Did God Really Do This?

[Paidion]

God had nothing to do with my wife's death or any of the atrocities which occurs daily due to man's inhumanity to man.

To say this you must believe God was powerless to prevent what happened to your wife and the atrocities that occur. And it is useless to pray for anyone. As in Calvinism, it will not change anything.

Homer, please explain why you think your statements logically follow from your quoted statement of mine.
I say, that it doesn't follow at all. If you can show me that it does logically follow, I will need to change my thinking, and indeed, I will do so.

[Paidion]

I don't understand the objection. I thought being a Christian disciple meant that we surrender everything to God—wife, children, our own lives also. If we begin complaining about His administration of what is His, this strikes me as a renunciation of that surrender. Maybe someone can show me where I'm thinking wrongly here.

What objection do you not understand? Are you referring to the belief that God is entirely loving as the apostle John said when he wrote “God is Love” twice in his letter?

When I became a Christian, it involved the acknowledgement that God has all the rights and He only does right things. If someone has not reached that conclusion, what is there about their commitments that can be regarded as "Christian"?

I don't understand how this paragraph fits into to the position that God doesn't kill people or cause the unnecessary atrocities which occur among humanity. I, for one, have never questioned God's “rights”. I agree with your conclusion that God does only right things. Whether or not that is the case is not the issue. The disagreement lies in whether or not He is behind the horrible atrocities which constantly occur among people.

God can take anything He wants from me, and the Bible affirms that He does so.

All right.

To take a living person from this life is only to take at that time what would have been taken at another time (a no less painful loss at any other time).

But does He take a living person ANY time? Hebrews 2:14 affirms that it is the devil who has the power of death.

To pretend that the scriptures can be trusted in all cases, except when they tell us something about God or His activities that we don't like, is to adopt the exegetical habits of the Word of Faith folks, who think that God is not "good" if He does not always choose the circumstances of health and wealth for people.

Who is pretending? I don't think even Word of Faith people (with whom I disagree) are pretending — only mistaken. I believe the Bible is true history. But during that long historical period, particularly in pre-Christian times, the understanding of the character of God was deficient. No one truly understood His character until His Son was born on earth and revealed it.

This is making-up our theology as we go along, according to our tastes. Anyone who likes that methodology is welcome to it. I would prefer my life to be built upon firmer ground than that.

Steve you have stated many times during our discussion about this very important matter, that my position arises from emotions — that I pick and choose parts of the Bible according to what I like. This suggests that my position if merely subjective in spite of the fact that I have already explained otherwise. I won't accuse you of ignoring my explanation; perhaps you somehow skipped over it. In any case, I will affirm it again.

Jesus, the great Messiah, my Saviour from sin, is my authority. I believe all that He has said. You have never read from my posts any rejection of His words on the grounds that the gospel writers were mistaken. You have pointed out that Jesus referred to Moses and the prophets. True enough. But did Jesus ever quote Moses or the prophets in connection with God ordering hands to be cut off, killing disobedient children, “taking away” (through death) anyone's wife, etc.?

The writer to the Hebrews affirmed that the Son of God is the exact image of the Father's essence (Heb 1:3). If your depiction of the character of God is correct, and if Jesus has exactly the same character as God, wouldn't we expect that He would have killed a few people while He was here on earth? But He didn't kill even one person. Indeed, He, with a wise word, prevented the Pharisees from stoning a woman to death.

Jesus revealed the Father as He really is when He said that the Father is kind to ungrateful and evil people. (Luke 6:35). He said that we will truly be children of the Father if we love our enemies and do good as the Father does. At no time did Jesus reveal the Father as being hateful or vengeful or killing people for trivialities such in the case of Uzzah, whom He supposedly killed for steadying the ark of the covenant when it was about to fall.

Those of us who are married, or have children (or siblings, or parents, or grandparents, or friends, or anyone else sharing our world with us) should know that each person we care about (and we ourselves) is going to die.

Yes, all shall die, with the exception of those who will be alive at Jesus coming. I don't think many people suggest otherwise, although in 1920s a JW publication was titled, “Millions Now Living Will Never Die”, and a few small groups think that God will “give life” to some individuals and that they will never die. Nevertheless, I affirm that death was not God's intention for creation. It was part of the fall of man. Genesis 3 states that God “cursed” the ground, perhaps meaning as Greg Boyd suggests, that he lifted his protective hand from creation so the Satanic powers had their way.

