Evangelical Outpost linked today to this article, questioning the traditional understanding of the martyrdom of Lady Jane Grey. Even if all it says is true, for me it doesn’t diminish the pathos of her youthful martyrdom.
Then I read an article about Auschwitz in Smithsonian Magazine.
So I’ve been contemplating human suffering today.
Have you ever thought this thought? I’ve thought it many times: If I had been God, and had known that giving human beings free will would result in all the evil and horror that have in fact been produced, I wouldn’t have given them free will. And if the human project was unsatisfactory without free will, I’d have just skipped the whole business.
I have an answer that satisfies me intellectually. 1 Corinthians 2:9 says, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.”
Apparently, in God’s economy, the good He is creating far outweighs all the innumerable evils perpetrated by man since the fall of Adam. From the viewpoint of eternity, we’ll look back and say, “Yes, it was well worth it.”
Now that answer raises a hundred questions in my mind. Questions for which I have no answer, and for which we have been given no plain answers.
This, I guess, calls for faith.
But it also argues, I think, for courage on God’s part. Granted, He saw the outcome from the beginning. But part of that outcome, I believe, was His own assumption of all that evil on the cross.
I read somewhere that, in the early years of the Superman comic strip, the writers came to a crisis when they’d made their character so powerful that they couldn’t come up with a challenging enough opponent for him anymore. That was when they invented Kryptonite. Something that took all that power away.
God did it in real life.
I can’t find the reference, but G. K. Chesterton wrote somewhere that all those scoffers, who call God evil for creating an evil world, are right in a sense, and that God acknowledged it (in a way) by explicitly accepting the punishment for creating all that evil.
Whatever else you think, I think you’ve got to admit it’s no cowardly strategy.
This thing you wrote, Lars has given me the willies!
Well, maybe it is not what you wrote, ’cause that was a work of art… ney, it is what is going on after I read your post.
First; Before I read what you had written here, I had read the article on Auschwitz and next the Lady Jane Grey article. (I, unlike you, did not come away with an inspiration to write a really nice piece in a blog.) (As the Duke would say, this separates the men from the boys.)
Now here is where this gets interesting.
I attended an Evangelical Chinese church’s New Years celebration last night. It went on for hours! (They believe in predestination.)
It was SSSOOOOOOO loud. You could hardly hear the music or sermon as people just kept talking through the whole thing, over the loud-speakers even. I didn’t know if this was a Chinese thing or what…. Ah, I stray…
There is so much I could describe here as to the colors and sounds, etc… but that would wander down too many more rabbit trails… and I’m straying again….
I was startled when the pastor started giving his sermon, through a interpreter. It was like he was reading your post, almost. He’d left off the Auschwitz and Lady Jane Grey parts. But, maybe he HAD read it… as this was on the 13th. Hummmmm I thought to my self…. But, no, he can only read Chinese.
So, here’s today, this morning, 11 AM. MY pastor gets up and totally ingores the fact that it is the big V-day and starts in on his sermon. Once again, its like listening to someone read your posting, ‘cept he left of the Lady Jane Grey part!
I know he hadn’t read your post as I asked him. He has a PC but doesn’t read blogs.
So, next I went on to our Japanese church for my wife’s and my ministry there and after a bit, listened to the Japanese pastor give basically the same sermon as the other two pastors!!
Nope, he hadn’t read your post either as he has no PC!
Of course, the sermons weren’t word-for-word, (I hadn’t brought a copy of your post with me to compare….), but the whole idea of your post was there all three times!!! I’m pretty sure, you didn’t phone all these pastors and read them your post… So! Is this spooky or what? Twilight Zone material?? What gives? Heh?
Spooky. I can only assume God was communicating to those pastors, and I somehow picked up some bleed-over of the signal.
Spooky it is!!
Lars, you would make a good Japanese man.
You could say God was communicating with YOU and the other three got the “bleed-over”…..
Ah! You humble guy you…
The final remarks in your posting, Lars, remind me of a dialogue between two of the Karamazov brothers in Dostoevsky’s novel. Ivan is not saying that he cannot believe that there is a God; but he cannot accept a creation in which children suffer shaming, painful abuse and death. (I think the examples Dosty gives Ivan are authentic or based on authentic accounts.) His pious brother Alyosha is troubled, but begins to talk to Ivan about Jesus.
Ivan changes the subject…
Dostoevsky got a lot of his ideas from me.