We have all been appalled by the events in Iraq over this last week with accounts of the shooting and beheading of men, women and children who have refused to convert to Islam because of their commitment to Jesus Christ. They are truly Christian martyrs.
Our hearts cry out for Christians in Iraq, Syria, Nigeria (there are still more than one hundred kidnapped teenage girls hostage to Boko-Haram), South Sudan, and many other places. And we find ourselves asking with the Psalm writer (Psalm 13),
‘How long, O Lord?’
Where do we look for answers? In the power of western forces? While there is now some action, it is too little, too late. Perhaps one of the reasons for the lack of western involvement lies in the silence of Christians in the West. Over the last forty years our voice has become muted in the public square. We have not been willing to look for ways to ask questions or speak out against the self-interest of our times with wise, clear, bold and reasoned thought.
Consider the opening lines of Isaiah 40: “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God”. Handel’s Messiah opens with these very words. Isaiah was speaking to people who had been brought low by conquering armies. For hundreds of years they had been told they were God’s special people. He had given them their land and success, but now they were under siege by the armies of pagan Babylon. Picture that scene: mothers weeping for their children; people being forcibly taken to another land, their homes and city a smoking ruin.
We can only imagine the shattering effect those events would have had on the faith of those people. The temptation to reject their God would have been enormous. Even the strongest of believers would have been tempted to think, ‘God doesn’t care. How could he do this to us?’
How did the faith of ancient Israel survive? Through the voice of the prophets like Isaiah. His opening words in chapter 40 have a timelessness to them as they speak to people who are suffering in every age: Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. And the tenderness of Isaiah’s words continues in 40:11:
He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom…’
How could Isaiah speak like this? When things are going well people tend to forget God. And those who go to church tend to put aside the tough questions. But when tragedy strikes or when your nation, your family, or you, are threatened, the bottom can drop out of your faith.
Let me say, that kind of religion is gutless. In tough times a pocket-sized God is no good to anybody. Only a big God can sustain us. Only a God who can overrule our world when it is falling into chaos around our ears, can say to us, with any degree of credibility, ‘Comfort’.
How can we be sure this is not fiction? Isaiah goes on: The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken (Isaiah 40:5).
These words were fulfilled in part with the coming of Jesus Christ. Three of the Gospel writers quote this very text. But Isaiah was also speaking of the far, far greater day, when we shall all see Jesus Christ in all his glory. This news about this God cannot and will not be contained: it must be shouted from the rooftops – not just in the cities of Judah, but to the nations of the world, even if in the face of suffering. For here is the God worth knowing – the awesome, true and caring God, who is Lord of all.
Isaiah concludes his great chapter saying that ‘Young men will grow weary; their energy will pass, and their empires will one day be nothing but dust. But the people of the living God will never become extinct.
One of the things we need to do is pray daily for God’s people who are suffering. We also need to ask whether we are being silenced by fear or lack of confidence in God. Jesus warns us that we will encounter challenges and various kinds of suffering. So, let’s pray that the Lord will give us the wisdom to know the questions we should ask and the words to say, and the grace and boldness to speak.
Because the subject of suffering is so important and so complex I am taking a third week to draw together some key points. I welcome any comments you have. To sum up:
1. Flawed. It may sound harsh, but we need to recognize that none of us deserves any good thing from God. We deserve judgment rather than mercy. Nevertheless it is God’s desire that we come to him. Sometimes he will use the tragedies of life, not so much because he is especially angry with one person or group, but rather as a wake-up call. We need to sort out our relationship with him while there is time (Luke 13:1-5; 2 Peter 3:8-10).
2. Justice. We often overlook the fact that it is God’s ultimate plan to uphold all truth and justice. A good and perfectly just God is behind the universe. One day he will bring us all into his courtroom. Perfect justice will be done (Luke 12:1-7).
3. Failures. Suffering sometimes occurs because of the disobedience of the church. It is one thing to blame society for making a mess of its relationship with God, but we also need to ask: To what extent are professing Christians or the church to blame? How often have we been so caught up with our life that we are silent about God? We may respond to the world’s injustices or poverty by mailing a check to a Christian care program, but we give little heed to the thought that we may have contributed to the ills of others through the inconsistencies of our life or the public disagreements we have with one another. And all too often there has been a failure to make church truly welcoming, forgiving, and joyful in times of change.
4. Transformation. In the meantime it is God’s desire that we come to know him and grow in our relationship with him. It follows that some of our experiences of pain will occur because of God’s wakeup call or his hand of discipline (Hebrews 12:3-13). Sometimes God allows suffering, to test us and to stretch our confidence in him. There may also be occasions when, for reasons hidden to us, God has given us a special place in participating in Christ’s share of suffering for the sake of others (Romans 5:1-5; 8:17ff; Colossians 1:24-27).
