Why Suffering? (Part 1 of 2)

Suffering is something all of us experience, and it's difficult for us to understand. We often wonder why an all-knowing, all-loving God would create a world where we experience pain. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains the biblical framework that addresses the question, Why suffering?

It's the first message in our new series called My Times Are in Your Hands. Let me invite you to turn to the book of Job. I'll make reference to it from time to time, although I confess that our study this morning is more topical than is our normal pattern, and that is this whole matter of the Christian in the experience of suffering and pain and evil. Obviously, this is a vast subject, one into which we can only dip, hopefully, significantly enough to be able to at least address some of the questions that are on our minds and in our hearts.

But it really isn't possible for us to walk through our lives, to live in the company of one another and see the significant number of individuals whose lives are ravished by pain and by discomfort. And in the course of my life, I read a number of books, and one that I've been particularly enjoying is entitled The Beatles, the Bible, and Bodega Bay, written by a man called Ken Mansfield, who was the former United States manager of Apple Records, an executive with Capitol Records here in the States. And in the sixties, he was at the very forefront of everything that was happening in the rock and roll world as it relates to the Beatles. Along the journey of his life, he found that he washed up against the rocks that refused to roll and finally discovered that he needed to take a stand on the rock of the Lord Jesus Christ. And in the course of reading this book and not looking for illustrative material on the matter of suffering in the life of the Christian, but finding myself drawn in that direction, even in apparently happenstance reading, I read last evening this entry, which was an entry in his journal in September of 1993.

And he's writing from somewhere on the coastline in Bodega Bay, California. I know a man is not supposed to cry, but today I felt like Jeremiah the weeping prophet. I wept in the wind as I walked before the waves, wondering why Matt died. I gazed out at the sea, gnawing beneath its surface at the sharks and the dolphins swim in the same water.

Just once, though, I wish that Flipper could give Jaws a whale of a beating. Matt was a Christian brother and the young father of three small children. A fourth child was Jew in a few weeks. He had lost his job recently, and things were tough on all fronts. He was killed instantly in a tragic motorcycle accident. I honestly believe that some of the tears I shed were for those last days that his family had with him. I wish things could have been better before he went away for the sake of their memories.

I never cried when my dad passed away. I kept thinking I would, but now I can't stop crying for Matt. Maybe I'm shedding the tears for this father as a symbol of all fathers when I think about these young children, what they have lost. I fall to my knees at the water's edge and lift my swollen eyes to the heavens above, and I pray. And then there's his prayer, and then he writes, I came to the water's edge for answers after I heard the tragic news today. I've been staring at it for hours and waiting. As the ripples wash up on the sand, I want to rush in and have this whole thing healed, to have everyone's pain go away. But I stand transfixed, unable to move in any direction—mentally, physically, or spiritually. I refuse to ask God why these things happen. He is God.

We got that straight a long time ago. So I have learned to ask him what and how instead. What am I to learn from this experience? What can I do that would be in line with his wishes and purposes? How can I bear a godly witness in a situation like this, especially when all the unbelievers have a field day as we crazy Christians try to explain this one away? How can I minister to those in need? How can I glorify God in this and in every situation in my life?

Now, that is not a circumstance that is remote to us as we make our journey through our days. To one degree or another, each of us has or will have occasion at least to feel the feelings that man had, if not to be able to express them so cogently as he's done in that section. Certainly, this was something akin to the experience of Job, who, as the most upright and blameless man, one who feared God and turned away from evil, he found himself subjected to the most dreadful circumstances. I encourage you to read, Job, for your homework, and when you do, you will discover that his life was such that once the devil had asked God if he could put him through a time of testing, everything fell apart. The Sabeans invaded his territory, they killed his servants, they stole all of his cattle. The following day, lightning struck all of his sheep and the shepherds that were looking after him. In the middle of the next night, the Chaldeans came and rustled his camels. And then the news reached him that the previous night's storm had brought down his house, where all of his sons and daughters were feasting, and each one of them had been killed.

All of them were dead. And just to add to the dreadful predicament, he himself became the recipient of this most dreadful plague of boils from which he could get no relief at all. And all of this, the experience of a God-fearing man, reminding us that suffering is no respecter of persons. So, we take life and live it, we take the Bible, and we read it, and it becomes immediately apparent to us that suffering is a fact of our human existence.

Now, some people will try to alleviate the problem in a variety of ways. For example, Christian Science, the work of Mary Baker Eddy, has labored long and hard to try and convince us to see pain as something of an illusion—to believe that somehow or another we can, in a mind-over-matter approach, isolate ourselves from these dreadful experiences of pain and suffering. Certainly, I haven't found that the proponents of this are holding to that line very vociferously when it comes to most obvious things, like broken limbs and ruptured spleens and so on. Nevertheless, that is offered up to us as a way of trying to deal with the problem of pain—you know, kind of ignore it and it'll go away, deny it and it won't really be there. Others attempt to deal with it not by removing pain from our mindset but by rejecting God. So they say, If this is how things are to be, then I will simply reject God. And by rejecting God, then somehow or another I've dealt with the problem. Some of you may be here this morning, and that's the line that you've taken.

