[Why Suffering?]

- CHAPTER ONE -

“The question of pain and suffering provides the greatest challenge to belief in God. In a discussion between scholars the issue of a world torn by suffering is often described as an insoluble trilemma. The argument by skeptics is positioned by first posing three basic claims that are adhered to a Christian, and then showing these claims to be irreconcilable. At least, they insist, these claims as they define them must be held by a Christian:

   [1] God is all-powerful: He can do anything He wills.

   [2] God is all-loving: He cares with an intense value for His creation.

   [3] Evil is a reality: Suffering is an all-pervading part of this world.

At face value, it is obvious that the ideas are indeed at variance. An all-powerful God can do anything He pleases, and from our perspective, the loving thing to do is to ease the pain of someone you love. Yet evil and suffering occupy a major part of our human experience; God has not removed them. These assertions together make no sense. This is the trilemma.”

“What if we interject just one more assertion into consideration – that the Christian faith also makes – that ‘God is all-wise’? Is this really more of a quadrilemma than a trilemma? God is all-powerful, all-loving, and all-wise… and evil exists. Maybe even a quintilemma? God is all-powerful, all-loving, all-wise, and eternal… and evil exists in time… What is it that we finite, self-serving, time-constrained, so-often-wrong human beings think we have all the wisdom needed in which to castigate God and hold Him before the bar of our wisdom within our timetable? Is it simply not possible that though thinking we are operating in the light, we could really be operating in the dark? Is it not also possible that there are character lessons learned in adversity that could never be learned in any other way?”

“It is… true that the shortest distance to a destination is not always the best route because the most important experience are often missed. One can quickly see how our journeys in life contain ready examples of traveling toward the destination we seek along a path that is not always free from impediments or obstructions or pain, and that often this is the better way to go. Freedom from pain is not the only indicator of whether or not something is beneficial.”

“Worldviews must be put through the sieve of our reasoning process to examine if we have done justice to the facts and to logic or have merely forced conclusions from them that amputate other realities. Such extrapolations are often tendentious and reveal more of the cultural bias from which the contender argues.”

“Is there a moral framework to life? Are the moral judgments we make reflective of a reality that is not just a preference of values but is in some nature binding upon us? You see, to the naturalist, the presence of evil is troubling with a double edge. From where do they even get the category of evil? And second, how do they break its stranglehold? To the Christian theist, good and evil have a point of reference. With the naturalistic starting point, good and evil are either emotionally sensed or pragmatically driven, both of which fall victim to the reasoning processes of our diverse cultures. This is a glaring inconsistency within naturalism.”

“I ask a simple question of the naturalist: Since you say that the reality of evil causes you, a human being, to disbelieve in God, what is your definition of being human? Are we merely educated animals, different to the natural world only in degree, in which case there is no reason for us to act any differently than the animals, and evil as a category cannot exist? Or are we essentially different, equipped with a sense of moral responsibility that is inescapable and subject to a different set of rules?”

- CHAPTER TWO -

“[The] existing theories [of origins] are not monolithic and change constantly, as every discipline seeks footage in trying to find an explanation for how we got here. The reason they keep probing for a life-form on other planets is because our scientific laws do not explain the origin of life. They may explain process but not origin.”

“[For] the Christian, the starting point is that God is the author of life. So the difference really lies in one of two beginnings:

   [1] In the beginning God… with a purpose, with intent, with design, with a revealed blueprint, brought the created order into being; or

   [2] in the beginning nothing… no purpose, no design, yet from primordial slime or cloudburst with no prevision, nothing became something and the something gradually moved up the scale of complexity until thought emerged and, finally, this self-caused entity we call homo sapiens.

In the beginning was matter, or in the beginning was the mind of God? From these two starting points we have to understand why evil and suffering exist, why we hurt, bleed, suffer, and die.”

“The argument that God is the author of life is presented with three assumptions:

   [1] Nothing physical in the universe explains its own existence.

   [2] Wherever one sees intelligibility, one assumes intelligence.

   [3] God has intervened in history and in moral reasoning.”

“With God as the prime mover, an explanation for everything else can be found. G.K. Chesterton said that the sun is the one created thing we cannot look at, but it is the means by which we look at the rest of creation. Like the sun, it is the spiritual that gives light to and explains everything else.”

