The Age Old Question

The question has been around since the dawn of time; ever since God began to reveal himself to mankind and to let them have the understanding that he is good. The question? "If God is good; why does he allow suffering and pain?" I am currently reading a book by Randy Alcorn entitled: If God is Good, that deals with this very issue. In fact, I have a library FULL of books on this topic...Joni Eareckson Tada: When God Weeps; C.S. Lewis: The Problem of Pain; Philip Yancy and Dr. Paul Brand: The Gift of Pain; Dr. James Dobson: When God Doesn't make Sense; Elisabeth Elliot: A Path Through Suffering; and John Piper/Justin Taylor: Suffering and the Sovereignty of God----to name a few. The greatest of minds, both in antiquity and in our modern times have struggled with this topic...and the answer is one that is elusive and one which perhaps, I have little right to add my two cents on, considering the company which whom I stand.

Being a person who suffers and perhaps, has suffered more than many other people commonly do; it is not surprising that this is a topic of interest to me. It was, in fact, this very question which caused me to flip God “the finger” and to abandon my faith for well over a decade when I was in my late teens and twenties as mental illness began to wreak its devastation in my young life. Initially, as any "good" Christian would, when I began to experience symptoms that were distressing and very unpleasant, I cried out to God to come to my aid and to remove them. The response from God?

Silence

It was a heavy and complete silence that was to last through all those years of my wandering. The voice of God which had spoken to me so often in my earlier teens, was now quiet…and the suffering continued, in fact deepened, unabated.

I am not proud of the fact that abandoning God was my response. It seems, as Randy Alcorn suggests, that if one’s faith is the kind which dies upon testing; it is a good loss….for it was a faith not worth keeping. My view of God, then, was that He was my messenger boy and my “provider of good things”…my sugar daddy and that somehow he OWED me these. And the Almighty God does not, nor ever will fit into such a small and confining box as that – He is bound to burst out, exploding our small comfortable box and challenging us: Will you follow the true God? Or will you cling to the God of your imagination? Or will you as so many have, turn your back on your Creator and give up on his plan to redeem and save this aching planet?

But you know what I found? Even though I’d abandoned God (whom I’d callously blamed for my pain) my suffering continued and in fact worsened. And now, not only was I suffering, but I was suffering but without any aid or comfort and worst of all, HOPE. The expression, “Life Sucks and then you Die” was a reality to me…and the only thing that I could see which made any sense was to try to speed through that equation and get to the “death” part as quickly as possible. But, and here’s the kicker: I couldn’t trust God but I couldn’t get rid of Him either. I never could shake the knowledge that I had, that death is not an ending but a beginning. The Bible says that “God has set eternity into the heart of man” and that was true of me. I knew that I and my miserable life had a significance which would extend beyond the grave…And I HATED THAT FACT. More than anything, I simply wanted to be “worm food” or to explode into flames like the proverbial phoenix only not to rise but to dissolve into smoke and ashes. But my heart knew that this was not to be. So I was caught in an awful bind. Wanting to die; to escape…and knowing that there really is NO escape. That somehow, someday, I would have to face God with my wretched life and give him an answer for how I’d managed it …or destroyed it. And this left me with NO peace and no place to run.

The story of my return to the embrace of God is a long and rocky one and one that I won’t share here and now, but the fact is that once I’d made peace with my understanding of who God is and allowed him to remain incomprehensible and inexplicable…to have his reasons beyond those which my finite mind could comprehend and to relax into the fact of his incredible love for me; suffering never again “threw me” the way it had all those years ago.

I’ve had and have mental anguish, the likes of which is very hard to explain to someone who has never experienced hallucinations and delusions. I mourn the loss of a life of high promise and great expectations. I have constant intractable and really severe pain in my spine as a result of old back surgeries and newer damage due to the Psoriatic Arthritis. My hands are twisted and knobby, often swollen and usually very painful as well. My hips are shot also. I’m not “braggin’ on my pain”…I’m just explaining to you that I think that I have some right to say what I’m saying here. And what exactly IS it that I’m saying? That God entrusts us with pain…just as he did with Job.

There’s the old debate about whether or not God will give us more than we can handle. 1 Cor 10:13 says, "There is no temptation (and I’ve seen that translated also as “trial”) but such as is common to man…and God is faithful and will not tempt us beyond what we can bear but will, with the temptation provide a way out so that we can bear it.” I believe that this verse is what spawned that philosophy about God minding our limitations. But I don’t know if that is true. I think that maybe that verse was talking about temptation and temptation only. Because honestly, when you are wracked with a pain that NEVER abates; when the tsunami has obliterated your village and all of your family; when your youngest child dies an early death—there really may be NO WAY OUT of that suffering. We simply have to walk THROUGH it. And I have been overwhelmed by suffering that was truly greater than I had the resources to bear…and I believe wholeheartedly that the damage to my mind that has occurred as a result of this illness, is directly related to that “overload”…that circuits were literally fried in my brain and now I struggle to think clearly and to recall yesterday.

OK, so I’m saying that God does burden us to the point where human resources are completely inefficient and fall shy of meeting our ability to cope. What is the point then? That God is here with us; through our suffering; his tears mingle with ours; and he longs for the day, as we do, when he will at last arise from his throne; call an end to the pain of this world; punish those who are evil and those who cause evil and those who take delight in inflicting pain and make it all new; the way it was intended to be. Why does he delay this process? The Bible answers this question. OUT OF MERCY. There are still those people who need to come into his embrace and to trust him with their lives. If he had “righted the wrongs of the world” in 1985, I would probably have not been able to enjoy that redemption…because I was still in defiance and unbelief. If he were to right the wrongs of the world today, my daughter and husband would “miss the boat” and suffer eternal suffering. God knows the exact minute when the last believer will be saved; and that, friends, is the minute when this world will be folded up like an unused circus tent and things will begin anew.

God does NOT work on our timetable. With him “a thousand days are as a minute and a minute is as a thousand days”… But you know what? When I am in the New Earth or in Heaven and I look back on this pain-filled life; it will seem to me also, to a be a blip on the radar screen of eternity. These long sleepless nights will be like the blink of an eye. And all that will remain of it will be the knowledge of the character of the Almighty God which I have been able to develop as a result. My relationship with God which has been hardened like a clay pot in the kiln of suffering will remain for eternity. The pain will be gone and the gain will remain. And that heart and body ache will seem to be a small price to pay for something so infinitely valuable.

I don’t know whether what I have said here has made any kind of sense out of that old debate…whether it has caused you to think differently on anything. These are the answers which I have come to understand…and there are others like: It was sin and its effects which brought about the suffering of this planet; God is working on a logical premise and is completely consistent. He has allowed man to run this planet and to have his way with it; for good or for bad –and he will NOT (although yes, he COULD) magically intervene and eradicate suffering. God has established the policy and the terms of his dealings with mankind; He will not break the rules on any occasion because he is completely consistent…Man has a few grains left in the hourglass yet to “do his own thing” and to remain autonomous…but the time is coming—when God WILL STEP IN AND WILL BRING EVIL AND PAIN AND SUFFERING TO AN END. That is our hope. Not our “hope “ as in “oh, I hope so,” but our bedrock of Hope upon which we can plant our feet when the wind and waves rise and the storms rage.