In a world that, from the perspective of many people, is getting worse all the time, can we know if God is interested in this world?
One of the problems with this question is that American Christians tend to have a Deist view of God – a God who lives in the sky and is disengaged from our world. This view of God makes the belief in a apathetic God the default mode. And while this means that Christians and non-Christians tend to agree that the problems of this world are caused by humans, the question of God’s care or lack of care for this world is still a valid one. It’s easy to look at a broken political and economic system and ask whether God cares, but the mistake of this position is that the God of the Bible typically doesn’t work through the political and economic system; in other words, if there is a God who is concerned with this world he probably won’t engage these problems in the way we would expect: not through power and money, but through weakness and suffering.
The God of the Bible cares so much about the problems of the world that he joins himself up to the essence of these problems by becoming a human and giving up his life on the cross in order to absorb all these problems into himself, rise from the dead, and begin making all things new.