The Answer To Pain

I bought the book The Case For Faith (Lee Strobel, 2000) a long time ago but never got round to reading it. Recently, I began discipling new believers, and thinking that the book could be a good review of the basics in apologetics, I decided to make a stab at it. The book hasn't been disappointing so far, and particularly stirring are some of the quotes so magnificently worded that you would wish they had been written by you:

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world." C. S. Lewis

"Since God is the highest good, he would not allow any evil to exist in his works unless his omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil." Augustine

"In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures on earth, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel." Saint Teresa

"It's a self-contradiction -- a meaningless nothing -- to have a world where there's real choice while at the same time no possibility of choosing evil. To ask why God didn't create such a world is like asking why God didn't create colorless color or round squares." Peter Kreeft

"The answer to suffering is not an answer at all; it's the Answerer. It's Jesus himself. It's not a bunch of words, it's the Word. It's not a tightly woven philosophical argument; it's a person. The person ... " Peter Kreeft

So here goes a mini-message on theodicy ...