We're all too well aware with suffering in the world. We see in on our TVs regularly – the horror of destruction by the Boxing Day tsunami, the hurt caused to families following acts of terrorism and war around the world. We’re also aware of suffering at an individual level: we too know hurt, disease and illness in our own lives and in the lives of those we care about most. We find ourselves asking: if a loving and powerful God really exists, why doesn’t he do something about all the evil in the world?
The question is complicated, and this article will not be able to provide a perfect answer, or to be able to disperse all mystery. The Christian conviction is that God is infinite, and our minds are finite. We can’t grasp or understand everything about God - if we could, then we would have reason to think he wasn’t the infinite God. What follows is an attempt to state something of the biblical view of human suffering. The article seeks to be an explanation of the truth. Some of the things which follow might, at first, sound harsh and insensitive. Please don’t take offence. Like a doctor who has to explain the bad news about a disease before he can explain the cure, we hope that the unpleasant truths about the depths of our situation will, by contrast, illustrate the greatness of God’s love.
Jesus on suffering
Jesus was not immune either to questions of suffering, or pain in his own life. On regular occasions, Jesus came face to face with both people and situations that showed suffering in clear perspective. Jesus cried at the funeral of one of his friends, Lazarus [John 11:35]. Jesus’ clearest teaching on suffering followed two tragedies that occurred during his ministry in the region of Galilee in modern day Palestine. We can read about it in the Bible:
About this time Jesus was informed that Pilate had murdered some people from Galilee as they were sacrificing at the Temple in Jerusalem.
In this episode, Jesus was told about two tragic events in Jerusalem: the Romans had massacred some Jewish worshippers, and a tower had collapsed on another group of people, leaving eighteen of them dead. It seems that a simple explanation was doing the rounds; ‘Those people must have done something dreadful to deserve that! God has judged them!’
We sometimes hear similar ideas about suffering today. On internet forums around the world, there are some who insist this is the explanation for the Asian tsunami: a punishment from above against particular people and nations. For Jesus, however, this explanation was a load of rubbish – and he said so. ‘Were they really worse sinners than others?’ he asked. Jesus then challenged those who put the blame on the victims to look at themselves. ‘Unless you repent, you also will perish,’ he said. These are surprising words – no condemnation of the Romans, not an excuse to feel sorry for ourselves and blame God. Above all, Jesus says that suffering should stop us in our tracks: it should tell us that we are living in an broken world as brokenpeople.
The issue of suffering has typically been used as an argument for atheism. If there is a contradiction between the idea of a loving God and our real experience of suffering, then an easy way to resolve the problem might be to throw out the idea of God. If there is no God, and the universe is only the random outcome of chance, then it is unsurprising that pain and suffering seem to happen at random and for no reason.
However, this is not the simple solution it might seem.
To put it another way, how can we know that something like suffering is bad unless we have some standard to measure good and bad against? There must exist an objective moral standard, or we wouldn’t ever even think of ideas such as "good" or "evil". And if an objective moral law exists, then where did it come from? It isn’t possible for it to have happened by chance - there must be an ultimate source. And so the fact that we even feel suffering is wrong points to the presence of a God who is completely good. A completely random universe can’t explain why we feel anguish at suffering. We are outraged at suffering because, deep down, we know that suffering and pain are not meant to happen, yet they do.
The problem of rebellion
Imagine an immensely complex aircraft engine providing the power for a flight across the Atlantic. Miles of wiring connects it to the cockpit from where the pilot controls every function of the machine. Now imagine that it is fitted with a particular component, a sophisticated control box that makes its own decisions. The pilot’s instructions feed into it, but the box makes its own mind up, and it can ignore what the pilot tells it to do. Halfway across the ocean the control box shuts off the pilot’s instructions altogether. It decides that its own decisions will take precedence over those of the pilot. This is dangerous, for whilst the control box is making the rules up as it goes, the whole aircraft is in peril. The component with free will that can ignore the pilot puts both man and machine in mortal danger.
