We do it to each other
Year Delivered or Published: 2007
Author: Rev Gerald R Zollar, A.M.E.C.
Author's Faith: Christianity
Date Submitted to Inspiration and Issues: May 2, 2007
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Topic: Spirituality
We do it to each other.
That is the simplest answer there is. Well the atheist-agnostic-apostate-believer asks why does not God intervene, why, how can a loving God, if He exists, allow this to happen to His people.
God allows things to happen to us.
Many people believe that to be true. Consider the following statement from an article by Rev. Tutu.
“Our God who is omnipotent is also weak in that God has imposed limitations on God’s omnipotence to give us the space to have a real autonomy.
Our God cares, for this God is Immanuel, God with us, who joins us in our dumbfounded speechlessness and bewilderment and this God does not give advice from a safe distance but enters the fiery furnace of our anguish and God wipes away our tears, this God who knows us by name, from whose nothing, not even death can separate us.
Life is hard and we do not make it any easier on each other.”
Mt 26:11
The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.
The writer of Matthew reports these words of Jesus.
One meaning we can ascribe to them is that we do not treat our neighbor as we want to be treated. Whether it is emotional, mental or spiritual poverty is something we can do something about.
Do we?
Death is the legacy of each and every creature. The more we know about how our bodies work the less we can do about it. As a group, humans are still short lived. Three score and ten and not much more. We can now count the number of people living to one hundred years or more and that is the problem the number is small enough to be worth counting.
Some 13% of North Americans are now older than 65; that is somewhere around eight million people from the Artic circle to South America. The numbers in the U.S. of A. will increase the numbers somewhat as the baby boomers come of age but world wide that is drop in the bucket.
The bad things to good people issue is not aging, it is accidents and killings. Babies die. They die before they are born, soon after, as little kids and as teens. There is not one cause of death that is not attributable to us. Our life style in one way or another kills us and our progeny. God gave life; God gave a way to live. No we do not have to live like Hebrews but the clues are there, in diet and life style. The key is to live lives as God has decreed, so that we may live.
The life of the creature is not as important as the spiritual life of the creature. I use the word creature instead of human to focus us on who and what we really are. It is a bit of hubris to look at the verse that says we a created a little less than the angels and take that as a sign of our specialness. We are special because we can praise God. We are special because we can express the love of God in this world among each other.
Total Depravity
Some oppose the doctrine because they believe it implicitly rejects either God's love or omnipotence.[citation needed] That is, it is posited that if God is loving and omnipotent, then either he would not have allowed mankind to become totally corrupt or he would have immediately restored humanity to its original state. Thus, the argument goes, if the doctrine of total inability is correct, God must either be not loving or not omnipotent. Advocates of total depravity offer a variety of responses to this line of argumentation. Wesleyans suggest that God endowed man with the free will that allowed humanity to become depraved and he also provided a means of escape from the depravity. Calvinists note that the argument assumes that either God's love is necessarily incompatible with corruption or that God is constrained to follow the path that some men see as best, whereas they believe God's plans are not fully known to man and God's reasons are his own and not for man to question (compare Rom. 9:18-24; Job 38:1-42:6).
The above cite is one answer why bad things happen to good people. As I stated in the opening we do it to ourselves, why, sin is the reason. When we turn from God to do what we want that is the pain that is unleashed on each other.
