If God is Loving, Why is There So Much Pain in This Life?

By Dianne E. Butts
Guest Writer

CBN.com - No answer seems to completely satisfy when it comes to why God allows pain. Since the dawn of history, mankind has wrestled with this question, only to come up with answers that scarcely fill the soul's void.

While God grows our faith through pain, it is not His foremost reason for allowing us to hurt.

Paradoxically, love is the greater reason, and God will allow His creation to go through anything in the name of love. Anything at all. For God, love is a higher priority than comfort, enjoyment, and even happiness.

Pain was not part of God's original design. Love, on the other hand, was, and God knew that in order for love to exist, free will would also have to exist. In a world where He gave humans the choice to love or hate, He knew some would choose the latter and pain would inevitably be the price. But, God apparently thought that this was preferable to taking away His creation's humanity, even though He knew rape, murder, disease, and tragedy would plague our world.

Yet pain breaks God's heart, and so God has taken man's misuse and abuse of free will and redeemed it. God isn't about righting all the wrongs on Earth. But, He is big on taking the wrongs and making something beautiful of them. And so He constantly offers opportunities for His children to exercise that free will in love towards one another, so that some of what has been broken can be remade. Pain offers opportunity for growth in love.

Also, pain is a unique opportunity for humanity to choose whether it will love God for who He is, rather than for the gifts that He bestows upon His creation. Granted, God loves to give to His children. But in a life void of suffering, there would also be little need to love God for any reason beyond his role as Santa Claus. God wants to be loved for who He is -- for His mercy, grace, kindness, compassion, and other attributes -- and not because He makes life easy for us.

Finally, God allows pain to remind us that our home is not in this world, that our real life begins in the afterlife, in Heaven. He wishes for us to long for that place. And pain has a way of keeping our hope there, rather than on Earth. This is a good thing, for Heaven promises more wonderful, beautiful things than those which are found here. Earth is for deciding whether we will love one another as well as our Creator; Heaven is where our experience of life will find its fruition.

But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle [you].
1 Peter 5:10

Is Jesus the Only Way to Salvation?

By Craig von Buseck
CBN.com

Many people have criticized Christianity and believers in Jesus Christ as being too narrow-minded because we preach that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation. They point to the numerous other religions of the world and say, "How can your way be the only way?"

One of the answers to this question is that Jesus himself declared that He was, in fact, God in the flesh.

I and the Father are one. (John 10:30, NASB)

He who has seen Me has seen the Father… (John 14:9b, NASB)

Jesus did not give Christians any other option but to preach that it is only through faith in His sacrificial death on Calvary that we can receive salvation from our sins.

Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me." (John 14: 6, NLT)

Jesus claimed to be God. We have to judge his statements about himself as either true or false.

The great British writer, C. S. Lewis, explained in his well-known book, Mere Christianity, "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher; he'd either be a lunatic -- on a level with a man who says he's a poached egg -- or else he'd be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse."

"You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

So Jesus was either a madman, a liar, a myth, or He really was -- and is -- the Son of God.

It's Not About Me

Some people believe that all the religions in the world are basically the same. But that simply is not true. Christians, Jews, and Muslims believe in a personal God who has revealed Himself to mankind. Buddhists and Hindus believe God is impersonal and unknowable. But God cannot be both personal and impersonal -- both concepts cannot be correct.

But Christianity is also different from all other religions of the world in one other vitally important concept -- the idea that God reached out to man to save him because man was helpless to save himself.

Every other religion in the world is based on man's efforts to reach God. These world religions teach that man must somehow do righteous deeds or perform religious service in order to become good enough for salvation. In order to be