5. Answers? We also need to be honest and admit there will be times when there do not seem to have any intellectual answers to our suffering. Job’s questions, for example were not answered in the strict sense that we might have expected. Instead, God himself asked Job a series of questions concerning his own majesty and nature (Job 38-41). Job’s response was to return to God in humble repentance and wholehearted trust even though he didn’t get all the answers (Job 42). Jacob’s son, Joseph (Genesis 50:19, 20), and Jesus himself, exemplified a confidence that God would ultimately vindicate them (Romans 8:28ff).
6. Jesus. We need to remember that God, in Jesus Christ has experienced every agony that we experience. We may not always understand our plight or the plight of others, but we can be comforted and comfort others in the sure knowledge that God in Christ has tasted the agony of injustice, the pain of suffering, ignominy and death (Hebrews 2:18). On the cross, when evil humankind crucified the sinless Son of God, when Jesus took evil on himself without retaliation, God bore the sin of those who turn to him. It is the cross of Christ that gives us confidence that God has our best interests at heart. Jesus’ resurrection assures us of this.
In Romans 8:38 we read,
“I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Why do appalling things happen?Why was flight MH17 shot down? We all want answers.
The reality of pain and suffering is probably one of the biggest reasons some philosophers and people generally, use to argue that a good and loving God cannot exist.
The line of argument goes like this: A God who is all powerful and all loving would use his vast resources to end suffering and pain for his creatures. BUT, suffering and pain exist. Therefore a God who is all-powerful and all loving does not exist.
Simple logic. At first sight this reasoning makes sense. However, consider the response by philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga who conclude, not that God does not exist, but that a God who is all powerful and all loving has a bigger plan.
It’s a good response, but it begs another question: Is there any evidence of a bigger planand, if so, what is it? To answer this we need to explore themes we find in the New Testament.
Colossians 2:13-15 reads:
You, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having cancelled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him.
Captives.The Bible sees history as divided into two great eras. Before Jesus came there was the present age— the world. Now that Jesus has come a new era has begun—the age to come. For the present this stands alongside the first era. Yes, God has always been in control but the first era is in bondage to sin and evil. In it we are captive to moral laws we can’t keep. Even when God’s written law was revealed, we couldn’t keep it.
Satan, our accuser, has power over us because he holds a catalogue of our failures to present to God’s court of justice. God, being the perfect and just God he is, has no other choice but to condemn us to death because sin – treachery against him – is a capital offense.
C.S. Lewis captures these elements in his Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Edmund had betrayed Peter, Susan and Lucy, and Aslan himself. The white witch demanded Edmund’s life saying he had broken ‘the laws of the deep’. “His life is forfeit,” she shrieked.
This is our natural condition. Alienated from God we are in the power of spiritual forces we cannot defeat and we are en route to a grave we can’t avoid. And so we are captive to the pain, suffering and evil that we have brought upon ourselves.
But then came Jesus.At a single stroke he smashed the bars of this spiritual prison of the first age. He wiped out the moral debt of the laws we couldn’t obey and disarmed the demonic powers we couldn’t overcome. He also abolished death whose clutches we couldn’t escape.
How is this extraordinary freedom achieved? Paul tells us twice: By the cross. For Paul, the first era has given way to the world to come. The cross is where Jesus Christ has potentially turned our captivity into a glorious liberty.
Having created us, not as robots but in his image, God gave us the capacity of choice and with it the potential to turn from him and experience the consequential suffering. However, God’s bigger plan has been to use his vast resources to destroy the enmity – our hostility towards him and towards one another, and the suffering and pain that follows – without destroying the enemy – you and me.
It’s a plan we would never have dreamt of – God himself providing the means of our restoration as the glory of his creation. No wonder Paul the Apostle wrote,
The sufferings of this present age cannot be compared with the glory that is to be revealed (Romans 8:18).
Why do appalling things happen?It’s a question we all want answered. For the professing Christian who says that God not only exists, but that he is compassionate and all-powerful, it is one of life’s toughest questions. Why doesn’t God step in and do something to relieve the suffering and pain, and clean up the mess?I have to say, there are no complete answers.
What then can we say about this profound and perplexing subject? Today and next Wednesday I will briefly touch on a number of points.
Our cry for justice…!All of us have within us a sense of right and wrong. This suggests that we live in a universe that has meaning and is moral. If we lived in a world that had come into existence simply by the process of spontaneous change, logically we would be nothing but particles, bumping around in some sort of meaningful connection. Our conscious state would be nothing more than electrical discharges in the human brain.
