Health & Wealth and Friendly Disagreement

Just had a really infuriating conversation with a friend.  A Christian friend, who just doesn't see theology the way I do.  That is the "infuriating" part about it-I've never been much of a fan of the whole "agree to disagree" thing.  I just can't understand how two people can look at the same two things and see something so radically different.  We are both Christians, both believers in God's sacred and holy scriptures, yet we come to different conclusions.  I am NOT satisfied with that!

We were discussing the concept of the "health and wealth gospel."  A concept which infuriates me much more than "agreeing to disagree."  To be more accurate, what we were really discussing is what God's blessings look like and the reality of suffering in our lives.  To best sum it up, my friend was arguing that God does not want us to suffer and blesses us for our faithfulness.  I had to part with him from the gate.  Christ suffered immensely--and not just on the cross, through the act of redemption, but throughout his life.   I would argue that, 1.  Suffering can come to us unprovoked.  In other words, it sometimes has nothing to do with our faithfulness, or the lack thereof.  2.  That God specifically calls us to share in the sufferings of Jesus.  In other words, sometimes, as a direct result of the choices we make to live according to God's Kingdom, as opposed to the kingdom of this earthly realm, we will indeed suffer.  For some reason completely beyond my comprehension, my friend had to part with me on those points.  I see them as nothing other than wholly Biblical.

He kept saying, "you're pointing out all the extreme cases" (responding to me speaking of children who die of diseases, women who are raped, people who die in totally random car accidents--uh, how about women who are happily jogging one minute and dead from a fallen tree branch the next).  Of course those are all "extreme," however, they are also all very common (except for the tree branch thing) and have nothing to do with our level of faithfulness, or our "naming and claiming" blessings for our lives.

Next I brought up Job.  This seemed to be pretty cut and dry to me.  Scripture clearly tells us that Job was blameless before God and that the entire course of "unfortunate" events was completely outside of his understanding.  "For my ways are higher than your ways" declared God.   "Did you put the stars in the sky?  Did you place the behemoth in the sea?"  The point being, you don't always need to know and fully understand why suffering happens--sometimes we just can't.  My friend said that Job was the richest man of his day, God was getting his attention because "where our treasure is, there is our heart."  I wanted to bang my head against a wall.

So, there really is no conclusion to this posting.  We didn't agree, and after two hours on the phone, I had to use the facilities and just couldn't continue any longer.