But what about Corey Comperatore, a loving and devoted husband, father, and public servant? Was it God's plan for him to die?For every person who is saved from cancer by the power of prayer, there are thousands for whom those prayers are never answered. When we were in Cambodia, I witnessed more than the horrific effects of human trafficking. We visited some of the Killing Fields....
I understand: my best friend is dying of stage four cancer at a very young age. I watched my father die too, and he was a brave and faithful man, one who saved lives, a firefighter, a volunteer.
We are told that death has been conquered, and therefore perhaps it is of no real concern. That's hard to accept as people who have to die, and who have seen the effect of death on those we love. Yet, like Jules in the movie, I think you can't help but acknowledge the miracle. I don't understand it, but I can't deny it.
16 comments:
I don't think we should assume God intended Chief Comperatore to die. It is the fate of all fallen mortals to pass at some point in life. I trust that God will provide what his widow and children will need in the future through the hands of His children.
Death would be the ultimately indignity and tragedy were it not for resurrection. We have trouble shaking the horribleness of it because it really is a terrible thing.
Miracles seem to provide for the wicked, too. I've been (gratefully) out of touch for a few days, and don't know if the point has come up, but those who believe Trump is the reincarnation of Hitler can point to the latter's almost-miraculous escapes too.
I don't know, and I'm reluctant to take on a prophet's role without authorization.
Wise. Likewise I make no prophecy; if anything, this experience clarifies that I don’t see clearly enough.
Jesus is the ultimate expression if sacrificial love. There are probably people who need to be reminded that such love exists in us, imperfect as we are. The Chief’s death may not make sense to you or to me, but God sees if it makes sense to someone.
Terminology counts. God ALLOWED the death of Comparatore, He did not WILL it. He also ALLOWED the death of thousands of Vendees.
'My ways are not your ways', says the Lord.....
…At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to Him….
Theodicy is hopeless-- we humans can't possibly understand God's ways. A worm understands more about your 401(k) investment strategy, than we understand about God's plan. To an unborn child, birth is a catastrophe, the end of everything he knows; but to us, we know that it's the start of something far greater, and the end of something that could not possibly go on any longer.
I would be very, very cautious about seeing "the hand of God" in anything other than your own life (and even that, mostly in retrospect). God is never doing just one thing, and further is primarily concerned with the salvation of individual souls rather than anything else. Consider the stories of Israel/Judah's history in the Bible-- lots of intrigue, war, natural disaster, etc. happens, but really the only things that matter in the end? Marrying the right woman (not necessarily the "best" or the one that makes them happiest) and having/raising a particular child; and personal faithfulness to God. So maybe the fate of the presidency is ultimately irrelevant, but this is a way to shock Trump out of a rut of selfishness and sensualtity. Or, it's so that some guy in Des Moines is shocked out of a rut, etc., breaks up with his girlfriend, meets somebody else, and several generations later, somebody important is born. Or, it's to give you and me a shocking reminder that God is working through even human evil, to accomplish His plans. ...Or, all of those, or none of those. We can't know.
--Janet
@ Janet
You said very well much that I was going to say. In particular, your examples were better.
Aristotle opened the De Anima: "Holding as we do that, while knowledge of any kind is a thing to be honoured and prized, one kind of it may, either by reason of its greater exactness or of a higher dignity and greater wonderfulness in its objects, be more honourable and precious than another, on both accounts we should naturally be led to place in the front rank the study of the soul."
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.1.i.html
Theology likewise is the study of the highest sort, and to be greatly prized. I've spent a lot of time with it, and I understand the arguments about what we can and can't know and why. I've studied the proofs of God and the arguments against them. Ultimately I am convinced that God exists, roughly on Avicenna's grounds, and that he is active in the world.
Nevertheless I can understand the reluctance to appeal to God as an explanation. There are several perils, not least the one that James alludes to in his brief remarks.
It is probably to my father's credit that I had no fear of God as a child. His earthly example gave me faith that the Heavenly Father would likewise be trustworthy, loving, and good.
It is doubtless my own fault that my inability to understand now causes me to be unsettled. Philosophy is worthy, but there is no substitute for faith.
Read the book of Job
Short book, teaches us our place!
God is the maker. Infinite. We can not grasp his plan. Our Job is to love God with all our heart and all our might even if we do not understand and love our neighbor as ourselves no matter how hard it is to do so and how often we fail at the task.
Now that you have read this go ahead and mark as spam and delete
Greg
I see the hand of God in the conscience of each of us, and in how much grace we exhibit in dealing with "the adventure that God sends us." I've never had much use for interpreting our good fortune or bad fortune as God's message that we're right or wrong. Was Jesus' life marked with ease and good luck?
I was planning on letting this go, but on reflection Janet and Tex raise a set of issues that needs more elaboration.
Greg, I'm going to let this one comment stand because it's on topic and relevant. I don't want you to take that as an invitation to keep coming back around, though. My ability to perform my theological duty to love you in spite of your difficulties is greatly eased by your absence.
Let me jump in there on the subject of Job, though. It's a very difficult, brutal book, clearly aimed at an audience that assumed one way to identify the righteous was to observe their good fortune, with an ugly undercurrent of assuming that anyone with a loathsome disease was receiving a just punishment and deserved to be abandoned with contempt. At least, I take the most powerful part of the book to be an effort to cast doubt on those assumptions. God obviously expects Job to keep his eye on the ball whether or not worldly fortune shines on him.
Which is exactly what's wrong with the casual assumption that any good fortune is God's way of placing a gold star in our copybooks. Jesus told us to pray not to come into the time of trial. We'd have to be pretty cocky to hope to be tested harder so we could get a chance to shine brighter. The fact remains that our duty is to behave right, whether we encounter good fortune or bad. Maybe good fortune will lead us to complacency and bad behavior; maybe bad fortune will break our resolve rather than bring out the best in us. It's a distraction from the fundamental challenge of our lives.
I speak of fortune that's largely divorced from the natural consequences of our own behavior, of course. Nothing wrong with drawing conclusions from the kind of good fortune that comes naturally (most of the time) from doing the right thing, building a decent reputation, forming loving ties, etc.
Yes, that's what the 'always or for the most part' bit from Aristotle is about in the new post above. We think (or like to think) that we can know God by his works; but because random chance is a thing, we are wiser (we think) to reason from what always or usually works rather than from some chance event. Yet then there is a clear conflict with the scriptural accounts of miracles, where such things are tokens that God has gotten involved and taken a side.
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