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Christian notion of suffering
Importance of suffering
Understanding suffering
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The Scripture says, I begged the Lord three times to take this problem away from me. But he said to me, "My grace is enough for you. When you are weak, my power is made perfect in you." So I am very happy to brag about my weaknesses. Then Christ's power can live in me. (2 Cor. 12:8-9) It is my position that although God did not create suffering or disabilities, He allows them in order to show this dying world what his grace, mercy, and redemptive power looks like. Suffering is inevitable. It will effect each human that is born into this world, in one way or another. Suffering may come in one of many ways. It may be mental, emotional, physical, and/or socio economic. In addition, suffering could be concealed (internal) or apparent (external). Those with mental and physical disabilities are often times life-long sufferers and their suffering is a lot more intense and devastating. However, regardless of the type of suffering, we all need God and His word to comfort us in our time of affliction.
Although sin, suffering, and death were not a part of God’s original plan. He can use each one of these things to bring glory unto His name. While I do not believe that God created suffering, but was introduced through the Fall of Man, he uses suffering to keep humanity humble, show is grace and teach us how to truly love. On this earth everyone will suffer at one point in time or another, it is the consequence of living in a fallen world. There are countless stories of suffering riddled throughout the bible. From the first sons (Cain and Abel) to Revelation, there are recounts of sufferings.
Why would God allow so much suffering in this world? If what He created was very good (Gen 1:31), why do we experience pain? Furthermore, since there is...
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...r and we as the church must lead the way. I will culminate with this scripture in 1 Corinthians (21-27). The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. (NIV)
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (Lewis, 1994, p. 91). Throughout history man has had to struggle with the problem of evil. It is one of the greatest problems of the world. Unquestionably, there is no greater challenge to man’s faith then the existence of evil and a suffering world. The problem can be stated simply: If God is an all-knowing and all-loving God, how can He allow evil? If God is so good, how can He allow such bad things to happen?Why does He allow bad things to happen to good people? These are fundamental questions that many Christians and non-Christians set out to answer.
suffering hurts man spirit is does more good then constant happiness and power. We have to beat
If God loves us, why does He allow us to suffer? The central question in Shadowlands challenges traditional religious and moral conventions. It is a question asked by many, with few satisfactory answers. Before attempting to answer the question, and explore its relationship to Shadowlands, let us first define the question, so its implications may be more clearly understood. At the heart of the question is a doubt in the goodness of God, "If God loves us". From the beginning it is clear that God is being judged and criticized by the question. Then the second phrase follows"Why does He allow us to suffer?". The assumption made in the second phrase is that God has enough control over the world to prevent suffering. If He can prevent suffering, and He really loves us, then why shouldn' t He excercise that control, and prevent needless suffering?
After reviewing the work of David Hume, the idea of a God existing in a world filled with so much pain and suffering is not so hard to understand. Humes’ work highlights some interesting points which allowed me to reach the conclusion that suffering is perhaps a part of God’s divine plan for humans. Our morals and values allow us to operate and live our daily lives in conjunction with a set of standards that help us to better understand our world around us and essentially allows us to better prepare for the potential life after life. For each and every day we get closer to our impending deaths and possibly closer to meeting the grand orchestrator of our universe.
Kusher gets straight to the point in the first few pages of his book. We, as humans, assume that we deserve what we get. Somewhere along the way we have sinned and deserve what happens. We focus the attention on ourselves so we can keep viewing God as a righteous judge. God is simply being like a caring parent in hopes we can see he only means well, and hopes one way we can see why he would cause such pain. Kushner believes that maybe God is not the cause of our suffering, but that God is there to help.
The existence of a God is always questioned, but it is questioned even more so at times of suffering. As Rabbi Dr Louie Jacobs comments “If God exists… how and why could such a Being tolerate all the pain, misery, and anguish that is often the lot of humanity”.
African-Americans’/ Affrilachians’ Suffering Mirrored: How do Nikky Finney’s “Red Velvet” and “Left” Capture events from the Past in order to Reshape the Present?
