Why Not Become a Christian-Part Three

In the series on Why Not Become a Christian we have covered the following objections:
1. Christians Are Hypocrites
2. The Concept of Hell
3. I am too a wicked to be a Christian
4. Stumbling over the Bible

In this podcast I can my friends Bobby and Marty discuss the fifth objection, If there is a loving God that is in control why does He allow suffering. This will be covered in two podcasts.

Suffering Regardless of God or Not
If there is no god and there is suffering, then if there is a god can there be suffering, what would be the common factors?

What is the cause of suffering?
a. It is part of the natural order in a broken world. It occurs within the animal kingdom, it occurs through sickness and disease, it occurs through natural disasters.

b. There is evil in the world. Man has free will, that is why there is evil in the world, human beings have the ‘freedom’ to do evil things and thus suffering. There is sin and thus we have a broken earth.

Thus if God does exist, we are in a broken world and man has free will, God cannot prevent suffering without making the world new and removing free will from man. (Amazingly there will be a day when there will be a new heaven and earth, mankind will still have free will, but no longer a desire to sin because of glorified/redeemed nature-the Gospel.)

Free Will
If God was to remove free will to prevent suffering, we would all be robots. I have yet to meet a human being that wants to be a robot that has no emotions, feelings, and controlled by another entity, even if the entity was a loving God.

God Suffers
If there is suffering in the world, and there is a god, then that god feels the suffering of the world. He does not ignore it. So what does God do with suffering. Why does God allow suffering? That will be discussed in our next podcast-can good come out of suffering?)

Is Suffering God or Bad
Can suffering ever be a good thing? Can love be in the midst of suffering? We covered that subject for awhile. If you can only see suffering as bad and no good can come from it you will have a distorted perspective in regard to suffering.

The Benefits of Suffering
We touched on the fact that there can come benefits from suffering, That good can come from it. We will talk about this concept in more depth in our next podcast.