I want to start today by saying that I am no expert when it comes to the actual reality of this topic. I am 24 years old, I am a medic so I have seen some human suffering at close quarters. I have spent time in African hospitals where I have seen young children die, mothers die in childbirth, fathers leaving behind dependent families as they succumb to HIV/AIDS. But I have never personally really suffered. I have never experienced prolonged physical pain or emotional turmoil. In fact, some of you here may know this topic in the nitty-gritty of life far better than I do – so I want to say that if at any point I am glib or over-general about your suffering I am sorry, that is not my intention.
Although I am here to answer the question about a good God allowing evil and suffering, I do not at any point want to deny it’s significance in people’s lives. In fact at many points throughout the story line of the bible, people really suffer and show that suffering really hurts. There is no denying that. In whatever form it comes suffering is not good. We all know that.
And so we move to the question itself. And I want to answer it in two parts – firstly, I want to address what happens if we get rid of God in regard to suffering. What happens if we remove him from the picture – does the problem of evil and suffering go with him? Then I want to look at the God that the bible presents and hopefully show that he is the answer to all of life’s biggest questions of which this is arguably the biggest.
So firstly, what about getting rid of God. You see as we look at the recent devastation over in Haiti, as we hear of more dead civilians in Afghanistan, further bombings in Iraq and train crashes on the continent it is easy to be come overwhelmed with the scale of misery that people on this planet endure – and as a believer in a good, loving God; that is of course a problem to me. As I watch footage from reporters on the streets of port au prince, I do find myself asking why this has happened, why such needless evil, why the loss of so many lives – suffering is a problem for the Christian. Of course it is. But I think it is an equally large problem, if not a bigger problem for the non-believer. Why? Why do I say that?
I say that because modern objections to God are based on a sense of justice, on a sense of fair play – people, we believe ought not to suffer, be excluded, die of hunger or oppression – we look at the photo reel of one famine after another and say ‘this should not happen’. But the problem with this is that our current existence relies on this very mechanism. Evolution by natural selection fundamentally depends on death, destruction and violence of the strong against the weak. You could almost say that suffering is the very reason that we are here. So then, on what basis does the non-believer in God judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair and unjust? Surely this is just the way things happen, this is the way the natural world works – it is not evil or bad.
For you see I think when you remove God from the picture you also forfeit objective moral standards. If it is humanity who determines what is right and what is wrong, then morality itself becomes something relative, something that can be decided upon and so my personal judgement on what I consider to be evil is no less important or true than the next person. So a proportion of Nazi Germany during the second world war, believed it was not wrong to exterminate the Jewish race – and if morality is merely an opinion, then who am I to disagree? For their opinion is just as valid as my own. One person who understood this was the French existential philosopher Jean Paul Satre in his signature essay on existentialism says “If god does not exist there is no longer any possibility of an a priori good existing. It is nowhere written that one must be honest, that one must not lie, since we are now on the plane where there are only human beings. Dostoyevsky once wrote, if god does not exist, everything is right, Dostoyevsky is right, if god does not exist we have neither behind us nor before us a lumionous realm of values nor any means of justification of any behaviour whatsoever.
Do you hear what he is saying – Get rid of God and you scrap the ability to pass judgements on the world and its actions. Might becomes right, suffering and evil become merely events that happen. So, suffering is a problem for the Christian but I think it is a bigger problem for the non-believer. When I am unable to say certain actions are really wrong. I believe that goes against what all of us know to be true, we do look at some news reports and we have an inherent plea to an objective morality that comes from outside of us, from outside society, from what I would call God.
Ok, well, lets move onto what the Christian faith can actually say about suffering, how it tries to make sense of it, how it helps when in the throws of suffering and the promises that one day it will no longer be this way. And I want to start by painting a picture, a picture of what some people believe God to be like if suffering exists and is not dealt with. Sometimes referred to as the inconsistent triad.
1. First is that if God is all powerful and all knowing, he knows about suffering and yet does nothing to stop it, well then he cannot be all loving. He cannot be good. In fact, God must be immoral.
2. The second is that if God is all powerful and all loving when then he cannot know about suffering, he must be unaware of what is happening, so God must be ignorant when it comes to suffering.
3. The third is that if God knows about suffering, and if he is all loving well then he cannot be all powerful, for surely he would do something about it, basically God is impotent.
