I hope you have time to read all this: Are your questions are here.
Hebrews 2:18
I: -- "Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully before dying?" We could ask, "Why does God allow people to suffer dreadfully?", or even "Why does God allow people to suffer at all?"
When we ask the question, "Why suffering?", we may be assuming that anyone half as good and half as mighty as God is supposed to be would be able to program a universe and design human beings in such a way that suffering would never occur. In asking the question we are assuming that we human beings who are asking the question at this moment could remain who and what we are -- persons whose intellectual nature is what we know it to be -- even if we were redesigned so as to be unable to suffer. But is this the case? To ask the question, "Why suffering? Why does God permit suffering?"; to ask this question requires a high level of abstract thought. The capacity for a high level of abstract thought presupposes a very sophisticated brain and neural structure. After all, a toad doesn't ask questions like the question in today's sermon; neither does a robin. A robin isn't distressed over the matter of slaying a worm, when all the while the writhing of the worm indicates that the worm resists being stretched and slain and eaten. The robin merely kills and eats instinctually, as instinctually as the worm itself does whatever worms need to do to stay alive. We human beings, however, are different. We don't act instinctually; we ask questions. To ask the question, "Why suffering in a world ruled by God?"; simply to understand that there’s a problem, simply to be able to formulate the question: all of this requires an exceedingly complex neural structure. The complex neural structure that allows us to understand the problem and formulate the question is the same complex neural structure that gives us our extraordinary capacity for pain.
In asking the question we are assuming that we can have the extraordinary privilege, as it were, of being able to reflect as we do without our extraordinary vulnerability to suffering. But – let me say it again – the neural complexity that supports advanced thinking is the same neural complexity that supports increased suffering. Whenever we ask the question, "Why does God allow us to suffer?", we are asking, in effect, "Why doesn't God create us so that we can think profoundly enough to ask the question about suffering even as he creates us so that we have no capacity for suffering itself?" In asking for this has it ever occurred to us that we might be asking for something that is logically self-contradictory? If we were to ask, "Why doesn't God make a square circle?", we’d recognise immediately the silliness of what we’ve proposed and we’d never fault God for not making a square circle, since a square circle is a logical impossibility, an instance of nonsense, non-sense. No one faults God for not creating non-sense. When we ask the question that has motivated today's sermon we should pause; we might be asking for non-sense; we might be asking for a logical impossibility.
In the second place, since we are creatures with enormous sensitivity to suffering, we must admit that some sensitivity to pain is essential to our self-preservation. Sensitivity to physical pain is essential if we are going to survive in a physical world. The elderly person who has lost sensitivity in her hand places her hand on a stove element to steady herself. She burns her hand. Then the burn infects. Now she has blood poisoning in her arm. Because she has diminished sensitivity to pain she can’t protect herself; unable to protect herself, she can’t preserve herself.
In the same way it’s our capacity for mental anguish that facilitates our self-preservation. The person who is working too hard, too long, under too much stress finds himself exhibiting telltale signs that he is close to collapse. The telltale signs he exhibits are in fact different instances of suffering: his stomach ulcerates, his heart races, his head throbs, he can't concentrate. He has been warned. The warning signs (his suffering) tell him that he has to make changes for the sake of self-preservation.
In the third place, our capacity for suffering is also our capacity for pleasure. To be without any vulnerability to pain would mean that we should never know delight. Once more, to fault God for not making us able to experience pleasure without exposure to pain might be faulting him for not creating a logical impossibility, non-sense.
In the fourth place, when we think beyond our private vulnerability to suffering to our capacity to cause others to suffer, to harm them, the question then becomes, "Why is the universe so arranged that people can be made to suffer terribly on account of someone else's cruelty?" When we ask this question we forget that that arrangement of the universe which makes it possible for others to harm us also makes it possible for others to help us. If the universe. If it weren't possible for us to be hated, it also wouldn't be possible for us to be loved.
In the fifth place, we must never forget what C.S. Lewis holds up before us: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, shouts at us in our pain." Elsewhere the thoughtful Englishman has said, "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." Most often we don’t even recognise sin’s consequences to be consequences of sin until pain has pierced us. Our suffering here is God's attempt at getting our attention. (I say God’s attempt at getting our attention, since it’s obvious that his previous attempts failed). As fallen creatures self-absorbed in folly we tend to get serious about our sin only as its consequences pain us.
"Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully? Why does God allow people to suffer at all?" I trust that what I have said so far provides reason for some suffering at least.
II: -- At the same time I admit that when we have reflected upon the five considerations mentioned in the last few minutes we don't have reason enough for the great weight of suffering afflicting humankind. I can’t deny that there is suffering so intense, so relentless, that it’s of no use at all. It doesn’t further our self-preservation in any way. It is vastly greater suffering than appears to be needed for anything.
After writing a magazine article in which I discussed the sort of perplexity we are probing today I received a letter from an anguished woman in British Columbia. The occasion of her anguish was the distress of her best friend. Her friend, having longed for a child for years, and having miscarried several times, finally gave birth at age 33. The long-awaited baby was born with several major defects, among which were a heart condition and brain damage. There is no "lesson" to be learned from this sort of thing. There’s no lesson the parents are to be taught through their baby’s malformation; and certainly there’s no lesson the baby herself is to be taught.
One of the most hideous instances of gratuitous suffering, in my opinion, concerns the children who were annihilated en masse between 1939 and 1945. The parents of these children were gassed first; gassed, that is before their remains were burnt. The children, however, were never gassed: they were thrown live into huge incinerators. I don’t become unravelled easily, but I’m close to unravelling every time I see film-footage of the event. You too have seen the pictures of the children huddled behind barbed wire at the railway stations, waiting for the train that was soon to take them to the place of execution; 1.5 million children. Can you imagine the terror, the torment, in the nine year old's heart as he was separated from his parents, packed into a windowless boxcar, jolted for several days, only to be let out at Theresienstadt or Auschwitz? Why does God allow this? We are told in the book of Exodus that when the Lord God himself saw the affliction of his people in Egypt and heard their cry he couldn’t stand it and did something; specifically, he delivered them from their bondage to Egyptian taskmasters. The plight of 500,000 Israelites who were slaves, to be sure, but whose taskmasters weren't killing them moved him to act. The plight of 1.5 million children who were facing a horrible death moved him to do nothing. Why not? I have no answer. What’s more, I’m nervous about anyone who thinks she has.
III: -- I don’t think that looking for an answer is fruitful. In the first place I don't think there is an answer; at least there isn't going to be an answer in the sense of a satisfactory explanation until that day when our struggle and the questions born of our struggle are behind us and we are beholding the face of God himself in his more intense presence. I also think that on that day all questions and therefore all answers will be unnecessary. In the second place, even if we had an answer, a reason, an explanation now, having the explanation still wouldn’t spare us having to endure the suffering that is inescapably part of the human predicament.
