Christianity: Opium or Truth? by David Gooding & John Lennox

Author:David Gooding & John Lennox [Gooding, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Theology / REL067030 - Apologetics, HRCM / Christian theology
ISBN: 9781874584568
Publisher: Myrtlefield House
Published: 1991-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

A suffering God

The vastness of this project can be seen first of all by the fact that its achievement involved a change in the very Godhead itself. The one whom Christians call the second person of the Trinity was not always human. The Word, as he is called, was not always flesh. But he became flesh, became human, so that redeemed men and women might be spiritually incorporated into him, as a physical human body and its members are part of each other, (see John 1:1–2, 14; 17:20–26; 1 Cor 12:12–14). And becoming truly human he suffered, sinless though he was, just as we do; and by that very suffering was equipped to become our spiritual file leader on our pathway to eternal glory (Heb 2:17–18; 4:14–16; 5:7–9; 12:1–3). God is no static or unfeeling God!

‘But what’, says someone, ‘has all this got to do with the problem of pain and suffering which we are meant to be discussing?’

Why, this! Becoming a child of God depends on a person’s willing consent to receive Christ. For that reason (in addition to the other reasons we earlier discussed) |89|man had to be created, at what we have called the first stage, with a genuinely free will. Yet, as again we have already observed, God in his omniscience foresaw that man right from the beginning would use his free will to set his own will against God’s will, to disobey God, and to lead himself and the whole human race on a downward path away from God. God also foresaw that the only way of redeeming humans, and bringing them back and making it possible to proceed with stage two of the project, was for the Son of God, not only to become human himself but to offer himself as humanity’s representative Redeemer and Saviour, to bear the colossal cost, suffering, pain and penalty of human sin, and thus as the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world. God foresaw it, and for his own sake and for humanity’s sake, the Godhead was prepared to undergo the suffering involved in achieving the project on which God’s heart was set. The Lamb was foreknown before the project was begun, before in fact the foundation of the world (1 Pet 1:18–21).

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