I’m not really sure where I’m going with this suffering thread. The beauty of blogs is that you can pretty much meander around at will and no one’s gonna dock your pay.

I read a post by a children’s book author this morning . In the post she laments that she has no god to hate. She doesn’t believe in God, so she can’t hate him.

She’s a smart lady. A poetess, I believe, with deep thoughts and desire to express them. She’s much smarter than I am. I bump into this all the time–smart, well-educated people who are faithless. I feel so sorry for them, and I feel a little foolish for pitying them because I know they would hate me for it, after all they are way smarter than I am. But I can’t help but feel sorry for them. And I can’t help but thank God that I’m a Polly Anna able to take God at his word and accept that he is good even when logic would seem to say that he who is in control is guilty if he allows suffering.

An acquaintance once told me he hated the Reformed theology of suffering, and then he defined that strange term as meaning that Reformed people believe that suffering is something to be thankful for. He thinks the Reformed delight in evil. He was a Word of Faith man and thought we should claim God’s promise to heal, instead of praying “Thy will be done,” because God is good and he hates illness and it is always his will to heal.

And when I asked my dad, an ordained minister and missionary in the Reformed Presbyterian Church Evangelical Synod, why he has turned away from the Bible and now believes it is full of error, he answered with a question. “What do you make of the children of Israel killing the babies in the surrounding nations?”

Obviously the problem of evil and suffering is a huge one. Many wise men have wrestled with it and written books about it. It disturbs people. They can’t justify an all-powerful God who is good, with the suffering they see in the world.

I can’t solve the lack of faith of the world. I can’t open blind eyes and breathe life into stone-dead hearts. I believe the world’s error is that it starts with man and not God. In the beginning God…. If we start with God we see the tale unfolding logically. If we start with ourselves as if we are the center of the universe, then God does tend to seem like a brute.

But the reason I wanted to delve into suffering is that in the Christian world I keep bumping up against three ways of looking at suffering. One is that God is spanking us for some sin we’ve committed to a) punish us and b) teach us; the second is that suffering falls randomly upon the children of God simply because we live in a fallen world; and the third is that Satan is attacking us.

I know many Christians who hold these three views simultaneously. So when their car breaks down, ideally they would first look at their own lives to see if they’ve been sinning, maybe spending unwisely, maybe refusing to help someone, and then, finding nothing, they would assume it was either a random act of suffering brought about by Adam’s original sin, or Satan has attacked them because they were on their way to church or to take dinner to a neighbor and he didn’t like that. And whatever they discover about the cause of the suffering they enter into prayer–they either repent, or they ask God to deliver them from Satan, or they ask for money to fix the car since it randomly broke down.

I’ve seen this sometimes work out in another way. Mary’s car breaks down and Josie assumes that Mary is in sin and God is spanking her. “I knew when she bought that expensive car that God would punish her for spending the money on it.” A week later Josie’s car breaks down and she assumes Satan is attempting to overthrow the world by thwarting her as she drives to church.