Why do appalling things happen? The reality of pain and suffering is probably one of the key reasons many people insist that God doesn’t exist.
Their line of thinking follows this simple syllogism: ‘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’.
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.
Having created us, not as robots but in his image, God has given us the capacity of choice and with it the potential to turn from him and experience the consequential suffering. However, as Jesus’ Parable of ‘The Prodigal Son’ tells us, the very experience of suffering and pain can bring us to our senses and our need to turn back to God.
HOW TO RESPOND
So, let’s consider how we might respond to our questioning or even cynical family and friends.
Wake up. 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, God desires that we come to him. Sometimes he uses 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 our Creator while there is time (see Luke 13:1-5; 2 Peter 3:8-10). CS Lewis spoke of suffering as ‘God’s megaphone’.
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 – as we read for example, in Luke 12:1-7.
Failures. Suffering sometimes occurs because of the disobedience of God’s people. We can blame society for making a mess of its relationship with God, but we also need to ask ourselves, ‘To what extent are we or the church to blame?’ 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. Too often there has been a failure in times of change to make church truly welcoming, forgiving, and joyful.
Transformation. In the meantime, it is God’s desire that we grow up in our relationship with him. It follows that some of our experiences of pain will occur because of God’s disciplining hand (Hebrews 12:3-13). Furthermore, there may 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).
Answers? We also need to be honest and admit there will be times when we do not seem to have any intellectual answers to our suffering. Job’s questions, for example, were not answered in the strict sense. Instead, God himself asked Job a series of questions concerning his own majesty and nature (Job 38-41). Job’s response was to turn to God in humble repentance and wholehearted trust even though he didn’t receive all the answers (Job 42). We can compare Job’s experience with the way Joseph (Genesis 50:19, 20), and Jesus himself, exemplified a confidence that God would ultimately vindicate them (Romans 8:28-30).
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. The cross of Christ gives us confidence that God has our best interests at heart. Jesus’ resurrection assures us of it.
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.”
Writing in The Wall Street Journal last week (02/09/17), Peggy Noonan wrote:Let’s step back from the daily chaos and look at a big, pressing question.Last fall at a defense forum a significant military figure was asked: If you could wave a magic wand, what is the one big thing you’d give the U.S. military right now?
We’d all been talking about the effects of the sequester and reform of the procurement system and I expected an answer along those lines. Instead, he said: We need to know what the U.S. government wants from us. We need to know the overarching plan because if there’s no higher plan we can’t make plans to meet the plan.This was freshly, bluntly put, and his answer came immediately, without pause.
The world is in crisis. The old order that more or less governed things after World War II has been swept away. The changed world that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall is also over.
We’ve been absorbing this for a while, since at least 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea. But what plan are we developing to approach the world as it is now?
It’s a very good question. However, it’s not my purpose to consider it as a political question, but rather as a biblical and theological one. Assuming there is a higher supernatural realm, that there is a good and all-powerful God who rules, is there a higher plan so that we can ‘make plans to meet the plan’?
A HIGHER PLAN
In a world where, despite every human attempt to change things for the better, injustice and suffering continue unabated, is there in fact ‘a higher plan’?
To answer the question we need to ask another question: Is there any evidence that there is a God who has a bigger plan?If so, what is it? The answer turns on the Person of Jesus.
In Colossians 2:13-15 we read: 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 canceled 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 epochs. Before Jesus came there was the present age— the world. Now that Jesus has come a new epoch has begun—the age to come. For the present, this new epoch stands alongside the first. Yes, God has always been in control but the present age is in bondage to self-interest and evil. We are captive to moral laws we can’t keep.
Satan, theaccuser, has power over us because he holds ready the file of our failures to present to God’s court of justice. And God, being righteous, has no alternative but to condemn us to death. Self-interest is treachery against him and a capital offense.
C.S. Lewis captures these elements in his Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe when Edmund 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 CONDITION
Alienated from God we are in the power of spiritual forces we cannot defeat and are en route to a grave we can’t avoid. We are captive to the pain, suffering, and evil we have brought upon ourselves.
But then came Jesus. Paul tells us that Jesus smashed the bars of this spiritual prison of the present age when he died. He wiped out the moral debt of the laws we couldn’t obey and he disarmed the demonic powers we couldn’t overcome. Further, he abolished the death we couldn’t escape. The cross is where Jesus Christ has potentially turned our captivity into a glorious liberty.
God’s higher, bigger plan has been to destroy our hostility towards him and towards one another, and our subsequent suffering and pain. And he did it without destroying the enemy – you and me.
God’s plan is one we would never have dreamed of – God himself providing the means of restoring our true glory. 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).
When we begin to understand this bigger plan of God’s we come to see the ‘plans we need to make’ in a world that continues its giddy course of instability, injustice, and suffering.
It is more than time to play our part in reaching family, friends and many others with the good news that God has a plan for a world where there will be no more dying, no more tears, but one where there is true peace and lasting joy.
