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While even fine and self-consciously 'Christian movements' are affirming that nuclear weapons and Aids are God's divine punishment or response to 'godless communism', requisite damage is also done to elucidate all suffering as from the devil or through the direct consequence of sin. The bottom line is that the devil and man have a part to play, and the hand of God could be purposefully seen in suffering. Generally, God punishes those who transgress (for instance Achan, Miriam, Abiram, Korah and Dathan) and also allows suffering in others (Job, Joseph, Paul, to mention a few, for a purpose). There is perhaps someone else source of suffering which cannot be directly attributed to God, the devil or man.
The devil's hand in suffering
The hand of the devil in suffering could be seen as early as Genesis 3. God's rebuke to him after the fall of Adam and Eve clearly reveals his responsibility. That it was his doing cannot be doubted. The clear reprimand was "and I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head and you will attack his heel..." (Gen. 3:15).
Even though human beings fell into sin, one should stress that they did not design it. They were merely victims and not designers. This clearly explains why the gracious God provides redemption for mankind and not for the devil and his evil angels. Satan, "dethroned, disgraced, destined for destruction, the loathsome potentate of perversion, was (and is) obsessed with fiendish rage to destroy everybody and everything that is of God" (Berner 197,320). With all fairness to God, sometimes Christians murmur against Him for sufferings that should be attributed to the devil whose wittiness should not be underestimated.
Satan's hand is clearly seen in suffering right through the Bible. The occasion chapters of the book of Job chronicle that he can control the weather, our health, lives of our children and thoughts of our friends. In the book of Job, the existence of Satan is encountered as a way of comprehension the nearnessy of suffering and evil in the world. As a tester, a character who seems to enjoy leaning on habitancy to see how much they can take, "Satan can bring us pain and suffering" (Simundson 1980, 85).
With the capacity to enter the minds of habitancy and implanting evil thoughts, Satan has disguised himself as an angel of light, a wolf in sheep's clothing and a roaring lion sometimes using our best or closest friends, sometimes intimate members of our family, to deceive us and finally impose unimaginable degrees of suffering. The Bible presents Satan as a real being-a spirit nearnessy possessing great power to do harm. Because so many reject the existence of an actual devil, he is an unrecognized cause of much suffering. Whether we realize it or not, his deception of humanity is the major cause of anguish and grief.
The extent of Satan's affect and power is clearly revealed in the Bible. Revelation 12:9 tells us he "deceives the whole world." John writes elsewhere that "the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one" (1 John 5:19). When Paul proclaims that "the god of this age" has blinded the minds of many so that they do not believe the gospel (2 Corinthians 4:4), he refers to the devil.
Peter warns Christians that their "adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour" (1 Peter 5:8). In the parable of the sower and the seed, Jesus tells us that as soon as many habitancy hear God's Word explained to them "Satan comes immediately and takes away the word that was sown in their hearts" (Mark 4:15). This wicked being wants mankind blinded to the comfort, encouragement and deliverance of God's truth. Throughout history the devil has succeeded in tempting habitancy to indulge in an unlawful and immoral rehearsal of their corporal appetites. He employed this strategy in the garden of Eden, and his game has worked marvelously ever since. everybody has suffered because of it.
Jesus described the devil as "a murderer from the beginning" (John 8:44). Satan's intent has all the time been to make human life miserable and finally destroy us. His very nature is destructive, and those who commit destructive acts unwittingly effect him. Revelation 9:11 labels Satan as "the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, but in Greek he has the name Apollyon. These two names mean "destruction" and "destroyer," respectively. In distinction to God, who is the creator, sustainer and giver of life, Satan is the extreme destroyer and murderer.
Satan is the agitator of war and other conflicts. The book of Revelation depicts demonic spirits at the end of the age that "go out to the kings of the earth" to "gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty" (Revelation 16:14). Satan and his demons will instigate a time of distress that will be more terrible than any suffering human beings have ever experienced (Matthew 24:21-22).
We can see from these passages that Satan exerts a pervasive power over mankind. God, however, sets limits on Satan's power (Job 1:12; 2:6). God will not allow Satan to thwart His master plan for the salvation of humanity. As our Father and "Lord of heaven and earth" (Matthew 11:25), God will never relinquish His extreme control over mankind and the rest of His creation.