It isn't an answer we need. We need hope. We need encouragement. We need confidence. We need assurance; assurance that our suffering isn't the final word about us, assurance that one day we shall see that our suffering wasn’t pointless; most of all, we need assurance we are going to be delivered from it all.
I think a good place to begin is the book of Hebrews. Hebrews speaks of Jesus as the pioneer of our faith. It’s not that Jesus is the pathfinder; he doesn't find a path. Rather, he forges a way through life's suffering for us. Having forged a way through this himself, he comes back for us and beckons us to follow him. His life wasn't immune from suffering; therefore, the way through that he has forged for us will never give us immunity from suffering. A careful reading of the written gospels convinces us that our Lord knew physical torment, mental torment, spiritual torment; knew it every day, and knew it with unutterable intensity particularly in the last week of his life. Yet in the light of his resurrection we know that he has been through it all ahead of us, and because he’s been through it ahead of us we have confidence that there is a way through. We aren't going to get part way through our journey with him only to have him turn to us and say, "I thought there was a way through, but it appears there isn't; I’m stymied; we’re all in the same ‘fix’ together; your situation is therefore as hopeless as mine." In his resurrection he has gone through it all right to the other side of it. Now he comes back to us to see us through.
Yet there’s more to be said. Because Jesus is the Incarnate one, the Father himself is intimately acquainted with our suffering. God doesn't know about our suffering the way we know about the suffering of people in Kosovo or Cambodia. We know of the suffering there only by hearing of it third hand, or perchance through seeing it second hand; certainly we aren’t acquainted with the suffering of those people first hand in that we aren’t ourselves undergoing the miseries of Kosovo or Cambodia. Incarnation, however, means that the suffering the Son has endured, the Father himself has lived. And therefore we are never finally alone in our suffering. I didn’t say we never feel alone. I said we are never cosmically orphaned, forsaken. Our situation is never hopeless. We are going to be delivered. We are going to be delivered as surely as the Son himself, our "elder brother", as Hebrews speaks of him, was delivered. Delivered himself, he calls us to join him confidently on the way, certain that he will never abandon us before he has brought us through with him.
We have spoken already of our Lord’s resurrection. His resurrection enables us to interpret rightly his cross. Plainly his cross indicates there’s no limit to the vulnerability our Lord will expose himself to for us; there’s no limit to his identification with us in our pain; there’s nothing he will stop short of in standing with us in life and in death and in everything dreadful in both. Then his resurrection means there is no impediment to our inheriting that victory which finally relieves us of our predicament. For this reason there’s a glorious text from the book of Hebrews that we should tape to our refrigerator door and our bathroom mirror: "For since Jesus Christ himself has passed through the test of suffering, he is able to help those who are meeting their test now." (Heb. 2:18, NEB) We must memorise this and repeat it until we shall remember it for as long as we shall remember our own name.
As long as we remember? What if we don’t remember? What if, from time to time, pain so tortures us that we can’t remember? Then what matters above all else is the fact that God remembers. His promise to his people through the prophet Isaiah must sink into us: "I have graven you on the palms of my hands." (Isaiah 49:16) We need to learn the context of the promise. During their exile at the hands of Babylonian captors God's people feel that God has forgotten them. Through the prophet Isaiah God asks them, "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands." Can a mother neglect, even abandon, the child she has borne and nursed? She can. We read of this in the newspaper every day. But there’s no chance at all that God is going to neglect or abandon those to whom he has given birth. If you find these verses from Isaiah too much to memorise for now, then memorise the little paraphrase I learned as a youngster:
"My name from the palms of his hands
Eternity cannot erase;
Impressed on his heart it remains
In marks of indelible grace."
"Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully?" A few minutes ago I said I didn't think there was an answer, an answer in the sense of an explanation. I said too that even if we had an explanation it wouldn’t relieve us of the suffering. If I were suffering dreadfully on account of my leg and someone said, correctly, that the reason for my suffering, the explanation, was that my leg was broken, and had been broken as the result of a car accident, and the car accident was the result of… (as the explanation went back farther and father), I should find no relief at all in the explanation. Explanations don't relieve. We need a guarantee of release. We need assurance that we aren't fixed in our suffering for ever.
In his second letter to the Christian congregation in Corinth Paul speaks of his own suffering, together with that of the apostle who accompanied him on his journey. Paul doesn’t tell us precisely what the suffering was or what caused it. But he does tell us how intense it was and how close it came to collapsing him. Listen to him: "In Asia we were so utterly, unbearably crushed, that we despaired of life itself." (2 Cor. 1:8) Think about that: "We were so utterly, unbearably crushed, that we despaired of life itself." And then in both his letters to Corinth and Rome he writes something we must never forget: "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us." The sufferings of this present time are going to be eclipsed by glory that will one day overtake us.
Paul doesn’t say that our present sufferings are nothing. Had he said this, no one would listen to another word from him. Besides, his own suffering was so very intense that it would never occur to him to say of it, "Oh, it’s nothing." Everyone knows that our present sufferings aren’t "nothing"; our present sufferings are often terrible. Anyone who suggested that pain is not really pain is someone we should never listen to again.
Neither does the apostle say that our present sufferings are slight. No one who feels crushed and despairs of life uses the word "slight." Instead he says that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. As intense as our pain is now, it is soon to be followed by a glory that is indescribably more intense.
The apostle is fond of obstetrical metaphors. The context for the statement we are probing is Romans 8 where he speaks of a woman in the last stages of labour. Time crawls for her. Her discomfort seems endless. Her discomfort is greater than all the "how-to" manuals said it was going to be. Just when she feels she’s at the limit of her endurance, she is delivered. The moment she beholds her new child such joy floods her that her distress, only minutes earlier, is eclipsed and forgotten. If you were to ask her about her preceding distress she wouldn't even hear you; she can only think of her new child and the horizon-filling joy the child has brought her. It's not that her preceding distress was nothing; not even that it was slight. Even so, it has been eclipsed by the joy that bathes her now.
Paul never answers our question, "Why suffering in God's world?" He doesn't even attempt an explanation for his own suffering. Instead the apostle points us to a future where the glory of God is going to bathe God's people in such a way that this bath will dissolve even the calluses and the scars that our suffering layered upon us.
"Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully (before dying)?" We can go a little way in explaining how sensitivity to pain is essential for our survival as human beings, human beings who are possessed of a nature that is bodily, mental and spiritual all at once. We can go a little way, but only a little. Concerning that ocean of suffering which is vastly greater than could ever be helpful we have no explanation. Then will an explanation, a reason, be given to us on the day we behold our Lord face-to-face? On this day the glory of God that rivets our gaze on him won’t find us thinking of questions, answers, explanations, reasons. On this day the glory that floods us will eclipse our suffering, rendering it forgotten, as we are finally and forever "lost in wonder, love and praise".
