One of the saddest questions I see in the search logs is:
I have ____________________. Is God punishing me for my sin?
In today’s search logs someone who has fibromyalgia asked this very question.
If a person believes the Bible, as written, the answer to this question is Yes. God does afflict people because of their sin. God maims, sickens, and kills people on a routine basis. The Old Testament is a written record of God using affliction and destruction to either make a point or to get someone to do what he wants them to do. God is definitely a hands on kind of God, punishing sin to the third and fourth generation.
According to the Bible, God doesn’t a-l-w-a-y-s afflict people because of sin. Sometimes God afflicts people so they will be stronger or so HE will be glorified.
Christians believe God is the creator of the universe and that God is in complete control of his creation. So when a person is afflicted, God is behind it. To punish you, to teach you, to make you stronger, or because he gets a perverse form of glory when he afflicts you.
This is one of the reasons I am no longer a Christian. What kind of God operates in this manner? Of course, I am sure someone will tell me……who are YOU to question God’s work?
Not only am I questioning God’s work, I am accusing God of crimes against humanity. If a human being did to another human being what God does to human beings, they would be tried before a world tribunal and sentenced to death.
Better to believe that shit happens in life. People get sick, crippled, and die. Through genetics, environment, and lifestyle choices people are afflicted with all kinds of diseases. In many cases, these diseases are what will eventually kill us.
Better to believe this is how life is than to believe there is a God in Heaven set on afflicting you for your sin, because you need to be made stronger, or he needs some glory.
The liberal Christian is likely to scream foul and say, G-A-W-D is L-O-V-E. According to the Bible he IS love but he is ALSO everything I have mentioned in this post. Take off your blinders and read ALL of the Bible. Ignoring vast portions of the Bible that make you uncomfortable or make your God look like a mean, vindictive, son-of-a-bitch, doesn’t change the fact that those portions ARE in the Bible.
If God is unchanging, and Jesus is the same Yesterday, Today, and Forever, then we must take the Bible as written. Either that or we must admit that the Bible is not a divine book and it is just a work of fiction written by men thousands of years ago.
For most of my life, I lived as a stoic, come what may Christian. No matter what suffering came my way I believed God was either making me stronger or teaching me a lesson. Like Pilgrim on his way to the Celestial City, no matter what came my way, I continued to run the race set before me.
Polly and I are quite matter of fact about life. This drives some people crazy but our Christian past taught us to bear whatever burden came our way. God was faithful, God would never give us more than we could bear, you know all the one-liners Christians quote when their life is a shit-storm.
This kind of thinking can make someone quite passive about life. Since God is behind everything you just keep trusting and believing right up to the moment you draw your last breath. No kicking, no screaming, no defiance……..just a sweet, thank you Jesus, smile as you draw your last breath.
I have come to see that this kind of thinking makes people LESS human. It often robs them of their will, their desire to live. Many Christians are like the Apostle Paul who wished he could die and go to a better place. After all, according to the Bible, this world is such a sinful, wicked place. Death becomes the sweet release.
But what if you are wrong Christian? A little reverse Pascal’s Wager here. What IF this life is all you have? What if death really is the end of it all? Wouldn’t you want to enjoy THIS life to its fullest? Wouldn’t you want to live every moment and every day in such a way that reflects the brevity and finality of life? Instead of living according to the notion that we are most miserable if this is all there is, how about seeing how great a blessing it is to have life, often LONG life, even if there is no afterlife.
Even with all the pain I have to deal with, even with the physical debility I suffer with every day, life is still a blessing. I want to live…….after all what is the alternative?
I am not ready to become worm food. I am not ready for people to say lies about me at my funeral. Oh no, I will not go quietly into the night, I will not stand like a lemming in line waiting for the Wraith to come by and turn me into food.
Life IS worth living and I don’t need the promise of eternal life to make it so.
When Christians claim that suffering comes from God as punishment, test, or a means to glorify him, it provides Christians with little incentive to EASE suffering. If you believe that disease, hunger, oppression, and misfortune were deliberately created by God, will you be motivated to fix any of those horrors in the world? No.
Some suffering, such as old and and death, are part of life, but others forms of suffering can and should be prevented.
Agreed. Not only that, but if there’s a better world after this one, why “waste” time trying to fix all the problems in this world?
