I've had this discussion come up several times over the past 2 weeks and my answer is that I do not believe that God is always going to heal or keep us from harm. I've been told I don't know the Word of God. I've been told I don't have enough faith. I'm not going to go into a long dialogue about this right now; I simply want to throw the question out there and hope that people will give intelligent and scriptural answers for why they believe the way they do. Let me throw out a couple of things to ponder. Lazarus was raised from the dead, as were a couple of others in scripture that are recorded. (I believe their were probably more.) If anyone should have enough faith to live forever, it should be these people who experienced death, but the power of God resurrected them. Yet, at some point they died. (You don't see any 2000 year old folks running around... do you?) The point is... we all have an appointment with death. That in itself debunks the "always God's will to heal" theory. In the early church, all but one of the disciples died as a martyr, and we know that hundreds, maybe thousands of Christians died at the hands of their persecutors and/or the lions mouth. Seems that God did not always supernaturally rescue them. Just a few weeks ago, I received word that some Christians in Pakistan were murdered in front of fellow believers for worshiping Christ in their home. Somewhere we have to come to terms with the facts, and the facts are that God does not ALWAYS do what we think that he should do... and it has absolutely nothing to do with our faith. The persecution in the early church caused the gospel to spread around the world. As much as it does not fit into our tidy little box, God used that to further the Kingdom of God.
OK... I've thrown out enough to provoke thought. What say you all?
No comments:
Post a Comment