Saving Humanity, Part 5: Can We Blame God for Our Pain, Misery, and Suffering?

 

This is video number five in our series, “Saving Humanity.”  Up to this point, we have demonstrated that there are two ways of viewing life and death.  There is “alive” or “dead” as we believers see it, and, of course, this is the only view that atheists have.  However, people of faith and understanding will recognize that what counts is how our Creator views life and death.

It is therefore possible to be dead, yet in God’s eyes, we live.  “He is not the God of the dead [referring to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob] but of the living, for to Him all are alive.”  Luke 20:38 BSB Or we can be alive, yet God sees us as dead. But Jesus said to him, “Follow Me, and allow the dead to bury their own dead.” Matthew 8:22 BSB

When you factor in the element of time, this really starts to make sense.  To take the ultimate example, Jesus Christ died and was in the tomb for three days, yet he was alive to God, meaning that it was only a question of time before he was alive in every sense. Though men had killed him, they could do nothing to stop the Father from returning his son to life and more, of granting him immortality.

By His power God raised the Lord from the dead, and He will raise us also. 1 Cor 6:14    And  “But God raised Him from the dead, releasing Him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for Him to be held in its clutches.” Acts 2:24

Now, nothing can kill the son of God.  Imagine the same thing for you and me, immortal life.

To the one who overcomes, I will grant the right to sit with Me on My throne, just as I overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne. Rev 3:21 BSB

This is what is being offered to us now.  This means that even if you die or are killed as Jesus was, you merely go into a sleep-like state until the time for you to wake up.  When you go to sleep each night, you do not die.  You continue living and when you awaken in the morning, you still continue living. In a similar manner, when you die, you continue living and when you awaken in the resurrection, you still continue living.  This is because as a child of God, you have already been given eternal life.  This is why Paul told Timothy to “Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses.” (1 Timothy 6:12 NIV)

But what of those who do not have this faith, who, for whatever reason, have not taken hold of eternal life?  God’s love is manifest in that he has provided for a second resurrection, a resurrection to judgment.

Do not be amazed at this, for the hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear His voice and come out—those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment. (John 5:28,29 BSB)

In this resurrection, humans are restored to life on earth but remain in a state of sin, and without faith in Christ, are still dead in God’s eyes.  During the 1000-year reign of Christ, there will be provisions made for these resurrected ones by which they can exercise their free will and accept God as their Father through the redeeming power of Christ’s human life offered in their behalf; or, they can reject it.  Their choice. They can choose life, or death.

It is all so binary.  Two deaths, two lifes, two resurrections, and now two sets of eyes.  Yes, to understand our salvation fully, we need to see things not with the eyes in our head but with eyes of faith.  Indeed, as Christians, “We walk by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7)

Without the eyesight that faith provides, we will look at the world and draw the wrong conclusion. An example of the conclusion that countless people have drawn can be demonstrated from this excerpt of an interview with the multi-talented Stephen Fry.

Stephen Fry is an atheist, yet here he is not challenging the existence of God, but rather takes the view that is there really were a God, he would have to be a moral monster.  He believes that the misery and suffering that is being experienced by humankind is not our fault. Therefore, God must take the blame.  Mind you, since he really doesn’t believe in God, one can’t help but wonder who is left to take the blame.

As I’ve said, Stephen Fry’s view is hardly unique, but is representative of a large and growing number of people in what is steadily becoming a post-Christian world. This view can influence us as well, if we are not vigilant.  The critical thinking that we have used to escape from false religion must not be turned off ever.  Sadly, many who have escaped false religion, have succumbed to the superficial logic of humanists, and lost all faith in God.  Thus, they are blind to anything they cannot see with their physical eyes

They reason: if there really were a loving God, all knowing, all powerful, he would have ended the suffering of the world.  Therefore, either he doesn’t exist, or he is, as Fry put it, stupid and evil.

Those who reason this way are very, very wrong, and to demonstrate why, let’s engage in a little thought experiment.

Let us put you in God’s place. You are now all-knowing, all-powerful. You see the suffering of the world and you want to fix it. You start with disease, but not just bone cancer in  a child, but all disease. It’s a fairly easy fix for an all-powerful God. Just give humans an immune system capable of fighting off any virus or bacteria. However, foreign organisms are not the only cause for suffering and death. We all get old, grow decrepit, and eventually died of old age even if we are free of disease. So, to end suffering you will have to end the aging process and death. You will have to extend life eternally to truly  end pain and suffering.

But that brings with it, its own problems, because men are often the architects of mankind’s greatest suffering. Men are polluting the earth. Men are exterminating the animals and wiping out huge tracts of vegetation, affecting the climate. Men cause wars and the death of millions. There is the misery caused by poverty resulting from our economic systems. On the local level, there are murders and muggings. There is the abuse of children and the weak—domestic abuse. If you’re truly going to eliminate the misery, pain, and suffering of the world as God Almighty, you have to eliminate all of this as well.

This is where things get dicey.  Do you kill everyone who causes pain and suffering of any kind?  Or, if you don’t want to kill anyone, you could just reach into their mind and make it so that they cannot do anything wrong? That way no one has to die.  You could solve all of mankind’s problems by turning people into biological robots, programmed to do only good and moral things.