The situation is the same in modern times. The anonymous article Why does God allow suffering? realistically comments on the craftiness of the devil.
Through the spiritual blindness and ignorance Satan has foisted off on the world, he is the instigator of incalculable suffering. He has blinded humanity to the calculate for our existence. He has deceived humans into believing that his way-the way of selfishness and sin-is great than obedience to God's commands. Regrettably, humanity has fallen prey to Satan's ploys, not realizing the extreme grief that sin brings (2003, 4).
Jesus, however, was neither ignorant, nor spiritually blind. As Fitch observes, "that our Lord recognized the presence, the malignity, the hostility and the undying enmity of an evil one whom he called the devil, is unmistakable" (1967, 51). When Simundson observed that "there are times when it is a help to identify that there is an evil force that wants us to suffer" (1980, 147), he is acknowledging the responsibility of the devil as a source of human suffering.
Man's responsibility in suffering
Although the devil is to be blamed, man has freewill and also made a deliberate choice. In the account of Genesis 3, God turned to the woman and said "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children..." (Gen. 3:16). To the man, God said that "because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it', cursed is the ground because of you" (Gen.3:17). But why has that anything to do with one's suffering today? Suffering originated in the garden of Eden. It exists plainly because of sin. The book of Genesis tells us of the beginnings of sin, sorrow and suffering - the origin of our disjunction from God. Adam's sin was his deliberate choice. Christians erroneously believe that he was deceived but Paul, by divine inspiration informs us otherwise : "And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived..." (I Tim.2:14). In other words, the man made a very deliberate option to disobey. It is in this sense that Epp noted - "examine many of your (sufferings) and you will find your name stamped on them as the manufacturer" (1970, 23). A deduction from the above quotation is that man is responsible for most of what he suffers.
To apportion the responsibility of each source of suffering by quantifying it could be someone else beneficial or relevant study entirely. However, a wrong assumption is that every suffering is deserved. The law of retribution is hereby challenged. Job, for instance, was singled out not because he was bad but plainly because he was good. It would be unfair to charge Job with lack of humility for the Bible indubitably states that "there is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil" (Job 1:8).
A realistic quiz, is, are there connections between sin and suffering? definite expressions of liberal religious and secular notion tried very hard to dismiss the connection. In some ways, it was both understandable and right to quiz, this association since forms of Christian orthodoxy had the association all too explicit. This trust that suffering is punishment for sin, inflicted by God whose punishment begins already in this life, "is firmly rooted in approximately all the forms of empirical Christianity" (Hall, 1986,76). Airiohuodion believes that "the disciples of Jesus held the same view like the friends of Job that suffering is as a effect of some personal sin on the part of the sufferer or victim" (1996, 15). This explains why they were consuming and asked, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" (John 9:2). Even though these disciples recognized the theological deliberate upon Whether an individual, immediate ancestors or even the human race could be blamed for suffering, it would appear as if it is general to assume that suffering is a effect of someone's sin. Jesus' reply is worth analyzing. He noted that "neither this man nor his parents sinned..." (John 9:3a). Such a response by Jesus could be seen as a very "clear denial... That we should assume that every example of suffering is a direct effect of sin, Whether by the personel (as in Ezekiel 18 and elsewhere) or by the ancestors of the afflicted someone (as in Deuteronomy 5:9-10 and elsewhere)" (Simundson 1980,128).
Throughout the history of mankind and even today, man's freedom of option means that he is also responsible for his actions. In the world today, "one may select to smoke at an early age. He may think that it affects no one but himself. Sadly though, its effects are seen by everybody who breathes the smoke - the smoker and the non-smoker" (Northrop 2004, 3). There are many non-smokers dying today because of friends, relatives, and loved ones who smoke. The spread of Aids knows no boundaries. Innocent habitancy of all races and nationalities are being killed by this dreaded disease. They are not homosexuals, intravenous illegal drug users or promiscuous. They are innocent - often babies. They are guiltless victims of the poor decisions made by others. through the evil intentions of one man, Adolf Hitler, millions of Jews lost their lives. The effects of his brutality are still felt nearly fifty years after the Second World War. The corporal scars can still be seen. The reasoning scars can still be heard. Since there is nothing new under the sun, it has all the time been that the innocent suffers because of the decisions of others. The blood of righteous Abel still cries out. Wicked Cain's decision to murder affected not only innocent Abel but Cain's descendants.