You're angry, you're disgruntled, and you're confused. Can I say to you, as graciously as I can, that no one solves the problem of pain and evil and suffering by rejecting God? All that they do is remove the possibility of providing a meaningful answer to the predicament. If there is no God who is wise and in control, then the events of life are purely happenstance.

They take place as a result of blind chance. And we then live on our own, unable to make any sense of suffering at all. Indeed, without the presence of a personal Creator God who has fashioned all of his creatures and who loves them, even through their experience as dark and difficult as they might be, without a belief in such a God, we can never be sure that anything has any ultimate purpose or meaning, not least of all our suffering. And therefore, we add to the issue of pain total meaninglessness. And this, of course, is aptly summarized in all kinds of ways. It is the emptiness, or the nihilism, that is expressed in Sartre's writings, embodied in the work of Hemingway and others.

You can hear me quote it with great frequency, but it is such a striking quote. Hemingway says, Life is a dirty trick, a short journey from nothingness to nothingness. And the great dilemma, the great moral dilemma of pain and evil and suffering is not rectified by rejecting God. It is exacerbated by rejecting God. Because with God, we at least have a point of reference. Absent God, the whole thing is a mess. We are without form and void.

We are purposeless, and we are totally chaotic. So some have tried to deal with it by saying, Well, it's an illusion. Others have tried to deal with it by rejecting God.

And others try and deal with it by redefining God. This is the work that has been made famous by Rabbi Kushner. It wasn't an original idea for him—he never suggested that it was—but he has popularized it in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. And what does he say in that book? Well, he doesn't deny the existence of God.

He wouldn't—he's Jewish. But he solves the problem, he says, of pain and evil and suffering by denying God's omnipotence. There is a God, he says, but he is not all-powerful.

And so, on page 148 of the book, he says, We advise you to love God and to forgive him despite his limitations. So, we have a problem here, because it seems inconceivable that an all-powerful, all-good God would allow these difficulties to exist in our lives. So what shall we do? Well, says somebody, deny their existence.

It's an illusion. That's a silly idea. Reject God. That doesn't help.

That makes it worse. Redefine God. Who are you to redefine God? God has made himself known. God is not the work of our imagination. We do not fashion God the way a potter fashions clay.

Rather, the Bible says that God is the potter, and we are the clay. Well, all we're doing is saying, That's not a good answer. Is there a good answer?

Well, what's the question? The question, I think, is essentially this—at least, this is the ultimate question to which I get—why did God, who in his sovereignty knows everything, plans everything, and controls everything, create a world in which he knew things would go wrong? Create a world in which he knew things would go wrong and a world in which so much suffering would result?

Why did he not simply prevent Adam and Eve from sinning? Now, we're not asking that question in a defiant way. We're asking that question in an intelligent way. We're asking it, if you like, in a philosophical way. We're not asking it in a sense of putting God in the block. But I'm suggesting to you that the ultimate question is, if you have this God as he has revealed himself, why then, knowing the eventualities, would he choose to do this?

Now, clearly, we could stay up all night discussing this, and it is not within my frame of reference to be able to give a totally comprehensive response to it, but I want to say two things in answering my own question. The first reason, I think, is simply because he wanted men and women to serve him freely and lovingly, and not just because he gave them no choice, not because he had programmed them in a certain way. It's clear that God could have stopped Eve's disobedience.

He could have removed the fruit from her hand. He could have annihilated the devil before the world was made. But God chose to teach men and women the meaning of willing love and genuine obedience.

It is our very freedom that makes that a reality. Secondly, and really correlatively, God knew that men and women would learn more about their Creator and bring more honor to his name if he allowed them, first, the freedom to go their own way. So God allowed sin to come into the world with all of its horrible results, because that way we would learn to love God freely and because somehow God would show his love in a world of evil.

Now, I know that that is a tough explanation. It is not an explanation before which the mind of man immediately bows. But it is an explanation which does not have God wiggling out of responsibility, which allows us as Christians with a biblical worldview to say to our friends and neighbors, No, we're not trying to apologize for God in relationship to the problem of pain. We recognize that God himself takes ultimate responsibility. God could stop all evil tomorrow if he chose. And God has said that there is a day when he will bring all evil to a conclusion.

Meanwhile, he determines to leave things exactly as they are in order that man might be brought to a discovery of the fact that he has revealed himself supremely in his suffering, dying Son. Now, for me, that is very, very important, because it leaves God a sovereign over all things without making him the author of evil. Because God himself is not the author of evil. He cannot be in absolute goodness be the author of evil. But we have to acknowledge that God is absolutely sovereign. Therefore, ultimate responsibility comes to God.

For example, in Isaiah 45, he says through the prophet, I bring prosperity, and I create disaster. Now, when you learn to think along these lines, hopefully you will then be able to be of help to others—the kind of help that Job was not getting from his friends. Because his friends were full of hot air. That's what he said there in chapter 16. He says, basically, you're blowing a lot of air out, and your long-winded speeches never seem to come to an end.

