Question: Hello, Comforter! I have read all your answers to the questions that were posed to you, which I found reasonable and useful but, nevertheless, my soul cannot find rest. Allow me to explain why. I can accept and I recognize a man’s responsibility for all the suffering that he endures if man does a wrong, even if he does not know what is right, but nevertheless suffers affliction from his wrongdoing. It is clear that the very outcome of his mindlessness is his punishment, not to mention the punishment for more serious and intentional misconduct. It is also clear that this is not God who prosecutes him. The law is his prosecutor, as in the example given in your previous answers with the fool that is sloppy in dealing with electricity. But why is God indifferent to his suffering?
Even a man attempts to save another man in need who finds himself on the edge. Rarely does somebody's torment (especially physical) leave another indifferent, if one is psychologically healthy. People panic from the inability to somehow ease the suffering of others who, at times, find themselves in very terrible situations or die in awful agony.
Please understand me correctly: if God is all-powerful and merciful, does He not see human suffering, and can he not relieve it? Or, at the very least, can you provide an explanation as to why or for what reason people suffer in such a way, so that people have the opportunity to avoid such terrible retributions for their ignorance of the law?
His absence next to a suffering man is not clear to me, and completely inexplicable in terms of mercy, when the man is most likely to need it. I am not in any way attempting to remove responsibility from a person for his fate, but I am surprised by the indifference of God. This is what bothers me. After all, God is intelligent, and I would like to receive a reasonable explanation for what is, in my opinion, His incomprehensible indifference to the man at the moment of his greatest suffering.
Honestly, I myself have tried to find the answers to this question for a long time and, unfortunately, I have not succeeded. Yet, judging by what I already had a chance to read here, I still cherish a faint hope to receive them. I would be grateful for your response. I wish you every bit of luck in such a laborious affair as the reconciliation of man with God. It appears that God needs justification in human eyes no less than, as it is commonly believed, man does in His.
Alexey Sh., Pskov region, Russia
Answer: Hello, Alexey! Let's start with this: what do you know about God? Not so little, it seems – He is intelligent. But if He is intelligent, He cannot be cruel. You are absolutely right to intuitively correlate the best in man with perfection in God. So, His absence at the time of man's greatest suffering cannot be justified by His "heartlessness".
But if the absence of God at the time of a man's suffering is not dictated by a "malevolent intent" of God, then a man, at the very least, should understand that there is something else besides the desire or intent of God to help the sufferer with His personal intervention. It is exactly this "something else" that is the proper answer to your question. I hope you understand that nothing can restrict God except for His own restrictions that He chooses to impose on Himself. In this case, He has restricted Himself by giving a man freedom of choice, elevating it into a law, and sanctifying the human right to be oneself. God allowed a man to have a will that is different from His own, depriving Himself of the right to intervene in human choice. Since that time, this restriction practically regulates God's position beside a man.
Since man is created in the image and likeness of God, the same set of constraints is present in a person's life. He should, in the same manner as God, make every effort to restrict himself from the right to intervene in choices that people make around him. The degree of familial relationships or other closeness in relationships, such as friends and neighbours, as well as the way you perceive their conduct as being right or wrong, does not only make it non-permissible to intervene, but also poses a rather serious temptation to implement this interference. As is for God, a man's intention of non-interference is also voluntary. Therefore, the choice is called free.
However, freedom of choice, without personal responsibility for these choices, simply does not exist in nature. The one who makes decisions is the one who is held responsible for them. Suffering is an inevitable companion of the freedom of choice if the choice is wrong. This always occurs when the main condition of freedom is violated. The main condition is non-interference in another's choice, or its sanctity. The opposite is also true – satisfaction accompanies the right choice.
We needed this little excursion into the fundamental order of things in order to understand the origin of pain. Any suffering is always the result of interference with the choice of another, either through judgement or by force. Now your question, based on what has been said above, begins to sound differently: why is God absent when one begins to "pay the bills", so to speak? Why does He not come to the rescue to cancel a consequence of a man's wrong choice in order to relieve him from his suffering?
God forbade himself from intervening in human "settlements" with life, but this arrangement does not take away from Him the very possibility of doing so. After all, the one who creates laws has the ability to cancel them as well.
In suffering, a man begs for the abolition of the verdict (of the law) over him and, for the sake of his salvation, God is faced with the problem of abolishing the law for the sufferer. What law, you ask? The sanctity of human choice. That is, God is faced with the dilemma of suspending the painful consequence of the person's wrongdoing, or cancelling the very existence of the law itself.
This would be similar to abolishing the law of gravity for the sake of saving the lives of passengers on a crashing airplane. You can now imagine the seriousness of this process if we reduce it to approximate the human understanding of the role of God in the salvation of men. That is, in order to save a person from the law, God would have to take him out of the jurisdiction of the law or, in other words, to deprive a person of his freedom of choice. Note that all this is necessary in order to save a person from suffering. Being deprived of the freedom to choose as he pleases or to be whom he is, he ceases to be responsible before the law and, therefore, he rids himself of punishment which, in this case, is his suffering.
Once a person loses his right to be himself, he gets rid of prosecutions by law. It is not only the rule, but also the mechanism itself, which is actively engaged in a strictly organized system of the development of our world. Therefore, when one asks about the whereabouts of God during those times when it hurts so much, it is possible to say, without exaggeration that, in this moment, God is "concerned" with only one task – of creating an altar of sacrifice for the suffering person. This alter of sacrifice is the creation of circumstances in one’s life that will allow this person to exercise his humble behaviour in order to redeem himself from suffering.
Any conflict, any war that a man initiates in order to defend his right to freedom, which he lost (because he sinned), is completely irrelevant and opens the gate to martyrdom.
To defend freedom under these circumstances is like to stand against the abolition of the law of gravity intended to help the rapidly falling plane with live people on board. In the end, when the natural course of things is suspended, then people's deaths will be suspended as well. To insist on adherence to the lawful order of things will result in the inevitable collapse of the plane, as torture will inevitably catch up and take captive the unspoken truth-seeker.
It is exactly with this purpose that God sends the entire human nation into slavery, where submissive service to other's will, with the detriment of his own will, fully redeems him from prosecution and returns him the lost freedom. Later on, in the interpretation of the Revelation of John, personally applied aspects of this service will be revealed, with real meaning which, to this date, is comprehensible only to very few people.
When you write about the knowledge that is denied to man to obtain his salvation, it is hard to disagree with this statement. The objective of this website is precisely to fill this gap. The problematic side of this task is not in the inaccessibility of knowledge, but in the difficulty of its implementation. The idea that mortification redeems one from suffering is extremely difficult for human perception which is created free but, unfortunately, which is not always reasonable.
God created the world so perfect and individually adaptable to each person as an instrument for his salvation. God created the world so perfect that knowledge is required only for understanding this simple fact, and that no other knowledge for one’s salvation is required. The world possesses all the opportunities for a person to accept them and to use them. The question of familiarity with this kind of knowledge is valid only to an extent that this knowledge provides one with an understanding and awareness of this otherwise incomprehensible fact of its perfection to the human mind.
All of us should remember that God always takes part in the salvation of man. His role, in this case, is not the role of a sorcerer with a magic wand, or a footman standing in service of the whims of man, because God is a genius of the perfect solution. By overlooking this fact, a person subsequently misinterprets God's essence. This fact brings him even more suffering, but it does not lessen the dignity of God. It is crucial to know God at least in order to put an end to your own torment, which is the result of an ignorant war that you have with the world. This is no longer a question to God, but to the man himself: where are you, man, and where is your own compassion for yourself?
Sincerely,
The Comforter