How does God allow pain and suffering...?

There is this question that has been circulating that people dealing with pain and suffering can't seem to cope with; how could an all powerful and all loving God allow evil to happen in this world? But the problem with this is they are asking the wrong question.  God isn't just all powerful and all loving.  This question is like one of those caricature drawings where the artist will over emphasize a few of your qualities (like your face and your nose), but the picture would never look like an accurate depiction of you.  Christians simply do not believe that God is only all loving and all powerful, and since the questions arises out of their belief system, Christians are the ones who get to define it.

So assume with me God is all of the following: benevolent, loving, just, holy, righteous, merciful, eternal, all-powerful, all-pervading, all-knowing, sovereign, free, authentic, transcendent, emanate, among other things.  Assume all of these things are true and all integrated; that you can't have one without the other. And at least give me the fact that words such as all powerful, and all knowing are not terms that define a controllable force.  So how does a God that is all of these things let bad things happen in the world?

            First we have to understand where pain and suffering comes from, and through this remember God is among other things a just and holy God.  I believe pain and suffering comes from disobeying God.  I think there are two ways of living; searching after God, his will, and communion with Him, and searching after anything else that might fill the void of not having a relationship with God.  See we were all created as relational beings and we have a need for a relationship with God in our lives, and if we are not letting God fill that void we are using whatever else we can find (sex, drugs, rock n' roll ;) ) to try and fill that void.  We have (as well as Satan) a curious little way of always trying to do things our way, because our focus in life becomes ourselves instead of God and serving his goals. It's a funny little thing when our life becomes the center of our universe instead of God.  It's amazing to me how when we think of how insignificant our lives can be among all people of all generations, we still have this nasty habit of thinking everything is about us.

            This happened with Adam and Eve (Gen 3).  Sure God could have stepped in and stopped them from disobeying him and saved them from the pain and suffering that followed, but if God stepped in every time we made bad choices we would essentially be well controlled robots.  It would take away from our free will.  Which it is free will that gives us a choice to love God or reject Him.  Think about it, we were created in Gods image (Gen 1:27), as relational beings; we were made to love.  Would you want someone's love if it was forced upon them, if it was not by their own free will?  Of course not!  So here is the deal; God wants our love.  He wants us totally enthralled by him and he wants our total devotion. But he wants that to be real. And Free will is the only way for that to happen.

The downside to free will is the consequences that occur when we choose our way over Gods will for our lives.  And it's broader then just individual consequences.  Sometimes our actions hurt innocent people.  Sometimes our actions lead a whole people group into destructive situations such as with the Amalekites who were performing human sacrifices and throwing their own babies into fire. And the thing about our way is it's a conscious choice of ours to separate our lives from God.  And since God is just in allowing us free will decisions, he must allow (but control) evil.  And we can never under estimate ultimate judgment (judgment day), that will vindicate the sufferer.

            We may never understand the decisions God makes to intervene or to not intervene on pain and suffering, but I do know this; we have a God that deeply loves us and wants to bless us.  However, his main goal is not our safety and happiness.  If it were we would probably not have to deal with pain and suffering.  But just as a parents number one goal is not making a child happy (if it were they would give them lots of drugs) but their wellbeing, Gods number one goal for our lives is communion with Him (love the Lord your God with all your heart…) and to bring other people into communion with Him (..and love your neighbor as yourself). That being said, we come to a realization of our need for God when all the stuff we pursue after fails to bring us what we hoped for.  Or when we need meaning in the suffering that is present in our lives.  Without sin we would not know grace (the Latin term for this is Felix Culpx).  Thus pain and suffering is used to bring us into communion with God.

            We have a limited understand of who God is and how He works.  In that limited understanding of who He is we are trying to define in human, temporal terms a God who is eternal and indescribable, who by no means can be contained by the little box humanity has created for him.  That is the whole theme of God speaking to Job in the book of Job, He is God, Job is not. It deals with Gods sovereignty- that he can do what he wishes with his creation.

