From: mpaul@unlinfo.unl.edu (marxhausen paul)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: How can we comfort the afflicted?
Date: 28 Jul 92 06:47:54 GMT
Organization: University of Nebraska - Lincoln

I've been chewing on this myself; between a series of personal blows
endured by me and my wife, and the death this last week of a 35 year
old mother of three in our church from cancer and a stroke, I'm trying
to find how, as Christians trying to counsel and console each other,
I can find a middle ground between two viewpoints:

1) God has a plan for your life, he is working on it all the time and all
   events contribute to it.  He sees the Big Picture and we will too,
   someday, but in the mean time it's pretty inscrutable and we just 
   have to go on faith.

2) God does have a will for your life BUT He does not get down and fiddle
   about with circumstances and events; stuff just happens while God keeps
   his hands off.  As the common expression has it, "Sh*t happens", but
   then, grace happens too; God works with us and through us to redeem
   suffering.

The first is comforting and a common view, but it sure leaves God pretty
guilty in our eyes when we just can't seem to buy a break from tragedy.
The second seems closer to reality in my view, and is helpful to me in that
I don't have to rack my brains about "Why?" something happened so much.
However, I'm not sure it's really scriptural:  "I know the plans I have
for you, plans for good and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope",
uh, I think Ecc 29:11.  Also other references to God having plans and pur-
poses for us.  

aNYway, it IS tough.  I'll be interested in other responses.
-- 
===============================================================================
paul marxhausen                              \/               grace 
university of nebraska - lincoln             /\              happens           
===============================================================================

[I think it's important to keep Christ in the picture.  At least one
way God deals with suffering is to experience it with us.  The most
extended treatment of this issue is in Job.  Note that Job is never
given an answer.  Instead he comes to meet God face to face.  Thus he
is given an existential answer, not an intellectual one -- an
experience of God.  (I do not share the view that God simply
overpowers him.  My reading is that God respects his honesty, and
gives him as much of a vision of God and his purposes as he is capable
of dealing with.)  Christians have normally dealt with suffering by
seeing themselves as Christ's fellow sufferers.  As Paul puts it,
completing the sufferings of Christ (Col 1:24).  I believe God has
some reason why he deals with things through apparent weakness, by
dying on the cross instead of using brute force.  I don't know what it
is, though I can see at least some reasons.  But I think it's
dangerous to look for reasons behind every event.  This leads us to
see every bad thing as a specific punishment or warning.  But I simply
don't believe that God wants all of these bad things to happen.  Jesus
showed no sign of thinking that the various illnesses and other bad
situations he ran into were God's will -- he wept over his friend's
death, and showed no doubt that he wanted everyone healed.  God seems
to have made a basic decision to give the world and its people some
reasonable level of autonomy.  Thus I think our attitude towards
suffering has to start at that point -- we have to see it as a result
of God's respect for human independence and natural law.  But with
with Jesus' death, he makes it clear that he is willing to bear the
brunt of the consequences of that decision, and to be with us in our
suffering.  --clh]