Cornerstone Church | Changed Lives - Suffering

How can there be a God of love when the world is full of such suffering and apparently unrestrained evil? Can belief in God really survive in the light of the hideous evils of our Century. I make no claim to have all the answers but I want to attempt to make some kind of response to that.

Suffering

From an Address Given By John Risbridger 1999

A while back I was talking with a student at Reading University and he said to me, "I have one basic intellectual problem with Christianity, Christians classically say that they believe in a God who is all powerful and all good.

If He is all powerful surely He can intervene to prevent such suffering. If He chooses not to intervene surely He is not all good. Therefore I do not believe in the Christian God."

Well, he wasn't the first to say that, but the point was well made. Someone else put it this way (Jules Renard): "I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't."

Scottish Philosopher David Hulme, once gave a list of the ills of the world and then added, "Honestly I don't see how you can possibly square these with an ultimate Purpose of Love."

But first just a couple of things by way of intro:

There is a sense in which the very nature of suffering and evil is such that a complete solution to the problem is impossible for any of us. Intuitively, we all think of evil as something that shouldn't be, it is an affront to rationality, a distortion of what should be. Therefore if anyone - Christian or not - has claims to know ultimately why evil should be I am very suspicious - the chances are that they have not suffered much themselves. I am not therefore going to offer easy solutions to this question - I don't think they exist for any of us.
What I will try to do, however is to suggest that the unanswerable questions which remain are not in the end valid as objections to Christian belief.
My own thinking on this question is inevitably influenced by my experience and so I want to briefly tell you about the two worst experiences of my life.

In spring of 1993, my wife, Alison, gave birth our first child, a baby boy, Daniel - he was born 8 weeks early. Daniel wasn't able to breathe properly by himself and so had to be ventilated in a special care unit.

He lived there for two weeks, hovering along the borders of life and death. Finally at about 3:00am one Saturday morning, he lost the fight and we held him while he took his last few breaths. We were shattered.

We then had a similar experience nearly four years ago when our third child - Jonathan was still born. That too was a very hard experience.

None of us can escape the reality of suffering - we will all encounter it somewhere - the question is how can we respond? How could we respond faced by the loss of Daniel or Jonathan? In particular how do our belief systems help us to respond?

First, some general reflections on the nature of suffering.

The Universal Problem of Suffering

It is often assumed that suffering is a problem only for those who believe in God, but I want to begin by suggesting that it actually presents a problem for all of us. We all have to ask:

What is suffering?
Why do we react against it and feel that it shouldn't be?
Why does it happen?
Is there any basis for hope?

A while back there was a debate at Nottingham University. Someone got up and asked the question, "If there is a good God how come there's so much evil in the world?" The conversation continued as follows:

"If you believe in evil, I assume you believe in good."

"Yes."

"If you believe in good then you must assume a moral law-giver"

"I suppose so."

"But I thought that was who you were trying to disprove, so what's your question?"

If there is no God, then suffering isn't a problem it is just a fact. You can't say that suffering shouldn't happen, since that is to assume that there is some ultimate authority for saying what should happen. Well, in that case why do we make such a fuss?

Suffering is merely a particular response of our bodies and minds to some external stimulus - it is neither good nor bad. That is of course exactly the position that some would argue for. Richard Dawkins says in his book 'River out of Eden' "Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. We cannot accept that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply indifferent to all suffering, lacking in all purpose."

But is that how we experience suffering?
Does that make sense of suffering as we know it?
Is the death of six million Jews just a fact, isn't it an evil?
Do the massacres of Rwanda and Bosnia not matter?
Is human life really that cheap?

How does atheism respond to my feelings of anger and injustice when I have to leave my baby in the hospital mortuary? It has very little to say - all it can tell me is that these things just happen, they are neither good nor bad, they just happen. Face the facts, it continues, you get very sentimental about your children dying but all that's happened in fact is that a couple of biochemical machines have failed - and not very good ones at that. Your response is just a strong survival instinct - we all have it, but it's meaningless so go home make a cup of tea and get on with life.

I think that Atheism has a greater problem of evil that I have - it offers no explanation of the evil of suffering and it offers no comfort whatever. By contrast, as a Christian, I could at least make sense of how I felt about losing a baby. I still had questions, but I knew why it felt so bad. Because as a Christian I can see that it was bad. Atheism says it just happens, it's just cause and effect. Christianity says, "Yes, it's okay to be angry, suffering is distortion, death is bad, life is precious, people matter, life wasn't meant to be this way."

Suffering presents a problem to all of us. We all have to ask whether the way we look at the world really makes sense of suffering.

When we first look at the problem of suffering and evil it seems like an irrefutable proof against God's existence. But when we look more honestly at our experience of suffering, the argument turns round. Our intuitive definition of suffering is that it is something that shouldn't be, our reaction against it is intrinsically moral - that's why we ask the question. The question we pose itself presupposes an intuitive sense of what should be and so ultimately a moral lawgiver. So we find, far from taking us away from God, honest reflection on our response to suffering and evil actually drives us towards Him. John Lennon said, "God is a concept by which we measure our pain." Henri Blocher, "The sense of evil requires the God of the Bible." So the problem remains - how can a good God allow so much evil - but we cannot use that to argue against the existence of God because the question itself presupposes his existence.

Okay, but What can the Christian Framework actually say about the problem of suffering?

Four key things (growing out of the key events of the Bible Story):

1. The World was not created as a suffering World.

The repeated assertion of the first chapter of the bible is that the world as it was initially created was good - for emphasis it was repeated six times.

