INTERPRETER:
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I can tell you exactly what good a message like this can do you. It is meant to encourage you. Don't you think that it's good news to know that you are not lost forever? I think anybody would say so, if they thought about it, and accepted it for what it was.
I realize that type of good news doesn't make all your current troubles go away, but it is comforting to know that there's a light at the end of the tunnel -- even if you're still in the middle. And in a real sense, knowing that there's a light at the end of the tunnel IS a light in the middle of the tunnel. A comfort, a light.
It's like this: What if one of your friends had a painful bad back, and you learned that they would be better in two weeks? I bet you'd be anxious to tell them, hoping that it would comfort them to know that their pain would end in two weeks. That is compassionate on your part, isn't it? They could say, "Well, I am still in pain right NOW." True. But even so, what you said can and should bring them comfort, don't you think? It's worth a try.
God feels your pain, and He simply wants to comfort you. So, it might not mean anything to you, but He hopes it will. If you won't accept messages of comfort, then you just have to suffer WITHOUT the comfort those words could have given you.
I'll grant you, relief takes too long to come, sometimes. That seems to be the way it is. God will try, I imagine, to make things work the way you want them to work, if possible. But it's not always possible, due to factors beyond His control. What's beyond God's control? People's free will. God gave us free will, and He's got to RESPECT free will, because otherwise, there IS no free will any more. And that's where things get bit complicated.
It's not God's fault that some people decide to do bad things. If a guy has a messed up way of using his free will, lots of suffering can happen. Like maybe he takes drugs, and messes himself up. God didn't do that; the man did that -- with his free will. Or, another guy can decide to steal. God has to leave that alone, in order to respect his free will. That means somebody else loses some stuff.
Haven't you ever hurt somebody? Sure, everybody has. What happened was, due to a choice that you made, somebody else got hurt. You cannot blame God for that. In that case you could rightly take responsibility for it yourself. If you follow that reasoning, you'll understand, truly, that NONE of the bad things that happen in life are God's doing.
But then people still blame God for not stopping the bad things that happen in life. There are a lot of things God can't keep people from doing, because if He interfered with the bad things they want to do, He'd be interfering with free will. God won't do that. Period. Free will has to be. If there wasn't free will, then we're all just robots. It would be like God MAKING you be good, or love God. That is no good!
Now, you don't want somebody to come and mess you up out of their free will. But the thing is, God has to let that be. How would you feel if you were in a bad mood, and you wanted to go ahead and hurt somebody, and God just flat out stopped you? You might feel protected from your own stupidity, but more likely you'd be angry at God for getting in your way. In a world where people were not given the opportunity to do anything wrong, everyone would be quite unhappy with it, I'm sure.
And, if God can't stop people from doing negative things, He also can't protect innocent people from being hurt. A person may say, "Okay, I understand that God can't stop some maniac from stealing something, but if God cares about me, why can't God protect ME?"
Well, if God protected you from being stolen from, where would that person who wants to steal go, then? Don't you see that if YOU have a right to be protected by God from that thief, then everyone ELSE does, too? And if you and everyone is protected, then from whom should that thief steal? And if he is not in fact allowed to steal, then what has happened to his right to act according to his own free will?
So, there's free will, and sure enough, some nasty stuff happens because of it. Can't really be helped, unless man wants to get straight, and stop messing up so bad -- like stealing stuff. Hurt people hurt people they say. God can't stop that. The hurting will end only when someone decides to stop hurting.
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