You're a bunch of miserable comforters. Now, again, for your homework, you can look and see what these fellows were saying. What do you say when a friend is diagnosed with cancer? What do you say when someone loses their son in a dreadful motorcycle accident? What do you say when somebody's life begins to unravel before them, and they lose the sense of their mind, and they're reduced just to dreadful circumstances in some ward of a psychiatric unit? Well, the kind of things that these fellows had to say were as follows.

I'll just detail them for you, and you can read the chapters on your own. But Eliphaz, he took the high ground, and he came to Job, and he said, Job, I can see you're in a dreadful mess. You look disgusting, frankly, and I'm amazed at all of the things that have happened to you. And my advice to you is that you should seek God.

You can just imagine his voice, can't you? He said, I'll suggest that you seek God. The implication being that you haven't been seeking God. Job's response would have been, What do you think I'm doing? Why do you think I'm in the predicament?

Why do you think I am as I am? One commentator refers to Eliphaz as a theologian chilled by his creed. A theologian chilled by his creed. Let us each make a mental note of bewearing of becoming such theologians. So when we confront evil, when we confront pain and suffering in the lives of our friends and loved ones, though we don't immediately come to them and say, My, my, my, I think what you really need to do now is start seeking God. Of course, we always need to seek God at all times. But this is no answer to Job in his predicament. Beware of applying principles at arm's length to a problem that is too deep for your arm's reach.

Bildad—he was a friendly soul. He accuses Job of being a windbag. You can read that in chapter 8. Can you imagine that? Covered in boils. Lost everything that you own. All your sons and daughters burned up in a fire and a torrent. And the fellow comes in and says, You know, you're just full of wind, Job.

She must have said, Thank you very much. Could you get me a tissue and don't let the door hit you on the way out? The third fellow, Zophar—you can read of him in chapter 11—Zophar, he issues a call to repentance. He's narrow, he's dogmatic, and he shows that he doesn't understand for a moment the problem of Job's sufferings. So each of these characters exacerbates the problem. Here is Job facing all of this dreadful eventuality, and each of these fellows shows up.

Elihu is the all-answers man. He tells Job, It's simply a matter of discipline. Don't you love those people? You know, if you just tried a little harder, if you just pulled your socks up, you wouldn't be in this mess.

Now, just come along now. Are you reading your Bible every day? And are you just saying your prayers? How many prayers are you saying?

How long do they last? Clearly not long enough. I think you should double it up on both counts, and let's just see if we can't deal with this. What a load of nonsense! What a load of unhelpful claptrap! What a load of high-sounding, regimented, cliché-ridden religiosity spewing out of the mouths of individuals who perhaps themselves have never faced the dark night of the soul!

These fellows were useless. And his own wife, his helpmeet—what is she telling? Curse God and die! Hey, thank you very much. Could I have a little more cereal, please? And thank you for that. No, just rub the calamine lotion just here, honey, and thank you. Thank you very much. No, the bedsores are lovely, and thanks. Why don't you go shopping?

For the rest of your life. So he responds to them. He describes them in chapter 13, verse 4. He says, You're worthless physicians. You're absolutely useless. Oh, that you would keep silent, and it would be your wisdom. If you said nothing, he says, it would be profound in its eloquence. Actually, they passed their best at the very beginning, in chapter 2, when they see Job coming and they realize his extremity.

They do the best that they were ever going to do. And in chapter 2 and in verse 12, it says, And when they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him. They began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes, and they sprinkled dust on their heads. And then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights, and no one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was. And those of us who have known the darkness and emptiness and fearfulness of these circumstances will be able to testify to the eloquent wisdom of those who've been prepared to sit in the darkness with us and simply hold our hands or put an arm around our shoulders and say, There, there. There, there.

There, there. For when you read the Bible, you discover that the explanations in relationship to suffering and in relationship to pain are not provided in terms of cause and effect. The explanations in relationship to the dilemma are not there in taking it in terms of its origins but understanding it in terms of its goals. And when the Bible addresses the issue of pain and suffering, it does so within the framework of the fact that God, who is good and who is all-powerful, from all of eternity, has a plan to create a people who are his very own, to conform them to the image of his Son, and to bring them safely to glory. And he will, if you like, if we might say so reverently, do just whatever it takes in order to achieve that objective. And in the course of our lives, pain and suffering will be part of that. Our suffering takes place under the complete care and sovereignty of God. That's a comforting thought to help us through our trials.

You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. It is only in the pages of Scripture that we find ultimate answers to our human experiences, including why we encounter suffering and pain. God's Word is our sufficient source to address life's deepest questions. That's why our program is called Truth for Life. We believe God's truth is the roadmap for our lives. Without it, we're all adrift and without hope. At Truth for Life, we're committed to reaching as many listeners as we can with this life-changing good news.

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If you'd prefer, call 888-588-7884. I'm Bob Lapine, hoping you can join us again tomorrow as we continue in our new series titled My Times Are in Your Hands. We'll take a look at five reasons God allows righteous people to suffer. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.