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Father after seeing another young life taken by cancer how and why does God allow good ppl who do no wrong to suffer and even die from these diseases yet there are evil killers and rapists walking free. As someone who is suffering with cancer I think about this often, through everything I have faith in God that he only tests the ones he believes can handle it to show them they are strong yet I still question how he can let this happen and I hate that I question him
Answer to Question 156
Your question is something many people ask and often blame God for everything that happens in this world, but that is to forget what man has done to himself. Firstly we must understand that God did not create death, death is evil and there is no possible way for evil to proceed from God since God is only good. Neither does God take pleasure in destroying the living things he has created. God created man to live forever, but simultaneously he gave him a choice with the gift of free will to remain in this immortality or to become mortal. This choice was the commandment he gave to Adam and Eve not to eat of the forbidden fruit and he warned them that on the day they eat of it they would surely die. They chose to eat and sure enough they lost immortality. But why by eating a fruit did they die? The fruit is not important, what is important is that God gave them a commandment which was to help them grow spiritually and they chose to disobey God’s word. By rejecting God’s word they were rejecting God himself. But it goes even deeper because through their action they were saying to God “we don’t believe you, we have no need of you, we can live by ourselves, self-sufficient and independent. Thus of their own free will they chose to separate themselves from God and eternal life, because eternal life can only be in God: separation from God means death. So what then is death? Death is the consequence of being separated from God. This is what God meant when he gave them the commandment not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The Orthodox Church understands death as the consequence of sin, but Western Churches regard death as God’s way of punishing man because of his sin and sees the inheritance of death on the whole human race as a heritage of guilt. Thus for western theology God created death to punish mankind. They paint a picture of an unloving God punishing and seeking revenge because his creatures disobeyed his commandment. For us Orthodox this goes totally against the grain and we cannot fathom a God so unloving that he can be the cause of death. Death then entered human nature as a result of being separated from God, but it was not an immediate death as we usually understand death. There was first a spiritual death, which was the separation from God and then a slow deterioration of Adam and Eve’s bodies, which had undergone a transformation. In Genesis 3:21, we read: “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them”. It is easy to come to the presumption that these skins were animal skins in which God clothed them to hide their nakedness, but the Church understands this as something completely different. The skins in question are the skins of our bodies. It was the transformation from the immortal bodies into mortal bodies. This drastic change was necessary for man’s salvation, otherwise sin would have reigned in Adam’s immortal body and union with God would have been eternally impossible. This change was in fact their death, because they had lost immortality. They were in a state of death and subject to cold, hunger, illness, diseases, pain, suffering and ageing bodies, which eventually would bring about their bodily death by the separation of the soul from the body. All these negative sufferings are nothing more than human nature going through the slow process of death. This will answer also those many questions like, “why was that person born with an illness or a handicap and why did that person get cancer at such a young age? God did not create these illnesses, God did not create anything evil. These are just the fruits of death; they are ways in which death acts on the human body. Human nature deteriorates, and as it does so, this deterioration is expressed with various illnesses and diseases. Thus we shouldn’t blame God for these evils: they do not come from God. If we are to blame anyone it must be man himself because they are the results and consequences of the fall. I think I have said enough for you to understand what death is and where it came from. Death in man’s life is not what God intended and because he did not create death, death is unnatural to human nature according to how God originally created man. This is probably why most people fear death: it is against our nature to die. If it was part of the natural course of man’s life then we would not have any fear, but God create man as a union of both a body and soul. This union comes into being from the conception of every man in his mother’s womb. Man is what we call a psychosomatic being, which means that his soul does not constitute the whole man, but neither does his body. Both the body and the soul were created at the same moment, the soul was not, like some like to believe, living before the body and then at some moment entered into it. When this union is broken at death it is done again nature and by force: the soul doesn’t what to live without the body and is frightened by this separation.
Same member I heard that there are disciplines in the Orthodox Church such as how we should live in modern day life. But maybe I am wrong
Answer Simply live according to what the church teaches, read, pray and partake regularly of our Lord', precious Body and Blood.
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