39
How can I give you any kind of answer? What do I know?"
40
He continued, "You could not do even one of the things that I asked you to do. How can you expect to understand God's judgments or why God has promised his love to his people?"
41
Then I said, "But, Lord God, your concern is with the people who will be alive at the end of the world. What will happen to those who live before that time? What about us? What about those who came before us, and those who will live after us?"
42
He answered me, "The final judgment can be compared to a circle, and just as a circle has no beginning or end, so those who come early will not be too early, and those who come late will not be too late."
43
I replied, "But couldn't you have created all human beings, those of the past, the present, and the future, so that they would all live at the same time? In that way, you could have had your final judgment sooner."
44
He answered, "The creation cannot move faster than the Creator. And besides, the world wouldn't have been able to hold all the people if everyone had been created at the same time."
45
"Why, then," I asked, "did you just now tell me that one day you would bring back to life at the same time every creature that ever lived? If the world can hold them all then, it can hold them now."
46
He answered, "That would be like asking a woman who has given birth to ten children why she didn't have them all at once, instead of one at a time."
47
"That would be impossible," I answered. "She can't have them all at once."
48
"In the same way," he continued, "I have made the world like a womb so that it produces human beings at regular intervals.
49
The rule that neither a young child nor an old woman can give birth to a baby also applies to the world that I have created."