another way of looking at suffering

First, we have to accept that God is the explanation for everything. He is all-knowing and all-powerful. He is perfect. Therefore, anything that God creates can only be inferior to Himself. Because of this suffering and evil, or imperfection, are therefore an inevitable consequence of Creation.

“On God’s part creation is not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation. God and all his creatures are less than God alone. God accepted this diminution. He emptied a part of his being from himself. He had already emptied himself  in this act of his divinity; that is why Saint John says that the Lamb had been slain from the beginning of the world. God permitted the existence of things distinct from himself and worth infinitely less than himself. But through this creative act he denied himself, as Christ has told us to deny ourselves. God denied  himself for our sakes in order to give us the possibility of denying ourselves for him. This response, this echo, which it is in our power to refuse, is the only possible justification for the folly of love of the creative act.”

– Simone Weil

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Suffering and Why Doesn’t God intervene more?

From the writer John Blanchard:

“[At] what level should God intervene? We might say that he should not have allowed the worst offenders – the Hitlers, Pol Pots and Mao Tse-tungs of this world – to do what they did. But what about the next level – say, thugs, sadists, rapists, child abusers and drug pushers – should God step in and stop them?If he did, another ‘layer’ of offenders would become the worst – say, drunk drivers, shoplifters, burglars and the like. If we argued like this we would soon get to the point at which we would be demanding that God should intervene to prevent all evil. Would you settle for that, even if it meant having your own thoughts, words and actions controlled by a cosmic puppet-master, robbing you of all freedom and responsibility?”

Food for thought.

Beginnings

From the Life Application Bible:

The Bible does not discuss the subject of evolution. Rather, its worldview assumes God created the world. The Biblical view of creation is not in conflict with science; rather, it is in conflict with any worldview that starts without a creator.

Equally committed and sincere Christians have struggled with the subject of beginnings and come to differing conclusions. This, of course, is to be expected because the evidence is very old and, due to the ravages of the ages, quite fragmented. Students of the Bible and of science should avoid polarizations and black/white thinking. Students of the Bible must be careful not to make the Bible say what it doesn’t say, and students of science must not make science say what it doesn’t say.

The most important aspect of the continuing discussion is not the process of creation, but the origin of creation. The world is not a product of blind chance and probability; God created it.

The Bible not only tells us that the world was created by God; more important, it tells us who this God is. It reveals God’s personality, his character, and his plan for his creation. It also reveals God’s deepest desire: to relate to and fellowship with the people he created. God took the ultimate step toward fellowship with us through his historic visit to this planet in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ. We can know this God who created the universe in a very personal way.

The heavens and the earth are here. We are here. God created all that we see and experience. The book of Genesis begins. “God created the heavens and the earth.”

Here we begin the most exciting and fulfilling journey imaginable.

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