            We do not always have answers to why God does the things he does.  Unfortunately we do not experience the "butterfly effect" where we can look at how our lives will turn out by making one decision as apposed to another.  However God does have that foreknowledge, and you never no when God is sparing you from a greater evil (Isaiah 57:1), letting you learn something early in life based upon your suffering, giving you wisdom on suffering so that you may be a blessing to someone else, or just letting you deal with the consequences of your own actions. 

Regardless of the situation God can take any suffering and use it for good if you let him.  An example of this is if a mother's child dies of cancer her understanding of that suffering could in turn help other mothers cope with the loss of a child.  Even though that does not make the suffering go away, God will use pain and suffering for good if we just realize the world in which we live is much bigger than our own selfish desires, and that we are here for a greater purpose; to serve Gods kingdom.

So I don't know all the reasons why God allows for pain and suffering to occur.  But I'm confident that God is loving and giving and he desperately wants us to have our hearts over flowing with joy…and I'm aware of how much we as humans turn away from that.  But I understand for some people that isn't good enough, and none of those reasons can make any pain or suffering go away, but God didn't just leave us to deal with pain… he dealt with it Himself when he went to the cross…and even though that may seem like the cliché answer, God's people-Christians all have purpose to try and change the world and help people to find communion with God and internal healing.

This all being said- I'm open to thoughts, opinions, questions or anything else ya want to throw my way.  Just be gentle…I'm not claiming to know everything- I'm hardly a scholar.

heaven

Heaven.

I've been thinking a lot about heaven lately.  The more I grow up in this world the more I get the feeling that it is utterly and ridiculously broken and it has me yearning for heaven.  I love those moments when I can just picture what heaven will be like: the idea of being in total communion with God. Feeling the extent of Gods love for you that completely flows over in you.   I can picture eternity unfold before my eyes- everything so piercingly white-seeing the holiness of God (rev 21).  All the pain and hurt and all the emotional starvation for a relationship that completely heals me just totally gone.

 Something that Ben Depew said once has sort of stuck with me; what if it isn't just our idea of heaven to spend eternity with God, what if (because God does things out of his own good pleasure,) God's idea of heaven is to spend eternity with us.  When you think about it, that makes since.  The entire bible is this great story of the way God pursues our hearts.  It's his master plan to win us back to him because he yearns for us to be with him.  It's amazing to read the bible and see how much we as people defy him, turn our back on him, out right mock him, cheat on him, and live selfish lives yet he still continues to pursue our hearts because his love runs that deep.

Ezekiel 18:30: "Therefore, O house of Israel, I will judge you, each one according to his ways, declares the Sovereign LORD . Repent! Turn away from all your offenses; then sin will not be your downfall. 31 Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, O house of Israel? 32 For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign LORD . Repent and live!"

I can see God pleading to us, wanting to be with us, "Please turn to me!" He aches for us to spend eternity with him…Our creator made us and molded us into being just the way he wanted us, and he smiled down at us filled with the love in his heart and thought, "this is very good", and then when we turned our backs on Him and walked away from Him, basically flicking Him off and saying "I can do this whole life thing on my own, I don't need you", he was right there devising a plan to win back our hearts.

What an awesome amazing God. The pursuer of our hearts! How he longs to spend the rest of our lives with us! How he desires to fill our life with gifts from him, and too look down on our smiling faces as we wake up to them each day. How he longs to hold us when we ache, and to wipe away our tears when we hurt. Oh, how our Father in Heaven wants to live with us.

