Redemption Letter Sample: Fill & Download for Free

Why is there evil if God is good?Couldn’t God have made a world where there was no pain and suffering—at least for innocent children? Even if you blame free will, couldn’t he have made a world where people only chose good? If he really is all powerful, He can do anything right? So why didn’t he do that?It is not logically possible to make a world where people have true freedom yet only make good choices. It is the nature of moral agents making moral choices which requires freedom; they go hand in hand. In order to let people be people, God has to leave them alone. He has to allow them to make good and bad choices or the choices are not really free.It’s analogous to not allowing bosses to date their employees, or teachers to take advantage of their students, or any other authority figure to be in a position where that authority, that fear of the consequences of defying it, completely overwhelm the underling’s ability to make a free choice. It’s an abuse of power and we punish that under the law. God has to keep himself out of the way or risk undue influence.This is not, however, analogous to being a parent and leaving children unattended. We have power to make informed choices and take responsibility that children simply do not have.Creation is an ongoing process. This is significant. We are inputting into our reality every day. People can easily see that God’s Laws of physics are built into the world, but they often miss seeing that God’s spiritual and ethical principles are just as real.We are all born with an innate set of moral values that learning and experience builds upon—sometimes our learning adds to the good, sometimes not. We don’t have God’s ability to see the big picture, and when we make decisions that violate those basic moral values we are born with (that are God’s Law written on our hearts), we have no way to predict the moral “butterfly effect” those decisions will have. But it is a sure thing they will have an effect.Our choices help to create the reality we live in—and that is where most of the evil in the world comes from: human separation from God. We don’t know the effects of what we do—or don’t do—not the full effects. It’s similar to the ancient Israelites and all the laws God gave them— we can see now they were about germs, and bacteria, and black mold, and sexually transmitted diseases and psychological trauma, and other things they did not have a clue about. They didn’t know why God said, “If you obey my laws you will get none of the diseases of the surrounding nations.” They didn’t know how those things worked. We don’t know how things get passed from one place or one time or through generations from beginnings lost in time either. We can’t see that far. What we can have though is the sure and certain knowledge that what we do has impact.But if all suffering were attributable to human choice it would be easier to understand and accept it all, wouldn’t it?It’s the terrible randomness we hold God responsible for—those things beyond our power that—if He is real—we feel so strongly should not be beyond His. It is the unpredictability of the nature He created that lies behind much human grief: disease, famine, hurricanes, earthquakes: a chance cosmic ray smashes into an ovum, which produces a free radical, which in turn tears and mutates a chromosome, and a crippled child is born: the list of human suffering is long.Why doesn’t He simply break into nature and protect us from all that? This unpredictability, this indeterminism, is built into creation itself at the quantum level: wave function collapse, wave particle duality, these are aspects of quantum mechanics and those things that give us the “uncertainty” principle: it is the physics of “freedom” and protection from it would require a complete redesign.An Omnipotent Creator could—possibly—remove all randomness from nature, and crippled children, hereditary diseases and those wounded innocents would be no more; but randomness has purpose, and getting rid of the costs would also get rid of the benefits. and one of those benefits is life itself.The truth is, attempting to eliminate all randomness would probably end up eliminating us entirely: life would never have happened in the first place without randomness.And it is that very thing which creates life that also creates suffering.In biology, randomness means change happens independently of its environment: nature gets a wild hair and does something crazy and random and new. This is foundational to evolution and complexity. The beautiful variety of the amazing world in which we live would not exist without randomness. Randomness is not the same as dumb luck. Randomness is not gratuitous. It arises from complexity and contributes to it.In psychology, randomness means individuals are difficult to predict; the ability to exercise personal choice is essential to our freedom and makes it difficult to forecast our individual behaviors. Randomness in the universe is the only way to allow for freedom; for nature and for humans.But doesn’t the presence of randomness mean things are out of God’s control? Think of a referee at a football game when he flips the coin: he is in charge without determining the outcome. The presence of randomness in nature does suggest that God’s oversight is subtle: but He does not have to be a micro-manager to still be in charge.Even within a system set up for individual freedom and randomness, there is still structure and order. It has to do with something mathematicians call the central limit theorem: the bell curve. No matter how diverse or disorganized the individual samples, get enough of them, and you always end up in a bell curve—causing the statistician David Bartholomew to say, “God CAN have it both ways.”There can be freedom in the randomness of the lower individual level and there can still be order, structure and pattern at the higher level without there being any