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Nec5
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Remember. The brighter the picture, the darker the negative. It’s true in photography. It’s true in life.
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How is it that some people have everything so perfect, and some people have so much suffering?
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Joe_Kelley
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Years back we worked some couple’s retreats with some associates. Saturday evening we would each meet with several of the couples individually. I was often amazed at the burdens some apparently happy successful people were carrying.
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SeanTom
Guest
WHY DOES GOD ALLOW SUFFERING?
Perhaps the greatest trial for faith is the puzzle of why evil and suffering exists. If God is all-powerful and loves mankind, as the Bible teaches, why does He permit the good to suffer and the evil to prosper, as so often happens? Why does He permit poverty and illness and war, which destroys innocent and guilty alike?
This is the commonest objection to belief in God and there is no slick answer to it. It is a question which religious thinkers in every age have grappled with and no-one has yet come up with a satisfactory explanation. All we can do here is offer a few strands of thought which might point in the direction of a solution.
This puzzle is the theme of the anonymous Book of Job, one of the great masterpieces of ancient literature. God allows Satan to test Job’s faith by taking away this good man’s wealth, his children, and finally his health. Most of the Book consists of Job’s poetic agonies, for the philosophical problem proved to be more painful than pain itself. His friends were no help. They simply concluded that he was being punished for some great sins he had committed. But the simplistic view that virtue is always rewarded would never square with the undeserved suffering of Jesus, the only sinless man that ever lived.
What sort of world would it be in which suffering or unexpected deaths were totally eliminated? Clearly it would be a very different world from the one we live in now. First of all, the physical environment would have to be different. A world in which, for example, there could be no earthquakes, no droughts, no flood, no hurricanes, no disease, would have to be a physically different world from the one we live in. Is such a physically different world possible? Modern science seems to suggest that it isn’t. The basic laws of physics are so finely turned that even a minute change in them would reduce the universe to chaos. If this is the case then it looks as though the laws which make it possible for us to exist at all are the same laws which create the conditions in which suffering is possible.
But even if the physical world could be changed so as to eliminate the possibility of diseases and natural disasters, that would not solve the problem. There still remains the suffering which human beings inflict on themselves and on each other. To change that would mean changing people. Their freedom of choice would have to be destroyed, for people cannot have true freedom unless the possibility of misusing it is there. Would it be a better world if we had no free choice; if we were all programmed automations? Would such an existence, with all suffering eliminated, be worth having?
Jesus Himself offered a key to part of the riddle when He said that our heavenly Father “makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” Reason, free will, and a bounteous environment are gifts from God to all men, good and bad alike, to use as they wish. But man is sinful; and, in consequence, the society he creates includes many injustices. The poor, the underprivileged, the war victims, and the criminals all arise out of this imperfect society. But they are man’s doing, not God’s.
There are glimpses of a loving purpose even in the ills and misfortunes of life. Pain, a common mode of suffering, is needed to warn us when we touch a hot stove or when we have appendicitis. Gravity, which causes a disabled plane to crash, is necessary to hold us on our planet and to keep the elements of the universe in balance. Unhappiness is simply the dark side of our capacity to feel happiness. The need to work for a living enables us to fulfill our abilities and saves us from becoming a race of jellyfish.
Suffering, then, seems to be a consequence of the way things are. But it would be a mistake to think that God is indifferent to suffering, or worse—that He deliberately inflicts it.
Christians believe that God has revealed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. And in Jesus Christ God has subjected Himself to the consequences of the universe He has created. When Jesus died in terrible agony on the cross, He showed himself to be at one with a suffering humanity. He also showed that suffering can be transformed into life; that evil can be overcome by love.
This does not fully explain why there is suffering in the world, but it does perhaps help us to glimpse the meaning of suffering; that it is not all a futile waste.
The Apostle Paul says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us”?
Although we can not fully understand why God permits suffering or why He permits some of us to die at an early age, we do know that He has a plan. We know that His son Jesus also suffered and died at an early age. We have no doubt that God also suffered when His son was crucified and died on the cross. We have no doubt that God feels a hurt when we suffer and/or die of unnatural causes. Jesus did not tell us why these events happen, BUT we do know that He is always with us and that He leaves us hope. He made us a promise: He ASSURED us that if we follow Him, we WILL enter His Kingdom where there will be no suffering and where will live in peace and happiness forever.
