Why Suffering?

Why indeed? Who hasn’t asked, or been asked, a question along the lines of, “If God exists, then why is there suffering in the world?” The question is good and it is important, but the fact it is that it is only rarely genuine. The more I study the more I realize that the question of suffering is more often than not a means of provocation, asked by skeptics who really don’t care about the answer; skeptics who, in fact, know full well that there is no answer a Christian could give that would satisfy them. And they are absolutely right. Because of this, the question of suffering remains one that every apologist in history has been forced to acknowledge at some point or another. Because of its pervasiveness, no book or article hoping to defend God from the arrows of the skeptic could possibly be considered complete if it does nothing to address this most difficult and sensitive of issues, and for thousands of years now it is a question that Christians have dreaded facing up to.

I’m certainly not presumptuous enough to believe that I can settle the issue once and for all here, and there are certainly things yet to be said, but I hope to at least begin the conversation with a few observations of my own.

To begin with, it doesn’t seem insignificant to note that it is often the most privileged skeptics who are quickest to point to the suffering of the world as a means of disproving God—and that seems like a rather odd thing. Wouldn’t one rather expect the strongest cries against suffering to come from those who actually suffer? Shouldn’t the streets and slums of the third world account for more cries against God than the halls of the Ivy League? Shouldn’t refugee camps and homeless shelters be hotbeds of atheism? They should, but they are not, for the truth of suffering is a strange thing. No, we really don’t see much suffering in the western world; not, at least, at the scope or scale that we see elsewhere. Even the hungry of America are generally well-fed; even the poor are relatively rich; even the sick are relatively healthy. And yet the skeptics of the Western World are the first to decry God for allowing suffering into creation.

Yes, suffering is real. I have seen it too many times, and it has broken my heart. But what have I found in walking through the slums, hospitals and orphanages of the third world? Diseased, enslaved and famished multitudes cursing God for their plight? Orphans and widows abandoning their various faiths and giving in to their despair? No. I’ve never found what one ought to expect: I’ve found people thirsty for faith; eager for hope. I’ve found people hungry for the taste of eternity. I’ve witnessed men and women, suffering more than most of us will ever know, flocking en masse toward faith, and, likewise, I’ve seen these same sufferers finding faith, then immediately turning and preaching to their fellow afflicted.

It is a strange truth: Those who suffer—who truly suffer—are those least likely to use suffering as an argument against God.

And how is one to explain this? Why should suffering lead one toward God rather than away from Him? One must first understand the cause of suffering—something the theist and atheist ought to be able to agree on: suffering is a symptom of freedom. The fact that man is free—free to accept God (or a more secular morality) or to reject Him; to walk faithfully with Him or to turn away—means that there will always be suffering in this world. As long as there is freedom there will be some who disagree with others; as long as we are at liberty to believe what we want there will be no worldwide unanimity on anything of importance, and, yes, there will be those who suffer as a consequence. Suffering is not a symptom of man’s rejection of God, and nothing more. Dostoyevsky wrote beautifully of this in The Brothers Karamazov, through the words spoken by the Grand Inquisitor (one of the truly sublime characters in all of literature, no matter how brief his presence). The Inquisitor, a closet skeptic attempting to cure the world of freedom’s curse, argued the point while standing face-to-face with Christ. The greatest failing of Christ’s earthly ministry, the Inquisitor argues, was to give man freedom, a fact exemplified in the temptation in the wilderness. Jesus refused the Devil’s offer of miraculous food, which he could have used to feed the world. He declined a worldly throne, from which he could have forced us all to worship, thus ending all religious wars. He declined to show his power to the world through miracles, thus taking away the need for a faith that leads to so much disagreement. His threefold refusal gave us freedom and humanity has forever suffered as a result. As a rule mankind accepts freedom as a good thing, and yet we suffer because we are free.

But take heart! The same freedom that enables human suffering offers us a way out: it enables us to transcend even the bitterest of human suffering by humbly kneeling before the heavenly throne and finding comfort. It allows us to be sought and found by a God who promises, among all of His great graces, an end to suffering. No, it is not always during our lifetime—indeed, even the slave is not promised freedom on earth; rather, he is encouraged to obey and to work hard, as unto God (Eph. 6), even if it means that he will be a slave until the day he dies. But even for the slave; even for the hungry and thirsty, orphan and widow, there is promised an end to suffering that is both definite and absolute. Though this revelation may be (rightly) dismissed by the skeptic as absurd, it can scarcely be denied that this knowledge, this revelation, has a real, profound, lasting effect on those who suffer. The hope of eternal rest can and does set at ease even the most troubled heart; it can relieve even the most intense suffering. Yes, there is great power in hope, and even more so when that hope is based on truth. Though the humanist somehow thinks it humane to tear this hope away from the sufferer, allowing them to simply wallow in hopelessness, the truth is not easily destroyed, and those who suffer know in their soul that real hope lies only in eternity.

Here is the great secret of the Christian’s response to suffering: it will never make sense to the skeptic. Nor should it. There is no common ground to be found. Even the cleverest Christian will not find an answer that will put an end to the debate once and for all; it will rage on and on, both sides growing endlessly frustrated, but only because the two sides are speaking different languages and never acknowledging the fact. The answer of the Christian to the problem of suffering lies entirely in the eternal; that is, it lies entirely in a concept absolutely rejected by the skeptic. The Gospel is embraced by the sufferer, not because it offers immediate, miraculous relief from physical hardship, but because in the promise of the eternal it promises a far greater relief than any Novocain or Aspirin; a bliss far greater and far more lasting than any opiate or hash-pipe. A sufferer who truly understands the Gospel understands that even the worst of the world’s suffering is but a tiny leaf blowing in the wind of eternity, that we are as much sojourners in suffering as we are sojourners on the earth, and this brings joy. Real joy. Unreasonable, unexplainable joy.

It makes perfect sense that this should be taken as gibberish to the skeptic. “For the word of the cross,” says 1 Corinthians, “is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” One cannot possibly be expected to understand suffering before he understands God. One absolutely must come before the other.

To accept eternity—that is, to accept the Gospel—is to accept this great truth: “Truly, truly, I say to you,” said Jesus in John 16, “you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn to joy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world.” Likewise, Romans 8 says that creation itself is groaning as in the pains of childbirth. But Christians alone can take comfort in knowing that this groaning, which manifests itself in death, disease, and every vile facet of human nature, is not our true reality; it is our present, but certainly not our future. Our future is in our “adoption as sons and the redemption of our bodies.” Just as the woman experiencing painful labor can look forward to the joy of her child, so each of us, engaged in some form of suffering or another, can look forward to the joy of eternity if we know God. Without God, there is no hope; suffering will give birth to even greater suffering, like a stillborn child.

The difference between the Christian and the skeptic is not that one can offer a clear, reasonable explanation suffering and one cannot—though both certainly try. Nor is it that one can necessarily put a stop to it and the other cannot—though both certainly do make admirable attempts, all of which should be encouraged to continue. The difference is really can offer hope for those who suffer and the other cannot. One can offer the promise of a suffering that will turn to joy, and the other offers only suffering that ends in death. The skeptic may think that in the idea of suffering they have ammunition with which to attack the Christian, but before they mount their attack they must first acknowledge that they themselves have nothing to offer the suffering but the cruel notion that this is all there is.

There is much more to be said, of course. How are we to respond to suffering? How do we strive to put an end to it? Why is Christianity the optimal worldview for ending the world’s suffering (which it certainly is)? And so on. I may respond to these questions in time, but what I have already written ought to serve as a start—we have to understand suffering before we can truly attack it.