"Dear Josh,
What is your take on God and his necessity for suffering?
Sincerely, Dontunderstand
Dear Dontunderstand,
Your question is one that a lot of people wrestle with. It is asked in many different ways (although I particularly like the way you asked it), here are some of them: "How can you believe in a God of love who lets things like cancer, tsunamis and murders happen?," or "What kind of sick God could plan or allow terrible things to happen to people he claims to love?" or "How can you believe in a God of love who allowed your 57 year old mom to get cancer (a woman who served God her whole life) and die just 7 months later from it only 2 weeks after your youngest brother (19 years old) died in a car accident?" To be perfectly honest, I am not sure I have all the answers for you. How can I explain or even understand so much pain and hurt? Its confusing to try to wrap our minds around a loving God and a hurt filled world. We shouldn't be okay with all of the suffering we see. It should bother us. The insights I have come from my own struggle through my faith in the midst of very personal and deep loss and pain. You can read my mom's story here and my brother's here. This is what I believe when it comes to a pain filled world and a God who loves and is love.
In the midst of such intense pain I remember asking a lot of my own questions. Why did God take my mom and brother? Did he take them or did they just go? What kind of God would use suffering as part of his plan for me? What could God teach me through suffering that he couldn't teach me through any other means? My answers to these questions were a bit unsettling. If I believe in a God who is big and capable of anything then how can suffering be necessary for him to work things out in my life, or in my mother's or brother's life? What loads of questions and lots of suffering led to was a the somewhat peaceful understanding that suffering is not necessary but it is inevitable. To be honest many Christians, even "important" ones would make me feel like one day I would understand why all of this tragedy happened in my life and that I wouldn't trade my suffering for the lessons I learned and the things God showed me about himself. That's a big load of crap, and those people are not safe people to be around when you are hurting. I lost my brother and mother a year and a half ago and there is no new "big thing" I learned or experience in my relationship with God. I would trade so much to have them back even just for a few moments. Maybe some would say I have not been out of the woods long enough to say something like that. To which I guess I would agree, because I am still in the woods, but I believe that is why I can be honest about suffering and about God. I am not too far removed from them both. To say God must use suffering as part of his "plan" for us is to place faith in a very small God. Suffering is not necessary!
It is, however, unavoidable.
So then we must ask: If my God is big enough to do anything than why is suffering unavoidable? Is God all loving and too weak to do anything about suffering or strong but not loving so he doesn't care that we suffer? To answer those questions I think it is best to look at a few different types of suffering. There are three kinds of suffering in the world. I think sometimes we blame God for our pain when really God had been trying to show us a diferent way for a long, long time.
The first class of suffering is the kind of suffering we like to create as humans. We are constantly hurting each other. We murder, terrorize and steal. When some idiot picks up a gun and starts shooting people or some other idiot flies a plane into a building, a lot of suffering and pain fills our world. So how can God allow that to happen? My answer to that question seems ridiculous to type. My answer is...love. You see we were created in the image of God with free will by a God who loves us completely. And in our free will we were given the right to choose God or choose ourselves, choose to love or choose to hate, choose to treat others with love or choose to hurt others. So often we choose to hurt. True love requires freedom and it requires choice and our choices have consequences. If God were to only allow us to choose the good and right things or if every time we made a bad choice God opted us out of the consequences of that choice, we don't have real freedom to choose and God didn't create us out of love because he doesn't really love us.
Second, there are these things that cause suffering that are part of our natural or existing world. Hurricane Katrina, or the Tsunami, even cancer and disease could be thrown into this category. These tragedies seem to have no cause and so it becomes easy for us to point to God as the cause. To understand this type of suffering or tragedy we have to go way back to the garden of Eden. Do you remember that man and woman were created in this beautiful, cancer free, tsunami free, thorn free, pain free place called the Garden of Eden. Everything was perfect until then they used their freedom to disobey God. They sinned and chose themselves and the consequences of that choice affected everything, because everything is connected! The garden changed, the earth changed, it became tough for man to farm, Adam and Eve's bodies changed, childbearing became painful, they became mortal and death for the first time entered the story of mankind...because people chose it. Our earth is still suffering the consequences of our choices. (Romans 8:18-22)
The third kind of suffering I want to talk about is tough because it is suffering that comes at the hand of God. I want you to know that most of the suffering we feel in our lives comes from the first two clumps of suffering. But once in a long while suffering comes from God. Gangrene can infect the limb of a person and if not dealt with it can cause an infection in the bloodstream that will cost the person his or her life. Sometimes the doctor has to amputate a leg to save the person. Imagine an operating room where a surgeon is amputating the leg of a patient with gangrene. Now if you took the operating room out of the picture and you eliminated the nurses and took the surgery garbs off of both the patient and the doctor so that you really weren't seeing all there is to see, it would be easy for you to think that some sick dude was chopping off another dudes leg for fun or to torture him. But as you start to get the whole picture and the operating room comes back into sight and the nurses appear, and the monitors appear you start to see that it is a Doctor not a sick psycho and that the Doctor is carefully removing a part to save the whole, and you would know that the doctor does not wish to do this procedure, he has to. Sometimes, we suffer because God is sacrificing a part to save the whole and this too he is doing out of love.
People always talk about God's will for you or God's plan for you. "God has a plan!" I hate hearing that, it seems like a cop out to me, an easy way to answer a tough question. This makes people think they should ask God, when they are in tough time, what his plan is in all of this. I think that's the wrong question. Over and over and over again in scripture Jesus promises that he will never leave or abandon his children. Yeah the Bible talks about God's plan for us but it talks a lot more of God's presence with us when the wheels of life fall off. At the end of Matthew, Jesus' last words to the disciples are, "I am with you always, to the very end of the age." In fact he says that he will be with us much more than he says "hey don't worry I have a plan." Early he had said, "In this world you will have trouble, but take heart...I have overcome the world." What if the right question to be asking is: "In the midst of all this pain...Where are you Jesus?" I think when we start to ask that question, we start to see Jesus walking with us through the tragedies and pain in life. He often shows up in wats we don't expect him to...but he is always there.
Interestingly it wasn't just your sins Jesus carried to the cross. Isaiah 53:4 says, "surely he took up our infirmaries and carried our sorrows..." He knows you and he knows your pain, and he wants to help you walk through suffering. He has felt it before, he knows it hurts and he can help you through it.
In Romans 8:28 we also learn that he takes the stuff, we mean to hurt others, stuff meant for evil and he draws good out of it. He is the master manipulator (I am sure someone will get upset over that terminology), he can take the worst things in this life and he can make them bearable, and pull little bits of good out of them, he can start to transform the messes of life into something good.
I know it can be confusing, and you shouldn't be okay with suffering. It should always bother you. But know that it bothers God as well. And so he says to mourn with those who morn and to weep with those who weep. So I want you to know that when someone you love is suffering, don't try to talk to them about suffering or even about God, at least not until you have mourned and wept with them a while. He is close to the broken hearted.
Peace and Love,
Josh
