If God is Love, Why do People Hurt?

       Who knows even at this point how many people died in Haiti? 

       Was it a punishment to the nation because of the widespread involvement in voodoo?  That’s what Pat Robertson and some Haitian Christians claimed.  Was it what the insurance companies call an act of God?  He made a world where there are such things as earthquakes.

       But was the death of so many simply an act of God --- what some people call natural evil?  Or was it more an act of moral evil – the result of a country locked into poverty by its former colonial masters and now under the thumb of six wealthy families that drain the country dry.  A quake that might cost tens of lives in Southern California costs thousands of lives in Haiti. 

        This morning in our Lenten series on Hard Questions and Great Hope we are talking about suffering. We’ll explore it briefly in this sermon and in much greater depth in your small groups.   

       There is much more to say on this subject than we can possibly cover today or even this week.  So I’ve noted on the outline the link to a sermon I preached last September 27th.  I have also provided a reading list for those who want to go into much greater depth on los, pain and the reality of evil.  These are books I have read and absorbed and commend to you.

       Let me read the hard questions. 

       Questions

       A Barna poll asked, "If you could ask God only one question and you knew he would give you an answer, what would you ask?" The most common response was, "Why is there pain and suffering in the world?" 

       Some worldviews, like Christian Science, simply deny the issue altogether.  They argue that suffering is simply illusion -- like the boy who visits the family’s Christian Science practitioner to ask him to pray for his very sick father. The practitioner replies, "Son, your father only thinks he's sick Tell him to have faith and believe he's not sick, but well."  The practitioner sees him the next day and asks, "How's your father?" The boy answers, "Now he thinks he's dead."

       Well I will be in the same frame of mind because I also have a fatal disease. I'm terminal. I'm going to die. But the news gets even worse. You have the same fatal disease — mortality.  None of us is gong to get out of this place alive.   And while we are here we will have troubles.

       The Book of James is a letter written to Christians scattered all over the Roman world. The very first thing James says in this letter is "Consider it all joy whenever you face trials at any time." Kind of a strange way to start a letter, don't you think? I mean, imagine reading this verse to a person who has just lost their spouse, or to someone who is going through a family crisis. Consider it joy? What on earth does James mean by that?

        James is not saying that we should enjoy painful things when they happen. We can't do that. That's not noble to do that: it's stupid. Even though sometimes in our culture, I think that's what we do. We seem to enjoy the pain. Daytime TV has made an industry out of it.  We sort of wallow in it, or go on Dr. Phil and talk about it endlessly. Or the other thing we do in our culture, the opposite extreme, we pretend nothing's wrong. We keep a stiff upper lip.

       But between wallowing in our misery and pretending that there's nothing wrong, James gives us a third alternative. That is to find God's joy in the middle of whatever trials we face. Not happiness, which depends on circumstances, but the deep abiding joy of Jesus that only He can give.

       It hard for us to do that because as Americans I think we deep down have this belief that we have an inalienable right to a pain free life, and that being a Christian is like a Teflon coating, and the messes that stick to other people should just glide right off of us. There are churches that build their ministry on exactly that belief. 

        Some churches today have no place for pain. Those who say God has healed them get the microphone, while those who continue to suffer are shamed into silence or ushered out the back door.  Paul had a much different viewpoint. He wrote in Philippians 1:29: "It has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in Him, but to suffer for his sake" Jesus pledged in John 16:33, "In the world you will have tribulation.”   We can count on these promises as surely as we count on John 3:16.  But if we don’t know that we can feel ripped off. 

       A woman who had accepted the health and wealth worldview lay dying of cancer. She looked into a camera during an interview and said, "I've lost my faith." She felt bitter that God had "broken his promises." She correctly realized that the god she'd followed does not exist. Sh incorrectly concluded that the God of the Bible had let her down. He hadn't; her church and its preachers had done that. God had never made the promises that she thought he'd broken.

       The God of the Bible says that in the school of life, trials are not electives, they are required courses. James does not say, "Consider it joy if you suffer." He says, "Consider it joy when you suffer.”

       And our response to suffering raises a challenge.  Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl wrote, "Just as the small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it, likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicaments and catastrophes whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.” 