Last Saturday (02/04/2017), The Spectator (UK) carried an article by Douglas Murray who asked, ‘Who Will Protect Nigeria’s Northern Christians?’ Murray pointed out that the Fulani (militia) are watching everything closely from the surrounding mountains. Every week, their progress across the northern states of Plateau and Kaduna continues. Every week, more massacres – another village burned, its church razed, its inhabitants slaughtered, raped or chased away…
For the outside world, what is happening to the Christians of northern Nigeria is both beyond our imagination and beneath our interest… Villages have been persuaded to keep records of the attacks to show anyone who cares. One of the very few from outside who does – Britain’s own Baroness Cox – came here recently. Her vehicle was spotted by the Fulani, who came out hunting for her and only just missed their target. Because of attacks like this, almost nobody comes. Just one more reason why these atrocities do not attract the West’s attentions…
Murray writes of the region where three years ago the Boko Haran abducted three hundred school girls. While some have been rescued most are still captive. Murray commented, If the international community meant anything by its promises such as the UN’s ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine, then what is happening could not go on. But the international community is uninterested…
HOW LONG, O LORD?
And, as we learn of these atrocities directed specifically against God’s people, our hearts cry out with the words of Psalm 13, How long, O Lord…?
In the course of talks and conversations I had over the last two weeks, in Orlando, FL and New York, one of the questions that arose was how to respond to the carping criticism about suffering in the world. It is an important question and also one of the toughest to answer for anyone who believes God not only exists, but is all-powerful and all-compassionate.
Our cry for justice…! All of us have within us a sense of right and wrong.
This suggests that we live in a moral universe. If we lived in a world that had come into existence simply through a 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.
However, when we think about it, it’s 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 are irrelevant if our existence is simply the product of an evolutionary framework.
Is this a reason for the international and media silence about the plight of Christians in Northern Nigeria? But the reality is all men and women have a sense of justice – often ill-defined, but it is there.
Difficult though the subject of suffering is for anyone who believes in God, the Bible assures us that our cry for justice is right. It is right to condemn all wicked violence, all taking of innocent life. The Bible condemns the perpetrators of such deeds. Indeed, 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 observed 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.
But 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 a good 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?’
So, why doesn’t God step in now? The Bible’s answer is that God stays his hand for the present because he wants to give all men and women, like the Prodigal Son in Jesus’ parable, the opportunity to turn to him in repentance. The good news is that God will pardon and deliver 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 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).
Does this mean we do nothing about the atrocities perpetrated against God’s people now? We have this responsibility – to pray for our suffering brothers and sisters, to find ways of letting them know of our awareness and even to find ways of providing support. And, as we are able, to let others, including leaders, know of the plight of the persecuted peoples. As Edmund Burke, 18th century philosopher and statesman remarked: The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
‘Can I trust God to give me good things I ask for?’
In an important section on prayer in Luke’s Gospel Jesus responded to his disciples’ question to teach them to pray with what we call The Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:2-4). He then anticipated two questions we have: 1. ‘Can God be trusted to answer our prayers?’ 2. ‘Can we trust him to give us good things?’
In response to our first question Jesus told a parable, sometimes called The Friend at Midnight (Luke 11:5-8). The parable has an underlying, unspoken question: ‘Can you imagine…?’ In this case, Jesus was asking, ‘Can you imagine a man speaking this way to a needy friend?’
HONORING GOD’S NAME
The story captures village life in Jesus’ world where hospitality is an unwritten law: No matter the hour or the inconvenience, neighbors are required to assist one another when they are in need. If they don’t provide assistance, they bring dishonor to their own name and the name of the community. ‘Can you imagine,’ Jesus is asking, ‘Anyone saying to a neighbor in need, even at midnight, ‘Get lost’, ‘Don’t disturb me’? The response would be a unanimous, “No!”
Translations since the 12th century have not helped us understand this parable. In recent times scholars such as J. Jeremias have recognized that the original words usually translated boldness or persistence do not reflect the meaning of the original word. Indeed, Kenneth Bailey has pointed out that the word is better translated, sense of shame. The original word literally carries the meaning, avoidance of shame.
The Middle-Eastern culture of hospitality (which still prevails), the flow of the personal pronoun he in Luke 11:8, and the narrative impact of the story, lead us to the sleeper in bed as the focus of the story. The focus is not the man knocking on the door.
This is not a parable about persistence. Rather it is a parable about God and the honor of God’s name. The parable picks up words Jesus taught us to pray: “Hallowed be your name” (11:2). To pray for the honor of God’s name is also consistent with the heart of Moses’ prayer in Numbers 14:13-19). The theme of persistence in prayer is found in another parable (Luke 18:1-8).
Jesus promises that God, for the sake of the honor of his name, will not only hear our prayers, no matter how big or small, but he will also answer them. God’s honor and integrity are at stake. We can trust God to hear and answer our prayers.