It is so easy to play the armchair quarterback until they actually put you in the game. I can tell you from my study of the Bible that not only does God want to end the suffering, but that he has been actively engaged in doing so since the very beginning. However, the quick fix that so many people want will simply not be the solution they need. God cannot remove our free will because we are his children, made in his image. A loving father does not want robots for children, but individuals who are guided by a keen moral sense and wise self-determination. To achieve the end of suffering while preserving our free will presents us with a problem that only God can solve. The rest of the videos in this series will examine that solution.

Along the way, we’re going to encounter some things which viewed superficially or more accurately viewed physically without the eyes of faith will seem to be indefensible atrocities. For example, we will ask ourselves: “How could a loving God destroy the entire world of Mankind, including young children, drowning them in the flood of Noah’s day?  Why would a just God burn up the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah without even giving them a chance to repent?  Why did God order the genocide of the inhabitants of the land of Canaan? Why would God kill 70,000 of his own people because the King took a census of the nation? How can we consider the Almighty to be a loving and just Father when we learn that to punish David and Bathsheba for their sin, he killed their innocent newborn child?

These questions need to be answered if we are going to build our faith on solid ground.  However, are we asking these questions based on a faulty premise? Let us take what might seem the most indefensible of these questions: the death of David and Bathsheba’s child. David and Bathsheba also died much later, but they died. In fact, so that everyone of that generation, and for that matter every generation that followed up to the present one. So why are we concerned about the death of one baby, and not the death of billions of humans? Is it because we have the idea that the baby was deprived of the normal lifespan everyone has a right to? Do we believe that everyone has a right to die a natural death? From where do we get the idea that any human death can be considered natural?

The average dog lives between 12 to 14 years of age; Cats, 12 to 18; among the longest-lived animals is the Bowhead Whale who lives over 200 years, but all animals die. That is their nature. That is what it means to die a natural death.  An evolutionist will consider a man to be just another animal with a lifespan well under a century on average, though modern medicine has managed to push it upwards a little. Still, he naturally dies when evolution has got from him what it looks for: procreation.  After he can no longer procreate, evolution is done with him.

However, according to the Bible, humans are much more than animals. being made in God’s image and as such are considered God’s children.  As children of God, we inherit everlasting life. So, the lifespan of humans currently is, according to the Bible, anything but natural. Given that, we must conclude that we die because we were condemned to die by God due to the original sin which we have all inherited

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 6:23 BSB

So, rather than worry about the death of one innocent baby, we should be concerned about what it means that God has condemned all of us, billions of us, to death. Does that seem fair given that none of us chose to be born as sinners? I daresay that if given the choice, most of us would gladly choose to be born without sinful inclinations.

One fellow, someone who commented on the YouTube channel, seemed eager to find fault with God. He asked me what I thought of God that would drown a baby. (I’m assuming he was referring to the flood of Noah’s day.) It seemed like a loaded question, so I decided to test out his agenda. Instead of answering directly, I asked him if he believed that God could resurrect those who have died. He would not accept that as a premise. Now, given that this question assumes that God is the creator of all life, why would he reject the possibility that God could re-create life? Evidently, he wanted to reject any thing that would allow God to be exonerated. The resurrection hope does exactly that.

In our next video, we will get into many of the so-called “atrocities” that God has committed and learn that they are anything but that. For now, however, we need to establish a fundamental premise that changes the whole landscape. God is not a man with the limitations of a human. He has no such limitations. His power allows him to correct any wrong, undo any damage. To illustrate, if you are an atheist and are sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole, but are given the choice of execution by lethal injection, which would you choose? I think it is safe to say that most would prefer to live, even in those circumstances. But take that scenario and put it into the hands of a child of God. I can only speak for myself, but if I were given the opportunity to choose between spending the rest of my life in a cement box surrounded by some of the worst elements of human society, or immediately arriving in God’s kingdom, well, that wouldn’t be a hard choice at all. I see immediately, because I take God’s view that death is merely an unconscious state similar to sleep. The intervening time between my death and my awakening, whether it be a day or thousand years, would be for me instantaneous. In this situation the only viewpoint that matters is my own. Instantaneous entry into God’s kingdom versus a lifetime in prison, let’s get this execution going quickly.

For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. 22But if I go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. So what shall I choose? I do not know. 23I am torn between the two. I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better indeed. 24But it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. (Philippians 1:21-24 BSB)

We must look at everything that people point to in an effort to find fault with God – to accuse him of atrocities, genocide, and the death of the innocents – and view it with eyes of faith. Evolutionists and atheists scoff at this. To them the whole idea of human salvation is folly, because they cannot see with eyes of faith

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:20-25 NIV)

Some might still argue, but why kill the baby? Sure, God can resurrect a baby in the New World and the child will never know the difference. He will have lost out on living during the time of David, but will live instead in the time of the Greater David, Jesus Christ, in a world far better than ancient Israel could ever have been. I was born in the middle of the last century, and I don’t regret having missed out on the 18^th century or the 17^th century.  As a matter fact, given what I know about those centuries, I’m quite happy that I was born when and where I was. Still, the question hangs: why did Jehovah God kill the child?

The answer to that is more profound than you might initially think. In fact, we have to go to the first book of the Bible to lay the foundation, not only to answer that question, but for all of the others relating to the acts of God with regard to humankind throughout the centuries. We will start with Genesis 3:15 and work our way forward. We’ll make that the subject for our next video in this series.

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