Who’s Fault Is It? – Part II

 

Seems as though there is a quest to find the spiritual aspect of life. We can see it all around us. People are searching for a meaning and purpose, their looking for answers about life after death, they are trying to determine if God exists or not. There has been a trend in movies in recent years that prove our interest in the spiritual aspects of life. Movies like ‘Ambition to Meaning’, ‘Ghost’, and the upcoming ‘Hereafter’. Movies about God, from the comical ‘Oh God’ and ‘Bruce Almighty’ to the more serious and recent ‘Letters to God’. All of this points to the many that are looking once again toward religion and faith in God. However, in all of this searching for something spiritual, the issue of suffering is one of the common objections to religion and faith in God.

We are constantly confronted by suffering. Suffering on a global scale, signified by natural disasters, famines, floods and war. Suffering on a local level such as coal mines accidents, plane crashes, industrial plant accidents and the likes. Then we have suffering 0n a personal/individual level that affects us all: sickness, handicaps, broken relationships, loneliness, depression, persecution, injustice and poverty. The list doesn’t end there; suffering can take on many forms and no human being is immune from it.

Let’s look at suffering from a spiritual perspective. In order to do that we must consider God, the Bible and Creation. Suffering was not a part of God’s original created order. In the beginning, Genesis 1&2, there was no suffering before man rebelled against God. There will be no suffering after the new heaven and the new earth are created, as described in Revelation 21. Suffering only entered the world because Adam and Eve rebelled against God. When they rebelled against God they sinned, sin entered the world. Many theologians have said that all suffering is a result of sin, either directly or indirectly. If we take this to be a true statement then we have to ask, why did God allow sin to enter His created world and our world?

God allowed sin to enter into the world and our lives because He loves us and wants us to have control of our lives, He gave us a free will! Love is not love if it is forced; it can only be love if there is a real choice. God has given everyone one of us a choice and the freedom to love or not love. Given this freedom, this choice, men and women from the beginning have chosen to rebel against God and God commandments. The result has been suffering.

CS Lewis had this to say about suffering;

‘It would, no doubt, have been possible for God to remove by miracle the results of the first sin ever committed by a human being; but this would not have been much good unless He was prepared to remove the results of the second sin, and of the third, and so on forever. If the miracles ceased, then sooner or later we might have reached our present lamentable situation: if they did not, then a world thus continually under propped and corrected by Divine interference, would have been a world in which nothing important ever depended on human choice, and in which choice itself would soon cease from the certainty that one of the apparent alternatives before you would lead to no results and was there- fore not really an alternative.’

Suffering as a result of…   our CHOICE, others CHOICE, the WORLD…

(To Be Continued)