![]() From its beginning, Genesis emphasizes that the Creator God brings about good in all that he makes, orders, and sustains – ultimately calling it ‘very good’ (Gen 1:3, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31 cf. ![]() 2 Macc 7:28 Heb 11:3) affirm that God created the visible out of the invisible or non-existent ( creatio ex nihilo), the Genesis narrative highlights the Creator bringing order out of that which was ‘formless and empty’ ( tōhū wābōhū cf. To that end, we will move from creation to the fall and then look at the tradition’s handling of the resulting tensions.ġ.1 The goodness of creation and the problem of the fall But before we reach that conclusion, we need to gain a proper appreciation of the key movements in the story of the Hebrew texts. In Christian accounts of suffering, the Creator God thus accomplishes the work of re-creation, defeating the sin and suffering that have intruded into his good creation. Reconciling trust in Yahweh with hardship and suffering is central to Israel’s story, and that dynamic is one reason that later Christians found (and continue to find) the Christ event so powerful: in the Christ event, God acknowledges the deep and multi-layered trouble in this world even as the incarnate Son enters his fallen creation to make right what has gone wrong. As we will see, however, such questions were less asked about God and more directly asked to God. Hence, when the thinkers of the Enlightenment began to engage with this tension much later in history, they were not the first to discover this tension nor were they the first to ask hard questions, since these challenges had always been a major part of the Jewish tradition. ![]() Thus the Old Testament displays an abiding tension in which the believer is asked to face the suffering and problems in this world by affirming the holy goodness of God, despite the frequent appearance of events that might seem to give evidence otherwise. Amid this tension, worshippers of Yahweh are to cling to the Lord who made a covenant with them, listening carefully to his prophets while practising epistemic humility by trusting in God’s goodness and provision (Deut 29:29). Prov 6:16–19 catalogues seven ‘things that the Lord hates’, yet all of them happen in this world, creating great evil and disorder, presumably against his ‘will’). At other times, the event that causes suffering occurs in opposition to God’s revealed will (e.g. Sometimes God appears to act directly in creating events that cause the suffering (e.g. Avoiding simplistic reductionism, these scriptures portray a good and sovereign God who presides over all things, but who, nonetheless, also appears to allow events to happen that he does not think are good. The Old Testament, honoured by both Judaism and Christianity, does not provide easy answers to the challenges of suffering: instead, it gives us stories full of tension and faith. ![]()
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