(Isaiah 49:14-16a; Romans 8:18; 2 Cor. 1:8-9; Hebrews 2:18 – NEB )Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully before dying?" We could ask, "Why does God allow people to suffer dreadfully?", or even "Why does God allow people to suffer at all?"
When we ask the question, "Why suffering?", we may be assuming that anyone half as good and half as mighty as God is supposed to be would be able to program a universe and design human beings in such a way that suffering would never occur. In asking the question we are assuming that we human beings who are asking the question at this moment could remain who and what we are -- persons whose intellectual nature is what we know it to be -- even if we were redesigned so as to be unable to suffer. But is this the case? To ask the question, "Why suffering? Why does God permit suffering?"; to ask this question requires a high level of abstract thought. The capacity for a high level of abstract thought presupposes a very sophisticated brain and neural structure. After all, a toad doesn't ask questions like the question in today's sermon; neither does a robin. A robin isn't distressed over the matter of slaying a worm, when all the while the writhing of the worm indicates that the worm resists being stretched and slain and eaten. The robin merely kills and eats instinctually, as instinctually as the worm itself does whatever worms need to do to stay alive. We human beings, however, are different. We don't act instinctually; we ask questions. To ask the question, "Why suffering in a world ruled by God?"; simply to understand that there’s a problem, simply to be able to formulate the question: all of this requires an exceedingly complex neural structure. The complex neural structure that allows us to understand the problem and formulate the question is the same complex neural structure that gives us our extraordinary capacity for pain.
In asking the question we are assuming that we can have the extraordinary privilege, as it were, of being able to reflect as we do without our extraordinary vulnerability to suffering. But – let me say it again – the neural complexity that supports advanced thinking is the same neural complexity that supports increased suffering. Whenever we ask the question, "Why does God allow us to suffer?", we are asking, in effect, "Why doesn't God create us so that we can think profoundly enough to ask the question about suffering even as he creates us so that we have no capacity for suffering itself?" In asking for this has it ever occurred to us that we might be asking for something that is logically self-contradictory? If we were to ask, "Why doesn't God make a square circle?", we’d recognise immediately the silliness of what we’ve proposed and we’d never fault God for not making a square circle, since a square circle is a logical impossibility, an instance of nonsense, non-sense. No one faults God for not creating non-sense. When we ask the question that has motivated today's sermon we should pause; we might be asking for non-sense; we might be asking for a logical impossibility.
In the second place, since we are creatures with enormous sensitivity to suffering, we must admit that some sensitivity to pain is essential to our self-preservation. Sensitivity to physical pain is essential if we are going to survive in a physical world. The elderly person who has lost sensitivity in her hand places her hand on a stove element to steady herself. She burns her hand. Then the burn infects. Now she has blood poisoning in her arm. Because she has diminished sensitivity to pain she can’t protect herself; unable to protect herself, she can’t preserve herself.
In the same way it’s our capacity for mental anguish that facilitates our self-preservation. The person who is working too hard, too long, under too much stress finds himself exhibiting telltale signs that he is close to collapse. The telltale signs he exhibits are in fact different instances of suffering: his stomach ulcerates, his heart races, his head throbs, he can't concentrate. He has been warned. The warning signs (his suffering) tell him that he has to make changes for the sake of self-preservation.
In the third place, our capacity for suffering is also our capacity for pleasure. To be without any vulnerability to pain would mean that we should never know delight. Once more, to fault God for not making us able to experience pleasure without exposure to pain might be faulting him for not creating a logical impossibility, non-sense.
In the fourth place, when we think beyond our private vulnerability to suffering to our capacity to cause others to suffer, to harm them, the question then becomes, "Why is the universe so arranged that people can be made to suffer terribly on account of someone else's cruelty?" When we ask this question we forget that that arrangement of the universe which makes it possible for others to harm us also makes it possible for others to help us. If the universe. If it weren't possible for us to be hated, it also wouldn't be possible for us to be loved.
In the fifth place, we must never forget what C.S. Lewis holds up before us: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, shouts at us in our pain." Elsewhere the thoughtful Englishman has said, "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." Most often we don’t even recognise sin’s consequences to be consequences of sin until pain has pierced us. Our suffering here is God's attempt at getting our attention. (I say God’s attempt at getting our attention, since it’s obvious that his previous attempts failed). As fallen creatures self-absorbed in folly we tend to get serious about our sin only as its consequences pain us.
"Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully? Why does God allow people to suffer at all?" I trust that what I have said so far provides reason for some suffering at least.
II: -- At the same time I admit that when we have reflected upon the five considerations mentioned in the last few minutes we don't have reason enough for the great weight of suffering afflicting humankind. I can’t deny that there is suffering so intense, so relentless, that it’s of no use at all. It doesn’t further our self-preservation in any way. It is vastly greater suffering than appears to be needed for anything.
After writing a magazine article in which I discussed the sort of perplexity we are probing today I received a letter from an anguished woman in British Columbia. The occasion of her anguish was the distress of her best friend. Her friend, having longed for a child for years, and having miscarried several times, finally gave birth at age 33. The long-awaited baby was born with several major defects, among which were a heart condition and brain damage. There is no "lesson" to be learned from this sort of thing. There’s no lesson the parents are to be taught through their baby’s malformation; and certainly there’s no lesson the baby herself is to be taught.
One of the most hideous instances of gratuitous suffering, in my opinion, concerns the children who were annihilated en masse between 1939 and 1945. The parents of these children were gassed first; gassed, that is before their remains were burnt. The children, however, were never gassed: they were thrown live into huge incinerators. I don’t become unravelled easily, but I’m close to unravelling every time I see film-footage of the event. You too have seen the pictures of the children huddled behind barbed wire at the railway stations, waiting for the train that was soon to take them to the place of execution; 1.5 million children. Can you imagine the terror, the torment, in the nine year old's heart as he was separated from his parents, packed into a windowless boxcar, jolted for several days, only to be let out at Theresienstadt or Auschwitz? Why does God allow this? We are told in the book of Exodus that when the Lord God himself saw the affliction of his people in Egypt and heard their cry he couldn’t stand it and did something; specifically, he delivered them from their bondage to Egyptian taskmasters. The plight of 500,000 Israelites who were slaves, to be sure, but whose taskmasters weren't killing them moved him to act. The plight of 1.5 million children who were facing a horrible death moved him to do nothing. Why not? I have no answer. What’s more, I’m nervous about anyone who thinks she has.
III: -- I don’t think that looking for an answer is fruitful. In the first place I don't think there is an answer; at least there isn't going to be an answer in the sense of a satisfactory explanation until that day when our struggle and the questions born of our struggle are behind us and we are beholding the face of God himself in his more intense presence. I also think that on that day all questions and therefore all answers will be unnecessary. In the second place, even if we had an answer, a reason, an explanation now, having the explanation still wouldn’t spare us having to endure the suffering that is inescapably part of the human predicament.