And, really? Pain and suffering? He couldn’t just, say, write a sharply-worded letter?
“Not only am I questioning God’s work, I am accusing God of crimes
against humanity. If a human being did to another human being what God
does to human beings, they would be tried before a world tribunal and
sentenced to death.”
Mm. Yes. Have had this discussion with my parents before. (They’re ‘home churching’ now, my dad stepped down as pastor of the little church he’d taken on and started his own.)
I asked, quite reasonably, if a person were doing all these things or standing by and allowing them to happen, would that person be someone you could support? I don’t understand how anyone can call a being (forget for a moment that I think he’s an imaginary being in the first place) ‘loving’ when babies are raped or little ones or moms or dads get cancer or people are murdered for their sexual preference. How is that a loving God?
I got, “God moves in mysterious ways.”
I just can’t talk to them about this stuff anymore. I get nowhere, and they worry about my immortal soul.
Lose/lose.
Great piece, Bruce.
Sheesh, the god of the OT will make a decent fellow suffer extreme trauma over a friendly bet with the devil, a la Job. Less trauma/drama taking life on life’s terms rather than all the angst of trying to stay on a deity’s good side, or believe even the worst tragedies are for our good and his glory. Blech!!
I was not taught that everything unpleasant that happens to you is a punishment from God. Rather, that these things are a result of sin in the world in general, not sin in you in particular. And that germs and weather both have a natural behavior that has nothing to do with how we behave. I was aware that some people did believe that things were personal judgements.
Isn’t this actually worse? *I* didn’t eat that stupid apple — I had nothing to do with it. Why is *my* world full of pain and disease and earthquakes and war and murder because Adam and Eve ate some fruit God said not too? Why is God punishing random individuals indiscriminately for other people’s sins? (And don’t even get me started on how the apple thing works — if it was the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, how could Adam and Eve even have been committing a sin? They didn’t know the difference between right and wrong yet!)
**
This is one of the reasons I am no longer a Christian. What kind of God operates in this manner? Of course, I am sure someone will tell me……who are YOU to question God’s work?**
I’ve seen some Christians say that God’s ways are as above us as our ways are as above dogs, or some other sort of animal. But here’s the thing. If the animal is in pain, and lashes out at me when I’m trying to help, I don’t get mad at the animal or punish it further. The animal is incapable of understanding my motives, because it’s an animal. Or it doesn’t trust me, because it’s suffered at the hands of other humans. I don’t tell the animal that it has no right to question me.
So, if God is that far above us, and most of the questions about human pain and suffering some from a sense of compassion … how is that arrogant to question “God’s work?” If you truly are a compassionate human who cares about others, of course you’re going to question suffering.
Unfortunately for me, I haven’t been able to shake off the conformist, fatalist state of mind I had as a Christian. I am referring to “Whatever will happen will happen because God is in control.”
In other words, Christianity made me lazy. I’m trying to have a spark, but I’m finding it hard ;(
There are so many problems with these issues of the omnipotence of God. The concept of omnipotence, as with all the omni’s that characterize God, smacks of something made up from pure Platonic form. God can’t be good, he must be ALL good; he can’t be powerful, he must be ALL powerful; he can’t be knowledgeable, he must be ALL knowing; he can’t just get around quickly, he must be EVERYWHERE at once. This is childish.
I find it a bit surprising that there is no mention of the invention of writing in the Bible, since it is the written word that has become the means of soul enslavement. I think for most Christians, God’s “Word” is something written. In oral societies, rules and practices are much more subject to pragmatic interpretation and adaptation, but with a written oracle, once it’s set in stone, it remains for a long time, essentially unchanging. But it’s kind of like English spelling after awhile, a burden from the past representing outmoded pronunciations that we must put up with and learn largely independently of the way we talk. Writing always does this sort of thing.
Suffering is the very thing that led me from theist/deist to agnostic atheist, the most personal example being my mother.
My mother is one of those really Good People. She is cheerful, optimistic, warm, thoughtful, generous, helpful, and loving. She was a school teacher. After she let her teaching certificate expire, she volunteered as a teaching assistant in a classroom for special needs children. She illustrated books for children with vision disorders. She worked with the Deaf in churches. She was and is a devout Christian who uses her musical talents to write (mostly) Christian music which she performed in churches and nursing homes. (She also gives CDs of her music away, asking only for donations to cover costs.)
