How Can I Believe In A Good God In A Suffering World? Series

How Can I Believe in a Good God in a Suffering World?

Series: How Can I Believe?

Brad Bailey – May 13, 2018

Intro

We are continuing in our series entitled: How Can I Believe? We are engaging the questions that can be a natural part of the process of faith. So in the recent past weeks we have engaged the questions of How can I believe in God?…the Bible.. historical Jesus… in any one truth… and today we are going to engage the question:

How Can I Believe in a Good God in a Suffering World?

or it might be said as…

How Can I Trust A God Who Allows Suffering?

On a philosophical level this is often referred to as The Problem of Evil. It might take the form of a question such as

“If God is all powerful; and God is all loving, then he would not allow evil and suffering to exist? So the evil and suffering we experience must mean that God is not all powerful…or not all loving…or doesn’t exist.

More than merely a philosophical question, the problem of evil always involves a personal dimension as well.

We all know something of how this world seems to have something wrong… of the suffering so inherent to our human condition.

• A world in which nice people can feel painfully lonely.

• A world in which marriages can become battlefields and the children often bear the scars.

• A world of crippling conditions…physically, mentally, emotionally…with us or around us.

• A world in which diseases such as cancer take too many we love too soon.

• A world in which parents die and our pasts feel lost; children die and futures feel lost.

And of course even the suffering of those far away doesn’t completely escape us!

• The hungry children in drought stricken countries we pray for…yet so many still die.

• The oppressed and persecuted…still beaten.

The question we consider is a question for all who have wept and wondered.

Is it a little odd to engage such a question on Mother’s Day?

I suppose. But… I don’t know any role, which must by it’s very nature, faces the suffering of this world more than that of a mother.

On one level…we acknowledge that mother’s themselves are willing to suffer for the sake of their children… deprivation of sleep… space… of any time for their own needs.

But on another level… it is the heart of a mother who may feel most deeply the suffering of those they brought into this world.

No doubt there are some mothers who may not have seemed to care…or even been capable of caring as they should. But one can sense the tension with nature…for there is a bond that naturally is given to protection… and feels the suffering of their child as if it were their own… perhaps more than their own.

To every mother who wonder… to every person who wonders. You are in good company.

The best of the prophets raised this very issue, with different slants.

Habakkuk asked, "Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong?" (Hab. 1:3).

David cried out, "How long will the enemy mock you?" (Ps. 74:10).

And then there is Job… an entire Book in the Scriptures that follows the life of one who suffers and the issues it raises. And one of the elements that is captured in that story…is how his friends come…with good intentions…but with answers that prove simplistic.

Reminds us how easy it is to offer simple answers that only add new types of burden to those suffering.

It is not for us to “solve” the problem of evil… but to consider it in the light God offers.

How much light? Enough to live by.

I’ve noted throughout this series…that in regard to the transcendent question at hand… it is helpful to understand that we are by nature finite … limited…and our belief is always a matter of trusting what we don’t understand by what we do understand.

It is helpful to understand that it is a question that everyone faces.

Most people think the problem of evil and human suffering is a problem for those whose view of the world is understood in light of God’s Word; without realizing that everyone hold’s a view of the world and each world view must evaluated in the light of reason.

The questioner must realize that the mere question itself raises issues and one must consider among alternatives. We each have to consider what makes the most sense of our experience. And this is why the very nature of feeling that there is something wrong…fundamentally wrong… leads many to the reality of God. Because if we believe there is something fundamentally wrong… it can only be based in something fundamentally right. To declare that there is nothing but a material world with no real meaning…just by natural selection… removes the claim that there is any fundamental right or wrong.