From Jim McGuiggan... The Suffering Question

The Suffering Question

It would be a mistake to say that the world's great suffering must be answered adequately or everyone will become an atheist. That just isn't so! Believe it or not, it's a modern idea that wholesale suffering must mean there is no God. You only have to read through the Hebrew-Christian scriptures (and others as well) to see that down the centuries people lived with passionate faith in God (or gods) despite suffering. The Bible is filled with the "why?" question but the question is always addressed to God! It's never, "Since this is so you can't exist" and always, "You exist and your reputation is that you care for us so why is this happening?"

Of course even that is something of an overstatement because sometimes the prophets knew exactly why the peoples were suffering. "We have sinned and you have turned your face from us," they will often say. But that's only one face of suffering in the Bible because we find "undeserved" suffering recorded all over the place.

In life as in scripture we find blessing and curse, pain and pleasure sitting side by side. It isn't all pain and it isn't all pleasure. So while it's a nonsense (and anti-Christ as we can see from Matthew 25) to ignore or airily dismiss all the agony it's a serious mistake for the heart and head to ignore all the wonder and loveliness and blessing.

What if it's true that there is a cosmic "power" that Christians call sin that God is redeeming us from? What if there is something beyond the physical that makes sense of all suffering (undeserved and deserved)? What if the fully developed complex biblical Story is true and that the suffering of the innocent (like the suffering of Jesus Christ) is part of God's redeeming work? What if the completion of that holy, gracious and glorious purpose is so grand and glorious that it makes all the pain worth it? What if in this case "the end justifies the means"? What if even the worm that bores into the eye of a little child serves a purpose so marvellous that God himself had to come in Jesus Christ to tell us about it? What if all these parasites and all this trouble are part of a great tragedy involving both God and us? What if this a tragedy that he is working to serve his own holy and gracious purpose? A purpose which is to bless the cosmos and save us from our sin as well as our suffering and to bring us to eternal life that is brimful of life?
(You might find Celebrating the Wrath of God helpful.)

©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.