Prologue

You may take a look at my article about the problem of evil & suffering before beginning to read this one.

You may wonder, why in the earth, do good & holy people who follow God all their life, who have a selfless care for others, have to suffer and confront themselves with evil?

We would understand better when evil people deserve their punishment & penalty. But what about the good people? Do God hates them? Or do God punish them for something they didn’t commit? Isn’t that an injustice?

Is being a Christian a guarantee that everything will go well all the time? Not at all! Don’t get blind: it’s quite challenging! But, the difference is, we do have a hope to everything. Death won’t have the final word.

Job is a character in the Old Testament who had to suffer extremely hard, and yet, he kept his devotion to God (Job 1). How so?

The principle of karma is that if someone suffers, they deserved it. It’s a “pay your deed” situation. Perhaps they did something wrong during their lifetime, or in the previous lives. In Hinduism, it’s believed that once a person dies, they re-incarnate into another being, and the guilt of their personal bad actions follows them all the time.

What about Christianity? Sure we believe in the resurrection of the body, and sure we believe in original sin, which has been transmitted by Adam & Eve, but it is a systemic view like the Hinduism? Not really. Job was undeserved of his pain & suffering. He was a holy man. While there are sinners who are rich, powerful and famous, Job was the opposite.

Again, let’s see it in the light of the cross of Jesus Christ.

Job is like Jesus, he was a holy and good man who did God’s will all the time, but received an enormous suffering, undeserved, just like Jesus. He kept a humble attitude in the face of pain and suffering because he’s being totally realistic & humble : God is the author of life, He has the authority to take them back as he wanted it (Job 1:21). In life we become unsatisfied all the time because we take things too much as granted. And when things happen, we are shake up because we lost something that we consider as granted, not as a gift. It’s mostly during these times that we have an opportunity to take a step back, and think about what life is all about. Job didn’t love and worship God because he receive a lot, He loves God for its own sake. That’s what’s matter in a relationship or a marriage. Do you love someone because they give you money & pleasure? Or for their own sake? He’s a perfect example of a follower of Jesus.

Job is then, a prototype of Jesus Christ. In the Bible, we read theses connections as a typology. TYPE-ologie = prototype.

Only, at the light of the cross of Jesus can we better understand the problem of suffering in our life, that not only we suffer, but God knows pain as well.

In Hinduism, there’s this interesting concept of “karma”, which says that if something bad happened to us, it’s because we did something wrong in our previous life; that we have to pay the consequences of our actions later, as we all re-incarnated into another physical being. Christianity is different. When Mother Theresa started to take care of the poor in India, the Hindu people were shocked: the poor & needy deserved their suffering because they did something bad on their previous life (karma). But for her, as a Christian, she looks at it differently: each of them is an image of Jesus Christ, with an infinite value of human dignity.

Karma is about receiving the deserving consequence of our previous action.

Grace is about receiving an undeserved blessing despite our previous action.