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.
Well, what if God told you that you were imbibing the wrong spirit, and I don’t mean hooch. I mean the spirit that pervades this current world, which brags in itself and never looks beyond.
Imperfect lady :) /kidding...
Just a food for thought to perhaps nibble on sometime...
The New Testament... to think of it as testimony, like in a trial. The writer of each book is like a witness in a trial, testifying as to what they saw, heard, said, etc. They are testifying that what they say is true.
I thought, would I believe this person’s testimony ?
Here’s a sample written by a man who was later beheaded because he would not recant his testimony:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rom&version=KJV
Blessings.
So we are really faced with many of us going to hell with God's and Christ's approval. There we will roast and pop screaming in pain for all eternity while God, Christ and the Saints will look down upon us with joy and pleasure. Remember Lazarus and "The Rich Man?"this of course make God and Christ a pair of sadist's The only hope being that maybe after God, Christ and the Saints become bored with watching the rest of us suffer God simply annihilates the many and thus gives them respite. That would be mercy.
In short, I"m not too impressed with what I read and hear about God's "love" about which some human love seems better.
So we are really faced with many of us going to hell with God's and Christ's approval. There we will roast and pop screaming in pain for all eternity while God, Christ and the Saints will look down upon us with joy and pleasure. Remember Lazarus and "The Rich Man?" The only hope being that maybe after God, Christ and the Saints become bored with watching the rest of us suffer God simply annihilates
A good commentary could explain the intellectual side of Job easily enough. There is not a whale of a lot of controversy about that. We are not talking about interpreting specifics of, say, the almost psychedelic book of Revelation. It’s the heart that lags the intellectual understanding, and a wise heart begins to understand that yes, it does lag. It needn’t be embroiled in shame for the lag, in fact that would be generally harmful, but it needs to take the lag into account.
Job was never given a reason. Only a foolish man questions a God who can create the universe. Honest questions MAY get an answer. Questions that assume we have the right to judge God will not. At least, not an answer that the questioner will like.
Well, we could get into quibbles about specifics of the rich man, and various views have been expounded. But one useful view seems to be that if the money is held for the benefit of an entity that is allowed the place of God in your life (especially if that is self) then you are “rich” in the biblical sense. There are other references in scripture that say the believer ought to benefit his family or “is worse than an unbeliever” (in some sense), so being quick to impoverish one’s family (speculative in the case of the RYR who might well have been a single) is not unequivocally urged in the scripture.
Today is Pentecost Sunday, the day the Christian Church was born via the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the 120 in the uper room.
I totally agree with you. I see this "evolution" of morality in the entire scheme as a signature of its man-made origins. This is a hard truth that the subscribers to this dogma are forced to contend with, but pretend to ignore when it is called out on.
It is not ‘up there’, it is IN THERE.
We’d lie if we said that the earlier parts of the bible often glossed over such issues. We don’t see Lot being explicitly criticized for his efforts to flummox the homosexual perverts drooling at his door by offering his daughters to them (only for them to be misused and Lot not even coming back out to help), for instance. But the bible isn’t advertised as a complete account of every situation that its documentation touches upon.
The lesson of the book of Job is that (like certain atheists) the devil seeks destroy the faith of children of God, and to murder, yet regardless of who executes justice, sinners get less than what they deserve in this life, while the author of life certainly has the right to allow the innocent to die and deliver them to a better existence, while making the evil that the devil or man does work for the good of those who love good and thus God.
And that God is omniscient (unlike some atheists who basically make judgments as if they were), which involves going thru trials in proportion to one's faith, in which God knows the temperature of the fire, and in which things temporarily occur that are contrary to the blessings of God, but that for such, "as ye are partakers of the sufferings, so shall ye be also of the consolation." "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;" (2 Corinthians 4:17)
And which the unreasonable scorn of atheists as yourself will not change.
His former family blotted out and replaced like a manufactured commodity, as if the past didn't matter.
"..blotted out" except his wife, who sounded like the atheist, but this life is temporary, and apart fro eternity it is unfair, and your objection is really that that the author of life can not be just in allowing the death of sinners or the innocent, and cannot be effecting what is best for the latter those like Job, as if He was not omniscient and you are, based upon your presumption of moral superiority."
Sappy nonsense in the guise of comfort is more annoying than anything else. Then they’ll spout the Calvinist nonsense about a spirit in dwelling that is not by my choice.
For years you have been ridiculing faith in God on this officially pro-God forum, which i also see elsewhere from atheists who cannot allow any reasonable answers, or that there are any, but i will let others judge.
How about, rather, a story of humanity slowly being dragged out of a spiritual mud pit? It’s easy to arrogate the idea that oh, freethinkers were there all the way and made humanity evolve... nope. It was God’s spirit that led them back out, on a very rough road, after they fell.
I know nothing whatsoever about your struggles, all I can say is, I am very sorry to hear how hard it is. My only advice can be, don’t torture yourself on top of it trying to appease or reach a figment of someone else’s imagination. It only adds to your burden. It really is a waste of years.
The anti-God nonsense is actually rather lightweight, once one develops some spiritual muscle. We can’t force the atheists and agnostics to believe, but we can present a spiritually powerful case for what we do believe. The onus is then on the nonbeliever to deal with that spirit.
Studying Hebrew stories about their god is particularly useful when juxtaposed against Greek stories about their gods. You start to notice how much their gods resemble one another, and them: jealous, capricious, arbitrary, moody, vengeful, trivial, greedy... and then you realize: Man created God in his own image.
I think it is easy to get muddled up by well meaning believers who want to begin making themselves out as sole stewards of Christ’s saving spirit just because they have had a spiritual success in their own lives that they do not see in their immediate environs. C. S. Lewis’ essays have proven useful to me in this regard, especially where Lewis commented that once he was versed well in “mere Christianity” his quotations from various Christian sources of stature kept getting misattributed, such as John Bunyan being mistaken for Roman Catholicism. This is true... I’ve had more than one Roman Catholic tell me that I have to be some kind of unofficial Catholic. I don’t claim anything but to be a Christian who has learned from a myriad of channels of God’s spirit.
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