“IF God IS ABLE to help those who are in suffering and He WANTS, it means that He is a GOOD God. IF He WANTS to help them, but He IS NOT ABLE, it means that He IS NOT omnipotent. IF He IS ABLE to help them, but He DOES NOT WANT, it means that He is a MALICIOUS God!” one of my Christian friend exclaimed this statement to me. It caught me off guard.
My mind frantically grappled to find some answers....
I vividly remembered someone had ever said the similar thing to me. He was my schoolmate and he was once a Christian. But he witnessed some painful sufferings and became disappointed with God.
“If God is good, then He won’t allow genocide and mass murder happen in Africa! Many innocent babies are killed! I wonder what God is thinking when He sees that very incident!” He said hopelessly.
Since then, he chose to become an unbeliever and denied the existence of God, or even heaven and hell.
That time I could not say a thing to convince Him that God must have some reasons. It swayed my faith and I endlessly thought why I do believe in such a God. I read some books and searched for the answers myself. But no matter what, I still did not understand why. Perhaps my friend was right and I had to agree that sometimes God did not care about us.
Finally, I was recommended to read a book entitled “The Case of Faith” written by Lee Strobel and I found a satisfying answer there. And here I am, sharing this to anyone who deeply longed for the answers.
I had to tell you beforehand that there were no easy answers for these two cases.
Q : “If there is a loving God, why didn’t He make a world where people didn’t hurt each other?”
A : “He did! That’s what the Bible said things were like at the outset of human history.”
Q : “If God didn’t create evil, where did it come from?”
A : “Once God created human beings with free choices. Then it was up to humans, rather than to God, whether there was evil or not. That’s what free choices mean.”
Q : “Then why didn’t God create human beings who were unable to choose to hate, or destroy, or to do all the other things that caused pain and suffering? Why didn’t He create people capable only of being kind and loving?”
A : “Think of it this way! If you pushed a button on a talking Barbie doll and it said,’I love you,’ how meaningful was that? If ‘love’ or ‘goodness’ was something programmed into you, something that you had no choice about, was it really love? It was not a real love, it could be a forceful one. God created people with free choices because it was the only way they could experience real love. But human abused their freedom of choice by walking away from God, that was when suffering came into this world.
Q : “So, by creating people with free choices, God did create evil in effect?”
A : “He didn’t create evil but it was true that He did create potential evil to enter this world, because it was the only way to create a potential for authentic love.”
Q : “But if God is God, couldn’t he have known the consequences of creating people with free choices?”
A : “No doubt he did! He could foresee the possibility that people will rebel against Him or walk away completely from Him. But He still chose to create human beings with choices because it was worth the risk. He knew that many people would rebel against Him, but He also knew that many people would choose to follow Him. It must be worth it to Him because He not only created us with free choices, but also a way to bring us back to Him after we rebelled, through the suffering of His Son, Jesus Christ.”
Q : “So, why didn’t He put a stop to it now? When God sat by and refused to perform miracles to preclude us from possible dangers, wasn’t He a bad God?”
A : “It looked like He was. But the fact was He deliberately allowed certain things to happen to us. Think of it this way! If i said to my daughter that I could bail her out of her problems, but I won’t. It looked like that I was irresponsible and wicked. But we did that to our children all the times. We did not do their homework, we did not protect them from every hurts, we let them thread a needle by themselves. Why?”
“Because we could foresee that “pain” was a good thing for them at that times, so they could learn something and forgot all about the pain. Undoubtedly, God was wise enough to foresee that we needed some pain for reasons which we may not understand at that time BUT which He felt as being necessary to some eventual good. Therefore, God wasn’t being evil by allowing that pain to exist.”
It all made sense to me...
So, my question was how could He be using my pain and suffering to bring out eventual good?
It could be seen in my own life. Coming to Singapore to study, leaving my friends and families behind, never experiencing any sweet-seventeen parties, sacrificing my happy and youthful life, having hard times in school and difficulties in getting along with new friends were all some sort of sufferings for me.
However, if it wasn’t that way, I could never grow up in my faith and spiritual journey or become mature and independent in such a young age. I could meet with many people that I respected for their faith in my church and I could take a good example from them. I had a right mind-set about worshiping and serving God and I learned a lot about life from my Christian friends. Moreover, I learned on how to submit my life to God and tap a powerful source of strength from Him to walk my daily routine. I could never experience such a thing if I was still studying in Indonesia and I was profoundly grateful when I knew His purpose to place me here.
“Difficult life experience can shape a person’s character to make him or her a winner in some other ways. Indeed, God can use painful experience to strengthen us.”
Lee Strobel, The Case of Faith
“We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope”
Romans 5 : 3
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