How Can You Believe in a God Who Allows Suffering? Part 2

Leslie D. Weatherhead, in his must read book: The Will of God, tells this story:

I was standing on the veranda of an Indian home darkened by bereavement. My Indian friend had lost his little son, the light of his eyes, in a cholera epidemic. At the end of the veranda his little daughter, the only remaining child, slept in a cot covered over with a mosquito net. We paced up and down, and I tried in my clumsy way to comfort and console him. But he said, “Well, padre, it is the will of God. That’s all there is to it. It is the will of God.” (pp. 11-12)

In the last post we looked at two main ways we try to come to terms with suffering:

The first is to ascribe it, as the father does above, to God’s will. For many people, this explanation for suffering gives hope. It holds out the promise that the senselessness of it all is not all that senseless; that there is sacred meaning and purpose behind it. At the very least is offers the assurance that God is in control. Because life would be intolerable if it is random and beyond the control of God.

But while ascribing suffering to God’s will offers hope to some, for others it makes God the actor in our suffering. And it makes God ultimately into a monster.

Weatherhead tried to make that point with his friend:

Fortunately I knew him well enough to be able to reply without being misunderstood, and I said something like this: “Supposing someone crept up the steps onto the veranda tonight, while you all slept, and deliberately put a wad of cotton soaked in cholera germ culture over your little girl’s mouth as she lay in that cot there on the veranda, what would you think about that?”

“My God,” he said, “what would I think about that? Nobody would do such a damnable thing. If he attempted it and I caught him, I would kill him with as little compunction as I would a snake, and throw him over the veranda. What do you mean by suggesting such a thing?”

“But, John,” I said quietly, “Isn’t that just what you have accused God of doing when you said it was his will? Call your little boy’s death the result of mass ignorance, call it mass folly, call it mass sin, if you like, call it bad drains or communal carelessness, but don’t call it the will of God.”

Surely we cannot identify as the will of God something for which a man would be locked up in jail, or put in a criminal lunatic asylum.

If God is the source of suffering, then the question is valid: How can anyone believe in such a God?

The second way people tend to handle suffering is to deny the existence of God or to call into question God’s character.

But, as we saw in the last post, you can take God out of the story but suffering remains. So then what?

Either God allows suffering which calls into question God’s character and love, or we live in a world of pitiless indifference (in the words of Richard Dawkins) leaving us with lots of pain but no hope.

But what if there’s a third way?

What if it’s true that God’s love and suffering are related but not in the way we have been taught? What if a loving God speaks to suffering—to this seemingly pitiless indifference—not in the way we think God should but in the way we need God to?

Does suffering automatically prove that God isn’t loving or powerful; that God doesn’t exist? Or is it possible to see the true character of God in the midst of suffering?

Christianity offers a radically different answer to the question of suffering, and it’s found in a cross.

The story of the cross is a profound story of God’s stop-at-nothing love for the world. It’s the story of a God who in Jesus:

• Enters into our solidarity with us

• Enters into the human experience with us with compassion and grace

• Suffers with us because life is broken

• Absorbs our pain so that we don’t have to carry it alone

• Transforms our points of suffering by turning death into resurrection

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr says it this way:

Christianity is a faith which takes us through tragedy to beyond tragedy, by way of the cross to victory in the cross.

Suffering is not God’s will for you. God’s will for you, seen in the cross of Jesus, is to meet you in the midst of suffering with grace and love. To meet you in the senselessness of it all with hope, kindness, and goodness. And to let you know that suffering will not have the final word. Life will. Resurrection will. Grace will.

As Paul says in his letter to the church in Rome, chapter 8:

Can anything separate us from Christ’s love? Can trouble or problems or persecution separate us from his love? If we have no food or clothes or face danger or even death, will that separate us from his love? No!

I am sure that nothing can separate you from God’s love—not death, life, angels, or ruling spirits. I am sure that nothing now, nothing in the future, no powers, nothing above you or nothing below you—nothing in the whole created world—will ever be able to separate you from the love God has shown you in Christ Jesus your Lord.

How Can You Believe in a God Who Allows Suffering? Part 1: Setting the Stage

Where has God been the last two years?

• Millions of people around the world have died from COVID

• Millions more have suffered from the virus

• Millions have lost their jobs

• Mental and emotional distress has increased exponentially

• George Floyd was murdered by a police officer on his neck

• American citizens tried to overthrow the US Government

• Afghanistan has fallen once again into the hands of the Taliban

And that doesn’t include ongoing poverty, homelessness, people killed by drunk drivers, and the growing chasm between the have and the have nots!

If God is a loving God, why does God allow all of this suffering? Why doesn’t God put an end to it? Why doesn’t God intervene? Where has God been?

That question, along with the Hell question, presents one of the biggest stumbling blocks to faith and has done so since humans could ask questions.

In times of chaos, upheaval, and suffering we all look for something to make sense of it all—to bring meaning to the meaninglessness of it all.

And for people of faith the search for meaning begins with God (and that holds true even for those who don’t consider themselves religious).

There are generally two go-to responses to the question of suffering:

The first is the-God-is-control answer.  One of the common encouragements used to bring some hope in the midst of hardship is: Don’t worry. God’s got this. God is still in control!

For example, consider this word of hope from social media:

Sorry to break up the big panic, but the coronavirus will not take anyone outta this world unless that’s the good Lord’s plan. And you’re not gonna change that no matter what you do or what you buy. 

In other words, none of this is beyond God’s control.

But… if this is what God-is-in-control looks like, what does it looks like when God isn’t in control?!

This view of a God who has everything under control pictures God as a master puppeteer. Think Geppetto with Pinocchio, controlling and manipulating every move at every moment of every day; pulling the strings of human interactions, circumstances, and world events.

But when we dig down into that view of God, we find that it makes God responsible for all of the death, violence, chaos, and loss that we all experience in life. It makes God responsible for pandemics and cancer and divorce and suicide and car accidents and poverty and war and the Holocaust, etc.

If that’s what God is like, no wonder people want nothing to do with God!

The second response is the same as the first, but rather than fixing suffering onto God to bring hope, suffering is blamed on God in order to dismiss God altogether. How can a loving God allow suffering?

The argument goes something like this:

• God is all-powerful so can prevent suffering.

• God is good and loving so you would imagine God would want to eliminate suffering.

• But suffering exists so God is not all powerful or good or loving.  

And with no seemingly viable answer those questions, many people either abandon the faith or give up on the possibility of a God before even getting started with the questions.

But when we dig deeper into this second view, we also have some unresolved issues.

Let’s take God out of the equation for a moment. Many people who simply can’t believe in God because they can’t believe in a loving God who allows suffering, still have the problem of suffering.

Suffering doesn’t go away if we give up on God.

So how then do we explain it or come to terms with it?

Here’s atheist Richard Dawkins on suffering and evil:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of 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 that 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. (River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life)

If Dawkins is right, if life is chance or pitiless indifference, where does that leave us?

But what if it’s true that God’s love and suffering are related, but not in the way we’re often taught?

What if a loving God speaks to suffering, to this seemingly pitiless indifference, not in the way we think God should, but in the way we need God to? Does suffering automatically prove that God isn’t loving or powerful? That God doesn’t exist?

More to come next time.

You can connect with me at Tim@TimWrightMinistries.org