Now it seems to me that it’s very difficult to be morally indignant about behavior that results from quarks smashing together. Consequently the issues of evil and suffering and the cry for justice lose their relevance in a purely evolutionary framework.
Our cry for justice is much more in line with the Bible’s teaching that it is right to condemn all wicked violence, all taking of innocent life. For the Bible condemns such activities whether in ourselves or in others, and we condemn the perpetrators of these deeds. The Bible helps us to know evil when we see it.
So will justice ever occur?If we agree that we live in a moral universe, the picture the Bible paints makes a lot of sense and is very satisfying. Winston Churchill once said that there had to be a hell, to bring the likes of Lenin and Trotsky and Hitler to justice. The good news is that one day God will call everyone to account.
And here there is a sting in the tail. If we want justice to be done to others, we must agree that we too need to be brought to account. Yes, we long for justice and vindication, but we, too, are guilty before God.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote:
‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’
The roots of evil are intertwined amongst all humanity, including us. God’s judgment is just and will be without discrimination. Of this we may be very sure. We need not despair that sin will go unpunished. But we also will need to be prepared.
So, why doesn’t God step in now? The Bible answers by telling us that God stays his hand for the present because he wants to give all men and women the opportunity to turn to him in repentance. The good news is that God will vindicate us when we turn to Jesus Christ. His judgment may be slow as we count time, but it is very sure (2 Peter 3:9-13).
Here we see the passion of God’s love and our ultimate hope. We have this because of the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross of Jesus comes between God’s good creation, ruined by human sin with which the Bible begins, and the promise of a restored creation with which the Bible ends.
‘God will wipe away every tear from our eyes… there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away’ (Revelation 21:4).
Sometimes we may be tempted to doubt the supernaturalism of Jesus – his virgin birth, his miracles and his resurrection. In turn we may doubt the exclusiveness of Christianity – that it is through Jesus alone we have any hope of being restored in our relationship with God and knowing the joyful assurance of eternal life.
Evidence. How can Christianity be anything but supernatural if at a certain time in a certain place divinity did walk among men and women? Either Jesus did rise from the dead before many witnesses or he didn’t. If he didn’t, there’s no point in trying to salvage Christianity, by calling it, as some do, a myth.
Paul the Apostle expresses the logic of this in 1 Corinthians 15:14, 19: ‘If Jesus isn’t raised our faith is empty… and we’re to be pitied’. He, with the rest of the New Testament, is insistent: our faith rests on the testimony of eyewitnesses – the apostles and five hundred others – who said they saw Jesus physically alive, risen from the dead.
Not an irrational leap in the dark. Yes, Christianity is a religion of faith, but as I wrote last week, this doesn’t mean it involves some kind of irrational leap into the dark. Consider 2 Peter 1:16:
We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.
What we often overlook today is that Peter and Paul and countless others, overturned the Roman world, not by terrorism or force of arms, but by the example of their lives and the testimony of their lips. Can we imagine the disciples of Jesus constructing a monstrous lie? We have to assess the reliability of their testimony. Christianity is not based on myth, but memory. Peter invites us to trust those memories. He wants to silence the doubts that arise within us, especially when times get tough.
>Explanation.As you read this you may be thinking, ‘I have no problem with the facts; my problem is the interpretation. How do we know the Bible got it right?’
Let’s consider Jesus’ death. His crucifixion is a fact: historians outside the Bible tell us this happened. But the apostles said that Jesus died on the cross so that those who turn to him might be forgiven and reconciled with God. There’s no way a mere observer looking at the cross would have come to that conclusion. That’s an interpretation. So how can we be sure that apostles like Peter got it right? He answers our question in 1:19ff –
We have the prophetic message more fully confirmed. You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation…
Peter is emphatic: he is not only reliable as an eyewitness, but he is equally reliable in the way that he has interpreted the meaning of Jesus’ life and death. Why is he so sure? Because he had the words of a prophet:
You must understand this, … no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation. No prophecy was ever produced by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God(2 Peter 1:20f).
The divinity of Jesus, his virgin birth, his sacrificial death, are not simply human deductions about Jesus, they are God-inspired testimonies as to what these things mean.
If you’re wobbling as a Christian, finding yourself besieged by people around you, let me encourage you to read your Bible as they did. But do it consistently ‘paying attention’, as Peter urges, ‘to what it says.’ When you do this it won’t be long, as it was for them, that the light begins to shine in the dark place, and the morning star arises in your hearts.
