Suffering
I wrote this after I returned from a mission trip to Africa. I updated the post following the horrible killing of 17 students in a high school in Florida last week. There are no easy answers to “why evil?”. In fact, that question may not be one that human beings can answer at all. In this post I try to put suffering (evil) into some type of context. Not so much to understand the origin of evil, but so that I can know how to respond when evil occurs.
We saw a lot of suffering in Uganda. Hardships and difficulties are a daily occurrence there. Corruption, disease, violence, and abuse are common. Medical care is not generally available. Uganda is a poor nation, so poverty is widespread. The traffic in Kampala is crazy. It is amazing that more people aren’t killed on the ubiquitous motorcycles called boda bodas. By the way, these carry everything. Of course, people; but we saw them carrying queen-sized mattresses, lumber, even a real-life cow (full size). To be honest, I had to drive out Interstate 10 in Houston at 5:30 PM one weekday and I thought to myself “This traffic is not significantly better than Kampala – minus the boda bodas.
We have a lot of suffering in America. For each of us facing hardships, difficulties, grief, and pain our suffering is as real and intense as the suffering of every human being, no matter what continent they live on. But the suffering for most Americans seems proportionally less than in Africa; at least not as ubiquitous.
Suffering is probably the focus of more theological questions than any other human condition. In a sense, the entire Bible can be looked at as God’s plan to restore His creation to a world in which suffering is absent; as hard as that is for us to imagine. In Revelation 21 John writes “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21: 4). John promises us that this will occur on a restored earth. The Good News? God began the restoration of His people back to a relationship with Himself as soon as Adam rejected God’s rule. And God has not forgotten about us. He is restoring us to Himself even now — the Kingdom of God is here, but not in its fullness, hence we still suffer. Jesus is God’s plan and promise that this restoration will be completed, this suffering will someday end. Not when we all get to heaven, where ever that is, but here, on earth where we will ultimately all be resurrected. That is the meaning of the Good News – the Kingdom of God is here, the “now, but not yet”. We can taste this future as God heals His people and makes them whole – but we still suffer.
People have asked for millennia “whence evil” (evil = suffering). Augustine put it this way “If God were all good, He would only will good, and if He were all powerful, He would be able to do all that He wills. But there is evil. Therefore God is either not all good or not all powerful, or both”. This is called the Trilemma. In his book ‘Unspeakable’ Oz Guinness sums up Augustine’s words like this “The challenge of evil explodes on the believer with deadly force because it appears to make it impossible to hold together three cardinal truths of biblical faith: evil is evil, God is all good, and God is all powerful. Suddenly the three truths seem quite contradictory” (pg. 138).
Some evil, human evil, can be explained by man’s free will to chose to follow other gods. Paul makes it clear in Romans 1 that “they (us) worshiped and served created things rather than the creator” (Romans 1: 25). From this choice to worship, follow, and find our ultimate value in idols such as sex, money, and power (to name the big three out of a panoply of thousands) Paul tells us “they (us) have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity” (verse 29). He goes on from there, but you get the point.
Ok. So we release evil into the world. I will accept the blame for some evil. But what about cancer, earthquakes, depression, tsunamis, accidents, and other things that snuff out life and liveliness in the blink of an eye. Where do all these things come from in a universe that is overseen by a sovereign, all-loving, and all-knowing God?
People a lot smarter than me have been thinking about these questions for a long time. As far as I know, no one has gotten to the bottom of the issues of suffering and evil except to take the easy way out and say “there is no God, obviously.” But I know that God exists. I have experienced Him working in my life daily. I know He is real and I know without the shadow of a doubt that He is good and powerful. He is not the author of my suffering; He is not the angry Father who beats His children (I am not thinking of corrective spanking, but a beating) to get their attention or to discipline them. Unfortunately, too many earthly fathers abuse their children this way. As these children grow up and learn that God is their Father, they ascribe to God the only fatherly behavior they know: violence their fathers justified by saying “this hurts me more than it hurts you”.
God knows suffering. His only son died a horrible death. God grieved. Oz Guinness again “Here is where the silence of the Bible over why God permits evil is outweighed by the Bible’s stentorian shout about what God is doing about it. In the crucifixion of Jesus, shear and utter evil meets shear and utter love; unadulterated love wins out over unadulterated evil. No one can ever go so low (or suffer) that God in Jesus has not gone lower (suffered more). The horrendous evil that looks as if it is the final obliteration of goodness and humanness becomes God’s deepest identification with His creatures. For those who know the cross, the pages of history are stained in blood with the evidence of the goodness of God” (pg. 148).
I cannot answer the question “why does God allow suffering?”. But I do know that in my suffering, God will meet me (and has met me) and give me the spiritual, emotional, and physical resources to persevere.
(As I think more about suffering, I don’t think “why does God allow suffering” is the right question. God allows us freedom to choose. Much suffering is rooted in Humanities’s bad choices, beginning with the first ‘bad’ decision in the Garden of Eden which unleashed a destructive force over the earth. Some might be thinking – “hasn’t God been the most destructive force the world has ever seen? What about the flood? That was pretty destructive”. As we read the totality of Scripture, we see God constantly wooing His children, giving them opportunity after opportunity to return to Him. He is a compassionate and loving Father, but He is also a just God.)
Nietzsche said “to live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in suffering“. To be human is to suffer. I know one thing about being human: I don’t have to look for suffering; suffering will find me.
Paul tells us that “we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character hope. And hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us” (Romans 5: 3-5). Hope? Present hope that God is with me, healing me, and making me whole. And future hope, that even if I am not healed and made whole today, there is power to continue to lead an abundant life now; and an amazing eternal life ahead of me that will be just a real, just as physical as this life, but without pain, tears, and suffering.
We will suffer. God has suffered more. He has promised to meet us in our suffering in the incarnate, personal, present, person Jesus Christ. We will not be alone, even when everyone has abandoned us. God will draw us to Himself and we will know, maybe for the first time, how valuable and loved we really are. I do not want to suffer nor do I believe that God is the author of my suffering. But when I do suffer, I know there is a person to whom I can turn to find the path forward through the pain and grief. That person is Jesus. I believe this by faith and by experience.
Trusting Him,
John