Faith in the Presence of Pain
It’s possible that you might be harboring some fears and cynicism when it comes to this theological enterprise, this journey of faith. After all, knowing God – our supreme end and good – might prove a costly venture. It might also prove to be as mad as Don Quixote charging at Windmills. You might suppose God to be illogical as a basic concept. After all, if God is supremely good and also supremely powerful then how can he allow – or perhaps even decree and ordain – something we find utterly cruel and unthinkable? Surely the presence of AIDS and Auschwitz points to the absence of God, and convicts him of either wicked disregard or tyrannical cruelty or incompetent weakness. Either he’s good but not very strong or strong but not especially good. Ain’t nobody got time for that! There is no Savior, we must save ourselves.
My atheist friends love this issue, for it is the cross on which they most enjoy crucifying theists of all sorts. Now it needs to be noted that many atheist champions wouldn’t believe in God if they were roasting in hell. The esteemed Richard Dawkins noted that not even Jesus’ second coming would convince him that God was real – after all, he reasoned, his ‘appearing’ might just as easily be the arrival of a super being from another galaxy. Jesus in person isn’t proof enough for Richard Dawkins and for many more, and that is why many honest atheists finally say that they don’t believe in God because they can’t believe in God. For them, there’s no pudding in which to discover the proof.
In the end then, this ‘problem’ is a problem for agnostics – who aren’t sure – and believers who haven’t spent much time with Job, or with Jesus at the foot of the cross.
“Though he slay me I will trust him”, cried Job in his suffering. Faith in the face of deep personal loss, pain, and suffering isn’t simply courage on display, it is a miracle meant to be a sign.
When Job asked God, “Why?” God responded with questions rather than answers. When Jesus from the cross cries out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” he was met not by a thundering affirmation of love but by a silent sky. God’s answers to human pain seldom show up during the pain. The anguish of a Friday afternoon on the cross is only answered by the joy at the tomb on the following Sunday morning.
God offers no explanation for the dilemma we pose about his goodness and power. Philosophers may try to do so, but in the end, we are left with this stark reality: God offers no explanation for the presence of particular evils and pains. He does tell us that his ways and his thoughts are infinitely higher than ours – and that humans who’ve lived in closest proximity to his being have discovered that trust in his supreme wisdom and infinite love is the most sane response to God’s Godness. He’s God and we are not. Trust begins there.
I can’t offer an explanation that God doesn’t offer – hey, I just report the news, I don’t make it. What I can say is that some god whose actions we utterly understood, or some god who acted according to our standards at all times, would be a god very much on our level and not one who could save us at all. That really would be a god the atheists could believe in – atheism would be true for this would be no God at all.
It is best to trust God’s wisdom rather than decrying his unfairness. Do you wish to charge God with being unfair? But from where did you get your sense of fairness? And have you not noted his largesse, the sheer bounty of his beautiful handiwork and majestic wonder? Maybe the question about unfairness should be more about why in the world God is so good to people who hate him so much. Mercy triumphs over fairness. Good news!
“Though he slay me, yet I will trust him.”
That was Job’s response to “the problem of pain”. Jeremiah likewise knew that God drew near to his suffering people and would, in the end, show them his always wise and kind will, even when that is hard to discern at the moment of deepest sorrow. That ancient prophet was walking through the ruins of Jerusalem when he sang of new every morning mercies and God’s great faithfulness (Lamentations 3:22-23). We sometimes see the light of God’s character more clearly in our tears than in our laughter. If this dawn has sorrow for us, there is yet new mercy for us in it as well.
At the end of the day, our problem with suffering is met by the Crucified God, by the God who enters our pain and makes it his own. In Christ who suffered for us, we find the meaning of our own suffering as service and the future of our suffering in his resurrection.