It isn't an answer we need. We need hope. We need encouragement. We need confidence. We need assurance; assurance that our suffering isn't the final word about us, assurance that one day we shall see that our suffering wasn’t pointless; most of all, we need assurance we are going to be delivered from it all.
I think a good place to begin is the book of Hebrews. Hebrews speaks of Jesus as the pioneer of our faith. It’s not that Jesus is the pathfinder; he doesn't find a path. Rather, he forges a way through life's suffering for us. Having forged a way through this himself, he comes back for us and beckons us to follow him. His life wasn't immune from suffering; therefore, the way through that he has forged for us will never give us immunity from suffering. A careful reading of the written gospels convinces us that our Lord knew physical torment, mental torment, spiritual torment; knew it every day, and knew it with unutterable intensity particularly in the last week of his life. Yet in the light of his resurrection we know that he has been through it all ahead of us, and because he’s been through it ahead of us we have confidence that there is a way through. We aren't going to get part way through our journey with him only to have him turn to us and say, "I thought there was a way through, but it appears there isn't; I’m stymied; we’re all in the same ‘fix’ together; your situation is therefore as hopeless as mine." In his resurrection he has gone through it all right to the other side of it. Now he comes back to us to see us through.
Yet there’s more to be said. Because Jesus is the Incarnate one, the Father himself is intimately acquainted with our suffering. God doesn't know about our suffering the way we know about the suffering of people in Kosovo or Cambodia. We know of the suffering there only by hearing of it third hand, or perchance through seeing it second hand; certainly we aren’t acquainted with the suffering of those people first hand in that we aren’t ourselves undergoing the miseries of Kosovo or Cambodia. Incarnation, however, means that the suffering the Son has endured, the Father himself has lived. And therefore we are never finally alone in our suffering. I didn’t say we never feel alone. I said we are never cosmically orphaned, forsaken. Our situation is never hopeless. We are going to be delivered. We are going to be delivered as surely as the Son himself, our "elder brother", as Hebrews speaks of him, was delivered. Delivered himself, he calls us to join him confidently on the way, certain that he will never abandon us before he has brought us through with him.
We have spoken already of our Lord’s resurrection. His resurrection enables us to interpret rightly his cross. Plainly his cross indicates there’s no limit to the vulnerability our Lord will expose himself to for us; there’s no limit to his identification with us in our pain; there’s nothing he will stop short of in standing with us in life and in death and in everything dreadful in both. Then his resurrection means there is no impediment to our inheriting that victory which finally relieves us of our predicament. For this reason there’s a glorious text from the book of Hebrews that we should tape to our refrigerator door and our bathroom mirror: "For since Jesus Christ himself has passed through the test of suffering, he is able to help those who are meeting their test now." (Heb. 2:18, NEB) We must memorise this and repeat it until we shall remember it for as long as we shall remember our own name.
As long as we remember? What if we don’t remember? What if, from time to time, pain so tortures us that we can’t remember? Then what matters above all else is the fact that God remembers. His promise to his people through the prophet Isaiah must sink into us: "I have graven you on the palms of my hands." (Isaiah 49:16) We need to learn the context of the promise. During their exile at the hands of Babylonian captors God's people feel that God has forgotten them. Through the prophet Isaiah God asks them, "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands." Can a mother neglect, even abandon, the child she has borne and nursed? She can. We read of this in the newspaper every day. But there’s no chance at all that God is going to neglect or abandon those to whom he has given birth. If you find these verses from Isaiah too much to memorise for now, then memorise the little paraphrase I learned as a youngster:
"My name from the palms of his hands
Eternity cannot erase;
Impressed on his heart it remains
In marks of indelible grace."
"Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully?" A few minutes ago I said I didn't think there was an answer, an answer in the sense of an explanation. I said too that even if we had an explanation it wouldn’t relieve us of the suffering. If I were suffering dreadfully on account of my leg and someone said, correctly, that the reason for my suffering, the explanation, was that my leg was broken, and had been broken as the result of a car accident, and the car accident was the result of… (as the explanation went back farther and father), I should find no relief at all in the explanation. Explanations don't relieve. We need a guarantee of release. We need assurance that we aren't fixed in our suffering for ever.
In his second letter to the Christian congregation in Corinth Paul speaks of his own suffering, together with that of the apostle who accompanied him on his journey. Paul doesn’t tell us precisely what the suffering was or what caused it. But he does tell us how intense it was and how close it came to collapsing him. Listen to him: "In Asia we were so utterly, unbearably crushed, that we despaired of life itself." (2 Cor. 1:8) Think about that: "We were so utterly, unbearably crushed, that we despaired of life itself." And then in both his letters to Corinth and Rome he writes something we must never forget: "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us." The sufferings of this present time are going to be eclipsed by glory that will one day overtake us.
Paul doesn’t say that our present sufferings are nothing. Had he said this, no one would listen to another word from him. Besides, his own suffering was so very intense that it would never occur to him to say of it, "Oh, it’s nothing." Everyone knows that our present sufferings aren’t "nothing"; our present sufferings are often terrible. Anyone who suggested that pain is not really pain is someone we should never listen to again.
Neither does the apostle say that our present sufferings are slight. No one who feels crushed and despairs of life uses the word "slight." Instead he says that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. As intense as our pain is now, it is soon to be followed by a glory that is indescribably more intense.
The apostle is fond of obstetrical metaphors. The context for the statement we are probing is Romans 8 where he speaks of a woman in the last stages of labour. Time crawls for her. Her discomfort seems endless. Her discomfort is greater than all the "how-to" manuals said it was going to be. Just when she feels she’s at the limit of her endurance, she is delivered. The moment she beholds her new child such joy floods her that her distress, only minutes earlier, is eclipsed and forgotten. If you were to ask her about her preceding distress she wouldn't even hear you; she can only think of her new child and the horizon-filling joy the child has brought her. It's not that her preceding distress was nothing; not even that it was slight. Even so, it has been eclipsed by the joy that bathes her now.
Paul never answers our question, "Why suffering in God's world?" He doesn't even attempt an explanation for his own suffering. Instead the apostle points us to a future where the glory of God is going to bathe God's people in such a way that this bath will dissolve even the calluses and the scars that our suffering layered upon us.
"Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully (before dying)?" We can go a little way in explaining how sensitivity to pain is essential for our survival as human beings, human beings who are possessed of a nature that is bodily, mental and spiritual all at once. We can go a little way, but only a little. Concerning that ocean of suffering which is vastly greater than could ever be helpful we have no explanation. Then will an explanation, a reason, be given to us on the day we behold our Lord face-to-face? On this day the glory of God that rivets our gaze on him won’t find us thinking of questions, answers, explanations, reasons. On this day the glory that floods us will eclipse our suffering, rendering it forgotten, as we are finally and forever "lost in wonder, love and praise".
