The book of Job describes faith in the heart of suffering and retribution through the life of its protagonist, Job himself. While the book does not demystify or explain why human beings suffer or even provide a justification for the ways of God in regard to human beings, it efficiently probes the depths in which one can remain faithful in such intense suffering. Through the use of this book, Harold Kushner provides a description that is deterministic of why suffering and agony should not be the reasons for the loss of faith even as he himself antagonizes the death of his son at an early age. Job endures extensively a long list of suffering ranging from losing his children, his livestock, and his properties but majorly maintains his strong faith …show more content…
At first, Job is strong in his faith and he goes to a length of ignoring his wife and friends on forgetting his faith and dying. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (New King James Version Bible, Job. 1.21). However, with the continuation of his suffering, it becomes too much to bear and he questions God why he doesn’t answer him in times of his anguish, “I cry out to You, but You do not answer me; I stand up, and You regard me” (Job. 30.20). This is a point where many individuals get to in life, in the blink of losing faith and blaming God. Most of us at this trying moments would wish to have an umpire that would take our cries to God and perhaps get answers to the questions that we ask at those …show more content…
Bad things do happen, there is no argument in that regard, and God is not characteristically doing these bad things to us. Job’s thinking and wishes do not conform to Messianic arbitration and mediation, in fact, he wished at some point that God could answer to someone for his sufferings. Following this, Kushner notes that God is just and he is with us even in moments when bad things happen to us. The misfortunes that happen to us are not God’s doing and with this understanding then God should provide comfort and strength to deal with trials and misfortunes. This realization may be hard to contemplate because we have grown understanding that God is all-powerful and everything is under his control just like Job
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (Lewis, 1994, p. 91). Throughout history man has had to struggle with the problem of evil. It is one of the greatest problems of the world. Unquestionably, there is no greater challenge to man’s faith then the existence of evil and a suffering world. The problem can be stated simply: If God is an all-knowing and all-loving God, how can He allow evil? If God is so good, how can He allow such bad things to happen?Why does He allow bad things to happen to good people? These are fundamental questions that many Christians and non-Christians set out to answer.
Job has no agency, no participation in God’s decision to make him the object of a wager. God does not give him the option to decline and he is presented with no opportunity in which he might refuse God outright. He has no control over the duration or intensity of his suffering. He is completely at the mercy of God.
In the first chapter of God Behaving Badly, David Lamb argues that God is unfairly given a bad reputation. He claims these negative perceptions are fueled by pop culture and lead many to believe the lie that the God of the Old Testament is angry, sexist, racist, violent, legalistic, rigid, and distant. These negative perceptions, in turn, affect our faith. Ultimately, Lamb seeks to demonstrate that historical context disproves the presumptuous aforementioned. In addition, he defends his position by citing patterns of descriptions that characterize God throughout the Old Testament. “Our image of God will directly affect how we either pursue or avoid God. If we believe that the God of the Old Testament is really harsh, unfair and cruel, we won’t want anything to do with him” (Lamb 22). Clearly, they way Christians choose to see God will shape their relationship with Him.
As I continued to chat with my pastor that day, I really sensed the hurt in his eyes – the anger that comes from an unsolvable injustice, the tiredness of a problem. “What’s wrong?” I finally asked, “Having a bad day?” Sensing that I was truly concerned, he let the truth be told. “I talked with a woman today whose baby died suddenly of unknown causes. As we worked through her grief, she talked about how numerous friends and family, even a religious leader had patted her on the back, shook their heads and said, ‘It was God’s will.’ I find few things worse to say to a grieving parent. Saying nothing at all would be of more help.” It was obvious from our conversation that he had an understanding greater than I about God’s will, and his insight created in me a curiosity and desire to learn more.
In this short reflection paper I will be comparing the movie, “The Brook Ellison Story” and the book, “The Book of Job.” Both of these magnificent stories are highly respected by the public and they both give wonderful example of M.R. DeHann book, The Broken thing: Why we suffer. Some of the things that will be disgusting in this paper is a summary of both of these wonderful stories, how four out of the seven main questions for my search for meaning class best relates to both of these stories, which three out of ten “Key Principles of Catholic Social Teachings” closely relate to the two stories, and how both of these stories answer the question, “Does God Exist?” which is a popular fundamental question that was asked frequently in Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator book, Theology: Brewed in an African Pot.
After reviewing the work of David Hume, the idea of a God existing in a world filled with so much pain and suffering is not so hard to understand. Humes’ work highlights some interesting points which allowed me to reach the conclusion that suffering is perhaps a part of God’s divine plan for humans. Our morals and values allow us to operate and live our daily lives in conjunction with a set of standards that help us to better understand our world around us and essentially allows us to better prepare for the potential life after life. For each and every day we get closer to our impending deaths and possibly closer to meeting the grand orchestrator of our universe.
It is easy to place the blame on fate or God when one is encumbered by suffering. It is much harder to find meaning in that pain, and harvest it into motivation to move forward and grow from the grief. It is imperative for one to understand one’s suffering as a gateway to new wisdom and development; for without suffering, people cannot find true value in happiness nor can they find actual meaning to their lives. In both Antigone and The Holy Bible there are a plethora of instances that give light to the quintessential role suffering plays in defining life across cultures. The Holy Bible and Sophocles’ Antigone both mirror the dichotomous reality in which society is situated, underlining the necessity of both joy and suffering in the world.