contradiction at all.Both indeterminism and determinism are built into the universe and into our world and even into us. We live in a reality where polarity is a necessary aspect of existence. There can be no reality without polarity. And without some degree of randomness to balance pre-determined order, all events and all choices would be of one type—totally predetermined—and the absence of polarity would mean we would probably never come to be at all. There would be no evil, and there would be no suffering. There would also be no us.Nature itself would lose all ability to adapt itself. We would lose all freedom—if we were even here. And without that central limit, there would not be order as we know it. We need both those things for life as we know it. That means accepting suffering as a necessary aspect of life itself.God’s point of view is not ours. We see death as loss; He sees it as homecoming. God defines “good” as anything that draws people closer to Him. We tend to define good and evil based on personal pleasure or pain.We are the ones who must adjust our understanding.In his book, “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made,” Dr. Paul Brand, a lifelong missionary doctor to lepers in India explains that leprosy is not a disease that causes body parts to rot and fall off like so many think. Leprosy is a disease that kills nerve cells so the body no longer feels pain. Many might think this is a great gift—but it is actually pain itself that is the gift. It may be a gift no one wants, but it is what saves us every day. The inability to feel pain eventually cripples and kills. That is true of more than just the body too.In the nature of how God relates to His people, suffering is uniquely individualistic. God sees each person’s individual pain. He cares about it on that level: one on one. And within this big universe -wide system that allows for freedom and order, yet contains the cost of personal suffering, He includes not only comfort and power and Presence in that suffering, He also promises purpose and value to it.God could remove all freedom and all randomness and all pain, but the cost of that—to us—would simply be too high. It would protect us from struggle, but would that actually be good for us? That is a legitimate question to ponder.What stories that have ever brought you to tears, ever made you feel like standing up and cheering, were ever about someone achieving something wonderful —and it was easy?We admire overcomers because we know the value of accomplishing what’s difficult; we admire strength and purpose—and God knows suffering and struggle are part of what give that to us.We don’t arrive on earth as finished products. We have input into who we become. In his book RESILIENCE, Eric Greittens says that if you could bottle the benefits of suffering—the courage and strength and wisdom that people gain from it—people would pay all they had for it. But you can’t bottle it. It can only be earned by enduring.But the value of suffering reaches far beyond personal gain. All human suffering shares in the redemptive value of Christ’s sufferings.All evil is rooted in the greatest evil: our separation from God. Through His own suffering, Jesus came and healed that separation, and gave us the opportunity to live and love differently. Jesus not only redeemed us—he redeemed suffering itself.Jesus' mission on earth was to translate his Love for his Father into human language, into a human story, his own. The climax of this translation was in Jesus' own suffering and death. In his suffering, Jesus asked why essentially because he humanly experienced a conflict between his being the eternal Son of God in total unity with the Father and, in his suffering and death, being cut off from, or abandoned by, his Father.He cried "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34) because he who was not only innocent but also the Son of God—the One closest to the Father—took our separation from God upon himself out of Love. In light of this, we must say that no one has ever suffered or ever will suffer more deeply than Jesus Christ. We have no idea what it must have been like for the Son of God to suffer the human experience of being alone. Yet this very suffering and death is precisely the perfect translation of the Holy Spirit into human terms.The Holy Spirit, being God, could not be contained, imprisoned, or destroyed by suffering and death. …The Holy Spirit ambushed and destroyed death from within death and raised Jesus to newness of life.As St. Paul explains in his Letter to the Romans, this is the same Holy Spirit that has been poured into our hearts and minds through faith in the death and resurrection of Christ. Consequently, all human suffering has been transformed by and linked with the Holy Spirit.All human suffering has been made an extension of Christ's redemptive suffering. For Christ has overcome the greatest evil, our separation from God. In our suffering, we are caught up in the Love between the Father and Son, and our very pain becomes an opportunity to love with the Love with which God loves. And we become a part of Christ’s redemptive work in the world.EWTN.com - Redemptive SufferingPut all of this together and it means, in a very real way, God has considered everything in making life and giving it freedom and purpose and value—in giving that creation all his love and every opportunity—and hope.But eventually, suffering is something we all have to work through on our own. We can read about it and talk about it, but in the end, just as in a marriage, we have to work it out for ourselves with the other person in the relationship with us.And that’s always how it is with God if we are to be in relationship with Him.Life is hard is not just a cliché. We get hurt, and we get mad, and we wonder why; and God is so often silent while there’s noise from us; until we decide if we trust Him, and if we do, a whole world of understanding opens up to us.