These arguments made by Berish and Job boil down to the question the theodicy, “why do good people suffer? Where is God in all this? Where is justice” (Fox 173). Elie Wiesel provides an answer that parallels once again with the book of Job. Embodied in the character of Sam, who claims that suffering is, “all because of our sins” (Wiesel 134). Similarly Jobs friends give a similar answer to the theodicy question by saying, “Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same” (Job 4:7). The answer to the theodicy question in t The Trial of God is that suffering occurs because of the sins committed by individuals.
...rds reveal that the god he believed in was similar to the gnostic depiction of YAHWEH. Neither man seemed to have been able to grasp hope from their worldviews, which is diametrically opposed to the view of God that the Bible depicts. The existence of suffering and death is not evidence of a “sadistic” god, but rather evidence of a loving God who allows men the free will to create or destroy.2 God is not a cosmic rapist who forces his creatures to love him, and He did not create robotic entities incapable of real love. Rather, God has subjected the world to futility causing men to see the evidence of existence apart from Him.3 Men see the human condition and are compelled to seek God for explanation and hope, and ultimately to cry out to Him for salvation. Yeshua is the master builder who can empathize with us, and has enabled a plan of hope to restore mankind.
Why in the world did He ever create pain?”(179) If one is to talk about God, one does not stray far from hope, for that is what religion is, hope. Hope that when we die, we'll have a chance to do life over again, or enter some pearly gates up above depending on your beliefs. Yossarian strived through everything to survive. He who looked into the sky and flung that is was “where the night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves.
It is human nature for people to have the desire to overcome hardships and succeed in just about everything in which they participate. No matter the type of suffering or the extent of the suffering endured in whatever situation, people strive to be successful. In “The Matrix”, the characters aboard the ship suffered a great amount in order to save all of humanity from suffering under the rule of the computers, and defied all odds in order to do so. The Jewish people, about whom were written in Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl, did whatever they could to overcome their suffering in the concentration camps under the Nazi regime of the early 1940s. Avi Dalal overcame a different kind of suffering in Tel Aviv when he had to overcome
The question of suffering comes up much when talking about, or practicing any religion. Many ask why people suffer, and what causes suffering? The various religions try to answer these questions in their own way. Pico Iyer’s editorial, “The Value of Suffering” addresses the questions of suffering and how it is handled. This article could be compared to the Bhagavad-Gita which also addresses and explains suffering through different stories of the interactions of humans and different Gods. One can specifically look at “The Second Teaching” in the Bhagavad-Gita, which explains the interaction between a man named Arjuna and the god Krishna. In it Arjuna is suffering because he does not want to fight in a war and with people whom he should be worshiping. Krishna says to fight because the souls of the people will forever live on, and because he needs to fulfill his Dharma. With what is known about the Bhagavad-Gita and how Iyer thinks about the subject, Iyer would agree with how the Bhagavad-Gita address suffering.
As previously, stated God uses difficult situations as a way to improve the relationship we have with Him. Why suffering though? Frederick Sontag wrote in his book that evil or suffering are the best circumstances in which to find a God, unlike times where everything goes well
First romantic encounters by young boys are often wrought with many different emotions and illusions. In “Araby”, a portrayal of a young boy’s experience of romantic reality, the reader is witness to the narrator’s physical, emotional and chronological journey. The emotional reactions, anguish and anger, show the importance of the events in the young boy’s life. The deprecating word vanity is significant to the story’s theme, because while anguish and anger are emotional reactions, the admission of vanity is a severe moral judgment of oneself. Anguish is regarded as the key emotion in the young boy’s childhood. In James Joyce’s “Araby”, the exaggerated anguish of the narrator seems quite pretentious given the reality of his youthful perception.
Suffering can be defined as an experience of discomfort suffered by a person during his life. The New York Times published an article entitled what suffering does, by David Brooks (2014). In this article, Brooks explains how suffering plays an important role in our pursuit of happiness. He explains firstly that happiness is found through experiences and then, suffering can also be a motivation in our pursuit of happiness. In other words, suffering is a fearful but necessary gift to acquire happiness. This paper is related to motivation and emotion, two keys words to the pursuit of happiness (King, 2010).