We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
On Suffering and God’s Goodness
Seth Haines wrote a guest post on Tanya Marlow’s blog called The Overcoming Kingdom. He reflects on his young son’s illness and the questions it provoked in him, and the hope he came to in the process. Real suffering challenges our easy answers and drives us to Jesus in a way that nothing else can.
From his guest post:
When life upends you, it’s tricky to balance human suffering and the goodness of God. It’s tempting to default to cliché tautologies–God is good because he is God–but these kinds of pat answers seem unsatisfying in the moment, and the starkness of our personal suffering seems to heighten awareness of the plight of all humanity. There are wars, famines, diseases, injustices, and where, pray tell, is God?
Category: General
Tags: God's Character, Kingdom, Suffering, Theodicy
Related Reading
The Gift of Bearing Witness
Eustaquio Santimano via Compfight Our friend, Jonathan Martin, was featured in She Loves Magazine in a piece he wrote called At Least One Person Waiting. It’s an extraordinary reflection on sitting with the ones we love when they are suffering and we are powerless. From Jonathan’s reflection: We all have different skills, different things to…
Sermon: Letter to Henry
We usually share a short clip from Greg’s sermons here, but we decided that a clip just won’t do this week. This last weekend Greg preached about the life and death of Henry and what it does and does not say about God. You can listen to the sermon and download other resources over at…
Who is Responsible for Job’s Suffering?
In the prologue of the Book of Job, the author seems to ascribe the responsibility for Job’s affliction to Yahweh. For instance, Satan challenges God to “stretch out [his] hand and strike everything he has,“ believing that this would incite Job to curse God to his face (1:11). The fact that the Lord responds by…
Isn’t the World Unsafe If God Doesn’t Control Everything?
If God isn’t in control of everything, the world feels unsafe. If the future is open and if things can happen outside of God’s will, what guarantee is there that there is a point to a person’s suffering? Maybe it’s all just bad luck. My experience has been that many of those who honestly examine…
Podcast: Was it God Who Sent the Plagues in Exodus?
Greg discusses how God’s restraint from action is often written as an act (rather than a non-act). http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0075.mp3