Best response yet in this thread IMO. But again, an omnibenevolent and omnipotent being will cure suffering if he is able to, correct? And I wasn't exactly taking about what Jesus did in the Bible, although it's fine, I suppose. I was directing it more towards what God is often heard to do in modern times. The number of people being cured by miracles shouldn't decrease as time goes on, especially if God is perfectly fair.
Heya Monkeypsycho,
I think perhaps the confusion is coming about from not understanding God's character. The Bible is our sort of link with God, in that it tells us about Him and how He acts and what He values. In the Bible God comes to Earth for us, in the person of Jesus Christ. He did this to teach us His values and give us a way to salvation and to wash away all our past, present and future sins. During His time here, he performed miracles and healed people. He did not heal all people, or remove all suffering in the world.
Now your view of God is that He is omnibenevolent, that is a being of the purest good. This I believe is wholly true. The misunderstanding comes into it when we take
purest good and give it a
definite meaning with our limited mortal minds. For us purest good is someone who will help no matter what, who will set all wrongs right and God has done this too, in His sacrifice for us. Now before you question that, just recall that the Bible makes it very clear to us that God is different than we are.
Isaiah 55:9
"For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."
With this in mind, we cannot assume to know what a being who is so different to us will do. In addition, we cannot know what a purest good being would do, as we are not beings that are purely good. God sees the entire picture, of creation to the end, whereas we see just the tiny window that we can with our fleeting lives and limited outlooks.
In addition we have free will. If God wanted to, He could indeed clean up all our mistakes for us. But what kind of God is that? A babysitter. We would still be as children, yet in adult bodies. Not knowing how to live, how to do right or wrong, or what the consequences are of wrong. If I commit adultery and it causes a great deal of harm and hurt, and God heals it and purifies me again, what have I learnt? Nothing. I would just blunder right into it again. Our free will is our most precious gift, yet we need to accept the choices that we make and the consequences of them. God has a plan for us, we are told He is interested in our character, our hearts and motives. Not in worldly things, big talk or success and fame. But in what makes us, us. In this regard, it would be logical to assume that God does not hold the same value over the things of this world as we do. Everything will return to dust one day, and all will be undone, except for our eternal souls which will house our character.
I cannot make the call as to whether someone who suffered an injury and required amputation has had good come from it, or not. It's easy to look at it and say, "That's horrible!" yet God works in mysterious ways, and by this I mean that God takes the bad and turns it into good. Always. The most unlikley people in the world become God's tools.
In an unusual comparison, I am a serious Farscape fan, and there is an episode where the crew gets sent back in time to a monastry. The monastry was essentially the grounds of a legendary turning point in a war, where sisters and nuns held out against a ravenous horder of attackers. Criton (the main character) goes back and they accidentally mess up the timeline, and in order to set things right they help defend the grounds and save a great deal of lines. Yet when they go back into the future, and look at the historical record, it shows that what actually happened is that all the sisters got killed because the attackers wanted to know who was using advanced weapons (Criton and co.) and the sisters couldn't provide an answer, so they were killed. In a nutshell, we cannot see what our actions will cause in a timeline, when that line of thinking and the scope of time is beyond us. It's easy in the moment to go, yes, heal that person as it will make everything better, but it may not always be that clear.
I hope that helped some.
Cheers!
Digit