       Randy Alcorn notes, “When people lose their faith because of suffering, it's usually a weak or nominal faith that doesn't account for or prepare them for evil and suffering. I believe that any faith not based on the truth needs to be lost. The sooner, the better…any faith lost in suffering wasn't a faith worth keeping.

       But why should God even allow such pain in His good world to people He loves?  Those are the questions.

       But before we go farther with the questions let me say that I recognize that if you have been devastated by a loss then this issue isn't theoretical, philosophical, or theological. It's deeply personal. Logical arguments won't satisfy you; in fact, they might offend you. You need help with the emotional problem of pain, not merely the logical problem of pain.  I hope that we will be able to help that as well.  But one way to do that is to try to understand what God is up to in His world and what He has done to be with us and help us.

       Why should God even allow pain in His good world to people He loves? 

       It’s because we live in a world that is both broken and free. 

       We live in a broken world groaning under the weight and consequences of sin.  That’s what Paul writes in Romans 8:22.  God is not to blame for cancer, diabetes, AIDS, malformed babies, or any other disease or malady that afflicts humankind. They weren't a part of God's created order. They came along with humankind's fall. They are part of living in a fallen world – in the midst of a spiritual battlefield.  God hates them as much as we do.      

        God is also not to blame if we suffer the consequences of other people’s sin. 

       Take the case of Lily Burke that I talked about in the sermon last fall.  She was apparently killed by a drug addict out on parole.  The trial started a couple of months ago.

        Now could God have stopped Charles Samuel from doing what he did to that young woman? Could God have stopped the murders of those two young women in San Diego?  Yes, I believe he could have. Then why didn't he? Because He gave us the kind of world we want to live in. It is a world where people can touch us to make us feel good or touch us to cause us great pain. God made a world where freedom is real and choices matter. And God is not to blame when people choose to abuse that freedom.  True freedom involves the ability for people to do both unspeakable good and unspeakable evil to one another. 

       For many the most harrowing example of evil inflicted by one human being on another is the Nazi death camps.  But the Holocaust didn’t come from nowhere.  It came from a Germany that had increasing pushed the Christian faith to the sidelines of public life in any meaningful way. Once that restraining force was removed all hell was ready to break lose.

       This sobering warning was written by the German poet Heinrich Heine more than a century before the Nazi death camps were built: “It is to the great merit of the Christian faith that it has softened the brutal German lust for battle. But it cannot destroy it entirely.  And should that taming talisman break—the Cross—then will come roaring back the wild madness of the ancient warriors.... That talisman is now already crumbling, and the day is not far off when it shall break apart entirely." At that point, Heine predicts, “there will be played in Germany a play compared to which the French revolution was but an innocent idyll.”

       Don’t blame God for moral evil.  Thank Him for the restraint – what Heine calls the taming talisman —the Cross.   .   But realize with Heine that if the restraint is thrown aside then hell will break loose.         I don’t think it is a coincidence that the swastika is a broken cross.

       We can’t know the things that don’t happen in the world and in our own lives. When we ask why God doesn’t prevent suffering we need to realize that God may already be restraining the great majority of the suffering that could occur. The chaos that breaks out in some corner of the world always prove the exception rather than the rule.  That’s why it’s news.  God is limiting sin all around us, all the time.  2 Thessalonians 2:7 declares that God is in fact restraining lawlessness in this world.

       But let’s face it. We don’t want most evil restrained.  We want it all restrained – especially the part that touches us.  We are puzzled because God can show His power by preventing tragedies and healing diseases, but chooses not to. 

        But power isn't God’s only attribute. He also knows what we need for our health and growth in Him.  He knows things that we don’t know.

        Sometimes we make the foolish assumption that our heavenly Father has no right to insist that we trust Him unless He makes His infinite wisdom completely understandable to us. This is an impossible demand upon God, not because of His limitations but because of ours. A physicist father bears no blame because he can’t explain quantum mechanics to a three year old – or me. 

        God sees things that we don’t see.  So James writes that we can find joy even in pain is if we trust that God brings good out of trials. With Jesus, suffering is never hamster wheel suffering that goes round and round without going anywhere.  With Jesus, it is always pottery wheel suffering - it always produces something good.

