How can God allow suffering?

 

Of all the questions I had about Christianity, the question of suffering was the one that bothered me most. It was the one that kept me from going to church for over 20 years and it was the one that made me doubt whether there could be a good and almighty God in such a bad and hurting world. This was compounded by the death of a beloved Grandmother from lung cancer and the clear thought as a boy – “How could God allow this to happen?”

 

Suffering seems a scandal to our modern world. And perhaps it is a question that Christians feel a bit vulnerable on. We believe in a good and Almighty God, so how do we deal with a world full of suffering and evil? However, we’ll show later that all other worldviews actually find it very hard to explain suffering and almost impossible to give a liveable and consistent way of overcoming it.

 

Where does the question come from?

 

We need, first of all, to understand where this complex question comes from if we are to help with answers. And we need to understand that there isn’t one single answer or simple progression of logical answers. But as a Christian I am happy that there is a logical and thought-through answer to the question, how can God allow suffering?

 

We need to piece together a variety of perspectives.

 

The question can come from a number of directions and places. On the one hand it can be an intellectual blockage for people. After all, suffering is an issue philosophers have wrestled with for centuries. If God is almighty and God is good, how can evil and suffering exist? They do exist, so God must be either not good, or not almighty, in which case He isn’t God at all.

 

It can be a theological point – how does the Bible square with and explain this suffering world. And it can be an emotional issue – I am suffering, or friends or family are suffering how can I make sense of it?

 

If we are dealing with people who are asking for emotional reason then we need to park all our arguments and explanations and simply care for them. This speaks more about our approach to suffering than anything else.

 

There are four basic areas we can look at in relation to suffering:

 

1. Freedom and free will – and how it leads to suffering and explains why God allows suffering at all.
2. Time and eternity – and how Christians see a promised cure for suffering from God. Surely if God just allowed us to suffer, with no cure then we could question his Almightiness and Goodness.
3. The purpose of suffering – why it might be there and what we get out of it.
4. God with us – what the suffering of Jesus can lead us to and from.

Free will

 

God is good And He is almighty, but he is no dictator. We have freedom to choose him or not to choose him. After all, love can only be real when there is choice involved. God could force us to believe in Him, but then we would be slaves rather than freely turning to Him. Could God have created a world where people were free to choose, but where evil did not come as one of the options in that choice? Indeed we believe that our choice to turn away from God actually ushered in sin and suffering.

 

Free will has implications for suffering. Especially as Christians believe free will is allied with the central role of sin. We are free and the universe if free. We have the sin deep in our make-up – the desire to go it alone, to turn away from God. G.K. Chesterton said that original sin is the only Christian doctrine you can 100% prove.

 

The Bible narrative paints a picture of humans, on the one hand, made in the image of God and, on the other, fallen with sin – pride, lust, addictions, greed, violence. And of the world fallen too – with nature turned violent and turbulent natural forces leading to natural disasters.

 

And there’s a third factor. We believe that there is the very personification of evil in the world – the Devil. Who is painted as prowling around working for our destruction.

 

Put these together and we have, at least, a partial explanation for suffering and why God could allow it. Suffering has come into the world because the world has become mucked up.

 

But Christians go beyond this and suggest that there is a cure for suffering too. They also get to grips to the question with whether God is present in this suffering world and in what way.

 

Time and eternity

 

We believe that there is a deep promise from God that all our hurt, suffering, pain and the evil done to us will be restored. The world we are in is not as it is meant to be and God will make up for this in eternity.

 

The Bible promises that we will return home after our death – to a place without tears or suffering. One day we will become new beings, in new bodies that don’t break down. And God will do it through Jesus.

 

This a comforting thought, but it also brings attacks from critics that it is little more than wish fulfilment, an opiate for the people – a crutch for weak people who can’t face the savagery of life to hang on to.

 

But is it?

 

It is interesting that in this life, just about everything we need is actually provided for. We wish for sustenance, there is food, we wish to quench our thirst and there is water. So, just because we wish for something, why can’t it be true?

 

So this perspective of eternity is a perspective of hope.

 

Purpose

 

The argument goes that there is no purpose to suffering. It just happens and has no value? But is that true? To come to this conclusion surely requires incredible blind faith and enormous intellectual pride in our own ability to understand everything.

