Thursday, June 6, 2013

Is Our Suffering God's Will? Part 3

As for man, his days are like grass...
for the wind passes over it, and it is gone...
Psalm 103:15-16
 
It is so easy to blame God when things go wrong, tragedy occurs, or natural disasters strike.  After all, He is not likely to come down and argue His side of the case.  Many of us feel the need to blame someone in order to make any sense of what has happened.  God is all-powerful, is He not?  Surely things like this could only occur if He sent it, allowed it, encouraged it, caused it?

Mr. Tregar is a writer by trade, so he began to write about the bus crash and its profound aftermath.  He chronicled the opinions of his crash mates.  He deferred to written records when they were available - police files, hospital records, diaries, etc. He did not turn a blind eye to facts that were previously unknown to him.
 
When the bus driver's widow said that God had taken her husband, she did not talk about the fact that the accident happened at a bend in the road known as sivuv hamavet - "the turn of death."  This stretch of highway witnessed 144 accidents with casualties between 1980-2010.

The truck driver said that God, not he, had caused the crash.  He failed to include the facts that he had been partying in Tel Aviv prior to the accident and had ignored large yellow warning signs instructing him to shift the truck into a lower gear.  He also conveniently forgot to mention that, at the age of 25, he had already been guilty of 26 driving violations.
 
Treger says:  What for so many years had seemed to point to the arbitrariness of life was soon evidence of the opposite: my broken neck was the almost inevitable consequence, not of a divine plan, but of a reckless driver, a truck loaded with four tons of tiles, a backseat with no headrest, and a very dangerous road. ~to be continued

Materials obtained from, Opinion: Is Our Suffering God's Will? - by Joshua Treger, CNN.com


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