Perhaps the toughest question asked of Christians is, “Where is God in our suffering?” It is a question that escapes easy answers. All around us is the evidence of appalling and painful suffering. There are natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, disease and famine which cause painful devastation and loss to innumerable multitudes. Other suffering occurs because of human actions. Wars, betrayal, abuse, and theft are examples among many other painful and destructive behaviors. All of this suffering and evil presents a serious challenge to belief in the Christian God. The problem of evil is the bogeyman of Christianity. A monster hiding within the closet, whose presence we ignore for fear of discovering we are ill-equipped to understand and resolve. God is all-knowing, so he will be aware of suffering and evil. He is all-powerful, so he will be able to prevent suffering and evil. He is perfectly good, so he will want to stop all evil and suffering. Clearly, he does not stop evil and suffering. So, how can we believe in God?
This article and the next article will seek to provide an answer to this challenge. As we examine this issue, the case will be made that the existence of evil and suffering presents a powerful case for why the God of Christianity revealed in Jesus Christ can best account for why there is evil and suffering and give a secure hope for its final end.
No Evil Without God
To call anything right or wrong or good or evil is to accept that some moral standard must exist for how we can judge something. But, where does that standard come? Who determines it? In other words, when we say, “If God is good he ought to stop people from destructive behaviors,” where do we get our standard for “good?” Who ultimately determines how the world “ought” to be? Why should there be a standard, anyway? C.S. Lewis, when speaking of his change from atheism to belief in God, wondered where he even got the idea of an “unjust” suffering in the first place on the grounds of atheism. He explains:
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?
Lewis was saying that he needed an objective standard (outside of people) by which to judge something as good or evil, right or wrong. Otherwise, we are left with a world or brute reality without any real meaning; all suffering is simply the cause and effect of random and senseless forces of nature. Without this reference point, human beings have no more value to their behaviors than a swarm of ants or a herd of barn yard pigs. We are just more biologically advanced. That’s it. As atheist Richard Dawkins says that in a world without God there can be no basis to judge an action as evil. He writes the following:
On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes…blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
If there is no God then we are left with “pitiless indifference.”
Why Evil?
So why did God create a world with the possibility of having evil? Only a world with the possibility of evil would allow the possibility of love. God could have easily created a world in which nothing evil could ever happen. He could have preprogrammed people to always “act” in loving ways. But these preprogrammed agents would not genuinely be loving. Love can only be genuine if it’s freely chosen. Unless a person has the capacity to choose against love, they don’t really have the capacity to choose for it.
In fact, the concept of a “preprogrammed lover “ is completely meaningless contradiction of terms, like the concept of a “married bachelor” or a “towering midget.” God can’t create a “preprogrammed lover” because the very idea of an agent who is capable of love but not capable of choosing against love is meaningless. If God’s purpose in creation is raising up a people who are capable of receiving and reflecting his love, these people will have to have the potential to choose against love. The price of the possibility of love is freedom, and with freedom comes the possibility of evil. Madeleine Engle explains:
The problem of pain, of war and the horror of war, of poverty and disease is always confronting us. But a God who allows no pain, no grief, also allows no choice. There is no unfairness in a colony of ants, but also there is little freedom.
God Defeats Evil With Love
So, if there is evil in the world, how do we believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good God? Though granting that God is real and is the Creator, some think of God as above all the plight and difficult struggles in the world, knowing everything, in charge of everything, yet calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world. If this were true, it would be a serious strike against God’s goodness and love. But that is not the picture we get in the Bible. Evil and suffering are deeply personal. Christianity states that God gives the most personal response. God becomes human in the person of Jesus Christ and bears ALL the evil and suffering of humanity through his own suffering and death.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
Isaiah 53:5
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit.
1 Peter 3:18
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:21
Pastor and theologian John Stott voices the importance of this biblical truth:
I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross…In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross that symbolizes divine suffering.
As John Austin Baker says, “The crucified Jesus is the only accurate picture of God the world has ever seen.” The understanding of Jesus on the cross discloses a God who suffers with humanity. God, in allowing evil, suffers the effects of evil, to overcome evil.
The Good News
The message of Christianity is not just that God suffers with us. God suffers for us. We are trapped in the cycles of pain and suffering we experience and all too often cause them. God’s suffering is transformative. He bears our suffering and turns it into transformative love. Simon Cuff tellingly clarifies:
As human beings we cling to power, God sheds it. As human beings we flee suffering, God transforms it. As human beings we cause suffering, God endures it. Christ is his last word on the matter. God suffers with us, but more important, for us – so in that last word we too might be fully alive, and free from the suffering this life brings.
What is unique about Christianity among all other religions is that God actually enters into all of our suffering. God knows suffering as a horrible and brutal experience. But he does this to overcome and transform it. As the great hymn of the early church, quoted by the Apostle Paul, expresses:
6 Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.Philippians 2:5-11
What Does this Mean?
We cannot blame God for evil. The French atheist and novelist Albert Camus makes this astounding claim, “In that Christ has suffered, and had suffered voluntarily, suffering was no longer unjust….The divinity ostensibly abandoned its traditional privilege, and lived through to the end, despair included, the agony of death.” Camus appears to be saying that if God is no exception—if even he has suffered—then we cannot say he doesn’t understand. We cannot say that his sovereignty over suffering is being exercised in a cruel and unfeeling way. The cross makes it impossible to say that God has kept himself immune from our pain. We can fully trust him.
We can see God has provided the ultimate solution toward evil. At the cross evil is conquered as evil because God turns it back upon itself. He makes the supreme crime, the murder of the only righteous person to ever live, the very operation that abolishes the guilt and condemnation of our sin. This is utterly unprecedented. No more complete victory could be imagined. At the cross, evil is “turned back on itself.” As John Calvin expressed, on the cross, destruction was destroyed, “torment tormented, damnation damned . . . death dead, mortality made immortal.” Jesus exhausted evil with the power of his love and then rose again. Because of this the end of the story will triumphantly declare these words:
He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
Revelation 21:4
In the next article we will look at how God brings a greater good through evil and suffering.
Story of Grace 