The above consulation shows that the problem of human pain and suffering could also lie in man himself. Decisions made in the past to disobey God are still been made today. For instance, a house can suffer when a careless father spends his monthly salary on alcohol. A promiscuous personel may touch Aids. Man's decisions of the past affect us today and man's decisions today will affect man in the future. When man makes poor decisions, man becomes man's own worst enemy!
God's hand in suffering
Although God did not set in motion suffering, He ordinarily plays a very leading role in it. Genesis 3, the rest of the Bible and human history down to the present day, all article God intervening, punishing for disobedience and allowing suffering for a meaningful purpose. The antagonism between man and the snake is used to symbolize the outcome of the ongoing struggle between God and the evil one, a battle which is played out in the hearts of mankind. The offspring of the woman would ultimately crush the head of the serpent, a promise fulfilled in Christ's victory over Satan.
A response from God is to cause habitancy to suffer as a effect of sin. He is a God that "punishes the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generations..." (Gen. 20:5). How did Miriam suffer from leprosy? Did God approve of the stoning of Achan? Why did Israel lose a battle after Achan's sin? Can anything argue otherwise that God was not punishing Israel for the act of one man? When Korah, Dathan and Abiram rebelled in Numbers 16, was it not God Himself who put down the rebellion? The above biblical examples clearly show that God could cause habitancy to suffer as a effect of wrongdoing. final his consulation on the topic Why do Christians suffer?, Gould admonishes that "it would be good for us to know that many times we suffer because of our wrongdoing" (1980, 28).
Although Clarkson agrees that "God may send suffering into the lives of His children" (1983, 78), the position expressed is that it is for disciplinary training and chastisement. The researcher supports this line of reasoning since God, as a loving Father, clearly sees the end from the beginning, and seeks to turn His children away from their waywardness into His paths of righteousness and peace. He knows the awful end of the ways of man and the eternal blessedness of His.
Amy Carmichael comments on different aspects of human suffering in some of her books. In so doing, she casts a meaning and purpose on even the severest difficulties of life which is strengthening as well as enlightening. She forcefully argues that "if we are to be God's knights we must learn to go through flirts of arrows, and so the teaching which was set on fashioning warriors, not weaklings, often dealt with this" (Carmichael n.d., 129). Furthermore, she observes that the trust that no earthly father goes on chastising a loving child is misleading :
That is a coarse notion about suffering, but I am quite sure that it is a wrong thought. Paul's sufferings were not that, nor are yours. They are battle wounds. They are signs of high confidence- honors. They Father holds his children very close to His heart when going through such rough places as this (Carmichael 1981, 54).
In the process of denying the universal application of the retributive religious doctrine in John 9, "Jesus bypasses both sides of that consulation and says that the blindness has nothing to do with sin at all but an occasion for God's glory to be seen" (Simundson 1980, 128). A similar idea is expressed in Exodus 10:1-2 in the explanation of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart. This is echoed in John 11:4, where it is observed that "this sickness will not end in death... It is for God's glory so that God's Son may be glorified through it".
Deal believes that many Christians fail to see the designing hand of God in their furnace of affliction and are greatly discouraged. He argues, with adequate justification, that "a permissible eye of God's dealings with His habitancy reveals that behind the human scene is a private hand that governs all the painful procedure, ...watching with greatest interest and compassion for the final product, ended and polished" (1978, 19).
Viewing suffering as something that is Father-filtered, Warren (2002) aptly quotes Joni Eareckson Tada of saying that "we learn from God in suffering that we can't learn any other way" (194). leading lessons can be learned from Daniel in the lion's den, Jeremiah being tossed into a slimy pit, Paul and the shipwreck and the Hebrew children and the blazing furnace. Each of the above characters was drawn closer to God as a effect of the difficult experience.
