Wednesday, January 26, 2005
mms

sarah lent me a book i think about 2-3 weeks ago? yeah it was actually for my brother to read as sarah recommended it as a good book but my brother dissed it so i ended up reading it. i've only read till like halfway through the second chapter which is very slow cos i dont have a lot of time on my hands these days. yeah. hahas. erm. supposed to be studying for emaths test tmr but i decided to blog about the book. its called 'the case for faith' by lee strobel.

relating it to the disasters that happened, the recent tsunami being the most devastating one, the 2nd chapter roughly talks about why God allows suffering and pain to happen. firstly, God is all powerful. He can do anything that is meaningful, everything that is possible, everything that makes any sense at all. when God chose to create man, He gave them free will, so it was up to them whether they wanted to sin or not and not up to God. He created the possibility of evil, but is not the creator of evil. then why didnt God create a world without freedom? if He did, there would be no hate, no evil, but also no love. we'll end up like robots, strictly controlled by God! that wouldnt be so nice would it? the point here is that creating a world where there's free will and not possibility of sin is a self contradition and that opens the door to people choosing evil over God, with suffering being the result.

God is all knowing. not only does He know present good and evil but also future good and evil. if His wisdom vastly exceeds ours, it is at least possible that a loving God could deliberately tolerate horrible things like starvation because He forsees that in the long run, more people will be better and happier than if He miraculously intervened. for example, when God sent His Son down to earth to die on the cross for our sins, the people at that time thought that it was the worst thing that could happen, the Son of God being crucified. however God had a better plan when He chose for this to happen. He used Jesus to bridge the gap between man and Him. similarly, sometimes we cant imagine how anything good may emerge out of anything bad. but we've seen how it did in the case of Jesus and we can trust that it will in our case.

lastly, God is all good. in the book, the author describes when one of his daughters was 4 or 5, she had to thread a needle. it was difficult for her and she kept poking her finger. tho blood came out sometimes, the author never went forward to help her but stood from a distance watching. when she finally threaded it, she was elated and went to show him. the pain was a good thing for her, he says. as he treats his daughter and forseen that it was a good thing for her, so does our God who is much wiser. He is wise enough to foresee that we need some pain for reasons which we may not understand but which He foresees as being necessary to some eventual good. there are times when God allows suffering and deprives us of the lesser good of pleasure in order to help us toward the greater good of moral and spiritual education. we learn from mistakes we make and the suffering they bring. a world without suffering seems more like hell than heaven. for those of u who have watched stepford wives, u can see that the wives were made to be perfect and yet tho nice, it was so unnatural. imagine creating a world of ur own, a better world. you'd have to think of the consequence of everything u try to do improve. everytime u use force to prevent evil, u take away freeedom. to prevent all evil, u would have to remove all freedom and reduce people to puppets, which means they would lack the ability to freely choose love. u may end up creating a world of precision but you'll lose the kind of world that a Father would want.


ok. im tired. bleah. hahas. been quite busy so far. i think. all the late nights and hw and tests. oh yeah! i failed my first chem test. how saddening. lost like 9 marks to carelessness. oob. at least physics wasnt too bad. got b3. yup. falala. tests tests and more tests.