suffering

if the essence of God is love, and the creation is an act of love; then why is there suffering in the world. it is really not that hard to explain. we do not live in the creation as it was first ordered. we live in a fallen creation, fallen because of man's disobedience to God, the same disobedience that continued throughout the history of the Jewish people in the desert, and which continues in the world today down to this very minute.


God did not ask just a heck of a lot of man. Just that man love and obey him, primarily in relation to His one principle command, not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. it might seem trivial, it might seem irrelevant or incomprehensible, but that was it; and man did eat and the whole of creation changed in its very nature. therefore death, sickness, suffering, war, and natural disaster.

there was and is only one way back into the garden, and that is through the voluntary sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon the cross in which He took the sins of the whole world upon Himself and offered Himself, His very death, in atonement for those sins. there was and is no other way. we have only to accept His generous offer of perfect forgiveness to have the hope of ultimate restoration.