People often suffer terribly because of things like disease and natural disasters. This fact is actually compatible with the belief that there is an all-powerful God who cares about people. This argumentative essay attempts to support the position that disease and disasters do not annihilate existence of an all-powerful God who cares about people.
From all the religious perspectives, natural disasters and diseases are associated with disobedience to the laws set by the supernatural power. For instance, in the primitive and modern beliefs on the existence of the all-powerful God, there is a common agreement that lack of good will from the supernatural power may result in such occurrences associated with punishment.
In the entire plotline, God acts and reveals himself in freedom of his grace. Each stage of the plotline is characteristic of the freedom of God as evident in his progressive revelation of himself as a faithful God who keeps promises, but on the other hand declines to put himself at the disposal of mankind.
God can be known, but comprehending him may not be possible, and as such he freely reveals himself to the creation. The nature of God is only discernable to those who pay close attention to his self-disclosure in every stage of the salvation history, where he makes known to creation his promises, commandments, law, his grace, his feared word of judgment, and his eschatological fulfillment of the promises after judgment. Taken entirely therefore, the philosophy of creation through history of salvation demonstrates a dialectic of his faithfulness and freedom.
Although God’s promises as man understands cannot fail, constant threats from the sinful nature of mankind implies that only free decision of the divine grace can bring God’s promises to fulfillment. From the Christian perspective, there are several segments to confirm this assertion.
The main segments are giving of the promise Abraham and its fulfillment in the exodus, revelation of commandments to Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai, and the prophets who spoke the divine word of judgment when Israelites failed under the law, and the divine word of hope for the eschatological work of grace and the fulfillment of God’s initial promises to mankind.
God made the promise in the context of hypothetical self oath, and so it was a promise of guaranteed blessings. He compares this promise to the conditional promise and draws a differing conclusion, indicating that the promise presented an earlier tradition.
Therefore, law is not a mere word of grace that should uphold people at any price, but a destruction which awaits the unfaithful human race in case they drift away. The elements of grace and law exist side by side in some state of tension. God demonstrated that benevolence far exceeds his wrath. The two aspects of law; threat and gift, imperative and indicative are in tension with each other in the biblical theology.
Based on the above exposition, the relationship between disasters and existence of an all-powerful God cannot hold ground since the supernatural cannot be in a position of holding brief on behalf of mankind, who is expected to be the subject in this relationship. The elements of tension and complexity in the conditional nature of this relationship may be understood from master-servant engagement, where the master cannot be commanded by servant despite caring so deeply for the welfare of the servant.