(Isaiah 49:14-16a; Romans 8:18; 2 Cor. 1:8-9; Hebrews 2:18 – NEB )Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully before dying?" We could ask, "Why does God allow people to suffer dreadfully?", or even "Why does God allow people to suffer at all?"
When we ask the question, "Why suffering?", we may be assuming that anyone half as good and half as mighty as God is supposed to be would be able to program a universe and design human beings in such a way that suffering would never occur. In asking the question we are assuming that we human beings who are asking the question at this moment could remain who and what we are -- persons whose intellectual nature is what we know it to be -- even if we were redesigned so as to be unable to suffer. But is this the case? To ask the question, "Why suffering? Why does God permit suffering?"; to ask this question requires a high level of abstract thought. The capacity for a high level of abstract thought presupposes a very sophisticated brain and neural structure. After all, a toad doesn't ask questions like the question in today's sermon; neither does a robin. A robin isn't distressed over the matter of slaying a worm, when all the while the writhing of the worm indicates that the worm resists being stretched and slain and eaten. The robin merely kills and eats instinctually, as instinctually as the worm itself does whatever worms need to do to stay alive. We human beings, however, are different. We don't act instinctually; we ask questions. To ask the question, "Why suffering in a world ruled by God?"; simply to understand that there’s a problem, simply to be able to formulate the question: all of this requires an exceedingly complex neural structure. The complex neural structure that allows us to understand the problem and formulate the question is the same complex neural structure that gives us our extraordinary capacity for pain.
In asking the question we are assuming that we can have the extraordinary privilege, as it were, of being able to reflect as we do without our extraordinary vulnerability to suffering. But – let me say it again – the neural complexity that supports advanced thinking is the same neural complexity that supports increased suffering. Whenever we ask the question, "Why does God allow us to suffer?", we are asking, in effect, "Why doesn't God create us so that we can think profoundly enough to ask the question about suffering even as he creates us so that we have no capacity for suffering itself?" In asking for this has it ever occurred to us that we might be asking for something that is logically self-contradictory? If we were to ask, "Why doesn't God make a square circle?", we’d recognise immediately the silliness of what we’ve proposed and we’d never fault God for not making a square circle, since a square circle is a logical impossibility, an instance of nonsense, non-sense. No one faults God for not creating non-sense. When we ask the question that has motivated today's sermon we should pause; we might be asking for non-sense; we might be asking for a logical impossibility.
In the second place, since we are creatures with enormous sensitivity to suffering, we must admit that some sensitivity to pain is essential to our self-preservation. Sensitivity to physical pain is essential if we are going to survive in a physical world. The elderly person who has lost sensitivity in her hand places her hand on a stove element to steady herself. She burns her hand. Then the burn infects. Now she has blood poisoning in her arm. Because she has diminished sensitivity to pain she can’t protect herself; unable to protect herself, she can’t preserve herself.
In the same way it’s our capacity for mental anguish that facilitates our self-preservation. The person who is working too hard, too long, under too much stress finds himself exhibiting telltale signs that he is close to collapse. The telltale signs he exhibits are in fact different instances of suffering: his stomach ulcerates, his heart races, his head throbs, he can't concentrate. He has been warned. The warning signs (his suffering) tell him that he has to make changes for the sake of self-preservation.
In the third place, our capacity for suffering is also our capacity for pleasure. To be without any vulnerability to pain would mean that we should never know delight. Once more, to fault God for not making us able to experience pleasure without exposure to pain might be faulting him for not creating a logical impossibility, non-sense.
In the fourth place, when we think beyond our private vulnerability to suffering to our capacity to cause others to suffer, to harm them, the question then becomes, "Why is the universe so arranged that people can be made to suffer terribly on account of someone else's cruelty?" When we ask this question we forget that that arrangement of the universe which makes it possible for others to harm us also makes it possible for others to help us. If the universe. If it weren't possible for us to be hated, it also wouldn't be possible for us to be loved.
In the fifth place, we must never forget what C.S. Lewis holds up before us: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, shouts at us in our pain." Elsewhere the thoughtful Englishman has said, "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." Most often we don’t even recognise sin’s consequences to be consequences of sin until pain has pierced us. Our suffering here is God's attempt at getting our attention. (I say God’s attempt at getting our attention, since it’s obvious that his previous attempts failed). As fallen creatures self-absorbed in folly we tend to get serious about our sin only as its consequences pain us.
"Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully? Why does God allow people to suffer at all?" I trust that what I have said so far provides reason for some suffering at least.
II: -- At the same time I admit that when we have reflected upon the five considerations mentioned in the last few minutes we don't have reason enough for the great weight of suffering afflicting humankind. I can’t deny that there is suffering so intense, so relentless, that it’s of no use at all. It doesn’t further our self-preservation in any way. It is vastly greater suffering than appears to be needed for anything.
After writing a magazine article in which I discussed the sort of perplexity we are probing today I received a letter from an anguished woman in British Columbia. The occasion of her anguish was the distress of her best friend. Her friend, having longed for a child for years, and having miscarried several times, finally gave birth at age 33. The long-awaited baby was born with several major defects, among which were a heart condition and brain damage. There is no "lesson" to be learned from this sort of thing. There’s no lesson the parents are to be taught through their baby’s malformation; and certainly there’s no lesson the baby herself is to be taught.
One of the most hideous instances of gratuitous suffering, in my opinion, concerns the children who were annihilated en masse between 1939 and 1945. The parents of these children were gassed first; gassed, that is before their remains were burnt. The children, however, were never gassed: they were thrown live into huge incinerators. I don’t become unravelled easily, but I’m close to unravelling every time I see film-footage of the event. You too have seen the pictures of the children huddled behind barbed wire at the railway stations, waiting for the train that was soon to take them to the place of execution; 1.5 million children. Can you imagine the terror, the torment, in the nine year old's heart as he was separated from his parents, packed into a windowless boxcar, jolted for several days, only to be let out at Theresienstadt or Auschwitz? Why does God allow this? We are told in the book of Exodus that when the Lord God himself saw the affliction of his people in Egypt and heard their cry he couldn’t stand it and did something; specifically, he delivered them from their bondage to Egyptian taskmasters. The plight of 500,000 Israelites who were slaves, to be sure, but whose taskmasters weren't killing them moved him to act. The plight of 1.5 million children who were facing a horrible death moved him to do nothing. Why not? I have no answer. What’s more, I’m nervous about anyone who thinks she has.
III: -- I don’t think that looking for an answer is fruitful. In the first place I don't think there is an answer; at least there isn't going to be an answer in the sense of a satisfactory explanation until that day when our struggle and the questions born of our struggle are behind us and we are beholding the face of God himself in his more intense presence. I also think that on that day all questions and therefore all answers will be unnecessary. In the second place, even if we had an answer, a reason, an explanation now, having the explanation still wouldn’t spare us having to endure the suffering that is inescapably part of the human predicament.