The Devil was given rule, or reign, over the evil in the world today. Unfortunately, evil people can and will hurt good people. This is where the evil people use the choice that God has given them and they opt to hurt the good people of the earth., The good will suffer, but as God has promised, the good will spend an eternity in the peace of God’s Kingdom. Jesus went through this all through His lifetime.
Perhaps the greatest trial for faith is the puzzle of why evil and suffering exists. If God is all-powerful and loves mankind, as the Bible teaches, why does He permit the good to suffer and the evil to prosper, as so often happens? Why does He permit poverty and illness and war, which destroys innocent and guilty alike?
This is the commonest objection to belief in God and there is no slick answer to it. It is a question which religious thinkers in every age have grappled with and no-one has yet come up with a satisfactory explanation. All we can do here is offer a few strands of thought which might point in the direction of a solution.
This puzzle is the theme of the anonymous Book of Job, one of the great masterpieces of ancient literature. God allows Satan to test Job’s faith by taking away this good man’s wealth, his children, and finally his health. Most of the Book consists of Job’s poetic agonies, for the philosophical problem proved to be more painful than pain itself. His friends were no help. They simply concluded that he was being punished for some great sins he had committed. But the simplistic view that virtue is always rewarded would never square with the undeserved suffering of Jesus, the only sinless man that ever lived.
What sort of world would it be in which suffering or unexpected deaths were totally eliminated? Clearly it would be a very different world from the one we live in now. First of all, the physical environment would have to be different. A world in which, for example, there could be no earthquakes, no droughts, no flood, no hurricanes, no disease, would have to be a physically different world from the one we live in. Is such a physically different world possible? Modern science seems to suggest that it isn’t. The basic laws of physics are so finely turned that even a minute change in them would reduce the universe to chaos. If this is the case then it looks as though the laws which make it possible for us to exist at all are the same laws which create the conditions in which suffering is possible.
But even if the physical world could be changed so as to eliminate the possibility of diseases and natural disasters, that would not solve the problem. There still remains the suffering which human beings inflict on themselves and on each other. To change that would mean changing people. Their freedom of choice would have to be destroyed, for people cannot have true freedom unless the possibility of misusing it is there. Would it be a better world if we had no free choice; if we were all programmed automations? Would such an existence, with all suffering eliminated, be worth having?
Jesus Himself offered a key to part of the riddle when He said that our heavenly Father “makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” Reason, free will, and a bounteous environment are gifts from God to all men, good and bad alike, to use as they wish. But man is sinful; and, in consequence, the society he creates includes many injustices. The poor, the underprivileged, the war victims, and the criminals all arise out of this imperfect society. But they are man’s doing, not God’s.
There are glimpses of a loving purpose even in the ills and misfortunes of life. Pain, a common mode of suffering, is needed to warn us when we touch a hot stove or when we have appendicitis. Gravity, which causes a disabled plane to crash, is necessary to hold us on our planet and to keep the elements of the universe in balance. Unhappiness is simply the dark side of our capacity to feel happiness. The need to work for a living enables us to fulfill our abilities and saves us from becoming a race of jellyfish.
Suffering, then, seems to be a consequence of the way things are. But it would be a mistake to think that God is indifferent to suffering, or worse—that He deliberately inflicts it.
Christians believe that God has revealed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. And in Jesus Christ God has subjected Himself to the consequences of the universe He has created. When Jesus died in terrible agony on the cross, He showed himself to be at one with a suffering humanity. He also showed that suffering can be transformed into life; that evil can be overcome by love.
This does not fully explain why there is suffering in the world, but it does perhaps help us to glimpse the meaning of suffering; that it is not all a futile waste.
The Apostle Paul says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us”?
Although we can not fully understand why God permits suffering or why He permits some of us to die at an early age, we do know that He has a plan. We know that His son Jesus also suffered and died at an early age. We have no doubt that God also suffered when His son was crucified and died on the cross. We have no doubt that God feels a hurt when we suffer and/or die of unnatural causes. Jesus did not tell us why these events happen, BUT we do know that He is always with us and that He leaves us hope. He made us a promise: He ASSURED us that if we follow Him, we WILL enter His Kingdom where there will be no suffering and where will live in peace and happiness forever.
The Devil was given rule, or reign, over the evil in the world today. Unfortunately, evil people can and will hurt good people. This is where the evil people use the choice that God has given them and they opt to hurt the good people of the earth., The good will suffer, but as God has promised, the good will spend an eternity in the peace of God’s Kingdom. Jesus went through this all through His lifetime.
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