Suffering 1 - Suffering and the Beginning

Some of you will know that over Easter, Emma and I had some of my family to stay. It was great to be able to catch up with them and show them some of the highlights of Brussels- the market in Stockel Square, the Grand Place, our favourite restaurant, as well as a moving trip to Ypres.

One afternoon I went for a bike ride with James, one of my sister’s twin boys. It was good quality uncle-nephew time, and James for once was being remarkably grown up for an 11- year old. At one point while I was trying to mend my bike chain in somewhere near Tervuren we got talking about God, and as the conversation progressed, he asked me one of the most difficult questions I’ve ever been asked. “Why did God make Mummy deaf?

My sister, Pippa, was born profoundly deaf, because my Mum contracted German measles when she was pregnant. And James wanted to know why God, who is surely so powerful and great that he could stop bad things from happening, should allow something like this to happen, which has affected our family’s life so severely

It’s a question that has been echoing down through history ever since the start. Why? Why does God allow bad things to happen? Why does God allow suffering? And I guess we have all asked it at some point.

People ask it for different reasons, and I wonder if you can relate to any of the following:

1. Some people ask it as a theoretical issue. It’s not that they have received more than fair share of tough times. Perhaps life has gone pretty well for them. They can’t help feeling very uneasy when their atheist friends say that there’s no God- that it’s all a great cosmic accident coming from nowhere and going nowhere. They may even be drawn to the love of the Christian community or impressed by the beauty of Jesus’ life. But then a news bulletin pierces into life’s routine with news of thousands dead in a terrorist act or tsunami, and it all just feels so random again. Why does God allow suffering
2. For others it’s a deeply personal issue. There’s nothing of the philosophy class here. They ask this question because they have been in, or are currently in the very crucible of suffering- so painful that they can hardly begin to process these things. I think of one man who grilled me on this subject about his three children. The first child in the pit of depression took his own life. The second was killed in an accident while on drugs. The third has a severe mental illness which leaves him in need of 24 hour a day professional care. For this man there is nothing theoretical about suffering. Why does God allow it
3. For others it’s a practical issue- they want to know how to help people who are going struggling with suffering, or prepare themselves if it is to come their way. Which it will.

Why does God allow suffering?

Well if you are hoping for nice clear answers to this question over the next three weeks, I’m going to have to disappoint you. While the Bible, God’s perfect word to us, speaks clearly on everything that we need to know, he hasn’t necessarily told us everything we want to know! There are no easy answers on this one. Philosophical scholars and great Christians have pondered this one for centuries, without coming to a final answer. That’s a challenge to us who like things neat and tidy. Life’s not like that

I’ve started a special page on the Link website so that we can have an open discussion forum, and I invite you to share there any perspectives or questions on this topic that you might like to raise. I hope we can see this series as the beginning of the discussion rather than any final conclusions. I would genuinely value your contribution to this series.

I also want to add that when we are trying to help people who are right in their suffering, arguments and knock down explanations are not what people want and need anyway. They need an arm around them and a listening ear, not a sermon. I’m conscious that for some this topic will stir up memories and hurts that we may not have visited for a while. I ask us to be extra sensitive, and caring one to another as a community during this time.

So as we consider this topic (taking a break from a normal verse by verse look at the bible) I’m not promising easy answers. But I do want to offer three perspectives or angles from different places in the Bible that I hope will help us and our friends on this question. These are:

1. Suffering in the light of the beginning (Creation and the Fall)
2. Suffering in the light of the middle (Jesus and the cross)
3. Suffering in the light of the end (Heaven and the future)

So for today: Suffering in the light of the beginning, and I hope you have got your bibles open at Genesis 1. There are two main points that I would like to make today…

1) Suffering doesn’t stop God from being God or Good.

The Bible presents God as all powerful (He’s God) and all loving (He’s good). We see that throughout, but it’s here in chapter 1 in embryo. Look at v31 for example… “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning-- the sixth day.” Gen 1:3

God is God. The Christian faith presents him as having made everything. Just with a word (v3) he spoke “Let there be light” and there was. Incredible power- incredible authority. God is God.

And God is good. These verses speak about the excellence of the environment that God has made for his creatures. It was good…it was good… it was very good. And in this way it reflects him- the creation is good, because it has been made good by a good creator.

Now over the page is the fall of mankind, which we will come to in our next point. But though mankind rebels, and the creation becomes a dangerous place, God himself hasn’t changed. Throughout the Bible, he is still presented as being God (powerful) and being good (loving). 1)

I’m going to come onto a more reasoned argument in a moment, but purely on an anecdotal/experience level you will find that many Christians who suffer won’t say that in tough times they lost their faith in an all loving, all powerful God, but curiously it was strengthened and became more real when as they walked through the valley of the shadow of death, they found the shepherd all the more present.

