somehow knew that He was also experiencing my pain and that everything was going to be alright.

My point is this, it's not a matter of “if” we will be offended at God at some point in our lives, but “when.” The real question is: Will we be honest with Him and tell Him how we feel?  He already knows what we are thinking anyway. He sees the accusations in our hearts. We can either choose to press into the only One who can heal us, or we can run from Him and end up bitter.  Have the conversation, scream, throw your punches- He can handle it. Say the things you need to say and let the Lord come in and speak truth to your pain.  God can heal your heart if you speak honestly, approaching Him as your Father, believing that yes, God is good, and yes, God loves me.

© 2010 John Loux