Berserk2
|
I offer these 3 points as food for thought:
(1) Would our world be a morally superior school of growth without danger, want, or suffering? There is no courage without danger, no generosity without want, no compassion without suffering. Several of our most admirable moral virtues are pain-dependent.
(2) Suppose that suffering were fairly distributed on the basis of merit. Then there would be little incentive to make choices that are selfish and evil. But the value of our freedom to love is directly proportional to the intensity of our incentive to choose otherwise--i. e. to make unloving choices.
(3) Also, if pain were fairly distributed, this would be overwhelming evidence for a just God. But that would surely be bad. Why?
A Russian parable demonstrates why. A king wanted to find a bride. So he disguised himself as a peasant and wandered the countryside in search of that special maiden. When he found her, she initially resisted his advances because he seemed to offer almost nothing in the way of financial security. Finally, he won her love through prolonged exposure to his character and personality.
But then he had to convince her father to allow the wedding. The father wanted a more financially secure arrangement for his daughter; so he declined the king's request. But the king volunteered to work hard on his farm to demonstrate his personal initiative. Finally, the Dad consented, charmed by his guest's warmth and loyal service.
The king then revealed his true identity and arranged for the wedding at his castle in St. Petersburg. The Dad was incensed. "Why didn't you tell me who you were? I wouldn't have put you through all this trouble. Oh, I'm so embarrassed!" The king replied: "Because I wanted you to love me for my character and personality, not for my rank. If you knew I was the king, you would have consented out of fear, honor, and a sense of duty, not out of love that must detect character through an intuition that gropes in the dark. Even so, God must be detected through the eyes of faith groping in the dark to be loved in the way He approves.
Don
|