         Randy Alcorn notes, “Let's be honest: virtually everyone who has suffered little in life is shallow, unmotivated, self-absorbed, and lacking in character. You know it and so do I. And yet we do everything we can to avoid challenges, both to our children and to ourselves. If we succeed in our avoidance, we'll develop in ourselves and our children the sort of character we least admire.”  

       For two years, scientists sequestered themselves in an artificial environment called Biosphere 2. Inside their self-sustaining community, the Biospherians created a number of mini-environments, including a desert, rain forest, even an ocean. Nearly every weather condition could be simulated except one, wind.  Over time, the effects of their windless environment became apparent. A number of acacia trees bent over and even snapped. Without the stress of wind to strengthen the wood, the trunks grew weak and could not hold up their own weight.

        We need the wind.  Though our culture shuns hardship, we would do well to remember that Hebrews 12:10 tells us that God uses it "for our good, that we may share in his holiness."

       God doesn't simply want us to feel good. He wants us to be good. And very often, the road to being good involves not feeling good.   Joni Eareckson Tada spoke of a woman, pregnant with a disabled child, who cried out in desperation to her husband, "Things will never be the same." His response? "Maybe God doesn't want them to be the same."  As his wife, Joy, underwent cancer treatments, C. S. Lewis wrote to a friend, "We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be."

       A speaker often asks people to fold a paper in half. She then instructs them to write on the top half the worst things that had happened to them and on the bottom half the best things.

       Invariably, people find things at the top of the page that they also include at the bottom. Experiences they'd labeled as the worst things that ever happened to them had, over time, become some of the best things that ever happened. That's because God uses the painful, difficult experiences of life for our ultimate good and for our growth. 

        In making my own list, I find a number of the worst things have turned out to be the best. Try making your own list. If you've lived long enough, if enough time has passed since some of those "worst things”, then you will almost certainly find an overlap.  You may even find the overlap in the midst of the pain. 

       A few weeks before Steve died I talked with Maureen Rankin about what she is going through.  I am sharing this with her permission –even her insistence.  She said, “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone – but I also don’t want to give up what it’s given us.”  She shared the same thing at Steve’s service.

       How is this possible? Because while evil and suffering are not good, God can use them to accomplish immeasurable good. Knowing this should give us confidence that even when we don't see any redemptive meaning in our suffering, God can see it and one day we will too. Therefore, we need not run from suffering or lose hope if God doesn't remove it. We can trust that God has a purpose for whatever He permits.

        James says that we've got to choose joy. James doesn't say it Is joy when we encounter trials, he says "consider it joy." This is a considered joy. This is a deliberate act of our will to choose to look for the good things that God is going to bring out of it. We have to choose it. We have to consider it.

       Trials can make us bitter, or they can make us better. With Jesus, they make us better. There is not one trial that I have gone through that I would trade. I didn't like them, I don't want to go through them again, but God has used every one to make me better.

       We complain to God, "Where were you when I needed you?" I think He says in a still small voice, "I was there hurting with you." Jesus wondered where God was when He was dying on the cross. "My God, my God," He cried, "Why have you forsaken me?" We know God was not on a leave of absence while Jesus was hanging on the tree. God, in Jesus, suffered the pains of vulnerable love.

        God might say to us, "I have intimate understanding of what it is to be in your place. You have no idea what it is to be in my place. If you'd experienced Gethsemane and the march to Golgotha and the horrors of the Cross, you'd not question for a moment either my understanding or my love."

       Some people can't believe God would create a world in which people would suffer so much. Isn't it more remarkable that God would create a world in which no one would suffer more than He?

       The world isn’t fair.  And personally I’m very grateful that it isn’t.  If the world was fair, Jesus would not have died for me. 

       As D. A. Carson writes in How Long, O Lord? "Do you really want nothing but totally effective, instantaneous justice? Then go to hell."

       But we get heaven because the world is unfair.  The Bible promises that all who know him will fall into the open arms of a holy, loving, and gracious God—the greatest miracle, the final answer to the problem of evil and suffering. He promises us an eternal kingdom on the New Earth, where He says of those who come to trust Him in this present world of evil and suffering, "They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain" (Revelation 21:3-4).