In the midst of praying about all this I came up with my new motto.  I think what love comes down to is sacrificing what you want for another person, and I would say even further desiring to sacrifice what you want for what is best for another person.  This is where I am having trouble… People are so incredibly sinful and filled with their own selfish ambitions, how can we really love?  It goes against our human nature to give up what you want. It's a constant daily struggle (at least for a single female who has never had to give up my desires for a husband or kids (quick intergection, I see parents loving like this all the time)).  I guess what is hard for me is that I'm constantly fighting my human nature to do what I want or what is best for me, with my human nature mostly winning, yet I am suppose to be a Christ follower.  It frustrates me that I am part of a minority of people who claim to Love Jesus, yet I don't really live like I love Jesus (and in this way I mean I don't live my life daily sacrificing my own wants and desires because I take joy in sacrificing myself for what is best for God). I just don't understand sometimes how God continues to pursue us with most of the world either apathetic to him or definying him, and when those who claim to follow him can be out right adulterous toward him. It absolutely amazes me that God still has the capasity to deeply love us. 

I don't think I'm a horrible person or anything, but I don't just want to live a life of me "doing enough" in the church or being a good person… I'm not looking to win a merit badge or to be a better person, I'm looking to really live my life unabatedly loving God.  I think for awhile back about a year ago I was living my life as a "good Christian", and I thought I was a good person, and it really kept me from fully experiencing Gods grace. I'm at the point now where I don't want to just be better, and if we say that we really love God then we need to jump off our spiritual bridges and live like we really, truly, hands down, love Jesus and that his will, his desire, and his people are of utmost importance to our lives.

My new motto: live like you love Jesus.

*Edit*

This is something I wrote about heaven in October of 2006...I think it applies

..."Those broken places are the only places I seem to find a glimpse of you...A real glimpse of you that leaves me filled with a burning of your presence that makes me feel loved and sought after in a way I thought was imaginary... But a glimpse is all I seem to get before the realness of your love and faithfulness starts to fade and the radiance of your presence turns to a pale yellow, leaving me wanting more.  But with out sincere brokenness it seems all I get is the memory of your presence, and the wonder of how I can get that back and keep it alive for even just a little while longer.  And then I think, maybe that's what heaven is...here in this broken world we get glimpses of your filling presence but in heaven...In heaven we delight in it always...Your radiance burns in our souls, and your presence becomes so much a part of us that we can't even remember what it was like to be with out you."

timelessness

I just finished reading A Severe Mercy, and there were a few things that hit me quite deeply.  One of those was how we long for timelessness and how deeply that is a longing for eternity- the eternity which we were created for. 

            Time is part of our natural environment.  It is as natural as the air we breathe.  We as humans have become very accustomed to breathing, so much so we don't have to remind ourselves to do it.  But time on the other hand is not something we have mastered.  I can tell you that much from my constant struggle to be anywhere on time.  It spoils our greatest moments, it keeps us from doing the things we enjoy, and it locks us into punch cards and time sheets when we are longing to go and get out of work or school. Animals seemed to have mastered time like we have mastered breathing.  They seem to be utterly unaware of it. How then is it that time, something that humans have lived in since the beginning of it, still seems not to be a part of our natural environment?

            In one of C.S. Lewis' letters to Sheldon Vanauken he asks the question "how is it that you, a product of a materialistic universe, are not at home there? Do the fish complain of the sea for being wet?  Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures?"

            As Vanauken alludes to, and to which I strongly agree- If then we complain of time and being always constricted by it, and if we as humans long for the timeless moments, would that not suggest we have not always been or will not always be temporal creatures? It suggests that we were created for eternity; for timelessness. We so often complain about where time has gone.  How often do you hear people say, if only I could go back in time and do it over again? We haven't, not even for thousands of generations adapted to time, nor are we at home in it. This alone is a powerful suggestion that eternity is our home.

            The thing about humans though, is for everything Godly and eternal, we try and find our own way of doing things.  Just as God has created in us a need for relationships, since he is a relational being and created in us a need for a relationship with him –Humans have tried to make their own way of doing things. Humanity has perverted relationships by teaching you get love from sex, which in turn utterly frustrates humans (especially females in my knowledge) when what reciprocates is emptiness. Humanity, like with relationships, has tried to master time.  Half our inventions are said to save time (dishwasher, washing machine, planes, trains, cars).  The funny thing is humans have never been more hurried by time.  We are ruled by the watches and alarm clocks we have created.  But I suppose that is just one of the many consequences of people thinking they can do a better job about things then God. 

