If I were God, I'd end all pain

A speaker from Australia, John Dickson conducted a seminar series entitled a Passion For Life. He presented Christianity using an unbiased historical and academic approach, dealing with difficult topics like atheism and suffering. I like the way his puts forth his defense of the faith by using historical and academic evidence, to tear down the attacks of supposed 'scholars' who published their arguments based on seriously flawed premises and laughable school-boy errors. The second seminar on suffering was conducted using a cross-sectional analysis from the points of view of the different religions: Hinduism views pain as part of the balance of reincarnation; Buddhism attributes it to the presence of desire, Islam sees it as the will of Allah, Atheism boils it down to pure coincidence, Christianity explains it as part of the physical disorder and decay of creation due to human evil.

The difference is this: the unique Biblical perspective allows us to bring our suffering to God, unlike the other religions. In categorical terms, the God of the Bible would himself completely fail the test of the Buddha, as passivity in the face of suffering and immunity to the experience of pain are concepts utterly foreign to the portrait of God revealed in the Bible. For God Himself knows pain. The story of the Bible unfolds like a tragedy - The Creator designs the world for independent relationship with him. Human beings take that independence, transform it to autonomy and say no to God. God sends prophet after prophet pleading people to return to Him. Prophets are refused and rejected. Finally God himself enters our world in the person of Jesus Christ only to be resisted, rejected, insulted and ultimately tortured and crucified by the very people He came to save.

The anguish of God in the person of Jesus is captured in Mark 15, consistent with the poet of Psalm 22, an uncanny connection made explicit when Jesus cried "My God, My God why have you forsaken me?" the opening line of Psalm 22. To clarify, these words were not a cry of self doubt questioning His identity as the embodiment of God, or questioning His mission as the Saviour of the world. His words, chosen carefully, are a deliberate and agonizing identification with the suffering of the famous poet of Psalm 22. And therefore with anyone who has ever felt like crying out "my God, why have you forsaken me, there on the cross God in flesh intentionally enters into the pain and misery of the world. This is God at His most wounded, and yet at His most glorious.

God is able to comfort those who suffer, because He knows it firsthand. That God himself knows and understands pain - what the Muslim defines as blasphemy, and for the Buddhist as unenlightened - is for the Christian, precious.

http://abmp3.com/mp3/john-dickson-if-i-were-god-i%27d-end-all-the-pain.html