It isn't an answer we need. We need hope. We need encouragement. We need confidence. We need assurance; assurance that our suffering isn't the final word about us, assurance that one day we shall see that our suffering wasn’t pointless; most of all, we need assurance we are going to be delivered from it all.
I think a good place to begin is the book of Hebrews. Hebrews speaks of Jesus as the pioneer of our faith. It’s not that Jesus is the pathfinder; he doesn't find a path. Rather, he forges a way through life's suffering for us. Having forged a way through this himself, he comes back for us and beckons us to follow him. His life wasn't immune from suffering; therefore, the way through that he has forged for us will never give us immunity from suffering. A careful reading of the written gospels convinces us that our Lord knew physical torment, mental torment, spiritual torment; knew it every day, and knew it with unutterable intensity particularly in the last week of his life. Yet in the light of his resurrection we know that he has been through it all ahead of us, and because he’s been through it ahead of us we have confidence that there is a way through. We aren't going to get part way through our journey with him only to have him turn to us and say, "I thought there was a way through, but it appears there isn't; I’m stymied; we’re all in the same ‘fix’ together; your situation is therefore as hopeless as mine." In his resurrection he has gone through it all right to the other side of it. Now he comes back to us to see us through.
Yet there’s more to be said. Because Jesus is the Incarnate one, the Father himself is intimately acquainted with our suffering. God doesn't know about our suffering the way we know about the suffering of people in Kosovo or Cambodia. We know of the suffering there only by hearing of it third hand, or perchance through seeing it second hand; certainly we aren’t acquainted with the suffering of those people first hand in that we aren’t ourselves undergoing the miseries of Kosovo or Cambodia. Incarnation, however, means that the suffering the Son has endured, the Father himself has lived. And therefore we are never finally alone in our suffering. I didn’t say we never feel alone. I said we are never cosmically orphaned, forsaken. Our situation is never hopeless. We are going to be delivered. We are going to be delivered as surely as the Son himself, our "elder brother", as Hebrews speaks of him, was delivered. Delivered himself, he calls us to join him confidently on the way, certain that he will never abandon us before he has brought us through with him.
We have spoken already of our Lord’s resurrection. His resurrection enables us to interpret rightly his cross. Plainly his cross indicates there’s no limit to the vulnerability our Lord will expose himself to for us; there’s no limit to his identification with us in our pain; there’s nothing he will stop short of in standing with us in life and in death and in everything dreadful in both. Then his resurrection means there is no impediment to our inheriting that victory which finally relieves us of our predicament. For this reason there’s a glorious text from the book of Hebrews that we should tape to our refrigerator door and our bathroom mirror: "For since Jesus Christ himself has passed through the test of suffering, he is able to help those who are meeting their test now." (Heb. 2:18, NEB) We must memorise this and repeat it until we shall remember it for as long as we shall remember our own name.
As long as we remember? What if we don’t remember? What if, from time to time, pain so tortures us that we can’t remember? Then what matters above all else is the fact that God remembers. His promise to his people through the prophet Isaiah must sink into us: "I have graven you on the palms of my hands." (Isaiah 49:16) We need to learn the context of the promise. During their exile at the hands of Babylonian captors God's people feel that God has forgotten them. Through the prophet Isaiah God asks them, "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands." Can a mother neglect, even abandon, the child she has borne and nursed? She can. We read of this in the newspaper every day. But there’s no chance at all that God is going to neglect or abandon those to whom he has given birth. If you find these verses from Isaiah too much to memorise for now, then memorise the little paraphrase I learned as a youngster:
"My name from the palms of his hands
Eternity cannot erase;
Impressed on his heart it remains
In marks of indelible grace."
"Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully?" A few minutes ago I said I didn't think there was an answer, an answer in the sense of an explanation. I said too that even if we had an explanation it wouldn’t relieve us of the suffering. If I were suffering dreadfully on account of my leg and someone said, correctly, that the reason for my suffering, the explanation, was that my leg was broken, and had been broken as the result of a car accident, and the car accident was the result of… (as the explanation went back farther and father), I should find no relief at all in the explanation. Explanations don't relieve. We need a guarantee of release. We need assurance that we aren't fixed in our suffering for ever.
In his second letter to the Christian congregation in Corinth Paul speaks of his own suffering, together with that of the apostle who accompanied him on his journey. Paul doesn’t tell us precisely what the suffering was or what caused it. But he does tell us how intense it was and how close it came to collapsing him. Listen to him: "In Asia we were so utterly, unbearably crushed, that we despaired of life itself." (2 Cor. 1:8) Think about that: "We were so utterly, unbearably crushed, that we despaired of life itself." And then in both his letters to Corinth and Rome he writes something we must never forget: "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us." The sufferings of this present time are going to be eclipsed by glory that will one day overtake us.
Paul doesn’t say that our present sufferings are nothing. Had he said this, no one would listen to another word from him. Besides, his own suffering was so very intense that it would never occur to him to say of it, "Oh, it’s nothing." Everyone knows that our present sufferings aren’t "nothing"; our present sufferings are often terrible. Anyone who suggested that pain is not really pain is someone we should never listen to again.
Neither does the apostle say that our present sufferings are slight. No one who feels crushed and despairs of life uses the word "slight." Instead he says that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. As intense as our pain is now, it is soon to be followed by a glory that is indescribably more intense.
The apostle is fond of obstetrical metaphors. The context for the statement we are probing is Romans 8 where he speaks of a woman in the last stages of labour. Time crawls for her. Her discomfort seems endless. Her discomfort is greater than all the "how-to" manuals said it was going to be. Just when she feels she’s at the limit of her endurance, she is delivered. The moment she beholds her new child such joy floods her that her distress, only minutes earlier, is eclipsed and forgotten. If you were to ask her about her preceding distress she wouldn't even hear you; she can only think of her new child and the horizon-filling joy the child has brought her. It's not that her preceding distress was nothing; not even that it was slight. Even so, it has been eclipsed by the joy that bathes her now.
Paul never answers our question, "Why suffering in God's world?" He doesn't even attempt an explanation for his own suffering. Instead the apostle points us to a future where the glory of God is going to bathe God's people in such a way that this bath will dissolve even the calluses and the scars that our suffering layered upon us.
"Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully (before dying)?" We can go a little way in explaining how sensitivity to pain is essential for our survival as human beings, human beings who are possessed of a nature that is bodily, mental and spiritual all at once. We can go a little way, but only a little. Concerning that ocean of suffering which is vastly greater than could ever be helpful we have no explanation. Then will an explanation, a reason, be given to us on the day we behold our Lord face-to-face? On this day the glory of God that rivets our gaze on him won’t find us thinking of questions, answers, explanations, reasons. On this day the glory that floods us will eclipse our suffering, rendering it forgotten, as we are finally and forever "lost in wonder, love and praise".