Long brilliantly analyzes the biblical coming to suffering, observing that God teaches us to seek His comfort which comes to us as a effect of our association with him and also through our interaction with other habitancy undergoing similar traumatic experiences. He observes that "when we suffer, we also find comfort through others who have suffered.... Those who have suffered know what real comfort is" (1986, 73). It is out of the overflow of comfort they have received from God that they use to comfort others.
A requisite prognosis of the calculate why Christians suffer could be clearly seen in the consulation of Epp (1970). Paradoxically, God cares for His habitancy - that's why He allows them to suffer. He has a great plan for them and suffering is just a part of it. Placing His children therefore in the furnace of affliction and watching as they experience the process of refinement is perhaps deliberate since He wants to see the total image of Christ in them. As He molds His children into something indescribably beautiful, they will ultimately adorn heaven as requisite masterpieces.
If God is in the refining business, then He wants to purify and cleanse. Suffering therefore plays a role in this purifying since it helps to come to be more like Him. The apostle Paul demonstrates this clearly in Ii Corinthians 12:7-10 where he found God's grace adequate for his affliction and found himself strong when he is weak. Hart therefore argues that "we cannot have a theology of healing without a theology of suffering. Sooner or later everybody dies, and in order to die you must get sick" (1987, 31). In other words, the consulation is that some sickness or suffering is the definite consequence of living and cannot be avoided. Therefore, he believes that believers must learn how to suffer in order to know how to live gracefully and peacefully. If one receives a miracle from God, he should be grateful. If not relieved of suffering, dissatisfaction should not occur. Probably the need would be for a text "from the laments or from Job or from Paul which allows God to come into suffering and pain and feebleness and bring comfort without necessarily ending the suffering" (Simundson 1980, 129).
It would appear as if phrases like praise the Lord, repeated so often in modern Christian gatherings, both formal and otherwise, generate the misleading notion that all is well when it is not necessarily so. The idea of suffering is Whether swept under the floor covering or disregarded as not being one's portion. Realistically, In the era of praise the Lord theology, the real meaning of words like praise and joy may come to be lost to superficiality. For it is only in deep suffering that habitancy know the depths of all emotion, Whether it be pain that is approximately unbearable even for one occasion more, or joy that sweeps over the soul once that pain is gone (Skoglund 1992, 70).
Writing his book while the very last year of his life, Boyd emotionally observed that having aids is not a rock and roll time. This pathetic experience, among other things, is "painful (both physically and emotionally), dirty, smelly, and just plain awful. But, like so much else in life, where the Lord finds suffering, He provides a compensating grace that some how helps the sufferer to make it through" (1990, 41).
Throughout our lives we know that we never have to pay any penalty for sin, for that has been taken by Christ (Rom.8:1). Therefore, when we do touch suffering, "we should not think that God is punishing us (for our harm). Sometimes suffering is plainly a effect of living in a sinful, fallen world, and sometimes it is because God is disciplining us" (Grudem 1999, 348). In all cases, however, we are assured by Romans 8:28 that "God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called agreeing to His purpose". The definite purpose for God's discipline is clear in Hebrews 12, where we read that God disciplines those he loves. Not all discipline however serves to correct us when we have committed sins; God may allow it to advance us so that we may gain greater quality to trust him and to resist sin in the consuming path of obedience. This is clearly seen in the life of Jesus who, though without sin, "learned obedience through what he suffered" (Heb. 5:8). Since He was made exquisite through suffering (Heb. 2:10), it is observed that "we should see all hardship and suffering that comes to us in life as something that God brings to us to do us good, strengthening our trust in him and our obedience, and finally addition our quality to glorify him" (Grudem 1999, 349).
The beginning point for a Christian comprehension of suffering is the messianic self-understanding of Jesus Himself. A temptation to power and self-exaltation lay in the late Jewish promise to the coming of the Messiah-Son of Man. The Gospel of Matthew describes the temptation of Jesus by Satan in the wilderness as a temptation to worldly power. Jesus Himself disappointed His disciples' notions of aiming at power and exaltation in that He taught them, in accordance with Isaiah 53, that the Son of Man will suffer many things. From the foregoing, a Christian comprehension of suffering can be clearly seen. Indubitably, it is not the final aim and end in itself in the realization of human destiny; it is the gateway to resurrection, to rebirth, to new creation. This idea receives its solution from the Christian comprehension of sin. Sin as the misuse of human freedom has led humans into total opposition against God, who in turn delivers them over to death. Turning to God can therefore take place only when the results of this rebellion are overcome.
