- Mon, Aug 25, 2008
- Suffering and Evil
Affliction was Necessary to Me
I want to share the following, written by my friend Denny Hartford, the director of a terrific organization I highly recommend, Vital Signs Ministries (FYI, that's not Denny in the picture, it's Martin Luther). Denny works in the ministry with his wonderful wife Claire.





I've been thinking of it in context of a big book I'm writing on the problem of evil and suffering. How many times has God had a purpose in events that seemed senseless at the time they happened? How many things that seem pointless now will later be seen to have a divine point?
Fold a paper in half. Then write on the top half the worst things that have happened to you and on the bottom half the best. Invariably, if you’ve lived long enough, if enough time has passed since some of those “worst things” happened to you, then you’ll almost certainly find an overlap.
I have written about Hell in a number of my books, both nonfiction and fiction. It is an unpleasant subject, one which modern Christians are tempted to avoid and deny. And the church’s avoidance of it inevitably leads to many church-goers denying it.
I’ve had nearly six weeks now in which I’ve no longer experienced the depression I was battling the prior two months, which
On February 28, I will be interacting for three hours with a Torrey Honors Institute class at BIOLA University. We’ll be discussing my novel
Last week I spent two days at
People need to feel loved. A hurting child needs to feel his father’s arms around him. When the father is away, he may leave written words of love, as God has in his Word. But he may also call on the child’s older brothers and sisters to express his love to his child.
I’ve been attending and speaking at the C.S. Lewis Summer Institute at Oxbridge. Yesterday afternoon at one of the seminars, I talked about the problem of evil and suffering. We discussed how EVERY worldview must address this problem and the problem of GOOD as well. And no worldview does this as well as the biblical one.