Fortunately, this life is not all there is, and it is certainly not what we, or anyone else, should be living for. Jesus said, in every Gospel, one way or another, that we cannot love our lives in this world and still be HIs disciples. We allegedly accepted His terms when we signed up.

Jesus did not say that we should prefer death over life — indeed quite the opposite. He didn't say, “I came that they might have death” but “I came that they might have life and have it abundantly (John 10:10). He was talking about this present life, not the life which people will have after their resurrection. His statement that we cannot love our lives in this world and still be His disciples, refers to loving to live our lives as we want to live them instead of submitting to Christ's authority in everything. It does not refer to a rejection of living, and preferring to die.

Paidion doesn't believe what I am about to say (we have discussed it here more than once), but my convictions are as follows:

1) As with Belshazzar, our breath is in God's hands (Dan.5:23). If this does not mean that God has power over life and death, I do not know what it could possibly mean. Every breath we take is a gift granted because God chooses to extend our life that much longer (there will be an end of breaths);

I don't know what it means, though I suspect it means that God originally breathed into man the breath of life, and thus the reason those persons could even breathe is due to God. He also says, "and whose are all your ways". We might wonder how the ways of these people could be God's since they were worshipping "the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone." It can't mean that the worship of these gods are God's ways. And I suspect the former does not mean that God held their breath in His hands ready to take it from them at any time, as you seem to mean when you indicate that it means, "God has power over life and death." However, I remind you again that the writer to the Hebrews affirmed that it is the devil who has the power of death.

2) With reference to believers, God's supernatural, unconquerable protection is guaranteed for the duration of our proper lifetimes (Psalm 34:7; 91:11-12). We are able to survive in a deadly dangerous world because of this protection. There is no power greater than God to protect those whom He may wish to protect. When we succumb to something that kills us, it can only be because God chose not to proect us from that circumstance, in which case, He was either evil or He had good reasons. His being too weak to save and protect is not one of the options.

So why would God first protect you, and then choose not to protect you? What would be His motivation?

I have never been able to understand how anyone can face crises without understanding these truths. What possible "peace" (a constant endowment—"like a river"—for the believer) can be had if there are powers greater than the God we serve, who, despite His desire to keep people alive, can overwhelm Him and snatch His things out of His hand? I'll stick with the God who revealed Himself in scripture and in Christ, and leave the lesser gods to other faiths.

I was able to face my first wife's death with the understanding that God had nothing to do with it. If I had believed as you do, that God killed her, I couldn't have faced it with any peace. Such a “truth”, had I believed in it, may have destroyed my faith, and certainly I would have lost my confidence in God's protection.

3) Paul said that, for a believer, "To die is gain." Given the other components in the constellation of a Christian's worldview, this conclusion would have been self-evident, even if Paul had not mentioned it. Why would any Christian complain if God chose to promote a loved one (or him/herself) to a more desirable condition than that which they occupied here on earth? What, that is, other than a renunciation of our former surrender to His will?

Whose complaining about God's choices? Certainly not I. If I were going to complain, it would be about man's choices to hold to such a horrible view of God's character. You ask if I must hold out for “a lesser God whose thoughts are more like my own". Yes, God's thoughts are like my own. I was created in His image! I don't think you and I believe in two different Gods. I think we believe in the same God but disagree about His character. But if we did believe in two different Gods, I think yours would be the lesser. Mine is the God of Love which the apostle John proclaimed. Love surpasses all things. “The greatest of these is Love” said Paul. Yours is the schizophrenic God who loves and protects you one minute, but may hate and kill you the next.

[Paidion]

Why is free will such a sacred cow?

Because God has free will and He is sacred — and He created man in His image — with free will.

[Homer]

Hi Paidion,

You wrote:

Homer, please explain why you think your statements logically follow from your quoted statement of mine.
I say, that it doesn't follow at all. If you can show me that it does logically follow, I will need to change my thinking, and indeed, I will do so.

Previously you wrote:

Some say that since God "allows" particular events (that is, does not prevent them from happening) then it must be His "permissive will" that they happen.

Are you saying that God is powerless to prevent particular events from occuring? If He is, then it is of no purpose to pray to Him requesting that a particular event not occur. And if He has the power to prevent any particular event from occuring, and does nothing to prevent that event, it must be because he has chosen not to intervene for His own good reason. Just because He most often does not intervene, does not mean He does not have the power to do so. It might be argued from an "open Theism" perspective that God can not see the future and thus can not prevent every particular event, that God is "caught off-guard". But if that is the case He will not be able to protect us in many cases, no matter how much we might pray.

