What about Suffering?
In 2005 some friends of mine were pregnant with their first child. They happened to be studying at college at the time, with the intention of going into Asia to preach the gospel after they had given birth. About 6 months into their pregnancy they found out that there were complications. In January 2006, at 10pm they gave birth to a beautiful girl. By 11pm, she had died. The funeral was extraordinarily tragic. The eulogy from her parents was full of such grief and despair. And though the people in church that day were largely Christian, just about everyone was thinking the same thing. Why would God do this to two of his faithful servants just before they were about to spend the rest of their lives preaching the gospel in a foreign country? Why would God do this to them? Why would God do this at all?!? There were many tears that day and I doubt that I was not the only person who wanted to shout It is NOT fair God! It is not fair.
I have been asked today to speak about Suffering and I wanted to start by telling you that in the great scheme of things, God has blessed me with a pretty comfortable life. I have not, as yet, suffered very much at all. So it is with incredible humility that I approach this topic. Normally, in fact, I begin most talks with a bit of a joke or a funny story, but today is different. This is a serious topic and it demands a serious response. And even at the end of it, you still may not have the answers that you are looking for. Answers to questions that we are sometimes even too afraid to voice ourselves: Why me God? Where are you?, or even the terrible Why have you forsaken ME?
Before we get onto what the Bible says, I want to follow on from what James Rogers was talking about last week – what about other religions? How do they deal with the question of suffering..
1. The Alternative Perspective
I want to note however, that as we examine the alternative views I am not seeking to disprove or even critique them, nor do I claim to have an indepth understanding of any of them. I merely wish to unpack them so as to illustrate the differences. So to begin, Hinduism has a clear and comprehensive answer to the question of Suffering. All events are sincerely regarded as a result of karma. For example, a Hindu family that has lost a baby sincerely believes that they are reaping the consequence of actions either of this life or a previous one as a result of karma. Similarly, if you pass a beggar on the street, you shouldn’t feel compassion but you should see someone who is reaping the consequence of his or her karma. Suffering, therefore is not seen as an inversion of the Creator’s purpose, but a divine kind of balance.
Buddhism, on the other hand, rose out directly from this question of Suffering. Buddhism originally was a quest for how to solve the problem of suffering, and the answer was rigorous meditation. From that meditation, comes the realisation that suffering is an illusion and that Suffering arises from desire. For example, when a child’s father dies, the pain is not loss for the father, but because of the child’s desire for a father’s affection. The suffering of a beggar is not about poverty, but the beggar’s desire for a better life. If a child can remove their desire for the father’s life, the suffering will be reduced. Therefore, to extinguish suffering, one must completely removal desire. The whole of Buddhism is about this problem.
The Muslim world view states that suffering is not bad or evil – all events are thought of as determined by the will of God, the finger of Allah, the cause of all causes. Every time a baby dies, a car crashes, someone is murdered, It is the finger of Allah. They teach that God moves all things, but is himself moved by nothing. If you were to ask why, why does Allah do that? The answer comes straight back…He is Unknowable and Unquestionable – it is a blasphemy to even ask that question. For in Islam, you are resigning yourself to the will of God. The very word Islam, in Arabic, means Submission, to the will of Allah; and the very act of questioning God is quite clearly a refusal to submit your will.
For the great religion of the Western world, Atheism, suffering is a result of the sheer natural forces of the world. There’s no purpose or grand unfolding of history, it is just natural! Richard Dawkins is perhaps the best exponent. “In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect. There is no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music." Try telling that to a family who has just lost their child or a Holocaust survivor.
2. The Christian Perspective
A Hindu can’t care about suffering, a Buddhist deals with pain by convincing themselves that pain is a phantom, denying it’s there, a Muslim must not and cannot know why God is doing what he is doing and the atheist? He is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But what about Christianity? What is the Christian perspective? How do Christians deal with the fact that they follow an all loving, all powerful God, yet live in a world full of such horrible pain? A world where a million people can die in a period of 6 weeks in Rwanda, a world where people are struck down by crippling diseases for the rest of their lives, a world where a tsunami can wipe out hundreds of thousands of people, a world where people lose loved ones prematurely. I am sure we have all heard some good intentioned person tell us at a funeral that death is a natural part of life, that it is something normal. Well that is a lie. It is not normal, it is not natural, it is not fair. The Bible passage that was read to us a bit earlier from Genesis 3 illustrates that though God is the rightful Creator and Ruler of the world, he is rejected. Sin enters the world and the consequence of sin is death and pain.
