Nightlion wrote:Darth J wrote:
Sometimes, we are suffering because it is just how life is and we need to learn from it. We didn't do anything wrong, but we need to learn to have faith.
Other times, we already have faith, but that faith is being tested, even though the reason we have faith is that we have already been tested.
And then there are times when bad things happen to us because it's like God is spanking us, and he needs to teach us obedience.
And God gives us no way to tell the difference.
With the assets God provides to the sanctified there is not this problem. Those who are uninitiated should do better to just stop thinking about it altogether. Pretense is never the real thing. Considerations of God by way of pretense is futile. There is a way to come to know God. Less than that men should admit their ignorance and stop pretending to know anything about it. They are only going to mess it up and get mad and stomp on every green thing.
The way we get sanctified is, of course, through suffering. Through suffering, we learn to have faith. This faith will strengthen us so that we can withstand more suffering to demonstrate the faith that God already knows we have from making us suffer previously to gain the faith to endure more suffering.
Some people don't figure out that suffering is to teach them things or to give them faith. Sometimes that is because they don't make the connection between suffering and God trying to teach them suffering. The solution, of course, is more suffering.
A lot of the time, though, people don't figure out that God is making them suffer to teach them something because God is not there to explain it to them. Luckily, these people will eventually die, so they will then learn what they were supposed to learn on Earth, even though the conditions God put them in made it impossible for them to have learned that.
Let us also not forget free agency, which never works in the direction such that a child molester must undergo the horrible grief and trauma of being deprived of molesting children because a child is exercising his free agency not to be a victim.
And then sometimes people just sin and are not going to repent. The answer, of course, is that they should suffer.
I guess when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.