The Problem of Human Suffering

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The Problem of Human Suffering

The Christian tradition is haunted by a significant mark: Suffering. The question that arises from this suffering is if God is the omnipitous being that Christians believe Him to be, why would He let His people, whom he loves, suffer great pains and horrible deaths? According to premises derived from theologians and followers of the Bible, God is "all loving". If that is true, then God would not want His people to suffer, but by just looking around us we see that suffering, in fact, is happening. If there is suffering going on that God does not want, then He would be able to stop that suffering since He also believed to be "all powerful", yet suffering still goes on. Why? Hopefully by the end of this paper I will be able to answer that for myself.

Suffering needs little support for its existence, for things such as the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel's book, Night, documents the suffering of the Jewish people and his own personal suffering during the Holocaust. This massive amount of suffering is very hard to justify. How could God let this genocide take place?

To answer that question we must further examine the original premises that we based the first conclusion upon: God is all-powerful and God is all-loving. To say that either one of these postulates are true would disrupt the foundation of the Christian beliefs. So we must dig deeper and look at the thought that "God does not want suffering". Since suffering indeed happens, and God being the all-powerful individual and could stop suffering from happening if He wanted, then God must want suffering to happen for a reason. That's strange, since we are saying God is also all-loving. God must need suffering to happen for a reason, but ...

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...ering is always going to be painful no matter if God is the one who is doing it to us or not. What we need to realize is that suffering with faith in God is much more justifiable than suffering without. In I Peter it says "However, if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name."(I Peter 4:16). So suffering as a Christian is all right because it means that you share an aspect of Christ's life, and you should continue to praise God. "So then, those who suffer according to God's will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good"(I Peter 4:19). This is our answer: Have faith in God, through the good times and especially the bad, for during the bad times is where our faith will truly be tested, and when the "Problem of human suffering" arises, it won't seem like much of a problem at all.

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