Posted on 05/19/2013 12:21:32 PM PDT by HiTech RedNeck
Edited on 05/25/2013 2:44:13 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
"Where were You, God?" The question arises daily as news of tragedies abound, and even from time to time as the tragedy involves ourselves. Servicemen die in a bungled military defense operation that should have been a cake walk, and no government official has credible answers. A son is shot dead in his prime by a wanton criminal. A wife dies decades too soon from a deadly disease. A busy mother dies unexpectedly from a sudden heart attack. Maybe you were emotionally abused when a child and have been saddled with a destructive habit that you acquired in an effort to escape from the torment by the only means you knew, and prayer -- once you realized you were in a trap -- seemed scant help or comfort. In these myriad situations the bitter questions often arise: "Oh Lord, where were You? Dear God, why did You roll over for this? Almighty Father, I've always heard that you are righteous and omnipotent, so why did You not act when it would have been so simple for You to stop it from happening? Oh, the heart-rending woe! Why did You lose, God?"
This is not a modern question, and it was not discovered by modern atheists, agnostics, or freethinkers. It arose many thousands of years ago to a man named Job (pronounced with a long "o") who kept a tender conscience towards God about what he did, and as a result displayed a very upright life, and was blessed with a large, loving family and many earthly riches. And yet without warning this man's world came crashing down upon him. It began with the destruction and theft of his great riches, and was topped by the loss of most of the lives of his dear family. Then, the trouble soon escalated with an inexplicable illness that covered him with sores. His wife, in an apparent hint that God was fickle and undeserving of love, in great disgust told him to curse God and die. His friends, who initially wisely comforted him in silence, then began to lecture him sarcastically about how he must have done something terribly wrong to provoke God's wrath, and his agony grew as a heated argument erupted and Job insisted he had done nothing to deserve the tragedy. Finally a wiser friend suggested that Job look to God's sovereignty, and then God answered Job from a whirlwind, challenging the limitations of Job's knowledge about what God can do. With a deeper appreciation of God's capabilities, Job stopped complaining, and soon God blessed Job twice as much as he had been blessed before.
There is a simple enough answer to the question, at least to the mind: by allowing the world and even our selves to fail so dramatically at times, God highlights His capacity to save, a faith in which we sometimes are sorely lacking, and even if we know it in our heads, our hearts are slower and lag behind that and need to be taught. For God is not merely solving complex intellectual problems. He is solving problems that encompass our entire beings that He has created and bestowed with capabilities that are an image of His own.
Should remarried widowers go around with sad faces because of your pontifications on morality? Job’s life was never “perfect” on earth — just joyful.
Angels have lesser capacities in some way than men, though they are bestowed with stronger powers in the capacities they do have. From the bible, an angel can be all good or all bad, but never redeemed or saved. That is why angels long to look into the redemption of mankind. It is an exotic sight to them.
Just BELIEVE!
I have the same sense. This generation is a foolish one...
Always question but only after accepting the offer of salvation to live a new life in faith and grace being born again brings.
John 3:3
Jesus answered him, I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, that unless a person is born again, he cannot ever see (know, be acquainted with, and experience) the kingdom of God.
2 Corinthians 5:17
Therefore if any person is in Christ he is a new creation (a new creature altogether); the old [previous moral and spiritual condition] has passed away. Behold, the fresh and new has come!
The next 12 years are in your hands.
The inability to know why their former spouses were taken away from them and the limited nature of life is why they must remarry and try to regain some of the happiness taken away from them. Job's case was different. He knew who took away his family, and knew later that it was part of his god's test to him. His former family blotted out and replaced like a manufactured commodity, as if the past didn't matter.
God has to please angels with exotic sights like that, now?
To what end? And for what purpose?
I respect your Presbyterian/Calvinist background; I am not as Calvinist as I had been earlier in my Christian life, but some of the rough edges were knocked off by a realization that God isn’t limited to time, and can frame-in free will without negating it or its consequences or His power to rule over the overall sweep of eternity. Perhaps as though space-time were a large canvas curved around the Lord whose details He can fill out in any logical sequence He chooses as long as He does not reveal His work falsely to any creature at any point the creature is made aware of, which would make Him a liar or not self consistent. The bible does not depend on such an explanation, and other possible explanations may exist, but it is, as it were, an illustration that such an explanation can exist.
Someone else wrote exactly on the same subject you did. Have you read anything by a guy named Job?
Maybe the good angels enjoy it? You were suggesting that God isn’t good?
You didn’t read the rest of my post did you...
He MIGHT have known about that. It is uncertain who penned the book. And even if he did, are you saying God could not have grown his faith to the point it embraced and appreciated God’s goodness in the face of the setbacks?
Satan went all in and threw EVERYTHING he had at Jesus, but nothing he could do could shake Jesus. Nothing. All the way from manger to being hung to die on the cross, Jesus could not be broken, shaken or stirred away from God.
That, was that. Game over. God absolutely beat Satan to a pulp with Jesus. Nothing Satan can do will change that or undo it. Not that he hasn't tried.
There's been and will be some more temper tantrums, devious schemes and whatnot, which have already killed millions and caused untold and incalculable pain and suffering, until the very end when Satan comes back for the grand finale with everything he's got.
And we know how that ends. We just don't know how we end...
just saw it :-)
I concur.
Having family and friends to enjoy the company of, is not "worldly". Neither are these things excluded to those who cannot indulge in fantasy beings and worlds. Only a blind fool brainwashed by dogma can come to that idiotic conclusion. I pity the empty lives of such people.
Why do the good suffer is an old problem never satisfactorily solved. Logically, God is a different order of being about whom analogies to human thought, behaviors and feelings are not really valid.
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