{"id":5825,"date":"2010-10-29T12:52:02","date_gmt":"2010-10-29T01:52:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/?p=5825"},"modified":"2010-11-01T13:10:12","modified_gmt":"2010-11-01T02:10:12","slug":"christians-respond-to-suffering-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/2010\/10\/29\/christians-respond-to-suffering-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Christians respond to suffering #3"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c\u2026 Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?…\u201d Job 2:10<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>The Very Revd Richard Humphrey (Dean of St David\u2019s Cathedral) shares his thoughts on the questions of Why is there suffering?<\/strong> And, if there is a God who is supposed to be loving and all-powerful, then why does He allow suffering?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>Yancey handles this well in his two books, \u2018Where is God when it hurts?\u2019 and \u2018Disappointment with God.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u00a0Without wanting to go into a philosophical issue of causality, free will etc, I will go for my emotional response.<\/p>\n

The very fact that we respond to suffering the way we do says something.\u00a0 When we experience grief it is a real experience and that this matters.<\/p>\n

\u00a0But if there is no God then this feeling is only an illusion and it does not matter as we are only a random collection of atoms and accidents.\u00a0 The grief I feel is not real, it is only a chemical reaction.\u00a0 But the problem is we know it is real we may not be able to prove it but we know, and this sense of things not being as they should be only makes sense if there is a God who has determined what is right and wrong. \u00a0I do not have enough faith to go against this evidence.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The book of Job then calls on us to trust God in the moral sphere as we trust him in the creative sphere, to use David Clines remarkable phrase \u201cinnocent suffering is a hippopotamus.\u201d Just as we don\u2019t understand a hippo, what it is for, we should trust God.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Why, ultimately because he entered into that suffering. And triumphed over it. Thus whilst creation groans it will be redeemed.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Ecclesiastes would add that as humans we simply can\u2019t see things from God\u2019s perspective so it is all \u2018hebel\u2019 (vanity), mist, ungraspable.<\/p>\n

\u00a0It\u2019s not much of an answer, but I think it is worth saying that I am a Christian not because I understand suffering, but because of Jesus and in him I have the best hope of an answer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0See also Answering the problem of suffering <\/a>and Christians respond to suffering #1<\/a> and Christians respond to suffering #2<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201c\u2026 Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?…\u201d Job 2:10 \u00a0The Very Revd Richard Humphrey (Dean of St David\u2019s Cathedral) shares his thoughts on the questions of Why is there suffering? And, if there … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5825"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5825"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5960,"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5825\/revisions\/5960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}