Is God Good?
Posted by Marcus on February 6, 2008
Two men were discussing current events, wars here, disasters there, and other events that cause human suffering. The first man asked the second, “How can God watch all this evil in the world and do nothing.” The second man quipped, “I am more troubled by God asking me how I do it.”
This will only touch on a small corner of one of the biggest questions for those who 1) think about God, and 2) live or have lived on Earth for some amount of time during the past 10,000 years.
Harald Kushner, a rabbi, wrote in his book, “When Bad Things Happen To Good People” , there are three things in the Book of Job which we all understand to be true: God is good, God is all powerful, and that Job was not at fault. Kushner points out that only two of the three can be true at once. Take a moment to arrange them in the different sets of two. This is the conflict of the whole story in Job. The big question he answers is that we are not God’s defenders. When people go through trying times, times of suffering, bad times, we are not responsible for shifting the blame from God. God does not need your defense. When we do this, we end up shifting the blame to the person. The result is their suffering only increases due to our help. Read Job for yourself, he really lashes out at his friends for the things they say.
Kushner concludes that God has to let all things happen here because of free will. For example, stopping a man from hitting his wife would be an intrusion of his choice to do either good or evil. I don’t assign that amount of idleness to God. What Kushner does rightly assign is that pain is a crucible, from pain we can draw two different lessons. The easy lesson is that you are alone and suffering defines the universe. The other lesson is that you are not the center of the universe, you are not in control, and pain is temporary.
This is an ongoing topic, I will explore it again and again.