God tells Adam in Gen 3:19, the consequence of his sin:
By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground (the ground which God just cursed) since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
By the sweat of your brow….Suffering and pain will follow you until you finally die. Suffering and pain are very real.
The Bible does not shy away from the fact, it acknowledges the link between sin and suffering, but not in a karmic sort of way, where if I commit a specific sin, God will send a specific punishment. It is important to note that the connection between sin and suffering is at the general level. We cannot draw a specific link between someone’s suffering and someone’s sin. In fact, we even get a snapshot of just such a conversation in the gospel of John. The disciples were waling along and come across a man who had been blind from birth. “Who sinned”, they asked, “this man, or his parents?” "Neither," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” So someone who dies in a car crash isn’t anymore sinful than I am. Their tragic death is just a symptom of a sinful, fallen world. Instead, the Bible speaks of the world being frustrated in its bondage, it is literally rotting away. Rom 8 tells us that the whole world groans, waiting to be freed from the bondage to sin and death and suffering. If you are in the world, you are under its bondage to decay. Every time we feel pain, we are reminded that this world is not how it should be. Death is not right, pain is not right. The world groans…..the world hates suffering, people rightfully hate suffering. Well God too, hates suffering.
Not so long ago I was in Cootamundra, a small drought stricken town in the middle of nowhere when I heard a story of a particular farmer. A Christian man who grew wheat, who had survived the drought when suddenly the rains came. And they came hard, so hard in fact that hail came with it. And 20 minutes later, his entire crops were completely ruined. That same afternoon another farmer, from over the other side of town came by. This man hated God and he started screaming at him. “See what your God has done!? He just picked your field to destroy! The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away ptooey!” And the Christian man, all too aware that there would be no harvest for a long time to come, that it would mean even greater hardship for his family, he rises to his feet and tells the other man: “You finish that verse! You finish that verse! The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the LORD!”
It is of course, a quote from Job 1:20, after Job has lost his house, his farm, his livestock and all of his children. God is very much aware of our suffering, he is very much aware of the pain of the 15 year old I am working with at Anglicare, who lost both of his parents 4 months ago in a car crash. He is very much aware of the pain of the 13 year old girl who Anglicare are working with who was beaten up by her Dad and now struggles to live with her suicidal Grandfather. He in fact knows the pain that many people in this very room have gone through over the years and perhaps even are struggling with it this morning. He is very much aware of it and he hates it! SO you have to ask, why does he allow it? Surely God has abandoned me in my time of suffering? And while Islam considers it a blasphemy to even think to ask why has God abandoned me? The God of the bible actually invites us to ask it, because God himself has asked the question.
Perhaps the best answer I can give you, as to why God allows suffering is that God himself has suffered. That in response to people’s rebellion and sin, in response to people’s pain and suffering, God himself came down to earth, God made flesh in the form of Jesus Christ. And he knew pain, he knew what it was to hunger, he knew what it was to lose a friend, he knew what it was to be betrayed, to be frustrated by friends, to be rejected and lonely, he knew what it was to be in torment and finally, having been beaten and physically tortured, Jesus on the cross knew what it was to have the entire sins of the world poured out onto him. God the Father turns his back on the Son and Jesus cries out (Loud!) My God! (pause) My God! Why have you forsaken me!? And it wasn’t the physical pain that brought him to quote the words of Psalm 22, it was the act of being separated from God. God himself knows suffering first hand. He suffered, so that the punishment that we deserve for our rebellion, is no longer ours but his.
I was watching a movie the other day called Blood Diamond, a film about the terrible loss and suffering caused by internal conflict in Sierra Leone. The main character turns to his friend and says “Sometimes I wonder if God will ever forgive us for what we’ve done to each other. Then I look around and realise that God left this place a long time ago." Is that what God has done? Has God abandoned this world to it’s own depravity, to an endless suffering? The bible states that God has intervened through Jesus Christ. Jesus is God’s definitive response to suffering.
