God, Creation, and Cancer: Wrestling With the Difficult Questions

[system]

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://biologos.org/blogs/archive/god-creation-and-cancer-wrestling-with-the-difficult-questions

[Shawn_Murphy (Shawn T Murphy)]

This is the most important question for Christianity and I look forward to hearing the orthodox reasons why God allows suffering in such instances. This includes my 20-year-old daughter’s stroke.

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

Thanks for sharing this, Morgan. Maybe one of the best responses others can give is to just be present with you. Of course, Job’s friends sat in silence for - what was it? (seven days?!) before they started spouting off. I don’t think I quite made the 7-second mark here before I had hit the reply button. So any reflections or ‘explanations’ I come up with are probably not likely to show as much wisdom as what you’ve already shared with us here. As somebody who has enjoyed sunnier climes of health (so far) than you were permitted to enjoy, I am happy to have read - and to continue to read the wisdom you share as the one who is facing this particular un-enviable hardship. [too trivial a word for it - I know.] But thanks for being a giver here while life has already taken so much from you.

[EDC1]

Very sad to hear he has passed away, particularly at such a young age. I havent read his book but he seemed to have viewed cancer as an inevitable product of a dynamic, changing creation. I can understand that view, but I wonder if that is how he viewed disease in general, or just cancer? Perhaps disease is inevitable, but in general Jesus’ attitude towards it seemed to be confrontational. He saw how it limited people, to the extent of sometimes describing it as being used by satan to keep a person bound. His kingdom was about releasing people from such limitations. Indeed the very fact that people want to be treated with medicine when they are ill shows that is the natural human response too, not to accept it as ‘normal’ but to try to heal or reverse the condition. It seems to me disease in all its forms, whether physical or mental, will not be part of His fully realised kingdom on the renewed earth, on which we will live with resurrected bodies. May your kingdom come.