So, god is either immoral – in that he inflicts the world with pain and does nothing about it, he is ignorant, in that he is blissfully unaware of what is happening, or he is impotent, powerless to do anything about it. Whichever, one you pick it is clear that the Christian God, the God described in the Bible as all loving, all powerful and all knowing does not exist, cannot exist.
But actually on a closer examination of the bible, I found these three contentions to be false. Actually, the bible presents good explanations for these apparent contradictions.
Firstly, the fact that God is immoral in allowing suffering to continue and to do nothing about it. Well, back at the beginning of the Bible it recounts the story of humanity and how wrong, how evil first came into the world. It explains very clearly that it was not God that brought it into the world but humans themselves. God made us all as autonomous human beings with the ability to act and think and he wants us to take responsibility for those actions. He wants us to face the consequences of the decisions that we make in life. If god were to come swooping down every time some wrong was to be committed, every time some suffering was to be endured, then I would say that the majority of human life and experience would be fenced off. In the past week I could recount to you endless times when I have acted and thought wrong things about my wife, about my friends, about other car drivers, about any amount of people – if I really want God to come and sort suffering out completely right now – well then I have to be prepared for him to come and sort me out right now. God is not the author of evil, humanity is. And so he does not inflict us with this pain – we are all too responsible for that ourselves.
Which leads onto problem number 2. God must not be aware of suffering for if he was then he surely would do something about it. And here I think we get to the uniqueness of the Christian position. For the great claim of the Bible, is not that God is detached, cut off and distant from the universe but that he is intimately involved in the universe that he has made, so involved in fact that in space, time history, he actually stepped into this universe. God became a man and walked on the earth. In Jesus, we see God the Son come face to face with suffering on many occasion and it moves him to anger and tears – the best example of this is the gospel of John chapter 11. Here Jesus comes to visit the tomb of his friend Lazarus who died 4 days earlier. And there he meets Lazarus’s sisters. Let me just read some of that to you now;
When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother Lazarus would not have died."
33When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. 34"Where have you laid him?" he asked. "Come and see, Lord," they replied.
35Jesus wept.
36Then the Jews said, "See how he loved him!"
Now, there are a few things to say off the back of this. Firstly, do you see Jesus response to the scene of grief that he finds – he is deeply moved in spirit, in actual fact the word that is used here in the original text suggests anger, a strong feeling of dislike at the scene in front of him. You see, Jesus sees the result of death and he is angry – he is angry because it is not meant to be like this, life was not supposed to be lived this way. And then as he approaches the tomb itself, Jesus weeps, and again the sense here is not just of a solitary tear trickling down a cheek as much as a body shaking, grief filled cry. Jesus faces the death of a loved one and it hurts him. This is not the picture of a distant God who stands removed from the world that he has made. By no means, Jesus knows the suffering of the world at a very intimate level.
And this leads us on perfectly to the final contention, which is that God must be impotent in the face of the world’s problems. For if god knew about suffering, and he loves us then he would surely do something about it. And the biblical answer to this contention is the biggest claim that Christianity makes. For at the end of all the accounts that we have of Jesus life, the authors recount that Jesus willfully was crucified on a roman cross. Not only did he encounter emotional suffering in his life, but died arguably the most painful death of all. Hanging on a roman beam after being beaten and mocked. The bible writers however, do not go into detail here about the physical pain but rather focus on the theological implications of the event. Because in some way, as Jesus hangs on the cross he is righting all the wrongs that have ever happened. He becomes a substitute for sinful humanity, he pays the debt that all of our rebellion against God has created. I said back at the beginning that evil was brought into the world by humanity, and we know all too well even in our own lives that evil is propagated still by the actions of humanity – and for god to sort it out, well he can either get rid of us all or he take it on himself. And that is what he chooses to do. As we look at the death of Jesus – we have an answer to all 3 contentions – here is a god who loves you so much he is willing to die for you, here is a god who knows intensely what it is like to suffer, and here is a god who is powerful enough to do something to sort it out.
For Jesus horrific death creates a way for this sinner, for this suffering-producer to be put right in the eyes of God and to take part in the great promise that the Bible has for those who believe in him.
This bible says that this world is not the end, that one day God will make all things new, it will be a place of no more suffering – and it is attainable through trusting in the death of Jesus on my behalf.
How can a good God allow evil and suffering? Well, as I’ve said, I think getting rid of God makes the problem worse, and in Jesus – we see a God who is loving, knowing and powerful. A god I can trust, a god who will help me endure my suffering and a god who provides genuine hope that one day it will all come to an end.
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