No, there’s actually good evidence that Paul wrote them both and the arguments against Pauline authorship are not very compelling.EXTERNAL EVIDENCEFirst of all, Ephesians and Colossians are cited approvingly in the writings of the early church. Ephesians is approvingly cited by Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Ignatius, The Didache, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, the Muratorian Canon, and Origen. Colossians enjoys the same attestation minus Polycarp and Clement of Rome.Even the heretic Marcion included them in his canon. These two epistles were copiously quoted by the early fathers and it wasn’t until the late 18th-century did anyone begin to doubt their authorship.UNDESIGNED COINCIDENCES: AN AMBASSADOR IN A CHAINThere’s also some interesting internal evidence against these letters being a forgery. In Ephesians 6:20 Paul calls himself an ambassador in chains (ESV), but the Greek literally says “a chain”. This is how it’s quoted in several translations, including Young’s Literal Translation. Compare that with Acts 28:20, where Paul says that “because of the hope of Israel that I am wearing this chain.” The Greek word is ἁλύσει, which means a light chain or bond.These are the only two places where this term is used, and it refers to the single-chain that bound him to a Roman soldier. This is interesting because church tradition tells us Ephesians was written from prison. Now oddly enough, in the parallel passage of Colossians 4:3, Paul uses a different word. He says: “And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains.” (Greek: δέδεμαι, which means to bind, tie, fasten.)Hmm…that’s a bit odd. Wouldn’t a forger be a little more careful to reproduce the same word? This might seem like a minor detail but it’s important. The eminent 18th-century scholar William Paley, writing on this undesigned coincidence, remarks:If it can be suspected that the writer of the present epistle, who in no other particular appears to have availed himself of the information concerning St. Paul delivered in the Acts (writer’s comment: because the author of Ephesians makes no reference to the events in Acts 19-20), had, in this verse, borrowed the word which he read in that book, and had adapted his expression to what he found there recorded of St. Paul’s treatment at Rome, in short, that the coincidence here noted was effected by craft and design, I think it a strong reply to remark that, in the parallel passage of the Epistle to the Colossians(iv. 3.), the same allusion is not preserved: the words there are, “praying also for us, that God would open unto us a door of utterance to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds,” di ho kai dedemai.… there can be little doubt but that these two epistles were written by the same person. If the writer, therefore, sought for, and fraudulently inserted the correspondency into one epistle, why did he not do it in the other? A real prisoner might use either general words which comprehended this amongst many other modes of custody; or might use appropriate words which specified this, and distinguished it from any other mode. It would be accidental which form of expression he fell upon. But an impostor, who had the art in one place, to employ the appropriate term for the purpose of fraud, would have used it in both places.”Horae Paulinae, pp. 110THE ARCHIPPUS/ONESIMUS CONNECTIONThere are some other interesting interlocking bits of evidence found between Philemon (which is universally accepted as a genuine letter) and Colossians. Col 4:9 reads “and with him Onesimus, our faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you.”We know that in Philemon that Onesimus was Philemon’s slave. We don’t know from Philemon what city he was from. All we know is that whichever city it was, it included a fellow by the name of Archippus. (Philemon 1:1) Now turn back to Colossians and you’ll see Archippus was called out by name as a Colossian church member. Colossians 4:17 reads: “Tell Archippus: “See to it that you complete the ministry you have received in the Lord.”Paley again here connects the dots:“The necessary result is, that Onesimus also was of the same city, agreeably to what is said of him, “he is one of you.” And this result is the effect either of truth which produces consistency without the writer’s thought or care, or of a contexture of forgeries confirming and falling in with one another by a species of fortuity of which I know no example.The supposition of design, I think, is excluded, not only because the purpose to which the design must have been directed, that is to say, the verification of the passage in our epistle, in which it is said concerning Onesimus, “he is one of you,” is a purpose, which would be lost upon ninety-nine readers out of a hundred; but because the means made use of are too circuitous to have been the subject of affectation and contrivance.Would a forger who had this purpose in view, have left his readers to hunt it out, by going forward and backward from one epistle to another, in order to connect Onesimus with Philemon, Philemon with Archippus, and Archippus with Colosse? all which he must do before he arrives at his discovery, that it was truly said of Onesimus, “he is one of you.”Horae Paulinae, pp. 111It’s these undesigned coincidences that fly under the radar by most readers but cut against the forgery hypothesis.BART’S PRO-FORGERY ARGUMENTSThere’s a number of different arguments Bart uses to argue against the genuineness of these two letters, but I’ll focus on the two that he believes are the strongest.