John 18:36 Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.” (NIV)
Good God in an Unfair World Part Three: Faithful Lives in an Unfair World
The story of the fall in Genesis 3 has been trivialized to be a fairy tale about a naked couple talking to a snake and eating an apple. Trivial fairy tale? Hardly! It is the story of the human rebellion against the Creator, which led to the cataclysm that gave us the unfair world in which we live. The rest of the Bible’s story flows from this dreadful event…
Good God in an Unfair World - Part Two: Grappling to Understand
Our world is undeniably and self-evidently unfair. For the unbeliever, this is just the way it is in a godless universe—it’s what we would expect. For those of us who believe there is an Infinite, Personal, and Holy God, this is troubling. Since we believe that God is truly and fully good, why isn’t His creation, especially since He declared it was very good (Genesis 1:31), very good? Yes, it’s troubling; it’s morally troubling. And so, we grapple to understand, and faith compels us to do so…
Good God in an Unfair World - Part One: The Faith to Question
One of the first sentences, almost all of us utter in life, ends with an exclamation mark: “That’s not fair!” We have a deeply engrained sense of fairness, and object when we sense unfairness—especially when we see ourselves on the short end of the stick. What we all can see is that this world is filled with unfairness, and it bothers us. It bothers us, not just because unfairness seems unfortunate, but because it strikes us as morally wrong. And so, we ask, “Where is God?”
Boomer Reflections on Ecclesiastes
These words from Ecclesiastes 12, make clear that the young are one of the author’s target audiences: “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth.” Beyond this passage and a few others (thanks to “The Birds” and youth rallies), I heard very little in this book. As a young student of Scripture, taking in the entirety of this book was a shock. I asked, “What is this cynical, near nihilistic book, doing in the Bible? Everything meaningless? This will lead to an unhappy and bitter life!”
God in the Storm
Statement of Problem
Hurricane Ian, once again, raises the most difficult question that people of faith in the God of the Bible face. Given that nothing produces nothing, defending the idea of a Personal, Infinite, Creator is fairly straightforward. The most difficult question we face does not involve God and science, but God and suffering.