The Bible says that we have ruled God out and rebelled against him in a similar way. It’s what the Bible calls ‘sin’. We reject God in the way that we live. We can see this in our own lives. For instance God says, “I am a God of truth, so in my world, you’re to tell the truth.” But we say, “Who cares about you, God? In my world, I’m going to be the one that sets the rules.” And in situations where we can make ourselves look better, or to get us out of tight corners, we reject God’s rightful authority over us and, from time to time, we lie.
This sinful behaviour is extremely destructive. If each of us is always putting our own needs first, we hurt ourselves and we hurt others. It is living in this manner, as individuals and as a society, which leaves us with millions of children living in poverty. It is living in such a way that leaves broken families and marginalised people and individuals hurt.This is the picture of the world given to us in the Bible. The crown of God’s creation, the human race, has gone haywire. In rejecting God, we fail to rule each other, the world or ourselves properly – and all is left in a mess. Even more tragically, we learn that the whole of creation has been cursed because of human rebellion against God. Acts of nature, such as earthquakes and natural disasters, are the result of the damage done to God’s creation through our rebellion. The Bible writer, Paul, for example says that ‘all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time’ [Romans 8:20].
When we see natural disasters, we see the world screaming at us: “This is not meant to happen. It is not the way things were created to be. You live in a broken world.”
So why doesn’t God sort it out now?
Because he is all powerful, God could wipe out the evil that causes suffering in an instant. But as we have seen, evil isn’t just ‘out there’. We’re part of the problem: we cause others to suffer and hurt. So God chooses to permit it for now out of love and mercy for us. If God were to destroy all evil right now, he would have to destroy evil human beings like all of us.
The passion of the Christ
We all know that we want to see justice done and wrongs righted. When we hear reports like the murder of a little child, we want to see the killer caught and brought to justice. It would be terrible to live in a world where people who do evil things could get away with it forever, where wrongs would never be righted. So the Bible says that God will one day judge all evil. Nobody will get away with anything. But right now, he is patiently giving us an opportunity to turn to him and receive the forgiveness and life that he offers. See, despite the fact that we are not innocent victims, and despite the fact God is rightly angry with us for the suffering we have caused others through our rebellion, the truth is that God loves us. His love for us is unimaginable. It is far greater than we can even begin to grasp. And so out of his completely undeserved kindness, God has made a way for our rebellion and guilt to be dealt with, and for his own anger to be turned away.
This is the whole point of the life of Jesus, and more particularly of his death. When Jesus died on the cross, this was not just an accident of history, but it was God's way of dealing with our rebellion and guilt. Christ was paying the price that we cannot pay. The Son of God was suffering God's anger in our place. With painful irony, the only one who was truly innocent chose to endure the most horrific suffering the world could throw at Him, so that we might be reconciled to Him.
All of this means that we can begin to understand the promises in the Bible about heaven. If sin is dealt with at the cross, and Christians are changed so that sin is done away with, then we can know that heaven will be a place without sin and, therefore, without suffering. Just as suffering is real, so are the promises of God and the hope of heaven. This is no spiritual anaesthetic, designed just to enable us to cope with suffering. Jesus’ death and resurrection of Christ act as the pledge and guarantee that what has been promised. For the moment Christians, like anyone else, must suffer. Life is still hard – but can now be placed within a greater, eternal perspective. Christians can know the sure and certain hope of the day when all this will be changed for those who have been made right with God, through the death of Jesus. The Bible describes heaven in this way:
Conclusion
Contrary to what we might first think, the existence of evil and suffering should lead us toward belief in God, not away from it. If we were alone in the universe with no God, then there would be no standard of right and wrong. Suffering would be meaningless. There would be no ultimate consequence or value in anything. Our lives would be completely insignificant. We would have come into existence by chance, and whatever we do would have no meaning or moral value.
Jesus’ teaching shows us that we are right to feel anguish at suffering. God does not enjoy seeing us suffer. Our instincts are right when we are outraged at the hurt we feel and see in others. And Jesus says: the fact that suffering does occur shows us of our sinfulness and need to be forgiven. When Jesus died, he was dealing with the problem of our guilt: the root problem of suffering today – this gives us more of a perspective in the sufferings we see today, and helps us to long for heaven, where tears and sin and suffering will be no more.
All Bible quotations are taken from the New Living Translation.
