More thoughts on suffering and evil.

As I keep thinking on this, I'll keep on posting.

Here's a comment I recently made on a Capturing Christianity video:

1. The question of eternity. As an abstraction this means little to people, but your illustration brings it home. I've used a similar one. "It takes about 30 years to really get to know someone, your closest buddy (or your spouse). Let's say there are about a billion Christians ever, over all history taken together. So in the eternal New Creation, our first 30 billion years would be spent getting to know everyone. After that, I'm at a bit of a loss."

2. But on a more substantial note, I'm glad you brought in the effect of 'world-view', the conception of 'real reality' that a person holds.

Most people who seek to mount the misoantitheist argument (the argument from suffering/evil) do so from within their anti- or non-theist world view, or a world view that captures the 'god' into the cosmos, the domain of our life-world, to 'be nice' to us, cause we think we're worth it! Pride driven to the max.

But this is not Yahweh, the God who created, as you rightly point out.

This brings an utterly different conception of reality, and its frame of reference is given in the creation account: fundamentally, mankind is in God's image and so makes meaningful choices. The creation is man's domain (Genesis 1:26-28, 2:19-20a and Ps 115:16). Mankind has rejected fellowship with God (Genesis 3:17-19). Man will live for ever, either in fellowship with God facilitated by Christ and his gift of new life, or in enmity with him in rejection of Christ.

God in his desire for man to return to the joy of knowing God has not hidden our plight from us, but allowed us to be engulfed by it, but with many mercies of relief and ultimately in the greatest mercy: the option to turn to him in belief and repentance.

Suffering tells us the state of nature we are in, evil shows us who we, as mankind, really are. This is us!

They represent the siren of hope telling us that where we are is not right, it is not who we were made to be, and there's a way out. Like the fire alarm in an apartment tower.

In these terms, ponder Luke 13:4, Yeshua's answer to the 'problem of evil': repent!

Then I added an appendix:

Just another thought came to me as I was watching a marvelous lecture: "Shakespeare is civilisation" by Andrew Doyle on the Ideas Matter channel. He mentioned Shakespeare's way with words and, having just made the above comment, these lines sprang to mind, from Macbeth:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

**Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing**.

This is mankind confronted by its own limitations despite all effort that we might make. A great marker that we are incapable of resolving the very problem we seek to lay at God's feet: the problem of evil, or suffering, that has its apotheosis in death.

There is no resolution within our domain and by our effort. Nothing we can do staves it off and all our gestures, summarized neatly I think in Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness" are a nullity in our realm. This is all the power of mankind gives us: despair! It requires external intervention; and in Christ it is the creator who intervenes: the one rejected is the one who saves!

Did we make **this** 'god' in our image? I don't think so!