How does God feel about what's happening in Israel and Gaza?

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Wherever there is war and the suffering of innocent people we know that God’s heart is breaking. We know he desires us to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with him as our God (Micah 6:8). He reveals his heart for peacemaking with enemies through the life and teaching of Jesus and the cross of Christ speaks to us about God’s judgement on all human sin.

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Why doesn’t God do something?

If you mean why he doesn’t intervene directly to stop the war, we need to remember how God has chosen to rule his world. He exercised his wisdom and power in creating the universe and gave human beings freedom to live in this world under his guidance. You can’t change the way the universe is operating to exclude suffering. In a memorable phrase of C.S Lewis: "Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free will involve, and you will find you have excluded life itself".

God may not intervene in the way we would want him to but have no doubt that God is doing something.  He works with those in Gaza who are comforting the mothers and fathers who have lost their children; you see him in the courage of doctors and nurses when the bombs are falling, fearlessly working to save lives in operating theatres; he is working in the patience and wisdom of the peacemakers in their midnight meetings with angry people from both sides of the conflict. However dark the night of suffering I always hang on to the words of Romans 8:28 and believe that 'God is always working for the good of those who love him'.

by Rev David Coffey, President of the Baptist World Alliance