Punishment

I have met parents of special needs children or parents who have experienced the death of a child. On more than one occasion, I have heard some of these parents make a statement that this happened to their children as payback for past sins in their (the parents’) lives. They feel like it was God’s way of punishing them. How do we worship a God that allows our children to die?
There are many places in the Bible where God punishes sin with death. Individuals were often struck dead by God for disobedience and laws were given in Deuteronomy that require death if broken. We are at first appalled at this. We are amazed that anyone can call God “loving” if He would do these things. However, we forget who we are and who God is. God is righteous and just. Our sin makes us unrighteous. Our sin requires justice. We recognize that law breakers should be punished in our society. We scale the punishment for the crime. God has done the same thing but He didn’t have to. There is no such thing as degrees of perfection. God is not almost perfect or mostly perfect. He is perfect. He requires His creation to be perfect. When sin entered the world, it changed not only humans but creation as well. God would have been just in wiping out creation and starting over. The most amazing thing is that He did not wipe us out. This perfectly just God did not exercise His justice completely. He actually has preserved humans and creation in spite of our sins. However, we are left in a fallen world where death, disease, and sin persist. How does God interact with sinful humans in a fallen world? Mercy.
The parents I spoke with that made the statements that they thought God was punishing them have missed the big picture. If God truly punished each of us for our sins, we would all be dead, not just our children. The miracle in a world such as this is that disease and destruction are not more rampant than they are. There is a place in the Bible that records a man being put to death for sin, but not his own. God the Son became a man, Jesus, and was put to death on a cross for our sins for he never had any of his own. God does punish for sin. He did it at the cross. God may train us, otherwise known as discipline, but He has already doled out the punishment at the cross. The death of our children is a product of a fallen world, not punishment. God the Father put that punishment on His begotten Son to redeem us and this fallen world. He has given us time to surrender to His mercy by trusting in the justice of the cross. Macayla is a victim of this fallen world but she will also be free of its destructive tendencies soon. Her eyes are losing sight now, but soon her eyes will see with full clarity the extent of God’s mercy.