Why did people suffer if there was a merciful and powerful Creator? As mentioned in my previous post, I thought that was a reasonable argument against the existence of the Creator in the bible.
There was a man born blind as described in chapter 9 of the gospel of John. Jesus’ disciples asked Jesus why this man suffered from blindness. Was it because of the sins of his parents, or the sins of his own? Jesus replied that it was neither. He continued that “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him…”. Then he healed the man.
With all my respect to Jesus as a person, his reply did not seem to answer the question. Did it mean that all sufferings were to glorify God? A merciful God would not want to hurt people in order to display His work, would He? In fact, it seemed to me that Jesus healed the blind man right away so that his disciples would stop asking him a question which he might not have an answer!
I came to church regularly during my long period of searching. I heard pastors using the biblical story mentioned above to look into the problem of evil. There were many encouraging real stories that described how tragedies turned into blessings to many people. I heard how people who were born handicapped turned out to have rewarding and satisfying lives. These were encouraging stories.
It seemed to me that the Christian faith was a good medicine to sufferings. However, that still did not answer the question. The wonderful worldview of Christianity might provide some relieve to people from sufferings, but why did sufferings happen in the first place?
Honestly, I could not find an answer. Yet, it did not turn me away from my search to the biblical God either. If I accepted the fact that the world was not perfect, then sufferings must happen. Otherwise, we had a perfect world. If sufferings must happen, then it could happen on anyone, including myself and the people I loved. Why was the world imperfect? I did not know. God would know if he existed.
Friends, I am looking forward to sharing more on the problem of evil in future posts. The above is my take on the problem when I was searching for the biblical God. I could not find the answer, but it did not block my search.