3. The Final Perspective
Yet there is more to it than that. Have a look at the end of Genesis 3, for it is the post script of this passage that is so often overlooked when we read through it. Gen 3: 22 And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." 23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
Did you see it? It is the mercy of God. You’re looking at me quite strangely, how is blocking off access to another tree mercy, surely that is further punishment. God was not blocking them from the tree, he was protecting them, for if they ate it they would live forever. And given that the world is fallen, now full of sin and pain and hurt and torment, given that it is only by the sweat of your brow that you will get through life, who wants to live forever in that kind of a world? So it is indeed the mercy of God that our time on earth is finite.
And Gen 3 points to the final judgement, in Revelation 20- 22. It is the final Perspective. God not only hates suffering, he promises to end it. Because God is loving and just, he will not sit back forever and do nothing about it. The Bible talks about a day when he will judge every action and thought. This judgement is not a theological scare tactic to make you more obedient, it’s a pledge to humanity that he hears our cries for justice and will one day bring his justice to bear against tyranny. Thus as strange as it sounds to us, judgement is a dimension of God’s love. Because he loves the victims of the Holocaust, he pledges to bring judgement against those who bring about pain. Because he loves the Aboriginal community. And he will bring to judge the selfishly rich of the Western world. God doesn’t see just the big evil, but those closer to home. In the suburbs, behind our lovely wooden doors. It’s his pledge to satisfy his and our urge for justice – a warning to make use of this interval between now and the day of that judgement. And the only way, the only way, to escape God’s anger is Jesus Christ.
Which is why Christians have a magnificent obsession with Jesus’ death all the time. Cos Jesus took the judgement on the cross, the judgement that we so thoroughly deserved. He took our sins in his death, yet the resurrection is vital. Jesus didn’t stay dead. The resurrection means that you see that Jesus is himself the first fruits of non-suffering, He’s the first part of the redeemed and perfected creation, the tip of the iceberg of life after death! The point is that what has happened to Jesus will happen to all those united with him and it will happen to the whole world, a transformed world as we read from Revelation 21. It is guaranteed as absolutely happening, because it has already started, it started in Jesus.
In the face of suffering, we are confident that God so loved the world, that he gave his Only Son…yet we are also confident that there will come a day when there will be no more crying, there will be no more pain or injustice. God will make everything new once again. Yet what does this mean for us while we wait, while we survive, while we hang on, in a world full of hurt? Does the death of Christ offer a quick fix to the pain you are feeling? No. No, there are no quick fixes to grief and nor does God want Christians to pretend that everything is fine and there is no sadness in this world. He doesn’t want us to pretend that being a Christian is full of prosperity, blessing, and eternal happiness. There are blessings and there is happiness, but there is a time for grief. The evil of suffering is very real, and very painful. Does the death of Christ answer the question of why me God? There are still no easy answers but we can be sure that Suffering drives you to the love of a God who has Himself suffered!.
I am aware that I have gone over time, but I wanted to end by recalling the story of a man named Horatio Spafford. In 1873, he and his family of 4 kids decided to go to London from New York to join the evangelistic movement in England. At the last minute, Horatio was delayed but sent his family by boat anyway. On November 2nd, the ship Horatio’s family was in sank – his wife survived, but all four of his children died. Upon hearing the terrible news, he boarded the next ship out of New York to join his bereaved wife. During his voyage, the captain called him over and told him that this it was at about this point in the journey where his children perished. Horatio then returned to his cabin and penned the lyrics of one of the greatest Christian hymns ever written. It’s called It is Well with my soul:
When peace like a river attendeth my way;
when sorrows like sea billows roll;
whatever my lot, God has taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul.
Now this is usually where most preachers who use this story stop. Cos years later Horatio and his wife have another 4 children. All of them die in the first 4 years of their life. Although Horatio continued to preach the gospel, his wife seems to have gone mad with grief, had an affair and started her own cult religion. Yet the song continues:
Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.
Pain and suffering in this world are very real. And God hates it, he hates it so much that he sent his Son to defeat that horrible enemy, death. He hates it, and he will put an end to it. He will come again one day to Judge. If you do not know Jesus as your Lord and Saviour that will be a terrible day of judgement. But if you are a follower of Jesus you will pray to hasten that day, as you cling to the love of God, you will beg him to speed the day of Christ’s return.
My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.
Until Christ returns. Amen.