            Lewis later talks about how he was brought to God by his longing for joy. Secretly we are all questing after whatever earthly object we think to bring us joy (a boyfriend, money, marriage, children), and we learn when we find it that it does not fill us up with the joy that broke our hearts with longing. "Thus, Lewis says, 'if a man diligently followed this desire [for joy], pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given- nay, cannot even be imagined as given- in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience." (I quoted here directly from the book because I felt it was written much better then I could ever explain it) This again alludes to eternity. Vanauken talks about how he and his wife having each other longed for unpressured time and a time free existence which they sought out in the form of a boat that they could take around Islands, lay around getting as brown as nuts and just enjoy one another without the pressure of time. But the boat itself was just a means to an end.  Or at least they thought it to be.  It never quite works out how we imagine and in reality it was only a glimpse into the real timelessness. This got me to thinking; what sort of timelessness am I seeking after?  Are my efforts in pursuit of an eternity with God, or am I just looking for it in something else.   And what is it that we as humans try and get lost in to find timelessness (books, flat screen T.V's, movies), what is it we are pursuing?  For me, I think it is traveling the world-seeing God through all he has created.  That isn't bad in and of it self because the glimpse of eternity only strengthens that burning for something more.  But one must make sure that one's focus is on eternity and not on earthly desires.

 And let me clarify- by focusing on eternity I don't mean a heaven where everything's made of gold and you get all your desires of prosperity and comfort fulfilled.  I mean an eternity of joy that comes from God's over whelming love for you.  It's the final chapter of a fairy tale where you spend ever after with a lover whom no words could begin to describe.  And its timelessness- Can you imagine when we won't be ruled by those twelve numbers on that little round face?  The good thing though is eternity starts here.  Our journey of communion with God begins here and now. All one must do is decide whether or not that is worth living for.  Following God isn't about what rules there are to follow- it's about accepting an invitation from one that has been pursuing you in love since before you came into being. 

relationship quandries

So me and Anne have been in talks about doing a bible study on relationships, sex, and all that stuff…So yeah, I’ve been thinking about a lot of that stuff lately, and I have come to some conclusions of which I have written down.  So here it goes:

With half of all marriages ending in divorce and the other half struggling just how much hope can one put in love, relationships and happily ever after? How are we supposed to guard our hearts?  How are we suppose to not get caught up in the fairy tail of love and end up face down in the muck of heartbreak and divorce?  I don’t claim to know everything on relationships, but going through a good number of them and getting my heart broken a dozen or so times I’ve come out the wiser with a few tips that may help.

First of all, don’t listen to your heart.  I’m familiar with all the movies and what not that tell us to follow our hearts, and trust me I love chick flicks. But I do think they give woman these cruel expectations that a man is going to always be in love with her, fighting for her, and pursuing her. This delusion of relationships gives so many young girls a false hope of what love really is, which is sad because people will always let you down.  I have become more and more aware of the fact that people are messed up...we are selfish, self-serving beings who no matter how hard we try and be Christ like, fall utterly short... So yeah, follow your heart, bad idea, because you aren’t following your heart; you’re following your emotions.  That’s right, not your heart, not God, not Jesus, Mary, Joseph, or his technicolor dream coat, it’s your emotions.  And while emotions don't guarantee an end to a relationship, it sure is conducer to one if everything is based on them (sort of like gasoline on a fire). And what girls really have to be cautious about is when a guy guides a relationships based on his feelings and emotions because I’ll be quite honest, guys fall out of love with girls just as quickly as they fall into love with them, and if he isn’t making rational decisions about guarding your heart, then no one except your friends will.