“…the main reason for thinking Paul didn’t write Ephesians is that what the author says in places does not jibe with what Paul says in his own letters. Ephesians 2.1-10, for example, certainly looks like Paul’s writing, but just on the surface.Here, as in Paul’s authentic letters, we learn that believers were separated from God because of sin, but have been made right with God exclusively through God’s grace, not the result of “works.” But here, oddly, Paul includes himself as someone who, before coming to Christ, was carried away by the “passions of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and the senses.” This doesn’t sound like Paul of the undisputed letters, who say she had been “blameless” with respect to the “righteousness of the law (Phil 3.4).”Forged, pp 125I have to say, this argument is so underwhelming. Bart has no doubts that Paul wrote Romans and 1 Corinthians. Paul says that in 1 Corinthians 15:9 that he didn’t deserve to be called an apostle because he formerly persecuted the church. You don’t think that would qualify as being carried away by the passions of the flesh?Worse still is it seems like Bart simply forgets Romans 7, where Paul talks about his struggles with sin. Here’s just a sampling:“ Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me….For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing…For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?Using Bart’s logic, we could say that Philippians proves that Romans isn’t a genuine letter of Paul! But I doubt he wants to go there. This just isn’t a very impressive argument.But let’s give Bart one more shot.“Most significantly, Paul was emphatic in his own writings that Christians who had been baptized “died” to the powers of the world that were aligned with the enemies of God. They had “died with Christ”. But they had not been “raised” with Christ. That would happen at the end of time when Jesus returned and all people, living and dead, would be raised up to face judgment. That’s why in Romans 6.1-4 Paul is emphatic; those who are baptized “have died” with Christ, and they “will be raised” with him, at Jesus coming. Paul was extremely insistent on this point, that the resurrection of believers was a future, physical event, not something that had already happened.One of the reasons he wrote 1 Corinthians was precisely because some of the Christians in that community took an opposing point of view and maintained that they were already enjoying a resurrected existence with Christ now, that they were already enjoying the benefits of salvation. Paul devotes 1 Corinthians 15 to show that is not something that has happened yet. It is a future physical event yet to occur. Christians have not been raised with Christ. But contrast this with the statement with what Ephesians says: “Even when we were dead through our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ…and raised us up with him and seated us with him in heavenly places” (2.5-6.) Here believers have experienced a spiritual resurrection and are enjoying heavenly existence in the here and now. This is precisely the view Paul argued against in his letters to the Corinthians!“Forged, pp. 126So does the writer of Ephesians too much of a ‘realized eschatology’ in comparison with Paul’s other letters like Bart suggests? I think not.First of all, 1 Corinthians 6:17 says that believers have union with Christ. If Christ is seated in heavenly places, so also are those who are ‘one spirit’ with Him. Secondly, Ephesians 1:22-23 is a continuation of the thought in Ephesians 2:6. He’s talking about the glorious inheritance of the saints, which is that they are members of Christ’s body. Logically speaking, where the body of Christ is, so also is the head.In 1 Cor. 12:12-31, Paul goes to great lengths to show the Corinthian believers that they’re members of the Body of Christ. So where does that spiritually locate the Corinthian believers? Ephesians simply examines another facet of the same truth.Moreover, what Paul writes in Romans 8:30 could equally cause him to be accused of having too much of a realized eschatology. For it says that believers now, presently, are glorified in Christ. But I thought 1 Corinthians 15 teaches that only after the resurrection are believers glorified? (See 1 Cor. 15:43) Finally, Paul would seem to teach that believers are not just “dead to sin” but “made alive” unto God. (Roman 6:9-11, 13) This means that because of their spiritual resurrection, they can walk in newness of life and not be bound to sin.In nearly all of Paul’s letters, there is an already/not yet tension that describes the life of the believer. While believers are “blessed with every spiritual blessing” right now, Ephesians 1:13-14 and 4:30 say that the Holy Spirit is down-payment that guarantees future glorification and redemption. In this life, we still need to “put off the old man” and “put on the new man.” (Eph. 4:22-24) We still have to “put on the full armor of God” and stand our ground as we wrestle against evil spiritual forces. (Eph. 6:10-17)The believer is seen both victoriously seated with Christ and yet has a great battle to fight. There’s no conflict here. Elsewhere in the uncontested letters of Paul, he uses triumphant language to describe the believer’s position in spite of the struggle they still have in this earthly life. (Rom 8:37, 2 Cor. 2:14)PAUL WROTE EPHESIANS AND COLOSSIANSBart says what can be argued against Ephesians can be said about Colossians, so I’ll stop here. Here’s the bottom line: The external evidence for both of these letters is strong, as is the internal evidence. After examination, Bart’s arguments regarding conflicting theologies in Paul’s other letters turn out to be quite weak. The early church probably had it right, Paul wrote the letters.

