Suffering
The End of Suffering
Conclusion of Seven-part Series
The most frequent answer Christians give to the question, “Why is there suffering?” is: “Humans.” As Walt Kelly put it, “We have met the enemy and they is us.” For a time, Adam and Eve were sinless in the Garden of Eden. Peace and happiness were the norm. But they disobeyed God and the whole arrangement fell apart. Relationships devolved from intimacy to estrangement. Work changed from joy to drudgery, and with uncertain return for effort. Childbirth became painful and dangerous. Nature became capricious. The human race was tossed out of the garden, into the jungle. We have lived in the jungle ever since.
The foolish disobedience of Adam and Eve is clear. They failed to listen to the One they should have trusted. They failed to consider the consequences to their relationship with Him. They failed to consider the consequences to themselves (which had been explained to them earlier). But does the failure of Adam and Eve mean that God is without responsibility for the Big Breakdown?
The sovereignty (control over all creation) of God is something that all Christians profess, though with a range of understandings. The debate centers around the extent of God’s control over human history. There is ample biblical evidence that God’s sovereignty is absolute—that he caused Pharaoh to be stubborn, for example, or that belief in him takes place only after he first grants understanding. There is also ample biblical evidence that God holds humans responsible for all their decisions. Many Christians reason that a gracious God must, therefore, have given people the independent ability to make choices. So the question boils down to the degree to which, or whether God limits his sovereign reach in order to provide for human freedom and responsibility.
God introduces himself to Moses as, “I Am.” Jesus echoes this phrase to the religious leaders of his day. To our ears it seems like syntax error. To the Jewish religious leaders it was unmistakeable blasphemy—Jesus referring to himself as God. They began to gather rocks in order to stone him to death, the recognized punishment for blasphemy. The point is, God presents himself as being timeless. He is a spirit, unbounded by time and space.
With that in mind, let’s reconsider the Garden. When Adam and Eve sinned, did this take God by surprise? Was there a counsel of the three persons of the Trinity in which They/He debated over what to do? “I thought this would work out better.” “Me too.” “What a disappointment.” “Let’s wipe these people out and start again.” “I suggest we let the human race propagate for awhile, then we pick the best of the bunch and wipe out the rest.” “Sure, that might work, but let’s have a plan C, just in case. In Plan C we’ll go ourself as a sacrificial substitute for the punishment they deserve.” “That will definitely work.” “We’ll need a few millennia to explain to these slow-witted characters what we’re doing.” “Okay, all that seems predictably necessary.”
But this post-Fall debate makes no sense if God is not bound by time and He is perfectly wise. It seems necessary that God created Adam and Eve, knowing full well they would fail the requirement to obey him. And, yet, He went ahead with the plan. As God created the world, throughout the process He observes that the results are good. After Adam and Eve are added to the creation, He surveyed the completed work and concluded that it was “very good”.
It is essentially at this point that many people decide they must be atheists. “If God were truly loving, there is no way He would create a world permeated with suffering and death.” Thomas Hobbes commented that “the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” If there is a god, why did he put us in this mess of a situation? The resolution of the problem of suffering begins when God first proclaims his creation to be “very good”. This proclamation was not limited to humans before they spoiled everything. God creates in time but he also sees the results of his creation throughout time. Did He know evil would enter the scene and do great damage? Yes He did. Why didn’t He create a different design? Because the design He created was very good. The process includes the pain. Was it necessary for God to create a world that included suffering and death? Well, I don’t know how we could know the answer to that. It seems there are other creatures in the universe—angels, for example, of which there is a variety. Are there other worlds? I think so, though the evidence is sketchy. And all this is beside the point. The point is: God created this world, a world in which He knew there would be suffering and death, and yet He deemed it a good creation. The danger in saying God did not need suffering to be a part of human history is to suggest that suffering is superfluous to human history. If it is superfluous to human history, it is impossible to understand God’s permission of it. Is the crucifixion superfluous?
Don’t we have to conclude that evil and suffering are permitted because they have parts to play in our development? Is it not likely that we are being taught something more about the beauty of holiness through experiences of the misery that results from foolishness? Is it not clear that maturity is taking place when we learn to obey even when the immediate result is ridicule or humiliation or persecution? Isn’t it through trial that we become people of hope, people of trust? Aren’t our treacherous passages much like that of Israel out of Egypt, and aren’t our deliverances much like their walking on dry land as the water stands on end? We live to experience the extent to which God will go in order to bring us safely home; it is important to Him that we know Him in this way. It is important to us to know Him in this way. Profound suffering in this light becomes a means of profound training. There is reason to hope if we understand that the fire will purify us as it does gold, not consume us, as if we were chaff.
Nicholas Wolterstorff lost a young son to a climbing accident. He wrote a book entitled, “Lament For a Son”, expressing his anger and frustration and sorrow and hope. I’m sure writing these thoughts down was a helpful exercise for him. His thoughts were published in hopes they would be helpful to others, as well. I will quote from that book here: “[The mourners] are the ones who realize that in God’s realm of peace there is neither death nor tears, and who ache whenever they see someone crying tears over death. The mourners are aching visionaries. Such people Jesus blesses; he hails them, he praises them, he salutes them. And he gives them the promise that the new day for whose absence they ache will come. They will be comforted. The Stoics of antiquity said: Be calm. Disengage yourself. Neither laugh nor weep. Jesus says: Be open to the wounds of the world. Mourn humanity’s mourning, weep over humanity’s weeping, be wounded by humanity’s wounds, be in agony over humanity’s agony. But do so in the good cheer that a day of peace is coming.”
Glory out of suffering is the inner swirl of the fingerprint of God. “We see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.” Hebrews 2.9,10. This verse declares that the sinless Jesus actually underwent suffering in order to become perfect. As God He was always perfect. As man he was always without sin and, yet, being sinless was not enough for him to be perfect. Being a sinless, helpless baby was something less than being a sinless, man, obedient to the Father through the good times and the horrible. His suffering and death were the works through which His perfecting took place. He conquered death by remaining faithful, even as the jaws of death crushed him. His trust in his heavenly Father was more important to him than his own life. This is the crucible of life; it is how even suffering and death serve to refine us rather than destroy us. With this context it really is possible to rejoice even in suffering.
But it also important to mention that this dispensation of purification is an experience with a limited time frame. Revelation 21.3,4: “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’”
Armed with hope we are able to laugh at all things. It’s a good laugh when you can go through death, turn around, and laugh at it as you walk away.
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