(quote continued)

This, too, from my understanding is meaningless nonsense.

Please explain where you find what I have written to be nonsense if you disagree with it.

(quote continued)

God had nothing to do with my wife's death or any of the atrocities which occurs daily due to man's inhumanity to man.

You can not possibly know this, whether He allowed it or had a hand in it. When our 14 year old granddaughter lay near death, on life support, we believed her life was in God's hands. She suffered greatly for weeks before our prayers were answered and she recovered. We never thought for a minute that God was to blame yet we believed her life was in His hands. And our son and daughter-in-law were thanking God for having her 14 years, even though they knew she might not survive. We knew this is a cursed earth and that bad things happen. That is just the way it is, and sometimes God intervenes if it is in His plan to do so and sometimes He does not. In any event, prayer can change the outcome, if it is in His will, IMO. That is my belief and my practice.

You discount the OT. But what is your take on Jesus' statement "not a sparrow falls apart from the Father"?

[steve]

Paidion,

I will not answer all of your points because I consider most of them to be self-refuting. If it turns out that others here do not see that they are, and if they post saying so, I will answer point-by-point.

I will say this, though, to your repeated point that the devil has the power of death: The devil has no power to kill a saint without God's withdrawing the "hedge" and letting him do so. This we know from the Book of Job (I imagine you believe the first two chapters to be uninspired speculation, but I will stand with scripture). The devil has power, but it is limited by God's surpassing authority—the same God who has promised to protect His children. When you ask why God would protect His child from one incident of danger, but would allow him/her to succumb to another, I think you have presented a conundrum that your theology cannot answer, but which biblical theology can: viz., God does what is right and best in each situation. How would you answer your own question, from your standpoint? Why did Jesus heal some people and not others?

You do not see how God can be loving if He does what you cannot understand to be loving. In this, I see your ability to trust God as deficient. You trust Him to do only things that you can appreciate and in which you can immediately see a loving purpose. Christians are called upon to trust Him whether or not we can immediately see how His actions conform to our preconceptions of what He ought to be doing.

Jesus had the power to heal Lazarus, but chose to let that man "whom He loved" die instead—to the chagrin of the man's sisters, and probably the man himself. Lazarus' sisters thought it was unloving of Christ to tarry four days while their brother died—and they complained bitterly to Him about it. They were wrong. He said, "Did I not tell you that, if you would believe, you would see the glory of God?" And they did, but not immediately.

Jesus could have saved John the Baptist's life, but did not even make an effort to get him out of prison. He left his cousin in prison to suffer and to die. John's faith was shaken by this disappointment. Jesus' answer to him was "Blessed is he who is not stumbled by me."

Isaiah said that the righteous perish (and "are taken"), in order to deliver them from calamity in this world (Isa.57:1). Isaiah seemed to have no trouble seeing a loving purpose in the death of the righteous. We might ask, "Whose purpose was it to confer such a benefit on these people—the devil's?"—but the answer seems obvious even in the asking. According to John 12:41, Isaiah saw the glory of Jesus with his own eyes (something I have not seen, and I'll wager, you have not). Yet, it never occurred to him to see all the judgments of God as contradicting that glory of Christ which he saw. In fact, God (though Isaiah) spoke of His judgments as a function of His great love for His people:

"Since you were precious in My sight, You have been honored, And I have loved you; Therefore I will give men for you, And people for your life" (Isa.43:4).

Jeremiah described gruesome judgments that he said God was about to bring on Jerusalem. However, he was not unaware of the love of God. It was through him that God said, "I have loved you with an everlasting love" (31:3). The judgments and the love were not seen as inharmonious.

Peter specifically tells us that the Old Testament prophets were not speaking from their own limited powers of interpretation, but that they were moved by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:20-21). He even clarified that the Spirit who spoke through the prophets was "the Spirit of Christ" (1 Peter 1:10-11).

By contrast, you tell us that the prophets were presenting their own flawed interpretations, and that any spirit who would present such doctrines as those taught by Moses and the prophets could not be in accord with the Spirit of Christ, whom you know would never inspire such words! Yet, Peter actually knew Jesus (and the Old Testament) pretty well—possibly even as well as you do! Does it not concern you that he disagreed with you on this 100%?