 

God is in the business of transforming people. This is one of the evidences we Christians can surely claim for God  – we are changed people.

 

And here we have a clue to the role of suffering. As C.S. Lewis said, suffering seems to be God’s megaphone to a deaf world, forcing us to take stock of our life and consider the option that we have may have eternity in our grasp.

 

Malcolm Muggeride said:

 

“Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful. I now look back upon them with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say that with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence has been through affliction and not through happiness whether pursued or attained. In other words, I say this, if it were to be possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence by means of some drug or other medical mumbo-jumbo, the result would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal and trivial to be endurable. This, of course, is what the cross signifies and it is the cross, more than anything else that has called me inevitably to Christ.”

 

One of the great Biblical heroes, Joseph is an almost text book lesson on the role of suffering. He suffered enormously. He was sold as a slave by his brothers and cast into prison and yet in this suffering came character and from that character came a great social reformer. In the end he says: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good….” Genesis 50.20.

 

Victor Frankl, who suffered in a Nazi prison camp said: “If there is a meaning in life at all then there must be a meaning in suffering for suffering is part of life.”

 

When we are in the middle of suffering it is hard to make sense of it, but it seems to perform some kind of transforming role. Jesus urges us to take up our cross and follow him. And in doing so he clearly points to the central role of suffering.

 

It hurts. It can seem pointless, but it has a power to make us who we are.

 

God with us

 

This is the final perspective, and perhaps the most powerful. It is an answer to that hard question – do we suffer alone, or is God with us in the heart of our suffering? It answers the doubts that God is good.

 

Alone among Gods, our God came to us in human form, was, born, lived and died. In some way the life, death and resurrection of Jesus answers that difficult accusation made by the great sufferer Job, of God. “But you don’t know what it is like to be one of us.”

 

Jesus suffered. Looking forward to life of Jesus, Isaiah says: “He was a man of sorrows, fully acquainted with suffering.” 53.3 Jesus was also outraged by suffering. He wept when he saw it. But he did something about it. In his lifetime, he cured people of what ailed them. And in his death he paid a debt so we might have everlasting life.

 

The Bible story is a powerful one of God with us. And who understands suffering because he suffered. Of God who so loved us he put in place a plan to end suffering and defeat death. Jesus bore the burden of our bad choices. And he answered the accusation so often raised against God – how can you allow us to suffer. The answer comes back – There is an end to sin. There is an end to death. There is an end to suffering.

 

Answering the big question

 

And so I now look on the question of suffering and God very much differently. I do not feel that suffering is futile. I certainly believe we can say that suffering is not at odds with a loving and almighty God. There has to be suffering because of free will and sin. But more importantly is there a cure. If there is then it answers the objection that God cannot be almighty and good while suffering exists. The Bible heralds the person of Jesus as an answer to suffering and hints at a higher purpose and outcome of our own suffering. We look forward to an end to the suffering on this world but see how suffering with the person of Christ can be transformed.

 

Other reading

The Problem of Pain C.S Lewis

How Can Man Live without God, Ravi Zacharias

The Reason for God, Timothy Keller.

 

 

How do other world views deal with suffering?

 

Although Christianity has a hard job answering the suffering questions, all world views have difficulties with it.

 

Eastern religions suggest that suffering is an illusion. Buddhism says that if we can eliminate desire then pain cannot touch us. This sounds like a tempting option. But is it true? And where does it leave us? Japanese poet, Issa, felt the full force of suffering. He lost all five of his children and his young wife. A Zen master he visited advised him that suffering was an illusion – that in the end we are all part of the one impersonal universe. This is the poem he wrote:

 

                        The world is dew

                        The world is dew

                        And yet,

                        And yet…

 

Suffering is not done away with so easily. Suffering may be an illusion but put your hand in boiling water and you will burn.

 

Hinduism suggests that suffering is a result of past wrongs – karma. The sufferings we experience in this life are a result of wrongdoing in previous lives. This seems particularly cruel. If you have a child born brain-damaged, then he or she is a helpless victim of karma.

 

And what about atheists? Does doing away with God make suffering any less? Although some would argue that religion leads to oppression and suffering, there is no evidence that a world without God is any less suffering. Indeed, without God we institutionalise suffering. We are born, we live, we die. We suffer cruelly without meaning. It is a bleak and hopeless view.