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Where is God? #4
Other People’s Pain
Ever since the birth of her fourth son, my mother has suffered with phlebitis, which would manifest itself as an ulcer on her leg. I can remember, as a small child, seeing her have to wrap her leg with ace bandages and elevate it in order to keep it from swelling. Despite this painful problem, she raised five boys.
Well, not long ago, at 83, while raking leaves, she rubbed her leg against a brick wall and broke that ulcer. Typical of Mom--who’d have to be on her death bed before going to a doctor--she took care of it herself, washing and wrapping the wound, as she has done for decades. This time, though, it got worse and worse, and the family doctor--after finally being given a look at it--insisted the she go, immediately, to the hospital.
We’re glad she listened. The leg had turned gangrenous, and it got so bad that she almost had to have it amputated! Even worse, she almost died. Mom spent three weeks in critical care, much of it with excruciating pain.
During my mother’s suffering, how I wished that somehow, someway, I could’ve spliced into her nerves and taken the pain from her and onto myself. You know what I mean? I wanted to feel her pain, to acquire it myself, so that she wouldn’t have to bear it anymore. Of course, I couldn’t—I couldn’t feel anything of what she was suffering. Her pain was hers, and hers alone.
I bring this up because it leads into what we have been talking about this week, and that is--the question of suffering.
Over the past days we saw that human suffering doesn’t present the kind of philosophical conundrum to the atheist as it does the Christian. For the atheist, we live in a meaningless, godless world where there just happens to be a lot of suffering. There’s no sense trying to make sense of it because it makes no sense. It’s just the way things are.
For the Christian, however, who believes in a loving and omnipotent God, human suffering poses a big dilemma: If God is all powerful and all-loving, why has He allowed so much suffering here? Couldn’t an omnipotent God do better?
Well, we saw that omnipotence doesn’t mean the ability to do what is logically impossible. We saw that if God wanted beings who could love, He had no choice—He had to create free beings, because love to be love has to be free. Even an omnipotent God can’t force love; the moment it is forced it’s no longer love. For us to love, we had to be free.
We saw, too, just how real that freedom was, for Scriptures showed that perfect beings, such as Lucifer, and Adam and Eve, made choices that could’ve been made only by morally free beings. They couldn’t have sinned, they couldn’t have done wrong, were they not given freedom. And, it was from these wrong choices, choices made by free beings--that evil, violence, suffering and death have come into our world.
But, you ask (and rightly so)--if God is all-knowing, why did He create these free beings? He certainly knew what was going to happen. He certainly knew that these free beings He created would abuse that freedom and bring so much suffering into the world, right? And yet—He created them anyway? Why?
It’s like when you take your child to the doctor and the doctor has to put long sharp needles into those tiny arms. It’s painful, but it’s all for a greater good. And if God is an all-loving God--then somehow, in the end, He is going to have to bring out a greater good from all this suffering now. He has to; otherwise, how could God be all-loving and allow this to happen if not for a greater good? The book of Job showed, indeed, that there is a greater good involved here, that issues involving sin and suffering, go beyond even our own world, but that in the end God was going to work out everything for this greater good.
Yet all this leads to what’s, perhaps, the most important question of all: Whatever the great good that will be worked out in the end, how fair it is that God should be safely ensconced somewhere in heaven while the issues are being worked out with our blood, our sweat and our tears here? What kind of God sits safely in heaven while we suffer so much on earth?
Not a very good one, I would say.
Fortunately, friend, that’s not our God. On the contrary--our God has suffered with us down here in ways that no other human being has suffered or could ever suffer.
What do I mean?
Come with me to one of the most famous Old Testament prophecies in the Bible, Isaiah 53. This is a prophecy of Jesus written about 7 centuries before He came. The prophecy gives various descriptions of Jesus, but it focuses especially on His suffering at the cross. Among those descriptions, listen to what it says about Him: “He was despised, and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and as one from whom men hide their face he was despised; and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isa 53: 3,4).
It said that Jesus was a “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” Jesus, like all of us, knew grief and sorrows. The Hebrew word for “griefs” really means “sickness, disease, wounds,” and the word for “sorrows” means “pain”--both physical and mental pain. So Jesus certainly knew some of the things we go through.
But why, why did He know them? The verse says that “he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” Whose griefs, whose sorrows? Ours! Yours, mine, the world’s. What we know only as individuals, He knew corporately.
Have you ever experienced another person’s headache? Have you? Have you ever felt another person’s backache, or stomach cramp? No, of course not! It’s like with my mother. Here she was, right there in front of me, going through great suffering, and I felt none of it. It was all her own. Sure, I suffered with her; Oh! how it pained me to see her go through this. But all I felt was my own pain, not hers. I couldn’t.
You know, we’re so often horrified by the numbers that occur in tragedies, and rightly so. We’ve been looking at the recent earthquake and tsunami in South Asia. More than 150,000 dead! And our hearts went out to those who had suffered so much. We may glibly say to someone else, “I feel your pain,” but it’s just an expression. It’s not really, literally true. Each person bears only his or her own suffering, only His or her own pain--never another’s. No matter how much anguish we witness on our television screens, or all around us, it’s still only our own pain that we feel..
There’s only one exception to this. And that’s Jesus Christ, on the cross, who Scripture says “hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” In other words, our sickness, our wounds, our suffering and pain, what we know only as individuals—He carried it all in Himself. That’s what happened at the cross!
At the cross, the woes of a lost and fallen world, the sickness, disease, pain and suffering—all of it! --fell at once on the Jesus, which meant that He has suffered more than any single human being ever has or could. “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.” Surely, then, He has suffered more than any of us, because we know only our own grief, only our own sorrow, but at the cross He carried them all.
Can you see, friend? The cross answers to the charge that God was sitting up in heaven while whatever point He makes is wrought out among us alone. On the contrary. God has suffered with us, even worse than any of us. Who can accuse God of indifference to, or being distant from, our pain when He knows it more acutely than any of us because He has experienced it more than all of us? What we know only as individuals, He experienced corporately.
Even the atheist Albert Camus (Ka-moo) once wrote the following: “Christ came to solve two problems, evil and death, which are precisely the problems that preoccupy the rebel. His solution consisted, first, in experiencing them. The god-man suffers, too-—with patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to Him since He suffers and dies.” I might add, suffers and dies worse than any of us ever could.
Friend, I can’t explain why we go through the things we go through. I can’t give any rational explanation. I’m not even sure rational explanations exist. All I can do is point you to where I go every time I’m overwhelmed by the suffering I see around me, such at the tsunami that wreaked so much devastation, and that’s to the cross, where I see God in the flesh having suffered, not just along with us, but worse than any of us ever could.
It doesn’t answer the questions of why this suffering, but gives me faith to keep trusting in God’s goodness despite it.
What about you, friend? What does the image of God Himself suffering worse than any of us could ever suffer say to you? Why not make choice to know this God for yourself. To know, for yourself, the reality of Him and His love. It will change you life.
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