Pastor Bo WagnerBritish comedian Stephen Fry is being investigated by Irish police. The potential charge against him is blasphemy. There is a 2009 blasphemy law there prohibiting the publication or expression of anything "grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion."
His legal trouble stems from a 2015 appearance on an Irish television program called "The Meaning of Life." It was there and then that he said, among other things, "Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?"
He went on to say, "The god who created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac, (an) utter maniac. Totally selfish."
A couple of years ago, my wife and I bought a house. We had lived for a long time in a very tiny house, much too small for our family of five. We found a house that was much larger, had everything that we wanted in a home and was in my dream location for the county in which I live.
Normally there is no way at all we could have afforded it. But we purchased the house and land for pennies on the dollar. Most people literally drive vehicles that cost more than our home.
You see, our home had "serious issues." And by serious issues, I mean that it looked very much like a bomb had been detonated inside of it. It had first been neglected, then abandoned, then vandalized repeatedly. It had obviously been attacked with chainsaws and sledgehammers and who knows what else. Every scrap of glass was busted to shards. All of the drywall was ripped down. There was insulation knee-deep throughout the house. Bricks had been shattered. It was abysmal.
Two years later, we are still not completely done restoring it. It is beautiful and livable but still bears some of the marks of the damage done to it. Mind you, it has never once occurred to me to complain. The damage done to it allowed us to be able to afford to buy it when normally we never could have done so.
But let me tell you what else has never occurred to me. It has never occurred to me that I ought to speak ill of the builder of the home. It has never occurred to me to call him capricious or mean-minded or stupid.
The builder made the home perfect. He did his job well. Then he handed the keys to ones who would live there and left them with something very important: a free will to treat the home however they desired.
If the builder had, every day, barged into the home and forced people to clean it and maintain it and tenderly care for it, the people who live in the home would have sued him for his intrusion. They would have demanded that he back off and let them live their lives however they choose.
If the builder of the home had guarded the door and refused to allow entry to someone, anyone, good or bad, that the residents wanted to let in, they would have had him arrested for harassment.
We humans have lived in the home that the Builder made for us for a very long time now. We have taken a perfect world and filled it with hate and rape and violence and murder and filth and greed. And the Builder of our world, in love, has allowed us the free will to make all of those choices.
Had he forced us all to wear choir robes and sing "Amazing Grace" and go to church and be faithful to our spouses and refrain from all sin, people would shriek like banshees at how unjust he was being, forcing us to do those things against our will.
But you see, though everyone has a free will, no one has freedom from consequences. Galatians 6:7 says "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
We really cannot have it both ways. Either we get to have a free will, in which case the mess that is our world is laid squarely at our feet, or we do not get to have a free will, and everyone is forced to serve and worship God.
Mess and all, broken glass and shattered brick and ripped-up drywall, I am still glad God has given us a free will. He made this world. Then after we sinned and ruined it, he came to Bethlehem in flesh, lived, died an agonizing death to pay for our sin and rose again.
Based on that, I freely choose to love him, and I intend to spend my days working to make things better rather than berating the builder for the things humanity in our free will has done.
Bo Wagner is pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church of Mooresboro, N.C., a widely traveled evangelist and the author of several books. He can be contacted by email at 2knowhim@cbc-web.org.