(Isaiah 49:14-16a; Romans 8:18; 2 Cor. 1:8-9; Hebrews 2:18 – NEB )Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully before dying?" We could ask, "Why does God allow people to suffer dreadfully?", or even "Why does God allow people to suffer at all?"
When we ask the question, "Why suffering?", we may be assuming that anyone half as good and half as mighty as God is supposed to be would be able to program a universe and design human beings in such a way that suffering would never occur. In asking the question we are assuming that we human beings who are asking the question at this moment could remain who and what we are -- persons whose intellectual nature is what we know it to be -- even if we were redesigned so as to be unable to suffer. But is this the case? To ask the question, "Why suffering? Why does God permit suffering?"; to ask this question requires a high level of abstract thought. The capacity for a high level of abstract thought presupposes a very sophisticated brain and neural structure. After all, a toad doesn't ask questions like the question in today's sermon; neither does a robin. A robin isn't distressed over the matter of slaying a worm, when all the while the writhing of the worm indicates that the worm resists being stretched and slain and eaten. The robin merely kills and eats instinctually, as instinctually as the worm itself does whatever worms need to do to stay alive. We human beings, however, are different. We don't act instinctually; we ask questions. To ask the question, "Why suffering in a world ruled by God?"; simply to understand that there’s a problem, simply to be able to formulate the question: all of this requires an exceedingly complex neural structure. The complex neural structure that allows us to understand the problem and formulate the question is the same complex neural structure that gives us our extraordinary capacity for pain.
In asking the question we are assuming that we can have the extraordinary privilege, as it were, of being able to reflect as we do without our extraordinary vulnerability to suffering. But – let me say it again – the neural complexity that supports advanced thinking is the same neural complexity that supports increased suffering. Whenever we ask the question, "Why does God allow us to suffer?", we are asking, in effect, "Why doesn't God create us so that we can think profoundly enough to ask the question about suffering even as he creates us so that we have no capacity for suffering itself?" In asking for this has it ever occurred to us that we might be asking for something that is logically self-contradictory? If we were to ask, "Why doesn't God make a square circle?", we’d recognise immediately the silliness of what we’ve proposed and we’d never fault God for not making a square circle, since a square circle is a logical impossibility, an instance of nonsense, non-sense. No one faults God for not creating non-sense. When we ask the question that has motivated today's sermon we should pause; we might be asking for non-sense; we might be asking for a logical impossibility.
In the second place, since we are creatures with enormous sensitivity to suffering, we must admit that some sensitivity to pain is essential to our self-preservation. Sensitivity to physical pain is essential if we are going to survive in a physical world. The elderly person who has lost sensitivity in her hand places her hand on a stove element to steady herself. She burns her hand. Then the burn infects. Now she has blood poisoning in her arm. Because she has diminished sensitivity to pain she can’t protect herself; unable to protect herself, she can’t preserve herself.
In the same way it’s our capacity for mental anguish that facilitates our self-preservation. The person who is working too hard, too long, under too much stress finds himself exhibiting telltale signs that he is close to collapse. The telltale signs he exhibits are in fact different instances of suffering: his stomach ulcerates, his heart races, his head throbs, he can't concentrate. He has been warned. The warning signs (his suffering) tell him that he has to make changes for the sake of self-preservation.
In the third place, our capacity for suffering is also our capacity for pleasure. To be without any vulnerability to pain would mean that we should never know delight. Once more, to fault God for not making us able to experience pleasure without exposure to pain might be faulting him for not creating a logical impossibility, non-sense.
In the fourth place, when we think beyond our private vulnerability to suffering to our capacity to cause others to suffer, to harm them, the question then becomes, "Why is the universe so arranged that people can be made to suffer terribly on account of someone else's cruelty?" When we ask this question we forget that that arrangement of the universe which makes it possible for others to harm us also makes it possible for others to help us. If the universe. If it weren't possible for us to be hated, it also wouldn't be possible for us to be loved.
In the fifth place, we must never forget what C.S. Lewis holds up before us: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, shouts at us in our pain." Elsewhere the thoughtful Englishman has said, "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." Most often we don’t even recognise sin’s consequences to be consequences of sin until pain has pierced us. Our suffering here is God's attempt at getting our attention. (I say God’s attempt at getting our attention, since it’s obvious that his previous attempts failed). As fallen creatures self-absorbed in folly we tend to get serious about our sin only as its consequences pain us.
"Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully? Why does God allow people to suffer at all?" I trust that what I have said so far provides reason for some suffering at least.
II: -- At the same time I admit that when we have reflected upon the five considerations mentioned in the last few minutes we don't have reason enough for the great weight of suffering afflicting humankind. I can’t deny that there is suffering so intense, so relentless, that it’s of no use at all. It doesn’t further our self-preservation in any way. It is vastly greater suffering than appears to be needed for anything.
After writing a magazine article in which I discussed the sort of perplexity we are probing today I received a letter from an anguished woman in British Columbia. The occasion of her anguish was the distress of her best friend. Her friend, having longed for a child for years, and having miscarried several times, finally gave birth at age 33. The long-awaited baby was born with several major defects, among which were a heart condition and brain damage. There is no "lesson" to be learned from this sort of thing. There’s no lesson the parents are to be taught through their baby’s malformation; and certainly there’s no lesson the baby herself is to be taught.
One of the most hideous instances of gratuitous suffering, in my opinion, concerns the children who were annihilated en masse between 1939 and 1945. The parents of these children were gassed first; gassed, that is before their remains were burnt. The children, however, were never gassed: they were thrown live into huge incinerators. I don’t become unravelled easily, but I’m close to unravelling every time I see film-footage of the event. You too have seen the pictures of the children huddled behind barbed wire at the railway stations, waiting for the train that was soon to take them to the place of execution; 1.5 million children. Can you imagine the terror, the torment, in the nine year old's heart as he was separated from his parents, packed into a windowless boxcar, jolted for several days, only to be let out at Theresienstadt or Auschwitz? Why does God allow this? We are told in the book of Exodus that when the Lord God himself saw the affliction of his people in Egypt and heard their cry he couldn’t stand it and did something; specifically, he delivered them from their bondage to Egyptian taskmasters. The plight of 500,000 Israelites who were slaves, to be sure, but whose taskmasters weren't killing them moved him to act. The plight of 1.5 million children who were facing a horrible death moved him to do nothing. Why not? I have no answer. What’s more, I’m nervous about anyone who thinks she has.
III: -- I don’t think that looking for an answer is fruitful. In the first place I don't think there is an answer; at least there isn't going to be an answer in the sense of a satisfactory explanation until that day when our struggle and the questions born of our struggle are behind us and we are beholding the face of God himself in his more intense presence. I also think that on that day all questions and therefore all answers will be unnecessary. In the second place, even if we had an answer, a reason, an explanation now, having the explanation still wouldn’t spare us having to endure the suffering that is inescapably part of the human predicament.