Jesus continues with three exhortations and promises: “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened for you”(11:9-10). Our English word ‘Ask’ forms a mnemonic for these wonderful promises that we all too often overlook – they apply just as much to God’s people as to genuine enquirers.
Often I have encouraged people who find it difficult to believe to say, ‘God, if you are there, please help me to find you’.
CAN I TRUST GOD TO GIVE ME GOOD THINGS?
Jesus also answers another question we often have: ‘Can I trust God to give me good things?’
He uses two metaphors to assure us that God always has our best interests at heart (Luke 11:11-12). We can paraphrase his assurance this way: ‘Just as the most violent thief can be kind to his son and the most mercenary-minded father can be generous to his daughter, “How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?”(11:13).
This must be one of the most profound promises that Jesus utters. He is telling us that God’s great gift is to give us his Spirit who will open our minds to hear God’s voice through his Word. The Spirit will open our hearts to God, enabling us to call God ‘Father’ through the Lord Jesus Christ. The Spirit will open our lives to God, empowering us to trust him and follow him.
When we think about it, we are introduced here to the riches of God’s work: we can call God, Father; we learn from the Son who does all that is necessary for us to right our relationship with God once and for all time; we are drawn into the riches of a profound and true relationship with God through the wonderful gift of the Spirit.
Why is it that we are content to play around the edges of a relationship with God who delights in giving his all for us? Why is our prayer life so often barren?
At Christmas, we were reminded of the words the angels sang the night Jesus Christ was born: “Peace and goodwill…” It is something we long for in a world that is torn by self-interest, injustice, terrorism, and war. ‘Is the angels’ message really true?’ we ask. ‘Where is the peace and goodwill?
Before we dismiss their words, we need to read them in the context of their complete statement: “Glory to God in the highest heaven,” they sang, “And on earth peace among those he (God) favors!”The promise was to a specific group of people.
Consider Paul the Apostle’s words in Philippians 4:7: And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. And in 4:9: …And the God of peace will be with you.
Peace – Shalom!
It’s a word of security. Paul understood what it is to be anxious, even fearful about the unexpected in life.
He also knew the barbs of opposition that hurt God’s people. In December 2012, Dr. Angela Merkel remarked that Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world today. Richard Glover, himself an atheist, asked in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald (Nov. 14, 2015) why are ‘Believers, Christian people, so derided and ridiculed?’
At the time he wrote his Letter to the Philippians, Paul the Apostle was in prison for his faith. He knew what it was like to be in situations that cause anxiety and fear.
Paul’s word ‘guard’ in the context of his speaking about God’s peace is very encouraging. It actually means ‘a garrison’. Being a Roman citizen he may have had the Praetorian Guard in mind. It’s a great thought: God’s ‘Praetorian Guard’ providing a security for our hearts and minds, and so giving us peace.
The word ‘hearts’ in the Bible is a reference to our mind and will, our conscience and our emotions. It’s what is going on within us that finds outward expression in our life.
And the word ‘mind’ is a reference to our conscious thoughts and ideas that spring from these inner longings.
Dr. Ashley Null, one of the foremost scholars concerning Abp Thomas Cranmer, observes that Cranmer’s anthropology can be summarized: ‘What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.’ Null explains that, according to Cranmer, ‘The mind doesn’t direct the will. The mind is actually captive to what the will wants, and the will itself is captive to what the heart wants’.
When Paul speaks about ‘the peace of God guarding our hearts and minds, he is speaking about our need, not just for inner transformation, but our on-going need to keep our hearts and minds centered on Christ. Otherwise ‘our hearts and minds’, will turn away from Christ and become enemies of his cross – something that Paul speaks about at the end of Philippians 3.
CONSCIOUS PRESENCE OF GOD
But we need something more. We need the conscious presence of God. So in Philippians 4:9 Paul tells us again, ‘The peace of God will be with you’. Why would he make this promise unless we need this peace?
Paul knows that our faith can easily become a creedal formula rather than a living experience. While we theoretically know that Christ is with us, we can at the same time, in reality, forget Him. And in the absence of a sense of His presence, it is so easy to fall into sin and slackness. We need to know that in truth and in reality, the God of peace is with us.
In Philippians 4:7 and 9, Paul identifies some very encouraging promises: ‘The peace of God which passes all understanding will keep you… God’s peace will be with us.
The peace of God that passes all understanding is the promise that our lives will be touched by the supernatural. It is beyond the range of our human understanding.
So often our problem in standing firm in the face of hostility is that others do not see why we want to be different. As one commentator remarked, ‘Society looks on us as being in the category of the lady whose obituary noted that her chief hobby was religion’. What we need as God’s people, individually and as a people, is the touch of the supernatural – something that cannot be explained except by saying, ‘This is the finger of God’. (Exodus 8:19)
I’m not talking about some mystical power. Rather I am speaking of the work of God’s Word through his Spirit in our lives, enabling us to rise above the challenges of life in such a way that it can be explained only by the power of God at work within us.
