More About Pain and Suffering

I feel a bit more befuddled than usual this morning. Please bear with me here because I’m having a hard time putting my thoughts into words.

Back on Saturday, May 6^th, and on Wednesday, May 10^th, I wrote long postings about the problem of pain. My e-friend Jellyhead questioned how we can believe in a good, all-powerful God when there is so much pain and suffering in the world.

I’m not satisfied with what I said in those previous postings and I have another thought about this same question.

Back before I became a Christian, I often relished putting Christians on the spot. A missionary returned from Africa tried to convince me of the truth of Christianity and I teased and baited her with religious conundrums about God. Like the lines from the famous play (I’ve forgotten the name of it, Archibald Maclish’s J.B.??? ) where satan taunts:

Play the even, play the odd,
If He is god, He is not good;
If He is good, He is not God.

And I’d bring up questions about famine in Africa, deformed babies, senile old people, war, etc and I’d ask how a good God could allow such things to happen. The Creator must be cruel or capricious to put us in such a world as this.

In one of Shakespeare’s plays (again, I forget which one), two men stand on the deck of a ship at sea looking down into the water when one says, “I wonder how it is in the world of fishes?” The other man replies, “The same way it is in the world of men; the big ones eat the little ones.”

The big ones eat the little ones.

That is the observable law of nature. The strong deer our runs the wolf, till it gets old and weak, then the wolf eats it. When the wolf gets too old and slow to catch a deer, it starves in the snow. A successful bacteria infect its host and multiplies till it kills the host and dies itself.

This is the way the world works.

A tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Later the missionary told me she thought I’d never become a Christian because I was such a cynical hardcase.

About that time I read a Bible cover to cover looking for answers to my questions about pain and meaning and purpose in life.

I did not find them.

I found the Scripture addresses real questions, not my sophistries.

Not one word in the Bible tells me how other people ought to treat me; the Bible only tells me how I ought to treat them.

God comes across as intensely personal.

In His “Sermon From The Mount” Jesus uses some form of the word “you” 207 times; He never once says “they ought to” but with Him it’s always, “You, when you pray… You’ when you give… When a man has ought against you, you go and…”

With Christ, it’s always “you” not “them”.

For instance, once people questioned Jesus about some Galilaeans who were killed in the Temple by Pilate’s soldiers, and about a construction accident when a tower in Jerusalem fell killing 18 workers.

Jesus did not discuss the evening news with them.

Instead He made it personal and said, “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish”.

In one of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, Aslan says to Lucy, “No one is ever told someone else’s story”.

As I think on the personal intensity of the God of the Bible, I realize that He often does not answer my philosophical questions because the answers are none of my business.

I find that I often use philosophical questions about hypothetical or even real life situations in far away places to avoid God, to put Him off, to side track a duty that I know in my heart I should do.

My own questions are a smoke screen to hide me from God.

So, I don’t ask, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do”

Instead, I ask, “What about that senile old lady who can no longer read the books she herself wrote when she was young? What about the 13-year-old girl, an honor student, who was killed in Jacksonville last night when a stray bullet came through the wall of her house and hit her as she read a book in her own bed?”

And God does not answer my question about somebody else’s pain, suffering, death or disaster

His word only speaks to me me, about me.

It will only speak to you about you.

In the last chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus told Peter that the disciple would get too old to even dress himself and need somebody to carry him around.

Then Jesus said, “Follow me”.

But Peter looked around and saw another disciple and asked, “Lord, what shall that man do”?

And Jesus replied, “What is that to thee? Follow thou me.”