This is that age old question: why is there evil if God is good? Couldn’t God have made a world where there was no pain and suffering—at least for innocent children? Even if you blame free will, couldn’t he have made a world where people only chose good? If he really is all powerful, He can do anything right? So why didn’t he do that?It is the nature of moral agents making moral choices which requires freedom; they go hand in hand. That means it is not logically possible to make a world where people have true freedom yet only make good choices. In order to let people be people, God has to leave them alone. He has to allow them to make good and bad choices or the choices are not really free.Creation is an ongoing process and we as humans are inputting into our reality every day. People can easily see that God’s Laws of physics are built into the world, but they often miss seeing that God’s spiritual and ethical principles are just as real. We are all born with an innate set of moral values that learning and experience builds upon—for better or for worse. We don’t have God’s ability to see the big picture, and when we make decisions that violate God’s Law as it is written on our hearts and in our basic nature, we have no way to predict the moral butterfly effect those decisions will have. But it is a sure thing they will have an effect even if it is not am immediate and direct one.Our choices help to create the reality we live in—and that is where most of the evil in the world comes from: human separation from God.But if all suffering were attributable to human choice it would be easier to understand and accept it all, wouldn’t it? It’s the terrible randomness we hold God responsible for—those things beyond our power that—if He is real—we feel so strongly should not be beyond His.It is the unpredictability of the nature He created that lies behind much human grief: disease, those innocent children you ask about, hurricanes, earthquakes: a chance cosmic ray smashes into an ovum, which produces a free radical, which in turn tears and mutates a chromosome, and a crippled child is born: the list of human suffering is long. Why doesn’t He simply break into nature and protect us from all that?This unpredictability, this indeterminism, is built into creation itself at the quantum level: wave function collapse, wave particle duality, particularly the double slit experiment, things that give us the “uncertainty” principle: it is the physics of “freedom” and protection from it would require a complete redesign. An Omnipotent Creator could remove all randomness from nature, and crippled children, hereditary diseases and those wounded innocents would be no more; but randomness has purpose, and getting rid of the costs would also get rid of the benefits. And if those benefits outweigh the costs for the majority, the end result would be the greater tragedy.Randomness is not the same as dumb luck. In biology, randomness means change happens independently of its environment: nature gets a wild hair and does something crazy and random and new. This is foundational to evolution and complexity. The beautiful variety of the amazing world in which we live would not exist without randomness. Randomness is not gratuitous. It arises from complexity and contributes to it. In psychology, randomness means individuals are difficult to predict; the ability to exercise personal choice is essential to our freedom and makes it difficult to forecast our individual behaviors. Randomness in the universe is the only way to allow for freedom; for nature and for humans.But doesn’t the presence of randomness mean things are out of God’s control? Think of a referee at a football game when he flips the coin: he is in charge without determining the outcome. The presence of randomness in nature does suggest that God’s oversight is subtle: He does not have to be a micro-manager to still be in charge. And God is in charge. Even within a system set up for individual freedom and randomness, there is still structure and order.It has to do with something mathematicians call the central limit theorem: the bell curve. No matter how diverse or disorganized the individual samples, get enough of them, and you always end up in a bell curve—causing the statistician David Bartholomew to say, “God CAN have it both ways,” there can be freedom in the randomness of the lower individual level and there can still be order, structure and pattern at the higher level without there being any contradiction at all.Both indeterminism and determinism are built into the universe and into our world and even into us. We live in a reality where polarity is a necessary aspect of existence. There can be no reality without polarity. And without some degree of randomness, all events and all choices would be totally predetermined—and the absence of polarity would mean we never could come to be at all. Nature itself would lose all ability to adapt itself. We would lose all freedom—if we were even here. And without that