This is the latest short answers from Solas:
I also wrote about this here:
The Shelter of the Most High – New Year, Old Hope – a Personal Testimony
The Blog of David Robertson
The Blog of David Robertson
This is the latest short answers from Solas:
I also wrote about this here:
The Shelter of the Most High – New Year, Old Hope – a Personal Testimony
God is always there what happens happens You can’t blame God because country’s drop atomic bombs on each other Rob
No Rob, but life isn’t as simple as that. I don’t think stuff happens is a particularly helpful way of approaching suffering. It’s a question many of struggle with at some point or other in our lives, irrespective of whether we believe in God or not. One difference between atheists and non-atheists is the feeling intense suffering is somehow ‘wrong’, that it’s not supposed to be. Another difference is precisely that the latter feel they have someone to blame, as it were. The Bible is full of this. Job goes so far as to ask God why he had ever given him life if the kind of suffering he endured is to be his lot. Job is pretty bold insisting on his innocence and by extension that God is treating him unfairly. Similar thoughts are expressed elsewhere. Are we going to criticise Job? God doesn’t. Rather God reminds Job of his inevitability. That may not be a full answer but it brings God into the frame. God has a purpose. We want to know what that purpose is….just as Christ does when the Father forsakes him in his brokenness.
For myself, I take a great deal of comfort in the knowledge others have expressed the kinds of things experienced by hard pressed believers. One of my favourites? ‘O that I had the wings of a dove! I would fly away and find rest’. It’s a longing and a promise. Or ‘weeping may endure for a moment, but joy comes in the morning’. If God acts to bring joy in suffering, surely God is sovereign in the experience of suffering in the first place.
*God reminds him of his inscrutability
If God created everything, I must be one of his agnostics.
It would appear that when it comes to suffering God quite often prefers to kick back and watch the suffering unfold.