It is nice to know I am not the only one to have had sciatica healed. And why should I be?
I come from a family of engineers – but that gene skippedd me – and you can be pretty black and white, what works and what does not thinkers. I also have lost friends and relatives and I know that it is painful. There are two ways of looking at it, and you may not accept either. One: in the Bible, Jesus wept and so it is not a sin to be devastated – even if you ARE God Incarnate and about to call the man out of the tomb!! Death here must be seen as a sad consequence of the rebellion that occurred early on in human history.
Two: When my father was 91 he suddenly asked me why God had done nothing about Stalin. I told him that God was giving Stalin time to repent. Getting into a theological debate with a 91 year old man (who did not believe too much) is a tricky thing and so I left him with that thought. But you could also surmise that one way God has dealt with evil is to make sure we do not hang around this Big Blue Marble forever.
All the above is dependent upon a certain level of faith – faith, for one thing, in the goodness of God, regardless of how bad the circumstances — and maybe faith in a certain reading of things. You may not share that.
You have heard many views on this site, and I have learned things too. I have requested Hawkings A Brief History of Time from my library and hope that I will learn some new perspectives.
Consider a cut rose in a vase vs. a rosebush growing from your garden. A child might prefer the single rose, “just the cool/pretty part,” distilled from its surroundings, maybe even dethorned. But how much more valuable is the whole bush, which produces roses on its own schedule and without you telling it what to do?
And does the fact that the bush may or may not produce other roses make the one it has produced, that you are looking at, any more or less beautiful?
On a separate note, you mentioned that you were dealing with grief, and I wonder if you’ve either read or seen “The Shack.” It addresses questions of God and loss that may be relevant to you.
I’ll ditto this book recommendation. It won’t be for everybody --and acute grief from the loss of a child may make it a bit too close to home for some. It also weaves a narrative that pushes people into uncomfortable zones. So I would only recommend it with care, but recommend it for spiritually mature reflection nonetheless. It carries a lot of message that badly needs a hearing today.
Hello Matthew,
I didn’t read all the comments on your question so the suggestion to read Dr. Hugh Ross’ web site, “Reasons to Believe” and he has a book on point also.
The ancient Israelites don’t appear to have felt any rational or theological need for a cosmos whose dimensions were measured as stupendously as those we have since discovered since the invention of telescopes, i.e., a cosmos billions of light years in diameter containing a trillion or more galaxies (at last count).
Furthermore, does an almighty Being need to be restricted by physical laws? Couldn’t such a Being produce bubble cosmoses with say, miraculous borders of far smaller dimensions?
Instead, we live in a cosmos where matter and energy seem to be have been mixing on their own for billions of years, an experiment of size and duration that no one could conduct in limited human laboratories over limited spans of human lifetimes. Such evidence might even be taken to mean that the Designer was really a Tinkerer. Is this the Tinkerer’s first cosmos? And what about all the extinctions over billions of years, including mass extinction events? Was that the Tinkerer shaking His Etch-I-Sketch? Just some heretical thoughts for the day.
You know, I’ve often puzzled at the idea that God guided evolution by chucking an asteroid at the earth to cause the non-avian dinos to go extinct. (Which is not really guiding. It’s pushing the reset button.) Anyway, why not start at the end of the Permian extinction? No need to make dinosaurs and let them grow so large that you need to fry them in order to get humans going
Well, if birds are the “cap” to a long chain of dino evolution… it looks like God has big plans for KFC investors. There would be no meaty turkeys for us to celebrate Christmas with … we might have ended up with something more like this!
[ Perhaps I should put a copyright on this? I designed and executed the entire thing … but the flash of inspiration was triggered by Miss @beaglelady! ]
Just a note. You seem to question why God put “so much energy” into the universe but doesn’t give us more attention. Well, God didn’t really put any energy into the universe at all. An omnipotent God could have created what we see, a multitude of times over, without so much as lifting an infinite finger. In other words, the fact that God has appeared with and anointed men, in person, at all, must mean that God has put more effort into humanity than He has the rest of the universe combined – not to mention sacrificing His one and only Son for us, something that certainly exceeds perhaps the rest of creation on its own. So I do not seem to think, at all, that God has expended more energy into the rest of the universe than He has in us.
So, has God worked a lot for us? I tend to think so, even if He doesn’t make it more obvious to the one looking for signs. That’s what I think I can contribute right now.