central limit there would not be order as we know it.God’s point of view is not ours. We see death as loss; He sees it as homecoming. God defines “good” as anything that draws people closer to Him. We tend to define good base on personal pleasure or pain. But we are the ones who must adjust our understanding.In his book, “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made,” Dr. Paul Brand, a lifelong missionary doctor to lepers in India explains that leprosy is not a disease that causes body parts to rot and fall off like so many think. Leprosy is a disease that kills nerve cells so the body no longer feels pain. Many might think this is a great gift—but it is actually pain itself that is the gift. It may be a gift no one wants, but it is what saves us every day. It is not pain itself that is evil; it is the inability to feel pain that eventually cripples and kills.In the nature of how God relates to His people, suffering is very individualistic. God sees each person’s individual pain. He cares about it on that level: one on one. And within this big system that allows for freedom yet contains the cost of personal suffering, He includes not only comfort and power and Presence in that suffering, He also promises purpose and value to it.God could remove all freedom and all randomness and all pain, but the cost of that—to us—would simply be too high. It would protect us from struggle, but would that actually be good for us? That is a legitimate question to ponder.Wouldn’t the absence of all struggle only make us weaker and even more selfish than we already have a natural tendency to be? What stories that have ever brought you to tears were ever about someone achieving something wonderful —and it was easy? We admire overcomers because we admire strength and purpose—and God knows suffering and struggle are part of what give that to us.We don’t arrive on earth as finished products. We have input into who we become.In his book RESILIENCE, Eric Greittens says that if you could bottle the benefits of suffering—the courage and strength and wisdom that people gain from it—people would pay all they had for it. But you can’t bottle it. It can only be earned by enduring.But there is yet another level of God’s comfort that reaches even beyond purpose in personal growth. And that is the level of sharing in the redemptive value of Christ’s sufferings.All evil is rooted in the greatest evil, and that is our separation from God; through His own suffering, Jesus came and healed that separation, and gave us the opportunity to live and love differently.Jesus' mission on earth was to translate the Love for his Father into human language, into a human story, his own. The climax of this translation was in Jesus' own suffering and death. In his suffering, Jesus asked why essentially because he humanly experienced a conflict between his being the eternal Son of God in total unity with the Father and, in his suffering and death, being cut off from, or abandoned by, his Father. "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34)Jesus, who is not only innocent but also the Son of God (the One closest to the Father), took our separation from God upon himself out of Love (Holy Spirit) for his Father. In light of this, we must say that no one has ever suffered or ever will suffer more deeply than Jesus Christ. We have no idea what it must have been like for the Son of God to suffer the human experience of being alone. Yet this very suffering and death of Jesus Christ is precisely the perfect translation of the Holy Spirit into human terms.The Holy Spirit, being God, could not be contained, imprisoned, or destroyed by suffering and death. …The Holy Spirit ambushed and destroyed death from within death. As St. Paul explains in his Letter to the Romans, this is the same Holy Spirit that has been poured into our hearts and minds through the death and resurrection of Christ. ...Otherwise put, we are caught up in the Love between the Father and Son. Consequently, all human suffering has been transformed by and linked with Holy Spirit. All human suffering has been made an extension of Christ's redemptive suffering. For Christ has overcome the greatest evil, our separation from God. This means that for the Christian, suffering has become an opportunity to love with the Love (Holy Spirit) with which God loves. EWTN.com - Redemptive SufferingPut all of this together and it means, in a very real way, God has all the bases covered. But eventually, suffering is something we all have to work through on our own.We can read about it and talk about it, but in the end, just as in a marriage, we have to work it out for ourselves with the other person in the relationship with us. And that’s always how it is with God if we are to be in relationship with Him.Life is hard is not just a cliché. We get hurt, and we get mad, and we wonder why; and God is so often silent while there’s noise from us, until we decide if we trust Him, and if we do, a whole world of understanding opens up to us.