The Book of Revelation depicts the wrath of "the Lamb" (that'd be "Jesus") as bringing about immense sufferings in the course of executing righteous judgments. The Jesus in that book complained about a church having left their first love, yet He never saw the incongruity in standing for supreme love, on one hand, and bringing temporal suffering upon people, on the other.

This is where you claim greater insight into God's nature than that possessed by inspired prophets and even the Apostles Peter and John (the latter, as the disciple most intimate with Christ, wrote more than any other on the subject of "love"). If you cannot harmonize their affirmations about judgment and God's control over calamities with the love of Jesus, when they had no difficulty doing so, might not the deficiency be on your side—not theirs?

You say you do not pick and choose which scriptures to believe, all the while affirming that many of the Old Testament scriptures misjudge the character of God. Jesus saw no such flaws in them. He said, "The [Old Testament] scripture cannot be broken" (John 10:35). You seem to want to break them up into bits and decide which ones you are willing to agree with.

It sounds as if your wife's death represents a case in which you would not (by your own apparent admission) have loved God unless you had been able to discount all the scriptures that speak of His sovereignty over life and death. It appears that you have reshaped your God into a concept of your own choosing—one which is more palatable to you. When you stand in disagreement with Moses, the prophets, Jesus and the apostles, can you suggest any reason why your opinions should be accepted by readers here who choose to be disciples of Jesus?

Jesus said of Moses, "If you do not believe his writings, how can you believe my words?" (John 5:47). How indeed?

[Paidion]

Hello Steve,

I am still a seeker after truth and reality. I have looked up all of scriptures you presented and most of them are consistent with the theodicy to which I subscribe. I say "most" because I am not yet able to explain from this paradigm ALL of your objections. But I dare say this is the case also for you with your own paradigm as well. None of us have our theology sewed up and bagged in such a way that they are invulnerable to attack.

I do not have the energy nor the need to defend my every thought and position. I don't think God is leading me to do so. But the issue of God's character is of paramount importance to me and to the well-being of all disciples and to their testimony to non-disciples. You ask me how I explain that God intervenes in some cases and not in others. Well the problem of suffering, why "bad things happen to good people" has been the question of the ages, and I don't pretend to have a complete answer. Indeed none of the great thinkers (and I don't claim to be one of them) have come up with a total explanation. But in general, (and I have offered this before in these discussions) I think the reasons may lie partly in the following facts:

1. God has created man with the power to choose. Because this free will is perhaps the primary way in which man was created in the image of God, God chooses to seldom interfere with man's choices. It is a sort of respect for His own creation.

2. Mankind had fallen, by his sin and rebellion in Eden, and all nature fell with him. Since I believe in a "young" earth, the question about animals devouring one another prior to Adam and Eve does not form a part of my thinking. In the present, God has not usually prevented hurricanes, tsunamis, famine, drought, and other such conditions which cause horrible suffering and death among humanity. He has not generally prevented aids, malaria, leprosy, horrible intestinal worms, etc. from causing great suffering. All of these plagues are not part of God's creation in their present form. We read in Genesis 1 that all things which God created, He saw as good. The plagues I have just mentioned, and the other conditions are not good. The suggestion that God has a deeper purpose for "allowing" these plagues is grasping at straws. These plagues and "natural" conditions were a later development — as I see it, the result of the fall of nature. But why did God allow the results of the fall to continue to cause suffering? I don't know. The thought has crossed my mind that since man chose to do things his way, God is in effect saying, "Go ahead and do it your way. See whether or not this fulfills your needs." But this is just a thought, and I don't offer it as a definitive explanation.

3. God has created the Universe with a set of natural laws. These are necessary in order to have a working universe. If God intervened too often by performing miracles in order to relieve people of suffering, this would upset the system He established and create anomalies which would be quite confusing. For example, suppose He decided to keep all Christians who accidentally stumbled at the edge of a cliff and began to fall off the cliff from being killed. Suppose that instead of falling the usual way, they just floated to the bottom like a feather. Then gravity would not have a reliable effect. Sometimes objects would fall hard, and other times float slowly as they fell. Surely God would not permit such inconsistencies in nature.

