So your position is that there is no natural law.
Your questions demonstrate that you haven’t the least clue that the world is orderly!
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All suffering is due to sin, which is “of the devil”, and Christ came to destroy the works of the devil, which He did by His suffering. When we suffer but are joyful, we are doing what Christ did since He suffered the Cross due to the joy set before Him. And since we are His body, when we suffer He suffers, so we do not suffer alone, we suffer in unity with Him and He suffers with us.
And thus our suffering is sharing in the suffering of Christ.
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It’s not my distinction, it comes from systematic theology; it’s a logical distinction
for the purpose of clear thinking.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
Then you abhor the scriptures because God specifically declares that He is the one Who creates calamity.
And the account of the Exodus are clear on that: God sent afflictions on the Egyptians.
Then of course there is the example of Jesus, to Whom the Father gave the cup of suffering.
The Jews in Auschwitz and Treblinka who assert confidently that God sent all that suffering to them did so because they recognized that God is GOD, that He is the All-Ruler, and nothing happens apart from Him.
I’m going to bring up here another logical distinction from systematic theology: God’s prescriptive will, and God’s permissive will. One is what He mandates, the other is what He allows – but by any moral model, if something is allowed to happen it is the responsibility of the one who allows it. That is what those Jews in the Nazi camps recognized.
The only other choice is that God lacks the power to prevent things.
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That is not what I said.
Answer me. Is what I wrote what you think?
You seem to see laws where there aren’t any
Richard
Yes, it is, because all of those operate according to natural law – biology, physics, meteorology…
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No, GOD did not send the Holocaust on the Jews, The Nazis did, and in as far as Christians failed to prevent it, we Christians were also responsible. Allowing something does not make one responsible for it, unless one allows for the wrong reason, which GOD did not.
GOD is not our nursemaid. We need to act like humans and take full responsibility for what we do and do not do. GOD do3e4s not lack the power to prevent evil, but GOD does not create evil. GOD has given us humans the power to make choices and GOD cannot contradict GODSELF just because GOD disagrees with our choices.
GOD allows sin and death because humans cannot be human without them. In this sense they are good, but GOD does not mandate that we sin or dictate how we suffer pain. .
Evil is not a thing. It is a relationship. Evil is hate. Goodness is love. GOD is Love and not hate. GOD is also relational. Death is the result of our limited nature, not because of our sinfulness…
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In other words, your body parts are no longer under warranty? Re the monitor, I have an implanted one because they were looking for afib, but since I’ve been using my cpap machine I’ve had zero cardiac symptoms.
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It is telling that you selectively ignored what preceded:
Yes, and obviously – I misspoke. But yours was the original use of the initialisms in this context,1 as far as I know (that’s not very far ; - ).
1 (There is some VFB & VFA hardware out there though. ; - )
What on earth were Judas, the Pharisees, Pilate, and Barabas doing if not condemning Jesus to death?
GOD waged war against Egypt to liberate the Hebrews from slavery just as rhe North fought the South.
I don’t see either of your comments as speaking to or against @St.Roymond’s point that yes, God does indeed send hardship and suffering.
(And how was Barabas condemning Jesus to death? He just happened to be whom they released.)
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What would you make of the view of some theologians that God may, in some circumstances, choose to allow suffering to occur (e.g. he allows people to experience the real consequences of their sin) he “turns them over” to their own desires, but he is not the one that directly creates or inflicts that suffering. For example, in the parable of the prodigal son, the Father “turns the son over” to his own selfish desires, allowing the son to suffer the natural consequences of his sin. But the father is not angry at the son, but grieving as he lets the son go his own way, and the consequences of separation from God become evident.
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I have to agree. I read the post four times trying to figure out the relevance to what I wrote.
What Judas, the Pharisees, and Pilate were doing was playing their parts in God’s plan – a plan that inflicted suffering on the Son.
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Yes, definitely, and especially from the (sorry, but not too much ; - ) VFB.
In the view from above and in terms of timebound terms, there is ‘planning’ involved.
Some will be edified by ‘passive’ coercion and some won’t – the prodigal son was of the former.
And then there is Tim Keller’s contention in The Prodigal God that the parable was maybe more about the elder brother. (God was ‘prodigal’ because he was a spendthrift with his lavish grace.)
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This sounds good but a closer inspection reveals a problem. ‘All suffering is due to sin’ is problematic because humans do not suffer just because of sins. Natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, erupting volcanoes and asteroids hitting the Earth, can cause suffering. I do not believe that these phenomena are caused by sin.
It can also be questioned whether harmful mutations or other harmfull deviations during the growh are caused by sin. Some believe that the fall of Adam, as told in Genesis, caused all these problems but I do not agree. I see no evidence that things went suddenly and radically wrong about 6’000 years ago. There are signs of possibly deadly infections and cancer even in the fossils of dinosaurs or other species that disappeared a long time ago.
Suffering does not happen without a nervous system that reacts to tissue damage and external threats. It does not sound believable that we got the ability to suffer because of the original sin. So, even this alternative does not support the idea that all suffering is due to sin.
I do agree with the part saying that we suffer in unity with Him and He suffers with us.
Your term “passive coercion” sounds rather to me like a “married bachelor”. As Keller noted, the free will God gives us is indeed the sign of a Father filled with lavish love and grace.
If you passively let someone do something so that they will learn from it instead of coercing them actively to prevent them from doing something that will cause them some kind of harm…
Passively letting someone experience reality is giving them freewill, quite the opposite of coercion. The fact that the father hopes his child learns something and repents is because the father loves. And as I understand it, love can’t be coerced by definition.
As Paul noted (in Romans 7 maybe?) we are free from having to sin (we had no choice but to sin). We are free from the slavery of sin. So, yes, I certainly agree with Keller.