God did not create a suffering world; He created a world that was good.

2. Suffering is a result of our choosing to break our relationship with God our creator.

If a computer printer isn't properly connected to a computer it doesn't function properly - you might get a few random characters or you might get nothing at all! The parallel is not perfect but in a similar way we are created to be in relationship with God. We were created, as the bible says, 'in the image of God' - that is with the capacity and ultimately the need to know Him. If we break that relationship, then we cease to function properly - like a printer disconnected from its computer. The tragedy of human existence is that we have all broken that relationship - we have all tried to live our lives our own way rather than live them in relationship with God. We have placed ourselves and not God at the centre of our worlds and so have rejected God's basic purpose in creating us. And we see the outworking of that decision all around us in the tragedy and pain of so much of human existence.

God's response to our rejection of Him is not neutral. In His judgement on us, He has allowed us to experience the consequences of that choice - He has allowed us to see for sure that life without Him is doomed to failure, it doesn't work. It is thus human rebellion against God that stands at the heart of the problem of suffering. The heart of the problem is the problem of the human heart.

As Jesus said: "From within, out of our hearts come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside" (Mark 7:21-3).

Think about it, it is obvious that so much suffering is caused this way.

The Bible actually takes the argument one stage further. It speaks not only of our relationship with God but also of our relationship with the created world - we are stewards of it. Our rebellion against God has thus had consequences for the whole of created reality so that the created order itself has been spoilt and is therefore capable of bringing suffering to us in the form of disease and natural disaster.

I don't claim to understand that, but it fits with life as I experience it. We live in a world which is wonderful and yet spoilt. As people we are wonderful and yet spoilt. That's exactly the world we live in and exactly the world the Bible describes.

It is thus human evil itself that stands at the root of human suffering. This is not to say that suffering we experience is a direct judgement on specific sins we as individuals commit. It is rather that suffering is a consequence of universal human evil being worked out in a world that has been broken by our rebellion against God.

But then surely an all-powerful God could create a world in which there was no evil, or could intervene to prevent evil from happening.

Yes He could.

Why doesn't He?

The short answer is I don't know.

But remember, God created us for a true relationship with us as people made in His image. Now, that kind of relationship does require that we are able to make real choices and to bear the consequences of those choices. Even an omnipotent God cannot do things which are intrinsically, logically impossible. He cannot make a person with the capacity to make real choices who is unable to make real choices - it doesn't make sense.

Imagine what kind of a world it would be if every time we were about to do anything wrong God intervened to prevent it. It would be intolerable. It would mean God treating us as less than human.

No, if we pull a trigger, the bullet is shot and someone gets killed. If we live selfishly, we end up lonely and hurt. If we ignore God then our lives and our society fall apart. It is part of our human dignity that this should be so. Perhaps it is even part of God's way of pointing out to us constantly that life without him doesn't work.

I believe that God could have prevented my two children from dying - I wish He had. Yet in the end I accept that all the time this world is out of relationship with God, things like this will happen - evil results in evil. In the mean time I try to hear what God is saying to me in my suffering, and find that he is strangely near, when life is toughest.

3. God has done something about suffering.

While God is not constantly intervening to prevent all suffering He has actually done something - even if it is not what we would expect.

Christians worship a God who, rather than standing immune from pain and suffering, has the guts to come and live in a suffering world.

At the heart of our faith lies the extraordinary but historically credible claim that Jesus was the Son of God.

That in Jesus God has come among us, God has shared in our pain.

We worship a suffering God, who wept at the funeral of a friend,

Who experienced the pain of broken relationships

Who suffered the appalling agony of execution by crucifixion.

As I watched my son die, I knew that God was very close

For He has watched His Son die - He knew how it felt.

And it was the reality of that relationship with Him that enabled us to get through that experience.

However, the death of Jesus was not just God showing sympathy with the world.

The death of Jesus was God's way of restoring the relationship between us and God which is the root cause of human suffering.

By becoming one of us, Jesus was able to take upon himself the responsibility for that broken relationship.

And through His death, that relationship can be restored - for you, for me, for any of us so that we do not need to face life in this messed up world alone, we can face it in a renewed relationship with God.

This is what God has done about human suffering.

He has tackled the problem at its root cause.

He has acted to restore our broken relationship with Himself.

4. Finally, suffering will come to an end - justice will be done

As we have seen, God has acted in Jesus to make it possible for us to come back into a relationship with Him.

At the moment, He patiently waits for us to turn back to Him.

Yet a time will come when He will wait no longer and will finally intervene to purge evil from his universe once and for all.

The bible speaks of a time when this entire old, suffering world will be destroyed and a new universe will be created which is free from suffering and is in perfect relationship with God.

Justice will be done - evil will be destroyed and there will be a new creation free from suffering and evil.

In the end we can choose what we want.

Through Jesus, our relationship with God can be restored now and we can live in the real world with a solid hope for eternity.

Or we can live without God and remain as part of the old order which He will one day act to destroy in order that true justice may be done.

We began by asking God a question - how does he have the right to exist when the world is full of so much pain?

But we have found that, however deeply we feel that question, it does not enable us to avoid facing the reality that He is there.

In fact, as we listen to God's answer, we find that He is asking us a question.

The question is whether we want to have our relationship with him restored or whether we want to continue turn our backs from Him.

Whether we want to be a part of his new creation which is free from evil and suffering or whether we want to continue to live by ourselves and try to hang on to our own autonomy, keep God out of our lives and finally end up placing ourselves on the wrong side of his justice.