Re: Question for George (was Re: Vast Majorities...)
Murphy (gmurphy@imperium.net)
Sun, 16 Feb 1997 21:06:39 -0500Steve Alley wrote:
>
> I attend Harvest Christian Fellowship, in Riverside, Ca, and my pastor,
> Greg Laurie, just preached on this issue this morning: "If God is a
> loving god, and if God is good, then why is there evil in the world?"
> He had some very enlightening statements. He said that God is Good, and
> God is love, and God is omnipotent and could stop it if he wanted to,
> but that it is our own product, not his. He drew the illustration to a
> man, driving down the highway, who sees a new freeway overpass that
> isn't completed yet. It leaves the freeway and goes about two hundred
> yards and then ends, at a hundred foot drop. He says that if the man
> were to ignore all the dozens of signs that say "road closed," "do not
> enter," "wrong way," or "danger," and drive through them, then ignore
> all the workers who would flag him down and try to tell him to stop, and
> if he were to drive off the end of the bridge and fall to his death, it
> wouldn't be anyone's fault but his own. Greg said, today, "God is
> Good. He has given us guidelines to live by that will keep our lives
> free of harm, and when we break these laws and reap the consequences, we
> have the audacity to blame it on God, who made the rules in the first
> place." Quite profound.
There's some truth in this, but it runs afoul of the story
of Job. Job does _not_ suffer because he has broken God's rules:
"There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who
fears God and turns away from evil."
George Murphy