In the Christian understanding, suffering does not appear- as in Buddhism- as suffering plainly under the general conditions of human existence in this world; rather it is instead coupled with the specifically Christian idea of the imitation of Christ. personel Christians are called to come to be imitators of Christ; incorporation into the body of Christ is granted to those who subsequently are ready to carry out within themselves Christ's destiny of suffering, death and resurrection. The early church's characterization of the Christian was that of Christophorus - 'bearer of Christ'. Suffering was therefore an unalterable principle in the great drama of freedom, which was selfsame with the drama of redemption.
It would therefore be misleading to dismiss suffering as pointless. Clark supports this idea when he opines that "the idea that suffering has no point is so threatening to us that we are hardly even able to eye much less embody the implications of such a view" (1986, 31). The issue is that though God may not have planned a particular suffering in the life of the Christian, He has most indubitably permitted it. Therefore, Whether or not it is an attack from the devil, by the time it reaches him/her, it has the Lord's permission, and therefore will make it work together with all life's experiences for good. If anything, God indubitably knows what He is doing. The stimulating episode from Job is this: instead of seeing what the sufferings are doing to us, one should rather see what God is doing through them for the Christian because "the present agony of suffering is a prelude to the radiant ecstasy of life eternal" (Berner 1973, 51).
The mystery of suffering
There is perhaps a sense in which suffering can be seen as a mystery when it is not likely to be directly caused by the devil, man and God. The consulation is that suffering could be the inevitable, definite and definite consequence of living. The white man who walks down the road in an African town and is bitten by a mosquito, which finally causes him to suffer from malaria, cannot realistically blame the devil, man or God for the bite. Commenting on this seeming complexity, MacDonald asserts that "for this calculate we refer to it as 'the mystery' of suffering" (2000, 235). The reasons why suffering is regarded as a mystery is probably because of the mystery of Whether comprehension or tracing its exact source.
Perhaps a more vivid illustration is the logical consulation put forward by Hart (1987). The fact that man will ultimately die is probably not a debatable issue in any religious belief. If the above is true, a uncostly end is that "sooner or later everybody dies, and in order to die (some) get sick" (31). The quiz, here is that who is the direct source of that sickness that ultimately leads to the death of the individual? There are times when one could attribute the cause to the devil, man or God and there are times none could be identified. Who is responsible for the terrible earthquakes that had claimed and continue to claim the lives of many? A terrible problem or natural disaster in West Africa is the progressive advance of the Sahara Desert southwards. Is God punishing man by allowing the desert to expand? Is the devil using his agents to 'push' the watered regions southward? Is the desert addition because of man's actions? These are indubitably seemingly difficult questions to realistically answer. Consequently, "many Christians will use one of the other explanations as long as they work, but when all else fails, they will back on the idea that it is all part of ...mystery and we can never know more than that" (Simundson 1980, 147). That mankind cannot realistically classify the source of all types of suffering is an indication of the human efforts to understand the universe.
Sockman adds someone else size to this mystery. There is a kind of suffering he believes we do not understand. This is what he calls "the element of occasion play in life" (1961, 10). If we accept the definition of occasion as the unknown or undefined cause of events that to us are uncertain or not branch to calculation, then we have to agree that occasion happens to all.
From the foregoing, one can reasonably discontinue that devil is the extreme responsibility of suffering. His introduction in Genesis 3 is an account of his initiation of the notion in the human race. However, a wrong coming would be to exonerate the role of man in the discussion. Disobeying the divine command cannot be entirely seen as the fault of the devil. Man becomes responsible when he chooses to disobey. Although God did not set in motion suffering, He intervenes and punishes the disobedience of man. There is a set of suffering which could be regarded as a mystery.
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Epp, Theodore H. 1970. Why Christians Suffer. Lincoln, Nebraska : Back to the Bible.
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[http://www.satan]'sroleinsuffering.htm. 27th January 2004.
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