Monday, October 4, 2010
What?
In class today we talked about God healing some people but not others. Specifically we talked about giving praise in church for the healing of a child, while different parents in the same church may have just lost a child. We asked if that meant that God chose not to heal the other child, and that question really struck me. As simple as this question is, i never thought too much about it before. When my grandparents passed away i can remember being very upset with God, but when my friends grandfather was healed from cancer i never thought of it as God choosing my friends grandfather over mine until now. I think that if i was the father that lost his child i would almost be mad that God healed the other child, which sounds awful. i mean i would be happy for the other family, but it just wouldn't seem fair! In John Ch. 5 Jesus heals a paralytic, and leaves multiple other diseased and disabled people, who are sitting right next to the paralytic, unhealed. Its not like Jesus would have had to worked very hard to heal all the rest of them. He could have healed them all with the snap of his fingers, yet he chose not to. They must have been so angry and hurt. This idea has really bothered me, and the only thing i can leave with is that God is sovereign and that he knows best. And i cant question his authority or ask why, because who am i? The question i need to learn to ask is "What?" What is it that God is trying to teach and show us, and how is he using this suffering to accomplish it?
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This also struck me as a troubling question, and one I've never really pondered. While I also sometimes have to default to the "God knows and does what's best" thing, that normally doesn't get us anywhere in the way of an answer. But just as class got over, I had an idea. Is the purpose of miracles such as healing to prevent pain? Is God's intervening in order to cure a disease or save a life really for the benefit of the afflicted or their loved ones? If so, then it poses the problem you ran across. It would be unfair. Why would a God who is wholly good heal one while letting another suffer when he could cease their pain with a thought?
ReplyDeleteI’d assert that this problem is not quite a relative one. In my mind, miraculous healing is not intended solely to prevent pain, but to serve some other, bigger purpose in God’s plan. For instance, a non-believing parent might be brought to Christ via the observation of his terminal child’s impossible recovery. On the other hand, that same parent could be brought to Christ (or possibly brought closer to estranged family or something like that) by the death of that same child. Now maybe I’m deferring to that same brick wall of an argument that simply stops at God’s omniscience, or maybe this would be reading a might far into coincidences and the like. But I think there’re more to it than that.
The use of suffering to get our attention or teach us something that would otherwise go over our heads is a tough thing to think about, and I don’t rightly know what my feelings are on the matter. But I lean towards the belief that God doesn’t at all use healing to prevent pain nor the lack of healing to issue punishment, but that God uses those situations to somehow bring us closer to him.
Or maybe we just have to make ourselves believe that in order to keep from losing our minds.
I hope we can return to this topic in class so we can work through it some more.