It isn't an answer we need. We need hope. We need encouragement. We need confidence. We need assurance; assurance that our suffering isn't the final word about us, assurance that one day we shall see that our suffering wasn’t pointless; most of all, we need assurance we are going to be delivered from it all.
I think a good place to begin is the book of Hebrews. Hebrews speaks of Jesus as the pioneer of our faith. It’s not that Jesus is the pathfinder; he doesn't find a path. Rather, he forges a way through life's suffering for us. Having forged a way through this himself, he comes back for us and beckons us to follow him. His life wasn't immune from suffering; therefore, the way through that he has forged for us will never give us immunity from suffering. A careful reading of the written gospels convinces us that our Lord knew physical torment, mental torment, spiritual torment; knew it every day, and knew it with unutterable intensity particularly in the last week of his life. Yet in the light of his resurrection we know that he has been through it all ahead of us, and because he’s been through it ahead of us we have confidence that there is a way through. We aren't going to get part way through our journey with him only to have him turn to us and say, "I thought there was a way through, but it appears there isn't; I’m stymied; we’re all in the same ‘fix’ together; your situation is therefore as hopeless as mine." In his resurrection he has gone through it all right to the other side of it. Now he comes back to us to see us through.
Yet there’s more to be said. Because Jesus is the Incarnate one, the Father himself is intimately acquainted with our suffering. God doesn't know about our suffering the way we know about the suffering of people in Kosovo or Cambodia. We know of the suffering there only by hearing of it third hand, or perchance through seeing it second hand; certainly we aren’t acquainted with the suffering of those people first hand in that we aren’t ourselves undergoing the miseries of Kosovo or Cambodia. Incarnation, however, means that the suffering the Son has endured, the Father himself has lived. And therefore we are never finally alone in our suffering. I didn’t say we never feel alone. I said we are never cosmically orphaned, forsaken. Our situation is never hopeless. We are going to be delivered. We are going to be delivered as surely as the Son himself, our "elder brother", as Hebrews speaks of him, was delivered. Delivered himself, he calls us to join him confidently on the way, certain that he will never abandon us before he has brought us through with him.
We have spoken already of our Lord’s resurrection. His resurrection enables us to interpret rightly his cross. Plainly his cross indicates there’s no limit to the vulnerability our Lord will expose himself to for us; there’s no limit to his identification with us in our pain; there’s nothing he will stop short of in standing with us in life and in death and in everything dreadful in both. Then his resurrection means there is no impediment to our inheriting that victory which finally relieves us of our predicament. For this reason there’s a glorious text from the book of Hebrews that we should tape to our refrigerator door and our bathroom mirror: "For since Jesus Christ himself has passed through the test of suffering, he is able to help those who are meeting their test now." (Heb. 2:18, NEB) We must memorise this and repeat it until we shall remember it for as long as we shall remember our own name.
As long as we remember? What if we don’t remember? What if, from time to time, pain so tortures us that we can’t remember? Then what matters above all else is the fact that God remembers. His promise to his people through the prophet Isaiah must sink into us: "I have graven you on the palms of my hands." (Isaiah 49:16) We need to learn the context of the promise. During their exile at the hands of Babylonian captors God's people feel that God has forgotten them. Through the prophet Isaiah God asks them, "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands." Can a mother neglect, even abandon, the child she has borne and nursed? She can. We read of this in the newspaper every day. But there’s no chance at all that God is going to neglect or abandon those to whom he has given birth. If you find these verses from Isaiah too much to memorise for now, then memorise the little paraphrase I learned as a youngster:
"My name from the palms of his hands
Eternity cannot erase;
Impressed on his heart it remains
In marks of indelible grace."
"Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully?" A few minutes ago I said I didn't think there was an answer, an answer in the sense of an explanation. I said too that even if we had an explanation it wouldn’t relieve us of the suffering. If I were suffering dreadfully on account of my leg and someone said, correctly, that the reason for my suffering, the explanation, was that my leg was broken, and had been broken as the result of a car accident, and the car accident was the result of… (as the explanation went back farther and father), I should find no relief at all in the explanation. Explanations don't relieve. We need a guarantee of release. We need assurance that we aren't fixed in our suffering for ever.
In his second letter to the Christian congregation in Corinth Paul speaks of his own suffering, together with that of the apostle who accompanied him on his journey. Paul doesn’t tell us precisely what the suffering was or what caused it. But he does tell us how intense it was and how close it came to collapsing him. Listen to him: "In Asia we were so utterly, unbearably crushed, that we despaired of life itself." (2 Cor. 1:8) Think about that: "We were so utterly, unbearably crushed, that we despaired of life itself." And then in both his letters to Corinth and Rome he writes something we must never forget: "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us." The sufferings of this present time are going to be eclipsed by glory that will one day overtake us.
Paul doesn’t say that our present sufferings are nothing. Had he said this, no one would listen to another word from him. Besides, his own suffering was so very intense that it would never occur to him to say of it, "Oh, it’s nothing." Everyone knows that our present sufferings aren’t "nothing"; our present sufferings are often terrible. Anyone who suggested that pain is not really pain is someone we should never listen to again.
Neither does the apostle say that our present sufferings are slight. No one who feels crushed and despairs of life uses the word "slight." Instead he says that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. As intense as our pain is now, it is soon to be followed by a glory that is indescribably more intense.
The apostle is fond of obstetrical metaphors. The context for the statement we are probing is Romans 8 where he speaks of a woman in the last stages of labour. Time crawls for her. Her discomfort seems endless. Her discomfort is greater than all the "how-to" manuals said it was going to be. Just when she feels she’s at the limit of her endurance, she is delivered. The moment she beholds her new child such joy floods her that her distress, only minutes earlier, is eclipsed and forgotten. If you were to ask her about her preceding distress she wouldn't even hear you; she can only think of her new child and the horizon-filling joy the child has brought her. It's not that her preceding distress was nothing; not even that it was slight. Even so, it has been eclipsed by the joy that bathes her now.
Paul never answers our question, "Why suffering in God's world?" He doesn't even attempt an explanation for his own suffering. Instead the apostle points us to a future where the glory of God is going to bathe God's people in such a way that this bath will dissolve even the calluses and the scars that our suffering layered upon us.
"Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully (before dying)?" We can go a little way in explaining how sensitivity to pain is essential for our survival as human beings, human beings who are possessed of a nature that is bodily, mental and spiritual all at once. We can go a little way, but only a little. Concerning that ocean of suffering which is vastly greater than could ever be helpful we have no explanation. Then will an explanation, a reason, be given to us on the day we behold our Lord face-to-face? On this day the glory of God that rivets our gaze on him won’t find us thinking of questions, answers, explanations, reasons. On this day the glory that floods us will eclipse our suffering, rendering it forgotten, as we are finally and forever "lost in wonder, love and praise".
(Isaiah 49:14-16a; Romans 8:18; 2 Cor. 1:8-9; Hebrews 2:18