And how has she been rewarded by her God? Well, let’s see: she had such a bad case of endometriosis that she had to have a full hysterectomy when I was still in grade school. In her forties she started developing skin cancers that she has to have burned off every so often, leaving her legs in particular raw and unbearably sensitive. She can’t go out in the sun without full protection, but is allergic to most sunscreens so she has so wear more long-sleeved shirts and big hats. In her late fifties/early sixties she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. She also has rheumatoid arthritis, leukemia (this month is her last chemo for that — thank dog she’s gone into remission), and something that is either MS or a series of mini-strokes or a combination of both.
Bad luck and an unfortunate combination of genes, I can understand and accept. A “loving” god? Not so much. And to those who might say “God is so far above us we can’t understand his works” I say, “Well, if he’s that far above, he can’t possibly care if we worship and praise him and couldn’t expect us to after this kind of treatment.”
RE: Isn’t this actually worse? *I* didn’t eat that stupid apple — I had nothing to do with it. Why is *my* world full of pain and disease and earthquakes and war and murder because Adam and Eve ate some fruit God said not too? Why is God punishing random individuals indiscriminately for other people’s sins? (And don’t even get me started on how the apple thing works — if it was the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, how could Adam and Eve even have been committing a sin? They didn’t know the difference between right and wrong yet!)
I have no idea if there’s basis for my rationale for this, but you got me thinking about it, so here’s what comes to mind immediately.
This post frames the issue of natural disasters and general “bad things” as being specific punishments doled out personally and indiscriminately. But what if this isn’t a “personal” decision of God’s? I asked the same thing of a Baptist friend (as preacher looking for a church, specifically, so a well educated one), and got a similar answer to what the previous poster suggested, but slightly more detailed. His take on it was that these disasters were a result of the Fallen world we live in, so, yes, it all came from original sin, but it wasn’t being sent to certain people or as a warning, it’s just a ripple effect.
Okay, so maybe that’s not so different, or maybe not any more clear. So, let’s take an example that’s more immediate. Let’s say that your mother was herself a sinful woman. Let’s say she drinks to excess, she sleeps around, and, oops! Now she’s pregnant.
Now, say she gets an abortion – well, you’ve just suffered, even though you committed no sin of your own. Maybe that argument doesn’t work for you – if you were never born and don’t accept Christian teachings, who’s to say you suffered? That’s fair.
Say she DOESN’T get an abortion. Well, children of single, unwed mothers have a lot of baggage. The statistics are awful – more likely to drop out, more likely to commit crimes and be incarcerated, more likely to emulate poor role models, and so on. You may not have committed any sin, but the “original sin” of your mother brought you into a fallen environment where your chances to thrive and excel were drastically lowered. No one was out to get you, no one personally decided that, because your mother was a slut, you would be punished for it. It was just the circumstances that you encountered as a result of a very bad beginning.
That’s not to say you can’t turn out right. There are unwed mothers who turn their life around, and there are people who turn out as good or better than those with a more traditional up-bringing. But that happens despite everything. You start with a disadvantage, through no fault of your own. That’s what it means to have a fallen world through original sin. We all start at a disadvantage.
If the Bible is truth, if we are expected to believe what is recorded in the Bible, then we must conclude God is personally, intimately involved in his creation.
If we pick and choose what to believe then anything is possible.
When I was on the God bubble, I concluded IF there is a God, it created everything, set it all into motion, and then said, there ya go. Do with it what you will. I saw God as non-involved, the God of the deist.
I’m still not entirely certain I see a contradiction. I am still new (and learning, and uncertain) in my faith, so I don’t doubt you know the Bible better than I do. But couldn’t God still be directly involved in trying to help things get better, even despite the unavoidable, impersonal “ripple effects” of sin?
Modifying my original example a bit… What if this woman, your figurative mother, still led a life of excesses, but at one point, she met “boyfriend Jesus”. She thought boyfriend Jesus was so wonderful that she agreed to his insistence to get married before having sex, sure-fine-whatever, but once she did so and realized he was going to keep making hard demands of her to put her past life to rest and be better, she decides she’s done. She divorces, files for full custody and child support and denies visitation rights.