Which leads me to my next point; LISTEN TO YOUR FRIENDS!!! They know a lot more then you give them credit for.  If you really believe you have good friends then they are looking out for what is best for you.  They may just see something have you have overlooked being so blinded by “love”, and trust me you are… I can never once remember a time in a relationship where I wasn’t fooled by my feelings.  I have many, many times ignored what my friends have said, and many times have I crashed and burned.  If only I would have listened to the fair warnings I may have put a tiny bit of caution and mistrust in men, saving myself a lot of grief.  But then again I would not have gained wisdom to which I get the pleasure of spreading to you all like Christmas joy. 

Ok, now third, never trust people in a romantic relationship straight off.  I would say never trust men, but I’m going to say people in general are sinful and selfish.  And although people may not be trying to be deceptive, one wants to put his/her best foot forward in a new relationships and I guarantee you they aren’t going to reveal all of where their lives are messy.  And even if they give you a snippet of their messy lives, their inadequacies, and the stuff they struggle most with, I’m positive it wouldn’t be the whole picture and I can promise even if they are working on it or they have reached some new spiritual level or whatever they are going to carry that luggage all their lives and most likely struggle with that same problem all of their lives, and you have to take a look at what that means for you and if you can handle that.   I know from experience you think you know him and love him with in a month of dating but tru-hu-hust me, you don’t…again it’s an emotion thing; you have to go through the good, the bad, and the ugly to really know someone.  It’s not like most people are openly deceptive, all though some are…   people don’t want to take responsibility for their actions and decisions. But the thing is as much as you may regret them, it still takes two people to make them in a relationship.  I’ve been in those situations before and it is easy to blame stuff on the ex, but it’s far from truthful and it makes it far to likely that history will repeat itself.   The fact of the matter is, we have all been blinded by infatuation, adoration, and whatever else disguises itself as love, and we’ve all done things we regret, and we have to hold ourselves responsible for them.  But the probability of that happening is slim, so listen to your friends and take a loooooooong time to get to know someone.

And finally, less we forget about love.  What a terribly miss understood thing it is.  I know I’ve said it without knowing what it really was.  But the thing is nothing warrants more caution then love and those three big words.  And I understand this is hard to believe in a society that jumps in and out of it so quickly, where romance novels, romantic comedies, romantic dramas and so forth are all thrusting love at first sight, sex with out discretion, and marriage (always with the crutch of divorce incase things fall through); but trust me, love is far more then something you feel (those are butterflies).  And I can only explain it in part as this. Feelings are yours.  No one else is going to feel them but you…you can’t some how pass how your feeling off to someone else to bring them joy.  They are yours to feel and yours alone.  Love, on the other hand is selfless.  It’s not about your feelings or you it’s about the actions you display on the person you love...its about giving up yourself and putting someone else before you.  I know that doesn’t completely explain anything, but love is about your actions toward someone else (love is patient, love is kind, it is not self seeking), and more importantly I don’t think when a guy pursues a girl hard core it is love just because it’s an action…the action is selfishly motivated to obtain the relationship or whatever, so yeah, not selflessly motivated.  I know just from having long friendships that when you really love someone, you will disagree, argue, fight and scream, and there are going to be things that annoy you to no end, but it’s when you get to the other side of that and you see yourself actually selflessly giving up yourself for what is best for the other that you should consider it appropriate to discuss love.  And when you do want to discuss it, first do so with someone older, wiser, and in a healthy marriage.

Now I by no means think people should stop dating…it’s a trial and error system, and you learn from your mistakes… And don’t think that just because someone has messed up in the past or because they are of the male persuasion that they are evil and you shouldn’t date them. The point of all this is to minimize your heart ache and regret.  Wisdom, discernment, and caution NEED to be used in a relationship, because if they aren’t, it will always end in folly.  I write this from personal experience…I have made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I have learned a lot and I’m always willing to share experiences to try and help people out, so if you want to talk, let me know…if you are interested in the whole guarding yourself for dating thing and you are of the female persuasion, come to my bible study. 

Proverbs 4:23 "Above all else, guard your heart,  for it is the wellspring of life."