This article has been occasioned by the tragic death of the daughters of Rev. Eastwood Anaba. Somewhere during the Easter, two daughters of Rev. Anaba perished on the Tamale-Bolga road when they were travelling to Bolga to attend the Easter Convention of their father’s church, the Fountain Gate Chapel.
One of the tyres of the vehicle burst and the vehicle skidded off the road, somersaulting several times and killing six out of the seven people on board. It was sad news for not only the Christian community, but the entire Ghanaian population.
Indeed I had been wondering why this should happen to a “man of God”. But as a Muslim I immediately consoled myself with the Qur’anic injunction that states that God tests his servants with all sorts of calamities in order to judge the extent of their faith or belief.
“And we will try you with something of fear and hunger, and loss of wealth and lives, and fruits; but give glad tidings to the patient; who when a misfortune overtakes them, say, ‘surely to Allah we belong and to him shall we return’; It is these on whom are blessings from their lord and mercy, and it is these who are rightly guided”. (Q: 2:155-157).
I therefore consoled myself with the assurance that Rev. Anaba being a man of God will better appreciate these matters and therefore will take this misfortune in his stride and move on with the business of spreading God’s word.
I was however taken aback when I heard during the 10:am news on Joy FM last Friday that Rev. Anaba on commenting on the death of his daughters, had said that he will not allow the devil to derail his God-given mandate.
I hope my interpretation is correct. But my understanding of his statement is that somehow, the devil is responsible for the death of his daughters with the sole aim of distracting him from his work as a man of God.
This immediately brought to mind, a question that a friend of mine posed to me several years ago when we were teaching at the Siddique Secondary School in Agona Nyarkrom. “If you lose one thousand dollars say in the market and you return from town only to find the same amount of money in the same denominations in which you lost them, what will be your reaction?”
I said that I will pick up the money and praise God for restoring my money to me. But he said he will refuse to pick up the money because it will be the work of the devil. According to him, it is not naturally possible to lose money only to return home to find the money by your door step. He won’t pick the money and he will seek protection of God from the accursed devil.
Somehow I thought his reasoning was valid even though I did not personally share that view. But all of this re-echoes the question: between God and the Devil: Who is responsible for what? When do we determine that an act is an act of God and when do we determine that an act is an act of the devil?
As a Muslim my natural inclination was to turn to the Qur’an to find answers. But the more I read the Qur’an the more confused I became. I guess this question is more philosophical than it is religious.
I guess both Christians and Muslims believe in some amount of pre-destination or destiny as some will put it. If that is the case, then the matter of the death of Rev Anaba’s children will be a straight forward verdict. “Surely to God we belong and to him we shall return”. But the intervention of the devil in human affairs certainly complicates these matters. Some times we are genuinely confused as to whether indeed an act is an act of God or an act of the devil.
The Qur’an states that God intervenes in our lives only for good. It is the devil that does mischief. “Satan threatens you with poverty and enjoins upon you what is foul, whereas Allah promises you forgiveness from himself and bounty. And Allah is bountiful, all-knowing”. (Q: 2: 268) Elsewhere it states: “Whatever of good comes to thee it is from Allah; and whatever of evil befalls thee is from thyself…” (Q: 4:79)
To the extent that God is good, Rev. Anaba will be right in determining that God will not intervene so negatively in his life more so during Easter which is the time when Jesus died and resurrected to save our lives. Indeed Jesus died so that “we may live life and live it abundantly”. The business of the devil is to destroy, maim and steal. That ghastly accident could therefore not have been the work of God. Rev. Anaba may therefore be right on that score.
But the question still arises as to whether the devil has control over life and death. Could the devil have determined that the daughters of Rev. Anaba should die if God wished the contrary? These are matters that cannot be answered easily. There are people who believe that if God is perfectly loving, God must wish to abolish all evil; and if God is all-powerful, God must be able to abolish all evil.
But evil exists; therefore God cannot be both omnipotent and perfectly loving.
Saint Augustine responds to the problem of evil with the proposition that evil is the going wrong of something that is inherently good. According to Augustine, the universe is good. That is to say, it is the creation of a good God for a good purpose. Augustine argues that evil, whether it be an evil will, an instance of pain or some disorder or decay in nature, has therefore not been set there by God but represents the going wrong of something that is inherently good.
He points to blindness as an example.
Blindness according to him is not a “thing”. The only thing involved is the eye, which is in itself good; the evil of blindness consists of the lack of a proper functioning of the eye. Generalising the principle, Augustine holds that evil always consists of the malfunctioning of something that is in itself good.
But the great German theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) counters Augustine’s arguments. According to him, a flawless creation would never go wrong and that if the creation does in fact go wrong, the ultimate responsibility for this must be with its creator: “for this is where the buck stops”!
In the meantime I want to relate the arguments of Augustine and Schleiermacher to the incidence of the death of Rev. Anaba’s children. There was a vehicle involved. The invention of vehicles is good in itself. The accident that occurred was therefore the going wrong of something that is inherently good.
Schleiermacher on the other hand will argue that God in his goodness could and should have prevented the tyre from bursting. The fact that God did not prevent the accident from happening shows that he is not an entirely good God.
Another school of thought is that God’s creation was not meant to be perfect from the start as Augustine argues. According to this argument, we were first made into the image of God. And through the vicissitudes of life, we are supposed to grow into the likeness of God. In other words what we perceive as the imperfections of life, such as sickness and death are supposed to mould us and gradually shape us into the likeness of God.
But we still have not answered the question as to who is responsible for what; God or the devil? Most of the time when we read stories in the news papers about people who have either killed or raped, we read that for most of them in their statements to the police, they say that what they did was the work of the devil.
It seems to me that human beings have a conspiracy against the devil just as the devil has a conspiracy against us. We have somehow virtually agreed amongst ourselves that any misfortune that will befall us, we shall attribute it to the devil. But does this not go against our Christian and Muslim beliefs that everything is ultimately God’s doing? According to Muslim belief, there are six articles of faith to which every Muslim should subscribe.
One of this is to believe in destiny, which means that we should believe that whatever happens to us, it is from Allah both the good and the bad thereof.
In spite of my Muslim belief, I am also a firm believer in the law of karma. The law of karma basically states that for every cause there is an effect. In other words there is an extent to which we are the crafters of our own destiny. What we sow is what we reap. I guess that is what Allah refers to when he states that whatever misfortune befalls us, it is from ourselves. By our actions, we trigger certain reactions which have certain results.
One of my friends argues that perhaps there will never be a conclusion to the argument about acts being the work of God or the devil. His solution is that God and the devil are one and the same person. They are two sides of the same coin. According to him, we should be free to ascribe happenings in our lives to either God or the devil, depending on the circumstances of the experience and how we feel.
In that sense I guess Rev. Anaba cannot just bring himself to accept the fact that as a person who has devoted himself to the service of God, that God will take the lives of two of his daughters at the same time. It certainly cannot be God. But my response is that the judgments of heaven are often times reversed to those of earth.
Even though this is a philosophical question that defies easy answers, I will attempt to summarise my thoughts on the question, “between God and the devil: who is responsible for what?
We are entirely free as human beings to decide the course of our destiny by the choices that we make in life. But we cannot always do with life what we want to do with it. Things will sometimes go wrong in spite of our best efforts. Sometimes they are God’s trials and a way of testing our faith. For the righteous servants of God, the devil has no power of influence.
In all things therefore, let us give thanks and praises; for the good, the bad and the ugly all contribute to shape our lives for the better. My condolences to Rev. Anaba and his family. Thanks also to all my friends who hoped for my wife’s recovery. Insha Allah all is well now.
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