I know no one who has the complete answer to the problem of suffering, but I recommend Greg Boyd's book Is God to Blame? Greg was once approached by Melanie, a distraught middle-aged woman who said she had lost her passion for God and had lost the joy she had in life. Melanie had always wanted to mother children, and about four years earlier she had lost a child in childbirth. After that she could not conceive because of a medical condition. Then she and her husband began to pray and ask God for a miracle. Amazingly, Melanie conceived! God be praised! Her pregnancy progressed normally, but during the delivery, the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby's neck, and it choked to death. Melanie was devastated. Why would God miraculously give them a child only to take it away when it was coming into the world? Melanie and her husband sought answers from a Bible teacher who assured them that there were no accidents in God's providence, that the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. He said that they would just have trust Him. When Melanie asked him why God would do this, he replied that God knows what is best and suggested that He might be teaching them some kind of lesson by taking their baby. This is what resulted in Melanie's depression. Thankfully, Greg Boyd showed her through questioning, that God didn't kill her baby. She was astonished, repeating over and over, "God didn't do this to me?" In time, she and her husband regained their passion for living for Christ.

I wish I could share the whole introduction to the book which gives the above account in detail, but I can't. I did receive permission to make a number of physical copies, and am willing to mail them to anyone who requests them.

Finally, Steve, I want to say that this issue is so important to me, that I got carried away in my previous post. I was quite wrong in my concluding sentence in suggesting that your view of God entails that He might love you one minute and hate you the next. God brought me under conviction concerning having written that sentence. I should have limited the sentence to His protecting you one minute and ceasing to protect you the next. I ask your forgiveness for this foolish statement which in fact, did arise from my emotions and passion concerning the character of God.

[steve]

Paidion,

Thank you for the clarification. I still believe there is more peace in knowing that God is sovereign and omnicompetent—especially in the midst of the pains and losses of life. If He is not, all of His promises ring hollow, since human free will or natural law may prevent an impotent deity from fulfilling them.

I do not say that any couple loses a baby (or that you and I lost wives) simply to teach them a lesson—though there are, undoubtably, lessons to be learned from such tragedies. My understanding is that God is training and testing those who profess to believe in Him for the unutterably high responsibility of reigning over the world with Him. Such responsibility cannot be conferred on the untrustworthy, any more than a degree in brain surgery should be conferred upon someone who has not passed his medical exams. There is nothing God values or requires of His creatures more than trust. Our faith is tested when we cannot see why God's providences are good. In such cases, we are called upon just to trust His character. If we cannot do this, we show that we are not "the right stuff" to be entrusted with such high responsibilities.

When my last ex-wife left the children and me, 11 years ago, I could not imagine how any good could come from it. I trusted that God is good and could have prevented it. Obviously, God had no control over her free will, but He did have control over whether I married her or not. He knew of the mental health history of her family and of her own weakness. I prayed and believed that God had brought about the match, since she seemed like the most outstanding Christian missionary woman in our church. God could have warned me about the problems in her "wiring" which He knew would, or could, bring disaster into our marriage, the children's lives, and the reputation of this ministry. Why didn't He warn me when I was seeking His guidance about this? I don't know the answer.

However, when she had her (inevitable?) breakdown and did the things she did, I prayed earnestly for her recovery and for the saving of our marriage. She would not have left her family had God healed her mind, or expelled her demons—all of which we prayed for very earnestly. His refusal to intervene caused great harm to my children, excruciating pain to me, and an interruption in the ministry that seemed as though it would necessarily be permanent. I remember telling my parents, ten years ago, "My life is over." I didn't mean that I was suicidal. It meant that there was no conceivable way in which the ministry or my pain could ever be healed—and that no imaginable future outcome could seem to justify this much harm done. However, I never doubted God's love and goodness. I daily prayed out loud, "God, it is my privilege to be your servant, do to me what you see fit."

When I met divorced people a couple of years later, they were amazed that I had so quickly returned to a normal and healthy emotional state. They were generally still disoriented even ten years and more after their divorce. Of course, this was not my first tragedy in life and marriage. People expected me to be a basket case. In every case, my recovery from disaster was rapid, because I refused to find fault with God for His good providence—which I knew to be "good" only due to my trust in His good character. This has generally been the case with all of my spiritual heroes, who suffered worse things than I, and were able to keep their wits about them and grow through their tragedies, because they knew that God was the one controlling their fortunes (according to His promises), and they were convinced that He was wiser and more loving than they were.