Personally I remember a strange experience, when working in Oxford I was punched in the face by an angry teenager. Unexpectedly, rather than cursing God, while waiting for the ambulance and wondering if I would ever be able to see out of my left eye again, I found myself speaking to my next door neighbour about how good God is.

But for others this is simply wishful thinking. They put it like this… “You can’t have it both ways. Think of the recent Tsunami. Either God is powerful, and could have stopped it, but he chooses not to, and so he’s not loving. Or he’s loving, but he’s not powerful to do anything about it”. “But” they say “the fact that there is suffering is proof that he is either not the traditional Christian God of love and power, or going even further, perhaps he’s not there at all, like Father Christmas or the tooth fairy- a convenient comfort for adults who haven’t grown up”.

One of the more cutting comments I found along these lines was an online answer to the question “where was God when the Tsunami hit Japan?” And the post said “God was busy blessing middle class Americans with new jobs, raises, perfect children and faithful spouses”, an answer which criticises God and Christians in a double swipe!

But I was helped by John Dickson on this point, and I’ve got a few copies of his little book “If I were God I’d end all the pain¹” for anyone who would like a copy. John Dickson starts his book telling his own story of how his father was killed in a plane crash. And later on he lays out 2 alternatives like a kind of equation. First is the common view…

Assumption 1) An all-powerful God would be able to end suffering.

Assumption 2) An all loving God would desire to end suffering.

Fact: Suffering exists.

Conclusion: An all powerful, all loving God therefore does not exist.

But he takes exception with the words “would desire” in Assumption 2. He says “until we could show categorically that there could not be loving purposes behind the continuation of suffering, the logical force of the argument dissolves even though its emotional force remains”.

And he proposes a second equation…

Assumption 1) An all-powerful God exists.*

Assumption 2) An all-loving God exists*.

Fact: Suffering exists

Conclusion: God must have loving reasons (which he is able to achieve) for permitting suffering.

* Here he & I would cite evidence from creation, conscience and Christ.

In other words just because we can’t find good reasons why God might allow something to happen, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any. We are not God!

Here’s another quote, this time from Tim Keller “If you have a God, great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world, then you have (at the same moment) a God, great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know”².

As I read the Bible, and especially look at the person of Jesus, I see a great God and a good God. While I don’t know all the answers, I am willing to take it on trust that he knows best what he is doing. I’m not saying that’s easy to do. But I hope as we go on in the series- particularly next week, we will see glimpses of the trustworthiness of this God who has given up his own child for you and for me.

There’s a lot more that could be said here, but I hope at least for starters we can see that the presence of suffering in the world per se is not evidence against God’s Godness or God’s goodness. It may just be that we don’t have all the information yet. Genesis 1 says God is God and God is good.

Next we look at suffering from the beginning of the Bible, but a little further on- not Genesis 1 - God the creator, but Genesis 3- Man the rebel.

And the point I’d like to draw out from Genesis 3 is that…

2) Suffering came into the world because of our sin

Have a look at Gen 3:17-19…To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. ¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. ¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."

The Bible portrays everything at the start as a perfect garden. Three perfect relationships- (downwards) man and creation, (acrosswards) man and woman, and most importantly (upwards) mankind and God.

But man has eaten from the fruit God commanded him not to eat from, which incidentally is not sex, or an apple, but the decision to abandon God in favour of our own ideas and self rule.

It’s a crazy thing to do because God is God, and we are not- and he knows far better than us what’s good for us- after all he made us! He protects us and looks after us, provides for us and cares for us. When we decide that we know better all sorts of things go wrong.

Here in Gen 3 we see each of those three relationships becomes cursed by God. Downwards we are out of sync with the creation. The environment is now full of pain (v16) thorns and thistles (v18) and work becomes toil (v19). Acrosswards there’s the battle of the sexes- v16 desire and ungodly rule. Upwards, man and woman are hiding from God (v8) and they are driven out of his presence (v24).

We can never overestimate how serious it is to live in God’s world as if we know better than him. Pain and suffering weren’t there before our rebellion. It’s because we sinned that suffering has come.

Most of us can see that where there has been selfishness in the world like an evil dictator, the people suffer as a result.. But this goes deeper. It’s saying that the whole created order is out of sync with its maker- our whole world is no longer a safe place to be, and natural disasters are testimony to that. Suffering has come into the world because of our rebellion against God.

