Some Questions About Suffering

Last Sunday, we looked at the objection that suffering and evil disprove Christianity, or at least make it highly suspect in its affirmations of an all-loving and all-powerful God. It’s a difficult objection, and one any serious Christian needs to deal with honestly and thoughtfully.

You can hear how we dealt with it here.

One person who listened to the message sent me this question via email: “Are all the bad things..in my life because God is working toward something else? Or are some things only as a result of random, “I live in a sinful world”?”

This is a great question and I think everyone asks it at some point in their lives. It’s the old-fashioned, “who should I blame?” question. In the message, I talked about how one of the explanations of the problem of evil is that God is working towards a greater good. Does that mean, then, that He is ultimately responsible for all suffering? Often people will reference the story of Job to conclude that even if God isn’t the one sending the suffering, He’s at least allowing it, as if it’s some game between Him and Satan.

I think there are 4 possible causes for suffering in our lives:
1. God is shaping us. Sometimes, like a good personal trainer, God allows us to struggle and suffer through difficulties because it helps us mature and get stronger in our faith and perseverance. Sometimes, like a good dentist, God causes us pain in the short term to bring about health in the long term. Sometimes, like a good parent, God disciplines us so we make better choices. In all of these cases, He is with us for the journey and has our ultimate good in mind.

2. Satan is attacking us. God is not the author of evil, Satan is. Satan is a liar and has been lying since the beginning. Even though he was defeated once and for all on the cross, he has a stay of execution and is using his remaining time to disrupt God’s plans as much as possible. That means, he wants to bring you down and make your life miserable. Remember, spiritual warfare is ultimately a battle for your mind. Satan wants you to believe things that aren’t true so that you’ll experience suffering.

3. We are victims of other people’s sin. The sad reality is that all human beings are broken and sinful. That means people will hurt you. Sometimes it’s a stranger, sometimes it’s a loved one. But there’s no escaping pain from others in this life. People will let you down, and some actively desire to hurt you. This isn’t God’s fault, and it isn’t directly Satan’s. It’s someone, who is a free agent, making a willful and selfish decision that makes you suffer.

4. We suffer the consequences of our own sin. We all like to pretend we’re innocent, but we’re not. One of the major principles in the Bible is that we reap what we sow. There are consequences to our choices that we deserve. And there is a lot of suffering and pain that we try to blame on God or Satan or other people, when what we really need to do is own our own crap. We make choices on our attitude, on our time and on our behavior that sometimes make us suffer.
Finally, what about natural disasters or unexpected tragedies or our own mortality? Romans 6:23 tells us that death is the just payment for sin. Adam’s sin, as well as our own, broke the world, so there are things like hurricanes and tsunamis and earthquakes. Whose fault is this? Well, a combination of numbers 2, 3, and 4 above.

All of this might help explain suffering, but it doesn’t really fix the problem. That’s why there’s an even better question to ask than, “Who can I blame?” And that question is, “Can anything be done about it?” What Christianity offers that no other worldview can is a resounding “YES!” to that question.
You see, God is in the redemption business. And no matter which of the 4 causes of suffering is to blame, God can and does use all of those situations to bring good to bear in our lives because His plan cannot be thwarted. From our perspective, that answer may not justify the suffering- especially while we’re in it. But it does give us a different (truer) perspective when we most need it.

So the next time you’re tempted to ask, “Is God making me suffer?”, ask instead, “How can God redeem this suffering and bring about something good?”

Because that’s what He does.