Father Jesus now still wants to provide for you, but you mother’s choices distance you. She prevents you two from meeting, wastes his child support check, etc. He still wants and tries to be involved in your life and teach you how to be a better person, but, different story, same original sin (no fault of your own) means there are still consequences that affect your quality of life. Is this model not possible?
Here is the problem. The Bible presents God as the first cause of everything. He is sovereign, in control of everything. Nothing happens that he does not know about and control.
The Bible is quite deterministic when it comes to God and his interaction with his creation. Even man’s salvation is controlled by God and no one is saved unless God allows it.
Now, people will try to work around this by appealing to freewill or giving God credit for the good things that happen and humans credit for the bad things that happen. I don’t think these views are supported by the text.
Now, if we pick and choose what we want to believe, like every Christian does, then anything is possible. Every believer massages the text to make it say what they want it to say. I have no problem with this as long as they admit it. (and very few do so)
Thank you. As I said, I am still learning, and I will keep this in mind as I study. I do think it is clear some parts of the Bible are meant literally, and some parts are clearly figurative, and then there are plenty that could go either way. Beyond that, I’m in no position to state anything as more than a most humble, slightly informed opinion or understanding.
Bruce,
Love your articles! You put into words, where my thinking is currently. I was raised as an independent, fundamental, separated, etc…crap Baptist preacher’s son, and have so much emotional, mental baggage at 52, it’s ridiculous.
Anyway, you wrote, “So when a person is afflicted, God is behind it. To punish you, to teach you, to make you stronger, or because he gets a perverse form of glory when he afflicts you.”
And if it is anyone of those reasons, or possibly something else, and God doesn’t let you know why, then what’s the point? How can I possibly be ‘strengthened’ if I have no idea God’s motive for ‘allowing’ something. (I’ve always thought that the phrase ‘God allowed it’ is a verbal sleight of hand that is disingenuous. . . )
Anyway, I like and agree with your explanation better – It’s easier to live with the idea that ‘shit happens’ than it is to try to sort through variables and wonder which one was God’s reason –
Your blog is refreshing to me! I currently just attend church sometimes because I am quite sure my wife is in hope/prayer that I will get my heart right and return to God, but given the constant day to day non-responses to any of my prayers, seeing things that have happened to my sweet, incredible, wife of 30+ years who actually is committed to God, involved in her church, etc…I find it difficult, if not impossible to believe that God is involved, cares, let alone is loving or worthy of my awe, devotion, and worship.
After all, He is the guy who knowing created the angel who He knew would rebel, etc…become the catalyst of human sin and yet, God still chose to create this angel. This is the guy who created mankind on the same planet that He cast Satan to according to church theology. What’s loving about that?
Welcome, thank you for commenting and thank you for the kind words.
I am a few years older than you. I fully understand about the emotional and mental baggage that comes from a long exposure to the IFB.
I see a counselor…it is much better these days…but unpacking the past and trying to reconcile it is painful and quite difficult. Learning who I really am, that I can have normal human emotions, has been quite an experience. I am grateful for the man who is helping me work through this.
I am sure it must be difficult for you and your wife. I had it easy. My wife and I walked away together so this made things easy for us. I correspond with several people who have a spouse who is still a dedicated follower of Jesus. Their pain is evident as they try to be true to themselves while still maintaining a relationship with the person they dearly love. Not easy…
Bruce
Yes, sin does result in suffering and death, and there is no rest for me. I have suffered with this now for a year. Read your Bible and keep the commandments as closely as you can. I want to feel forgiven but as hard as I try I cannot, and must have insulted God not meaning to in an emotional moment. Please be careful in your thoughts and ever careful with your words and doings. I am reaping what I sowed.
James,
As an atheist, I don’t think our “sins” are killing us. Since there is no God, there is no deity punishing us for our sins. The suffering we face in this life is due to genetics, lifestyle choices, circumstances within and beyond our control, the actions of others, and luck.
Is this not a better way to look at the world thank thinking a prick of a God is sitting in heaven hurling pain and suffering at us when we sin, offend him in some way, or because he wants to “teach” us a lesson? Any God who inflicts suffering and pain on people is not a God worthy of our worship.
Bruce