I must be a glutton for punishment if I'm actually considering responding to this post. Oh well, here goes.
It is of course disturbing to a Christian to hear someone denounce the God who made him and everything else, and there is never going to be a way to answer him adequately, he thinks what he thinks, and many here agree with him, even as vimesey said, consider it noble of him to stand up against God for people who suffer unjustly in this world.
But of course the answer is easy from my point of view, easy but not simple: Everything God made was good, He said so. The original Creation had no disease or death, pain or suffering. Suffering entered the world when sin entered at the Fall. Just saying that will raise the specter of Calvin and God will be accused of all of it anyway since the Fall was also in His sovereign will.
But that doesn’t change the fact that all goodness is in God and it’s human sin that has brought pain and suffering into the world.
That being the case the opinions of this man are adding to the calamity he decries. He himself could be responsible for the worm in someone's eye, if only by influencing more people to hate God. Hating God is itself sin since the first commandment is You shall love God with all your heart...
Every day our own sins contribute to our own sufferings, if not now then later. And we inherit sin too through our ancestors. That's a Biblical principle. Nations accumulate sin by passing laws that violate God's laws. Abortion is murder. America has murdered some fifty million unborn since Roe v Wade. That's going to bring judgment on America. Sexual sin is also big in America. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" covers every kind of sexual sin, and if it's officialized in law it's definitely going to bring God's judgment against the whole nation. Fornication is a sin and it's tolerated in America, and people even applaud the birth of fatherless babies these days. Easy divorce is a sin as "God hates divorce." Applying the First Amendment to the protection of pornography and homosexuality is a bad one. God is not going to overlook these things for long.
That's just a few I think of at the national level. You can read the Ten Commandments and the elaborations of the Law in the Bible, and the penalties prescribed to Israel for violating them in Deuteronomy 9 and Leviticus 26 if you want to get an idea of where America is on the judgement calendar.
Personal suffering as a result of sin is usually not possible for us to track down. We all inherit sin through our ancestors and bring more suffering on ourselves through our own sins. Babies simply inherit it, and nobody really knows much about the sins of our ancestors so there's no way to guess why anybody suffers in a particular way at a particular time, the thing is the world is shot through with sin and we're all vulnerable to disease and calamity.
As long as we think it's righteous to promote abortion and homosexuality and all the sexual sins and so on and so forth we are all contributing to the accumulation of suffering in the world.
The way God's law works is almost like a sort of cause-and-effect machine whose operations are inexorable but too complex to trace. What happens of course is that people will go on thinking sin is just fine and God is a meanie and things will keep getting worse.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.