In the light of a recent tragedy, Doug Wolter, pastor in Humbolt, Iowa, shared the following with his congregation as a simple giving real help to those who were hurting. This is a summary.
H – Offer hope. We may not be able to offer any explanation of why this has happened, but we can point to Jesus, who has uniquely entered into our pain and suffering.
E – Enter into the other person’s pain. …
Imagine what it must have been like to have been a Christian in the days of the apostles!
It would have been a great, wouldn’t it? To experience the Holy Spirit coming with Pentecostal power. To hear the apostles preach and to witness their miracles. To see 3,000 people turn to Christ in a single day. They were heady days indeed, as the Christian message spread like wildfire, beginning in Jerusalem, and then Judea and Samaria, and onwards to the ends of the earth.…
At about 3pm on 1st August 2007 a interstate bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed. Workmen had, just a few days previously, been conducting extensive repair work to the 40-year-old bridge. There were tons of building materials piled up on the bridge at the time of its collapse.
Bethlehem Baptist Church is within sight of that bridge, and John Piper is its Senior Pastor. Just a few hours after the disaster Piper, not yet knowing the scale of human injury and loss, or whether any of his own friends and colleagues had been directly affected, wrote of his immediate thoughts and feelings about what had just happened.…
‘It is a perversion of Scripture to demand that humans suffering the consequences of the Fall are to somehow bear up under it with a resolute grin-turned-grimace. The books of the Bible, all of which deal frankly with human suffering, know of no such stoicism. Job was not ashamed or afraid to express his grief to God (Job 3:24) and complained bitterly about his perception of divine indifference (Job 23:2; 24:12). The psalms, which beautifully reflect the full range of human emotion, are full of references to sighing and groaning (cf.…
For philosophers, pain is a problem of metaphysics; for stoics, it is an exercise; for mystics, it is an ecstasy; for the religious, a travail meekly to be borne; for clinicians a symptom to be understood and an ill to be relieved. (Charles F. W. Illingworth)
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. (C. S. Lewis)
Mercy hath a heaven, and justice a hell, to display itself to eternity, but long-suffering hath only a short-lived earth. …
One of the most significant objections to the theory of evolution is the moral one: if there is an all-wise God, why would he use a process that involves so much waste, suffering and death?
Biology, says, Denis Alexander, is a ‘package deal’. For every ‘plus’ that we might see as positive for life and well-being, there is a ‘minus’. For example: mutations are essential for biodiversity, and yet mutations also cause cancer and genetic diseases.…
Can God be trusted, even in the dark? When your world has collapsed, and you can see no way of putting it back together again. When God himself seems to have dealt you a very poor deal, and when you cry out “Why?” heaven remains silent. When your faith is sorely tested. Can you – will you – cling to God nevertheless?
This is the very practical problem that I would like to explore with you from Ruth chapter 1.…
C.S. Lewis famously wrote of ‘The Problem of Pain’, and Christian apologists generally regard the reality of suffering as one of the most serious objections to the existence of a good God.
However, it is not difficult to see that at least some types of pain are absolutely necessary for our well-being.
Nick Lane’s recent book Life Ascending (Profile Books, 2009) is subtitled ‘The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution’. Writing as a biochemist, sets out his ‘top ten’ as follows:-
Although adopting a strictly naturalistic stance, Lane’s discussion of pain is of relevance to theodicy (i.e.…
Baghdad, July 30th 1919.
Dear Walter,
I’ve got some very sad news to tell you, last night when down at the river bathing poor old Eric was drowned. You must forgive me for putting it so blunt, but I feel too full up with it to say much about it. We were bathing as usual and poor old Eric went down. We dived with ropes round us and swam about for half an hour but nothing was seen of him. …
The difficulty of reconciling belief in an all-powerful and all-loving God with the existence of suffering is notorious. It is, of course, not merely an intellectual problem but a very real personal and practical problem for us all.
Many thoughtful writers have given help in the matter, and I have always been impressed by the wisdom of John Wenham. To summarise:-
1. It is good that man is a free agent, and not a machine. …
