by jabberwock 23 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Sounds to me like the all-powerful gawed of everything is either seriously lacking in imagination or is just cruel.
Why not just make them... POOF... disappear? (Kinda like the not -left-behind people do)
Why not turn them into good people? Hell, the gawd created them, the gawd can "fix" them.
I'm sure we could think of a hundred better solutions.
During today's Watchtower study there was a point involving Jesus' suffering:
(3) Jehovah rewarded Jesus with something that his Son did not have in his prehuman existence--indestructible life in heaven. (Heb. 7:15-17, 28) Jehovah was pleased to do this because Jesus had kept perfect integrity under severe tests.Jesus thereby provided his Father with the best, yes the complete, answer to Satan's lie that humans serve God with selfish motives and not out of unbreakable love.--Prov.27:11.
According to this article Jesus' suffering served a separate purpose from providing the ransom sacrifice. It seems that suffering served to test Jesus' motives for serving God and thus provide an "answer to Satan's lie that humans serve God with selfish motives and not out of unbreakable love."
I don't understand why Jesus example is considered "the complete" answer. Didn't Job, an imperfect man ignorant of the circumstances of his trials, suffer under incredibly harsh tests of his faith and prove faithful nonetheless?
Note the following quote from the 1975 book, "Man’s Salvation Out of World Distress at Hand!":
However, the issue was not settled with Job...The question now was, not just, Who among mankind will adhere to Jehovah’s universal sovereignty, but, more critically, Who in heaven will keep integrity toward the Most High God and remain loyal and faithful to His universal sovereignty as the right thing for all creation?...For this reason, the paramount issue reached as high up as to the foremost heavenly son of God, Jehovah’s chief official, “the firstborn of all creation...Above all other creations of Jehovah God, this highest official of God needed to be tested and proved on this issue of unselfish devotion to Jehovah’s universal sovereignty. Till Job’s time and for more than fifteen centuries afterward he had kept his integrity to his heavenly Father Jehovah. He had conducted himself faultlessly as his Father’s principal official, The Word. Ah, yes, but that was without suffering bodily pain, that was without undergoing the deepest humiliation and undeserved dishonor.” But now, let this highly honored and respected official of God experience such adverse things here on earth—at the hands of Satan the Devil—and then let us see whether he will keep his integrity to God and remain submissive to His universal sovereignty! Logically, that was Satan’s line of reasoning.
This confirms what I surmised from today's Watchtower article. In fact, it goes further by implying that suffering bodily pain was actually a significant part of Jesus coming to earth. And no one, not even the most loyal of Jehovah's servants, is exempt from further proving their loyalty in the face of Satan's challenge through physical bodily pain. It seems more than a bit strange to me that Jehovah would accept that Jesus, a spirit creature, needed to take on a human body, a form that he never intended spirit creatures to take, and suffer physical pain, which he never intended any creature to suffer from, in order to prove his loyalty, which Jesus had been doing perfectly for his entire existence.
Clearly, then there is value in Jesus suffering. Suffering, specifically bodily pain, proved to be an added element for testing his loyalty to Jehovah.
This, of course, raises more questions than it answers. The foremost I believe is, if there have already been test cases involving both perfect and imperfect humans as well as spirit creatures taking on human bodies is there any need for individuals to continue to prove their loyalty through suffering?
I'll leave it there for now. Let me know what you think of all of this.
jabberwock
Okay, after reading the quotes about Jesus' suffering, I can hold back no longer. My very dear friend (who also happens to be a Bishop) recently told me, "Pain is endurable, but suffering is optional."
I found this not only profound, but comforting. We all endure pain to one degree or another, but the suffering? At every point in time we choose whether we are going to suffer or not.
Love,
Baba.
Hi Baba Yaga
perhaps it is because Jesus himself did not mention much of that "gnashing of teeth" in his parables...
I would say the opposite: most of it is in the sayings (parables and other) ascribed to Jesus. (Of course that doesn't mean a "historical Jesus" ever told any of it, but the same caveat applies to the "nice" sayings.)
E.g.
gnashing of teeth, Matthew 8:12; 13:42,50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30; Luke 13:28
fiery hell (Gehenna) Matthew 5:22,29f; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15,33; Mark 9:42ff; Luke 12:5
torment Matthew 8:29 (of evil spirits); Luke 16:23,28 (in Hades)
judgement more or less "tolerable" Matthew 10:15; 11:22,24; Luke 10:14
eternal fire / punishment vs. eternal life, Matthew 25:41,46
Plus all the "woes," the reversed beatitudes in Luke 6, and the descriptions of the "great tribulation" and "sign of the Son of Man" in the Olivet discourse ("and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn," Matthew 24:30)... all of this implies suffering, and the "show" of suffering, as punishment and "vengeance" (Luke 21:22).
Thank you for taking the time to reply, Narkissos! I know Jesus was quite the anarchist (breaking the old Jewish laws) and I knew he could have a hot temper in a temple, but I guess I thought he wasn't so much into the whole eternal torment thing.
Poor guy, I have a feeling he was oft mis-quoted. If he did exist, who knows what he really said... weren't all of the accounts of his life written about 60 years after he lived?
My Armagedon death....I would l like to have a pillow fight to the death with 50 naked cheerleaders!
Hell as we "know" it didn't come into being until the 14th century when Dante wrote of it. Prior to that, it was simply understood that Hell was a place of shame and separation from God. The fire and brimstone of the Bible is figurative speech that is taken too literally. The Bible says that the sky melted and the stars fell from their place when Edom was destroyed. This is obviously figurative.
God does not force Himself on anyone, yet He does hold us accountable for our decisions. Many people rail against God and then expect that if He is just, good, or whatever, He should force them into Heaven anyways to spend eternity with a God they don't want to be with in the first place.
Hell just might be a merciful solution that allows God to respect a person as an individual being. They can continue as they wish while continuing to exist. http://justthinkingpages.tripod.com/hell.html
Two more short articles:
BY:
I guess we all make up our "Jesus" by picking and choosing what we like -- or what we dislike. The latter being no more objective than the former, only a little more twisted; not necessarily "safer" either (cf. Luke 19:20ff)... ;)
MD:
I understand (to an extent) how such a dramatisation of individual will can appeal to a Pelagian or Arminian understanding of Christianity. But it seems rather a (debatable) modern rationalisation than what was actually taught down to the 14th century. Methinks you are blaming (or crediting) Dante for too much. :)
My very dear friend (who also happens to be a Bishop) recently told me, "Pain is endurable, but suffering is optional."
I think your Bishop friend is right on the mark. Suffering is the mental anguish that is created and sustained in the mind - it is the "story" that attaches itself to the pain and gets repeated in the mind over and over; people end up living their lives in the story of suffering even if pain is gone; that story is not necessary, it is, as your friend mentioned, optional. Without the story pain can remain but suffering vanishes.
I'm afraid the previous comment is in serious error with regard to the Bishop stating that Suffering is optional.
Do you think that anyone chooses to suffer? Some have the emotional strength to get beyond it, others do not.
That comment is like telling a depressed soul to "snap out of it", "pull your socks up", "cheer up"; etc, etc.
To answer the original question: There is absolutely NO value in suffering?
