Questions: How Does a Loving God Allow Pain and Suffering?
He had lost everything….his children were dead, his livelihood was gone, and his property wad destroyed. His health had also waisted away – he truly felt as if he was only one step away from taking his final breath. His wife also felt the bitterness of all the loss – she let the sorrow turn her heart to anger…anger at the merciless God who would take her children from her. However, the man himself couldn’t breathe – and it didn’t seem to be the ashes of his destroyed barn that caused the suffocation. Instead it was the sorrow and questions that he pondered. He had always served others and loved God – why did this happen to him? How could a good God allow this pain and suffering? How could a God who truly cared about him allow this severe pain to permeate every ounce of his being?
Job was not alone in asking these difficult questions. Many of you reading this have asked God the same question: Why does an All-Powerful, loving God allow suffering? The once great evangelist turned agnostic – Charleston Templeton – stated in an interview: “I began considering the plagues that sweep across part of the planet and indiscriminately kill…and it just became crystal clear to me that it is not possible for an intelligent person to believe that there is a deity who loves.”
As I pray about answering this question – I truly feel humbled to even begin to type a response. And I can’t begin to truly compare with many of the great theologians and philosophers before me that worked to answer this question but I pray that my humble words may help some of you who are struggling in doubt due to the suffering you have either witnessed secondhand or personally experienced. For suffering is a universal phenomenon – one that each of us understands. Why does God allow cancer to exist? Why does disease ravage the land? Why does God allow pain and suffering to exist?
To begin to even answer this question we need to stop and focus on one very important attribute of God: his omnipotence (the ability for God to be All-Powerful). We have to start by thinking about just how big God is compared to us. I have a four month old that throws one heck of a tantrum when he gets sleepy. As he cries and stiffens his body in defiance, I carry him over to his swing, turn on soft music, and try to feed him his pacifier. He doesn’t understand his need for sleep – instead he just feels that I am strapping him down on a seat and trying to stuff something into his mouth. He doesn’t see the need that I see. However, as he finally takes his pacifier and closes his eyes – he finds the sleep that he so desperately needed. You see, I am able to give him what he needs though he does not understand it (and becomes quite angry when I try to help soothe and calm him).
Dr. Peter John Kreeft, Ph.D. gives another example that I believe also makes sense. He states: “Imagine a bear in a trap and a hunter who, out of sympathy, wants to liberate him. He tries to win the bear’s confidence, but he can’t do it, so he has to shoot the bear full of drugs. The bear, however, thinks this is an attack and that the hunter is trying to kill him. He doesn’t realize that this is being done out of compassion. Then, in order to get the bear out of the trap, the hunter has to push him further into the trap to release the tension on the spring. If the bear were semiconscious at that point, he would be even more convinced that the hunter was his enemy who was out to cause him suffering and pain. But the bear would be wrong. He reaches this incorrect conclusion because he’s not a human being.” He goes on to say: “I believe God does the same to us sometimes, and we can’t comprehend why he does it any more than the bear can understand the motivations of the hunter. As the bear could have trusted the hunter, so we can trust God.” (The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel)
Could it be true that God knows infinitely more than we do about our current situation? Could it be true that God truly has a plan in the midst of our suffering? Could it be true that we are like the bear – clueless and ignorant because we can’t come close to understanding as much as an omniscient (all-knowing) God? I believe that logically this makes a ton of sense but logic very rarely helps in the midst of suffering. I can know how gravity works but that doesn’t give me any re-assurance when I am falling off a building. I feel that there has to be something more…something deeper that we are missing.
When you have a friend who just lost both of their parents in a car wreck – what do you do to help? You can try to tell them that God has a bigger plan in place but for them that might feel like a slap in the face. You can try to re-assure that they are in a better place – but to be frank – some don’t know Christ as their savior and are in a far worse place (we will talk about that concept more at a later date). So how do we help our friend who is suffering? We simply be a friend – we sit next to them and be present – letting them cry on our shoulders while we don’t offer shallow answers but instead sit and suffer beside them. We share in the burden – trying to understand their pain so that we can help them not feel alone. And so we see that the answer to suffering may not be a logical answer…but instead a very personal one. The answer to suffering may just be to….well… “be” instead of continuously “do” or “solve”.
Isaiah 53:3 describes Jesus as being “despised and rejected – a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care.” Could it be that God answers the question of suffering not in some type of fancy answer we find in the Bible but instead in the very real person that we read about in the Bible? Could it be that the presence of God is answer enough – that we don’t have to try to find some other logical conclusion. When we go back to the start of our note and look at the man who lost everything, Job, we see that after days of questioning – God showed up and Job understood. It was the presence of God that made his suffering bearable.
Friend, I want you to understand something: Jesus understands the suffering you have gone through. When you cry, he cries with you. When you hurt, he hurts with you. He understands the ugliest aspects of evil because he underwent immense suffering. When you hurt – he doesn’t just sit from afar and give you some fancy lecture about how it will all make sense later on. Instead, when you hurt, he sits next to you and bears the burden with you. Perhaps this is why so many of us come to Christ when we suffer – because we know that His presence is the answer that we truly need. We don’t need understanding – we need a companion and comfort. We need a very loving hand of God to hold us close.
For you see, when we see others suffer it can be easy to doubt God. However, when we ourselves suffer it can be very easy to find God. For the Bible states that “He is not far from any one of us.” (Acts 17:27b) How amazing is it that God understands our suffering? How amazing is it that God understands loss? How amazing is it that He chose to experience suffering so that you could have a relationship with Him? Suffering is difficult friends but we have the choice of what to do in the midst of it. We can either turn away in anger or we can rest in the very loving arms of a savior who offers something amazing: to simply “be” with you in the midst.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28
