“If God exists, why are we suffering?
Oxford Apologist and OCCA Director Michael Ramsen says, “This is THE most difficult question any Christian can ask and THE most difficult question for any Christian to answer.”
Why?
Because it’s not just an intellectual or theological question, but a deeply personal one.
When I was preparing this message, I was thinking back to when it was that I experienced a deep sense of pain and suffering. I was in high school. My third year. It was the homecoming ball and like usual we went in big groups and I was lucky and got to share a dance with my crush on the last dance of the evening. It was heaven. But it didn’t last long. I was abruptly awakened by my twin sister who barged into my room early the next morning shouting and crying, “Ali, Kelly Morgan was killed in a car crash last night.” I couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. It didn’t seem fair. I felt angry…sad…confused. WHY did this have to happen? God, WHY?
I wonder what you remember about the first time you encountered pain and suffering? I wonder what kinds of questions it brought up for you.
As humans, it’s something that we all face, or will, in this life. No one is immune. Perhaps…
- You’ve had a loved one die from sickness, disease or a tragic accident.
- Or maybe you are silently suffering in depression, sadness and despair.
- Or maybe you’ve watched the news and seen the millions of lives destroyed by tsunamis, earthquakes, or tornados.
Whatever it is, the pain and suffering we see and experience in this world often leaves us asking different versions of the same question: “WHY?” Why is it that our God… who is supposedly so loving, powerful and good… would allow so much suffering in the world?
That is the question we are going to take head on tonight. It’s a difficult one with no easy answers. But I am not here to give you answers. I am actually here to ask more questions…to get you thinking about this topic and give you some ideas about how you might begin to make some sense of it on your own.
I am going to frame this talk with three “buzz words” to help give us a big picture framework within which we can explore this difficult and complex topic of suffering: The three words are:
- Mystery
- History
- Victory
Our first buzzword is MYSTERY. When it comes to trying to understand why there is so much evil and suffering in the world, a very plausible answer can simply be: “I don’t know.” A large part of suffering is a mystery that we just can’t understand no matter who we are. Remember Job from the Bible? He was a man who lost everything—his wealth, his wife, his kids, and his health…all in the span of like a week. In the depth of his pain and agony, God was strangely silent until the very end when he finally spoke to Job in a way that silenced everyone. In a nutshell, he said, “Hey Job, I am God…and you are not.”
You’ll have to go back and read the whole story on your own, but it teaches us we need to come to this area of suffering with a humble heart knowing God is God and we are…not. Isaiah 55:8-9 reiterates this point:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Sometimes, as difficult as it is, we need to surrender our need to understand everything. My mom was recently diagnosed with cancer and is going through her first chemotherapy treatment as we speak. You may have some people in your life who are suffering and you just don’t have an answer why. It’s painfully frustrating sometimes isn’t it? But when we ask God to help us in our not knowing and to help us in our trusting Him, I’ve always found that He does.
One thing that’s helped me with this is making a “Questions for God” list where I write down all the things I don’t understand. When we bring our questions to God, we can have full hope that God will give us the answers in his own way and timing either on earth…or when we see Him in heaven!
Our next buzzword is HISTORY. Now when we look at our world, and see the amount of pain and suffering people endure, our instinctual thought is “Something has gone terribly wrong.” We are right to think that in light of the suffering we see. But I would like to suggest that God knew exactly what He was doing when he created the world. If we zoom out and view this question through the lens of the entire history of the Bible, we can begin to understand that the world in which God purposefully and lovingly created is not a wasted project.
I called this buzzword history…HIS-story…because there is a big divine story being woven throughout our lives. First, a loving God sought to create a loving world where meaning exists. To give love meaning, it needed to be a free choice. Think about it. Imagine I called my husband Noah up here and asked him if he loved me…holding a gun to his head. Obviously he would say yes, but it wouldn’t mean anything would it? To give our relationships meaning, God created a world in which love could be freely expressed and experienced… and where people are given their own choices to make.
As we know, Adam and Eve were the first to abuse this freedom, bringing sin, suffering darkness and death into the world, but if we continue looking within God’s big picture story—this is all within His story—and we see that God’s plan is still in tact. In spite of the darkness and sin that entered the world, He promises to give us a hope and future and not to harm us…and that he created each one of us in our mothers womb…before the world began, he formed us…God predestined us to be sons and daughters.…he knows the number of hairs on our head and the number of days we will live are written in His book of life … we are his masterpieces created to do good works which he planned in advance for us to do.
These are all wonderful promises we are given in the Word of God. Instead of allowing our circumstances to dictate our reality, thinking that the grass is greener in some other divine universe, why don’t we continue to let God’s Word be our reality? It may not be a perfect world without any pain and suffering, but if it were any other world…you and I—we—wouldn’t be here. What if… God never intended to create a world free of suffering, but a world in which you exist? This is the world He created and this—even in hardship—is where we are supposed to be.
Reflect on that for a moment…I wonder how it changes your perspective at all.
Not only do we have a God who gave us purpose and meaning in spite of the pain and suffering in the world…but He also stepped into human history as a person…to face it head on. Which brings us to our final buzz word…
VICTORY! God KNEW before the beginning of time how it would all turn out. See, the broken world we live in today was never meant to last forever.
Skeptic and critic David Hume once said, “If your God is big enough, there is no problem of evil and suffering.” Jesus affirms that.
The person of Jesus came down to earth as God Himself to radically reverse the suffering of many by healing the sick, raising the dead, calming the fearful, etc. Jesus wept and wailed, experienced tiredness, hunger and anger. He was so…human and therefore, no suffering we go through is a surprise to Him. He knows. And he cares.
Not only that, but he willingly went to His death to deal with the root cause of suffering by suffering Himself.
Jesus died on the cross and defeated death once and for all. That means that as followers of Christ, we can have true hope that what we see now is not the end of the story. We have the hope of eternal life, where there will be a new heaven and a new earth where pain and sadness, tears, tragedy and terror will be no more (Rev 21:1-4). That hope changes everything about how we view suffering in this life. I am not saying it is easy. There are some horrific things in the world that no explanation can offer. But I pray that you and I will continue turn to God’s Word, embracing the mystery where we need to, but also choosing to see the hope and promise in the entirety and sovereignty of God’s history and the ultimate victory that Jesus achieved on the cross.
Paul’s words to the early Christians are still revenant to us today:
“Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death? No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loved us.”
Overwhelming victory is yours and mine through Christ, who loves us. May we let that truth sink into the depths of our souls tonight.
My prayer, in closing, is that we would walk out of here tonight, not with our questions about suffering answered…but with even more questions floating around in our hearts and minds. We’ve only scratched the surface of this topic! But my two challenges for you are:
- Develop intimacy with God. As theologian and pastor Dallas Willard said, “If you practice the presence of God in the good times, you’ll be more than prepared for the bad times.” If we have experienced the goodness and reality of God, we will know that when bad things happen, he won’t leave us but will strengthen us.
- Don’t be afraid to engage the difficult questions. Think about them, wrestle with them and ask God to give you further insight into how to make sense of them. Deut. 6:5 and 1 Peter 3:15.
My mom texted me the other day as she went to her first chemo treatment, “Feeling peaceful…Jesus is holding my hand.:)” Friends, my hope is that, in whatever trial or tribulation that comes your way in the coming days, weeks, months and years, you too will know that Jesus is always with you…helping you…and taking hold of your hand.