It has been a while since I have done a Sunday post, sorry about that, Seems like a topic just has not hit me until this one came along. It is my hope you enjoy it and maybe get something out of it. Would you say that there is suffering and bad things going on in the world today? All you have to do is turn the TV on to the news to be able to say that yes there are bad/evil things happening. We have all seen the commercials of the little kids suffering in poorer countries of the world. I believe that we can all agree that there is suffering/evil. I go through all of this to ask the question if God is in control how can He let this happen. How can He let those children suffer like that? This is the question that we are going to look at today. A book that I am reading says that why God allows suffering and evil is one of the most pressing questions for Christians of our time. Just the fact that you are reading this tells me that you have had some suffering in your life. I cannot image you would be on the Menieres page without having some contact with it in some shape form or fashion. If you have contact with Menieres you are suffering to some degree. “Why” is a question that I have asked? When you are spinning so bad that you cannot bend over to throw up, I have asked why are you letting this happen to me God? Why are you punishing me? We have seen this question asked more than once on this forum. How can a loving God that is all knowing and all powerful let this happen. The first reason that that I can come up with is that there is no God because a loving God would not let this happen. For reasons that I have listed and discussed in other posts I cannot accept this. In my mind there is a God out there that loves each and every one of us on this page. I know this in my mind as well as my heart. I know it as sure as I am sitting in my chair typing this. As we have seen in many other posts the debate of the existence of God has been going on years before us and will go on many years after we are gone, or Jesus comes back one of the two. For this post I see no reason to go any further down that road. So in my mind He is there, so what is the reason then? There are two other reasons that I can come up with. The first is God is all powerful but not all-good and therefore doesn’t want to stop evil. What do you think about this explanation? Another possible reason is that God is all-good but unable to stop evil; therefore He is not all-powerful. How about this explanation, does it work better for you. If you believe that there is a God, the word of God is the Bible, so you believe in God, you believe in the Bible. I just do not see how you can believe and live by one and not the other. On the other side you can say if you reject one you must also reject the other. I believe in God as well as what His word tells us. So I go to the Bible and it says in Psalms 100:5 “For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations. So this verse right here alone says that God is good. So if God is good He would want to stop evil. How can someone be good and not want to stop evil? How can someone be considered good and let bad things happen. To me when you say they are good, they wouldn’t want bad things to happen. The next verse that I want to look at is Psalm 147:5, “Great is our Lord and mighty in power, his understanding has no limit”. This Psalm tells us a little something about how powerful God is. Great is our Lord. What kind of picture does that paint for you? Also all through Genesis and it talks about creating the heavens and the universe. What is cool about this is when God wanted it to happen all he had to do was speak and it happened. He did not have to do anything else just speak and it happened. That is a pretty cool deal to me. I speak all the time in my house, try to make something happen. The problem is my wife and daughter usually ignores me and it doesn’t happen (jk). When you are the creator of something that gives you control over it. That is what I think anyway. So if the Bible says that God is good and God is all powerful where is the evil and suffering coming from then? Whenever something bad or evil happens the first thing we do is blame God. Here God this evil thing happened, it is your fault God that it happened, take responsibility for it. When 9/11 happened how many times do you hear someone blame God, how could you let it happen? For the answer to this let’s go back to the beginning. God created the heavens and the earth just by speaking (all powerful). Then God created Adam and Eve and put them in the Garden. He created them perfect and put them in the perfect place. Now we get to the point of this whole post. God gave Adam and Eve the ability to make choices. He gave them the ability to obey or disobey God. So here we have Adam in Eve sitting in a perfect world, they have it made in the shade. There is no evil or suffering in their world. Can do pretty much whatever they want except one thing. Do not eat of the tree of Knowledge. What happened, they made a choice. It makes no difference what led them to make the choice they made it. They did what God told them not to do; they ate the forbidden fruit- and gained the knowledge of good and evil. Thus we have the start of evil. Suffering came in right in on the heels of evil. To me this is the bottom line on all evil and suffering. Romans 5:12 says, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through on man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all have sinned”. If Adam and Eva had not eaten of the fruit from the tree of knowledge we would be living in a perfect world and enjoying God and all His creation the way he created it for us. It is us and the people that make choices, not God, that are responsible for good and evil. Our world today is the end result of all the choices made by humans throughout time. To help make my point what is the number 1 killer of us today, I am not sure but I would say heart disease and cancer. What is the number 1 killer 50 years ago, 100 years ago? I do not think heart disease or cancer would make the list 100 years ago. As a society we have progressed, we have made choices in the way we live and the foods that we eat. Yes we are living longer, but the things that are killing us have changed. There are societies in the world were heart disease and cancer is not a problem. What is the difference then? The way we live and the choices that we make. Humans need to step up and take responsibility for their actions and quit blaming everything on God. The most obvious question to pop up out of this then is, why didn’t God make us so we couldn’t sin? Why did He give us the ability to make choices? I believe with all my heart that He could have done this if he had wanted to. My question is then what kind of world would that be then if we could not make choices. Everything was decided for us? We would not be human beings we would be human machines. Machines going down a line called life, every decision made for us. How would you like to go through life without emotions? Emotions are a choice. How many of us have someone in our life that we love. That is a choice. It is one that we voluntarily make. Think how many choices you make in a day. What would your life be like if the ability to make those choices were taken away from you? We would be like robots. I like hearing my wife and daughter say they love me because they choose to not because that is what they are programmed to do. I like coming to this forum because of the differences among us, the different personalities, the different beliefs and opinions. What would this forum be like if we all were exactly the same in everything? If you take away the ability to choose for ourselves and it was all decided for us, what else could we be? A puppet on a string is what we would be. God could have made us a puppet but he didn’t He made us humans. If you were given the question of which would you rather get rid of, evil and suffering or the ability to make choices? How would you answer? I would love to live in a world without suffering and evil but I like the ability to make choices. I believe God in His wisdom, knew this, and gave us the ability to make choices. The result of those choices, starting with Adam and Eve, is the reality that we live in today. The next question, for another post maybe, would be why doesn’t God just stamp out evil?
free will...God created us to have free will. He did not create and cause such sufferings but in His wisdom has allowed it. This world we live in now is only temporary - our true home and riches (not monies) are stored in heaven for us. I could not read all of the post you wrote but I did read last line. I will go back and try and read later. Thank you for taking the time to write this!
This is a stepping stone, what you do here is your opportunity how /where you go when you die. If 'earth' and all of us here were "well" and never anything wrong with us we'd never die. We'd never have to have Faith, Love to Him or each other. We'd never have to strive to be good 'people', nothing to look forward to. I agree with A. God didn't create suffering He did however create humans that can work in many occupations that can help others, such as us. It may not happen until we're gone but it's being worked on. I pray it doesn't keep going down through my family, I'd rather be the one who suffers than my daughter or grandchildren. I thank God for giving us the Doctors we do have, those that help us as best as they can. The next step is Heaven or Hell. That is our own individual choice
