As a pastor I witness quite a lot of suffering. My wife and I are often among the first people contact after something terrible happens. At first there's just shock, numbness and disconnectedness. After the shock wears off and the real pain starts, people begin looking for answers. God is suddenly not who they thought he was. They want to believe that God is good in the same way he was before. They want us to help them understand how what they're going through is good and how it's God's expression of love for them.
The truth is, the honest response is usually this: there is no pat answer to be had. It's really going to hurt, maybe for a long time. There's no fixing it. There's no re-framing it. All we can do is bear community witness that it just flat out sucks. The worst thing that can happen often happens at this stage. People who should be relying on a loving God at this time more than any other find themselves unable to trust him because he's to blame for what happened. Their hearts cry out for justice. In the throes of their pain they ask, "How can I love a God who hurts me like this?"
The classic philosophical quandary is this: if God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all good, how can bad things happen at all? From a philosophical standpoint, evil should not exists if those things about God are true. Either that, or God is not good. The response to this quandary typically tries to clarify what we mean by the word "evil". After all, what seems evil from our standpoint might be perfectly good from the divine point of view. The problem with that answer is that it's a dangerous road to travel. At a certain point our good becomes God's evil and vice verse; at that stage God could just as well be a devil as anything else. The best we could say about him is, "we know him not". Furthermore, if we can know little or nothing about what is actually good or evil to God, then we have no basis for a moral framework of any kind. How would we know what is good or bad if not by discerning with respect to God's ultimate moral authority? That's a big, big problem.
Another response is a different kind of appeal to the divine viewpoint, where we say that from our limited point of view it is reasonable to say that we cannot possibly understand the affect our suffering has on other beings and other circumstances. Our suffering could produce good that we would never know about. We have the narrow point of view and God has the long view. It's like a tapestry that we're looking at from the underside, where it's all knots and tangles. If we were only able to look at it from the other side we'd see the beautiful design that's the result of all of those tangles. The problem with this point of view is that it's deeply unsatisfying. It's not something that you can live. It also runs contrary to the holistic biblical witness that this is, indeed a broken and hurting world in need of rescue. In other words, what we experience the bible verifies as true, but offers to permanent remedy aside from the new heaven and the new earth (Revelation 21).
A third approach is to postulate that a good God could allow suffering if this suffering acted to improve the sufferer. For example, many parents inflict physical pain on their children (spanking) knowing that the child will (ideally) be bettered by it. God sends us painful circumstances (or allows them) because they build trust in him and reliance on him. There are two problems with this theory. First, while the idea sounds good theoretically, our experience usually is that God's reasoning is not at all clear. In other words, people rarely know why it is that they're suffering or what they're supposed to learn as a result. Consequently, if God desires that we be improved but will not tell us what exactly the improvement should be, then the effect is usually exactly the opposite. People are less inclined to trust a God who they believe inflicts arbitrary suffering to build relationship.
Lastly, there's the idea that bad things happen to provide opportunity for God's glory to be revealed. No cost is too high (so it is said) if God receives glory. The problem with this is, it's really not biblical. Neither of the passages in the bible usually used to back it up (Job and John 9:1-5) are actually trying to teach that. The point to Job is in fact the chaos we live in, the affect the accuser (satan) has on our lives, and the way God wants us to respond to that. In the John passage the point is the healing of the blindness, not the blindness itself. Whenever suffering is addressed the overall biblical witness is that the universe is a complex place that only God truly understands. If God is glorified by our suffering, it is only incidental.
The thing is, most people can countenance the idea of suffering generally speaking; it's the meaningless suffering that throws us. It's the Holocaust or a child suffering and dying. It's an utterly senseless, arbitrary murder or an illness that comes out of nowhere and kills a person is his/her prime. It's a car accident or a natural disaster. It's the things that neither build relationship nor improve us, for which we will never have any answers.
There is another way to think about all of this, of course. What if we believed that God didn't do it at all? Of course, that would mean subscribing to a belief that God is not in control of every event all the time. That would mean believing that things happen contrary to God's will all day every day. But that's true, isn't it? God doesn't create, desire or will sin (Genesis 1:31). He created us for a relationship of love, and that requires real freedom, which comes with consequences that God must let us live with. Sickness and death are part of the fall, not part of God's perfect will for us (Genesis 4, Romans 6:23, 1 Corinthians 15:21). The accuser is alive and well, busy wreaking havoc in this world (John 12:31, 2 Corinthians 4:4, Eph 2:2).
What if we really believed that God doesn't want these things for us any more than we want them for us? What if we believed that he greatly desires to bring them to a halt, but that the only way to do that would be to sacrifice the only thing he desires even more, that more people might come to know him (2 Peter 3:8-9)? If we believed that then we could fully engage a loving, good God who suffers with us (Hebrews 2:18, Philippians 2:6-8), who can be relied on to step into our lives and live them with us. That God could bring healing into our suffering precisely because he didn't cause it. That God not only has the power to heal us, but has the desire to do it. For our part, we would become a people who did not try to reject the ambiguity of the world by finding God's will in suffering. Rather, we would work in the midst of the ambiguity of the world to apply God's will to suffering.
God is our advocate and comforter. He is not a rule book, a rigid morality code or an encyclopedia. He can be trusted to love us intensely and dynamically, running to our rescue when we need him most. This is the God of scripture, who tells us we can trust him. He will never leave, forsake or forget us (Jos 1:5, Is 49:15-16). He loves us and moves heaven and earth to bring about the best (Jer 29:11-14, Rom 8:28).
This is not a new view of God; it is God has he reveals himself in Christ. This is all we can ever know of him. This is God who will stop and nothing, who will go to any lengths to rescue us. This is the real God, who lays his hands on you and tells you that everything will be alright...because it will.
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