God sees all that happens to us why does he not help us? God loves us
In "Per Repitio Nos Studiare: The Struggles of Abraham and God," Ryan Priester also explores how one learns through repeated suffering. Instead of examining human apathy or submission in the face of pain, however, his examination of the binding of Isaac introduces us to the role of human rebellion and resistance. Both The Waste Land and the relationship between Abraham and God revolve around the human response to excess and extremity.
...n the world. Job questions what god is really doing for him. Then god talks to job in question form about the creation of the earth. This shows that jobs is very small compared to god, so small that he cannot even being to understand some of the the things god is telling him. Chapter 38 proves to job that humans are far below the power of god then in chapter 42 job quickly shames himself for the previous things he said.
At the early stage of novel, God is used as narrator’s scapegoat for failures that resulted from his actions. Narrator mentions God multiple times in the passage that usually talks about his failure. The views on God seem to be neutral as Narrator slightly mentions that “…God only knows if there’s any sense in my looking for a job any longer! All these refusals, these partial promises, simple noes, hopes built up and knocked down, new tries that ended each time in nothing” (Hamsun 5). Narrator believes that God is omnipresent and confess that only God understand what he is going through. But narrator’s view on God turns into anger as more misfortunes befall upon him and he states that “I came on the weightiest objections against the Lord’s arbitrariness in letting me suffer for everyone else’s sins” (Hamsun 20). The narrator suddenly changes his attitude toward God and goes into delusion like thought that God has chosen him to suffer and he thinks the God is the root of problem and that he is the problem for all his unfortunate ends regarding his living conditions and job status.
Job was a man of the purest faith. When the world shunned God, Job's faith never declined. Job was a wealthy, handsome man with a beautiful wife and a vast amount of property. At some point in time, Satan made a bet with God that if Job situation was changed, his faith would quickly falter. On this note, God took Job's wealth, his property, his family, and his wife. When times were at their worst, God gave Job pus welts on Job's face, taking his looks. Job's faith, however, did not falter, instead it becamestronger. Job passed the test. God then healed Job, gave him more land, greater wealth , and a better wife. Job was baffled, he wondered the purpose behind his fall and rise. When he asked God this, God replied: "...Because I'm God." That was answer enough.
The concept of suffering plays an important role in Christianity, regarding such matters as moral conduct, spiritual advancement and ultimate destiny. Indeed an emphasis on suffering pervades the Gospel of Mark where, it can be argued, we are shown how to "journey through suffering" (Ditzel 2001) in the image of the "Suffering Son of Man" (Mark 8:32), Jesus Christ. Although theologians have suggested that Mark was written to strengthen the resolve of the early Christian community (Halpern 2002, Mayerfeld 2005), the underlying moral is not lost on a modern reader grappling with multifarious challenges regarding faith in the face of suffering. In his article "A Christian Response to Suffering", William Marravee (1987) describes suffering as an "experience over which we men and women continue to stumble and fall". The way we view God is crucial to the way we view suffering according to Marravee, who delineates the disparity between a view of God as an ‘outsider’ and the biblical image of God – where God is an ‘insider’ who suffers with us in our struggle. This essay seeks to explain the Christian view of suffering and the purpose suffering can have in our lives.
The question of why bad things happen to good people has perplexed and angered humans throughout history. The most common remedy to ease the confusion is to discover the inflicter of the undeserved suffering and direct the anger at them: the horror felt about the Holocaust can be re-directed in the short term by transforming Adolf Hitler into Lucifer and vilifying him, and, in the long term, can be used as a healing device when it is turned into education to assure that such an atrocity is never repeated. What, however, can be done with the distasteful emotions felt about the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Surely the citizens of those two cities did not themselves directly provoke the government of the United States to deserve the horror of a nuclear attack. Can it be doubted that their sufferings were undeserved and should cause deep sorrow, regret, and anger? Yet for the citizens of the United States to confront these emotions they must also confront the failings of their own government. A similar problem is found in two works of literature, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and the book of Job found in the Tanakh. In each of these works a good man is seen to be suffering at the hand of his god; Prometheus is chained to a rock by Zeus who then sends an eagle to daily eat Prometheus' liver while Job is made destitute and brought to endure physical pain through an agreement between God~ and Satan. To examine the travails of these two men is to discover two vastly different concepts of the relationship between god and man.
In The Book of Job, one of the main themes is desire, more specifically the desire to know the actuality. Job is a wealthy man living in a land of Uz with his family minding his own business. He is a very religious man and usually strives to do what he believes is morally right. Satan one day challenges God that Job will lose his faith in him if he allows Satan to torture Job. God accepts the challenge and Job greatly suffers. Job at the beginning of the story had no desires or intentions at all, but as his condition gets worse and worse. Job mindset about God and his belief begins to shift. At this point in the story desire starts to play a key role in Job’s life. Desire is shown in Job when he demands answers from God and why God is putting him through all of this. The idea of questioning God terrifies Job but his desire for an answer ultimately overshadows his fear of questioning God, “Here is my desire...