The sequel is that I am now married to a woman who should, by all reasoning, have been my first wife. She is stable, mature, gracious, competent, and she loves me. We are both older, and are aware that we may only have the ragged ends of our lives to give to each other, but we both feel that, in the short time we have been married, that the Lord has restored the years that the locusts have eaten (except for the damage done to our children, for which we are still praying). Ten years ago—or even twenty years ago—being this happily married was inconceivable to me. When we inquire why God did not cause us to meet each other before we both had gone through such meat-grinder marriages, we speculate that we might not have been as much on the same page as we are, had we not had such similar experiences and grown through them.

The bottom line is that I trusted God when nothing He was doing could possibly have been seen as making sense. Once again, He has been vindicated by the outcome. "Whoever puts his trust in Him shall not be ashamed."

[TK]

Steve and Paidion--

I just wanted to say that I have really enjoyed reading your responses to this difficult question.

I believe there is much truth in what BOTH of you say, to the extent that is possible.

TK

[Paidion]

If He is not [sovereign and omnicompetent], all of His promises ring hollow, since human free will or natural law may prevent an impotent deity from fulfilling them.

Are you saying that God is powerless to prevent particular events from occuring?

Steve and Homer, I cannot see why you still think I believe God is impotent. I believe just as firmly as you that He is omnipotent. The two ideas: the idea that God controls every event, and the idea that He is powerless to control every event are not collectively exhaustive as explanations.

I just don't think He has his hand in every event which occurs on earth. I think He has nothing to do with human suffering (except for mild suffering, perhaps limited to mental suffering in order to correct His children as a loving human father might correct his children). I think He has nothing to do with people's deaths, and I explained some possible reasons He "allows" death in my last post to Steve. I don't think He has anything to do with the rape and murder of little girls. But if He "allows" it because of His permissive will, in order to bring to pass a greater good, what could that greater good possibly be? Couldn't that greater good be brought about in some way other than have little girls raped and murdered?

So there must be another explanation of why God does not prevent these atrocities. I think the 3 points I made in my last email to Steve at least partially explain it.

Harold S. Kushner, a Jewish rabbi, in 1981, wrote a book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. I read the book. Mr. Kushner had made a lot of acute observations concerning God and suffering humanity. But his solution was that God was powerless to do anything about it. That position I have never held.

I find that the idea that God "allows" excruciating suffering and death for a higher purpose is always devoid of a satisfactory explanation. Some of the pseudo-explanations are as follows:

1. He has His own mysterious reasons which we are incapable of understanding.
2. We should not even think about the reasons; just trust Him.
3. He sets the timing of each person's death, so why should we be concerned?
4. He does what He wants; there's no use questioning or protesting.

But it is human nature to know the reason why; God created us with inquisitive minds. Does God just protect some people and lift protection from others in a random fashion?

In my opinion, it is rational to seek other explanations for the problem of pain rather than to ascribe the execution of atrocities to the Loving Creator, whether their occurrence results from His active will or His "permissive" will. (I don't think there's much difference between the two.) My view, as you know, is that God is usually uninvolved, not only in human atrocities, but also in "natural" disasters (which aren't so "natural" since God didn't create the world that way) — not because He is powerless, but because He chooses not to be involved. If God so chooses, He can and does become involved, and even actively prevents some human suffering and "natural" disasters. But it is rare. When we read the Bible, (both testaments) it seems that God is intervening in human affairs a lot. But that doesn't imply that He was involved a lot. It's just that the Bible records many or most of the rare occasions in which God did intervene during the times in which the authors lived.

[Perry]

I think He has nothing to do with human suffering (except for mild suffering, perhaps limited to mental suffering in order to correct His children as a loving human father might correct his children). I think He has nothing to do with people's deaths, and I explained some possible reasons He "allows" death in my last post to Steve. I don't think He has anything to do with the rape and murder of little girls.

Hi Paidion,

Do you think God ever intervenes to prevent such things? I think I get what you're saying that God doesn't "act" to cause suffering, and that he doesn't even choose not to act in order to allow suffering. My question is, does he ever choose too act to prevent suffering? In other words, do you think he is completely uninvolved with suffering?

I think if you're going to be consistent, then you will have to say that he must remain uninvolved in all cases; that, to use your examples, he never ever counteracts gravity or intervenes in any way when a Christian stumbles over the edge, or that he never prevents the bad guy from raping the little girl...

If you permit that he does indeed act in some cases, then I'm curious to know what your explanation is for why he chooses to act only some of the time.

Perry