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another good point is that God allows suffering because suffering has a way of taking a hard heart, and softening it to the point where a person turns to God because there is no other course of action to take- Bitterness doesn’t help, anger doesn’t- resentment doesn’t- there is no other way to turn but to Him - Not everyone will CHOOSE to turn to Him of course- but God gives them enough time to make up their mind

Glen Miller says it well:

“God has made the human personality resilient, adaptive, and in most cases, able to transform situations of personal suffering into experiences of growth. “

“7. If a loving and powerful God really exists, why doesn’t He do something about all of the evil in the world?

“Actually, He IS doing something about evil—not the least of which is being patient with you and I about OUR evil! Even though He gets a lot of slander for not judging evil quickly, nevertheless many of us appreciate the fact that He didn’t judge us too early, and that He gave us time to ‘get right with Him’! “

http://www.christianthinktank.com/thumbs.html

Glen talks about our lives having a ‘group effect’ (IE: Our actions affect the ‘whole group’ (those around us that we are connected to) in ways we will never know- A simple smile or compliment from a suffering person for instance can so affect a young person that years later, faced with their own problems, remembers the kindness of the suffering person, and so decides to help humanity in ways that this person never would have even begun to conciser had that sick person not been kind to them earlier in life-)

“Group Effect” Is a powerful concept- our actions have ramifications far out into the future- and affect more people than we will ever realize-

Of course that brigns us to the person who is sick but bitter and rejects God- what good can possibly coem from this? There are many- and the site goes through those in several articles-Basically the bitter person was never going to accept Christ no matter what- but God will use it just as He used Pharaoh’s hardened heart to bring about good ultimately-

the problem of pain and suffering is a common issue that has been pondered all down through the ages- and there are a great many examinations of it by many prominent philosophers and theologians etc- There are answers- if we are objective enough to get beyond any preconceived personal finite, incomplete moral regulations we impose on God-

The ‘Group Effect’ is an important concept to study and learn- when trying to understand the presence and effects of evil, and the concept of hell and eternal suffering (Some people argue that the punishment outweighs the crime of rejecting Christ and living a life of sin- however, this ‘Group Effect” comes into play even here because crimes committed have far reaching affects that aren’t readily seen or known- for instance a murderer may murder a person and think they just affected the immediate family, but not so- the affects will carry on down through the ages, affecting distance relatives, affecting people who knew them- affecting national laws- affecting society as a whole- etc etc- so that ‘single act of murder’ wasn’t as limited in scope as first thought- and the seriousness of the crime is multiplied many times- this is just a quick eample0 there ism ore of course- but got to run-)