Not Alone In The Face Of Suffering

The past several months have been filled with a number of tragedies.  On every stage - international, national and personal - I've seen things happening that make the question of human suffering and the goodness of God very real and very close to home.

Different worldviews bring differed resources to such suffering.  My Buddhist friends in Asheville would tell me that suffering was just an illusion.  My Word of Faith friends would tell me I'm confessing the wrong thing.  Round and round and round.  Everybody has an "answer."  None of us feel safe or satisfied.

The challenge for Gospel-centered Christians is bringing together the Father's ability - omnipotence - and His will - loving character.  You know the drill, either He lacks the power to end suffering or He lacks the will.  Either way, my unbelieving friends feel like they have me on the point of a real "gotcha."

I've concluded over the years that no one has a neat and tidy answer that pulls together all the different strands of suffering and its reasons.  The Gospel does offer us a unique resource among all others though: A God Who Has Suffered With Us.

God did not create a world with death and evil in it. It is the result of humankind turning away from him. We were put into this world to live wholly for him, and when instead we began to live for ourselves everything in our created reality began to fall apart—physically, socially, and spiritually. Everything became subject to decay. But God did not abandon us. Of all the world's major religions, only Christianity teaches that God came to earth (in Jesus Christ) and became subject to suffering and death himself—dying on the Cross to take the punishment our sins deserved—so that some day he can return to earth to end all suffering without ending us.

Do you see what this means? Yes, we don’t know the reason God allows evil and suffering to continue, or why it is so random, but now at least we know what the reason isn’t—what it can’t be. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us! It can’t be that he doesn’t care. He is so committed to our ultimate happiness that he was willing to plunge into the greatest depths of suffering himself.

He understands us, he’s been there, and he assures us that he has a plan to eventually wipe away every tear, to make "everything sad come untrue," as J.R.R. Tolkien put it at the end of his Christian allegory The Lord of the Rings.

Someone might say, "But that’s only half an answer to the question 'Why?'" Yes, but it is the half that we need.*

I still remember a horrific thunderstorm one dark night in Michigan.  Our kids slept upstairs in that house and often felt halfway to the sky in their bedroom.  That was wonderful when the stars were out, but not on this night.  In the midst the flash and noise of the storm, I held one frightened little daughter.  I could feel her tense up with each thunderclap.  She was scared - I was too sometimes! - but she was never alone or overwhelmed.  A lecture in the physics of electricity would have been useless to her in that time and place.  Instead, all she needed was what she had: an earthly father who stood in as a dim shadow of her Heavenly Dad.  She was not alone in her fear.

It can be a frightening world that is beyond our understanding sometimes.  But there is One who has joined us and holds us.  We have not been left to face life alone.

* Click Here to Read the Entire Article Four Wrong Answers to the Question “Why Me?” by Tim Keller from the beginning.