Now I want to make one thing crystal clear. By saying suffering is because of our sin, I am not saying that the more suffering a person has the more they have sinned. The Bible specifically teaches against that in John 8 where a man is born blind; in Jesus teaching about the Tower of Siloam in Luke 13; and especially in the book of Job, who despite his so called “comforters” arguments to the contrary, he is innocent.

People who seem to get extra suffering are in no way extra guilty. But the bible teaches we have all sinned, and so suffering has come into the world.

So suffering is hard to take, it’s hard to get our heads round. Actually, if you don’t believe in God, then suffering shouldn’t be a problem to you. If this world is all a cosmic accident, and there’s no rhyme or reason, suffering is just be the next thing that comes up on the roll of the dice. We can’t complain about it, nor can we evaluate it, it just is.

But for most of us, who believe deep down that there is a sense of right and wrong, that people matter, and there must be more, I would suggest that comes from reality- that there is a God. Viewing Suffering from the beginning of the Bible helps us to see that God is indeed God and Good, and though we might not understand why he lets things happen, he might be so “God” and so “good” that he has a bigger picture that we don’t know about.

And Genesis 3 shows us that there is a reason suffering has come into the world in the first place- we have turned our backs on our maker. Suffering is part of God’s judgement on a world that has turned it’s back on him.

But it doesn’t end there. Next time we will look at suffering in the light of the cross (the middle), and then suffering in the light of where history is going when God sorts everything out (the end), and while we may not get all the answers we want, I hope we will see that God can still be trusted.

So back to my nephew on the bike ride- “why did God make mummy deaf”.

Well I hope this answer would be OK: “I don’t know… but I do know that he is God and he is good. And I know that because we have all sinned, the world is a broken place”. For the rest of the answer stay tuned next time. Let’s pray.

Oh Lord when we begin to tackle this question, there’s so much more we don’t know than we do. But we thank you for what your Word clearly reveals about your character. You are strong, powerful, authoritative, in control, you are God! And you are gracious, loving, merciful, despite our sin, brokenness and fallenness- you are good. Teach us more about yourself, so that we can say with Habbakuk that even though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the sheepfold and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Saviour. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

1 John Dickson “If I were God I’d end all the pain”, Matthias Media, 2001, p15-16.

2 Tim Keller “The Reason for God”, Hodder and Stoughton, 2008, p25.

Comments

[Jean Francois]

From Jean Francois Sourdoire...

When I went to South-Africa I had the chance to go to the evening service on Sunday at the CESA church of Saint-James in Kenilworth, Cape Town. This was a very special service as they were concluding a series of 3 Sundays on Job, but also because of tragic circumstances : one of their very active church member and his wife had been shot during a robbery gone bad on the previous Friday. He was unfortunately killed and the wife was in a coma. With both the story of Job and this tragic event in mind, the question of “why ?’ could hardly be avoided…

However, Scott, the minister, who happens to be originating from Australia, after reviewing why Job had not been satisfied with the explanations provided by his former friends about what happened to him, told the following story :

A few nights ago, while lying in bed, he heard some footsteps in the corridor. He got up to find Ben, their 3 years-old boy, in the middle of the passage, lying down in a fetal position and crying on the floor. He of course picked him up and brought him back to his bed. And has he pointed it out, Scott had to make a difficult choice between staying with his crying son or going back to bed to finish to watch “Pirates of the Caribbean’s”… Eventually, in fear of his wife or the social services (;-0), he stayed with Ben, just lying down next to him and patting his back until his son eventually stopped crying and fell back to sleep again. The next morning was a beautiful day and Ben woke up with a big smile…

Scott’s point was we could probably learn a lot from this simple story - that all parents could identify with - in the way it could illustrate as well our relationship with God our Father. Did Scott know what went wrong with his son (a nightmare, scared of the dark, whatever…) ? No. Did he try to explain to his son why he should not be scared and that his parents were in the room next door ? No. Did Ben get any answer to his problem? No. But did he feel better ? Yes.

We probably need to accept before all that we do not need to understand everything and that we will never have a look at life under the same angle as our Father in Heaven. This is very difficult for most of us human to live with this fact but we might want to remember that most of the things that we take today for granted - about the origin of the world, the human body or modern technology - were unknown to mankind a century ago. But humans have managed to live anyway without it for thousands of years !

However, the most important part of the relationship between us and God is to know that He is there, as a Father. He does not want anything bad to happen to us, like any parent does not want anything bad to happen to their children. But if it does - and it eventually will as pain is a component of life - and if we put our trust in Him, our Father will be there to comfort us. Parents indeed will always be present to comfort a child that fell off his bike or had nightmares at night…

I found the above story and explanation from Scott great, and hope you will too. Feel free to post it on the blog or use in the coming Sundays if you would like to.

Best regards, JF