Suffering III
Following on from my previous posts on this topic, I've been pondering the way we perceive suffering. We often hear these kinds of questions (from Christians and non-Christians alike):
- ‘Where was God on September 11 2001?’
- ‘How can a loving God allow innocent people to suffer so much?’
- “If God is so powerful, why doesn't he just get rid of all the terrible things in this world?”
... and so on.
But perhaps we ask these questions because of the way we think about suffering.
We tend to think of certain things—things like sickness, pain, natural disasters ... anything that causes human suffering—as being ‘bad’. We especially think of these things as ‘bad’ when they happen to us or to our loved ones. So we find it difficult to say that a good God actively brings these ‘bad’ things upon people, especially people who belong to him and are seeking to obey him. How can bad things come from a good God?
But when the same things are described in the Bible as God's judgement on people who are clearly the ‘baddies’ (like Pharaoh's army, who were drowned as they chased the Israelites through the Red Sea), we tend to cheer, and see it as God's justice.
What if we were to think of suffering as not necessarily ‘bad’, but something ‘neutral’ which comes from a good God who is bringing about his good purposes for the world?
We think suffering is ‘bad’ because it causes us pain, and we cannot see what God is achieving in the bigger picture. But if God gave me cancer, and if somehow through that cancer, certain members of my family came to know and trust God, then I would have to see that as a good thing.
Of course, ultimately all suffering is bad. We know this because God will do away with it in the New Creation where there “death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore” (Rev 21:4). But in the meantime, God can and does bring good things out of our suffering. If we didn't suffer, we might very well miss out on some of God's greatest blessings (cf. Heb 12:1-11; Rev 3:19).