“It is important to understand that God’s purpose for us was always perfect fellowship with Him. Just as water is to the body, the presence of God is to the soul. In freely choosing to violate His law, we forfeited the consummate fulfillment of our spiritual longing. Presence, relationship, holiness, trust, beauty, goodness, peace—all were present in the relationship between God and humanity at creation. By playing God and redefining good and evil according to our own discretion, we introduced into the human spirit disobedience, absence, severance, distrust, evil, and restlessness.”

“We want to hold God accountable to our notion of good, but we want to do away with the notion of evil and be accountable to nobody. We use our freedom to try to free ourselves from the very One who gives us our freedom. We want the gift without the giver. The symptom of evil remains—suffering—but we expunge the cause of evil—our own responsibility. By changing the metanarrative of God’s story, we have sought to change the narrative in our own lives and the result is, in one word: brokenness. We may call it independence or autonomy or coming of age or postmodern or progressive or political correctness. But in reality it is that we are broken. Renaming something doesn’t change its essence. Our bluff will be called. Let me say it again: What has happened is that we have been broken. Life is broken. We are broken and splintered individuals. We have enslaved ourselves in violation of the purpose for which we were created, and the result has been a shattering of everything we were intended to be. The Bible calls it sin. And pain is that constant reminder of our brokenness.”

“What is sin? Ultimately, it is redefining God’s intended purpose for you life and charting your own course. When God says the body is sacred according to the definition that He has given, sin is redefining His purpose and desacralizing the body. When He gives us laws by which to live, sin is rebelling against God’s rules and making our own rules. When He defines love, sin is profaning it for use to our own ends, as we define them. When He tells us there are consequences to disobedience, sin is demanding leniency when we flagrantly and unrepentantly break His laws. When God offers grace and forgiveness and love when we have fallen short, sin is spurning Him for ourselves while demanding a higher standard of laws for others. Sin is changing the purpose of God for our lives and becoming self-serving… God’s Word given to humanity has been redefined by humanity. His Word was specific, but we have scrambled it up, thinking we know better.”

“Sin is the stabbing to death of the spirit, causing a severance between spiritual life and the spiritual capacity of the person. The person is then no longer the carrier of the body, but the body carries the person. The shell walks and moves, but the being is dead. That was not the way God intended us to be, and that is why it has been said that ‘the worst effect of sin is within, and is manifest not in poverty, and pain, and bodily defacement, but in the discrowned faculties, the unworthy love, the low ideal, and the brutalized and enslaved spirit.’ Sin is the cause. A disconnect from the spirit is the result. Pain is the symptom. The worst judgment upon sin is more sin. Bereft of the presence of God, the isolation is rightly called death. Fyodor Dostoevsky said that hell is the inability to live. I can take it a step further: Hell is the self, isolated from God. His Word has been violated, His presence has been lost, and the pain we feel is that of being alone.”

“[Sin] is the brokenness of the soul, a wound that is deep and systematic, and pain is the symptom. Handling it inappropriately increases the agony, and a misdiagnosis only mangles the wound and results in greater pain.”

“There is a purpose to life, and sin is the violation of that purpose. The starting point of dealing with pain is to understand and accept that there is a purpose to your life and to mine. We are not just thrust into existence indiscriminately; rather, we are here by the divine will of our Creator God. What is life’s purpose? The Bible makes it clear that the ultimate purpose of God for us is communion with the Father. Not union, not just submission or being absorbed into His being, but communion with Him, friend to friend.”

“To some questions there are answers; to other questions there are no sufficient propositional answers. Both dissolve in the reality of God’s presence, and the answers we do have about Him carry us through the questions for which we still don’t have the answers. God has made us for that special relationship with Him. That is the purpose of life, that we might know God and enjoy His presence in our souls.”

“Our greatest gift from God is freedom. Our greatest blessing is His presence—perfect love and relationship. On this basis I move to two converging conclusions: First, the real malady is within us. The brokenness is in you and me. And because of that there are two ways God can enable us to cope with suffering. He can completely remove the pain by answering our prayers every time we ask Him to remove an obstacle. But think about that: Today perhaps it is a broken arm. Tomorrow it may be a bankrupt relative. The next day it could be a dying loved one. Problems will forever remain intrinsic to the human scene. Do we play God and demand that the evil be removed at every occurrence? That is asking for the logically impossible if love is to be supreme; God doesn’t want us to love Him for what we can get from Him. The other way God enables us to cope with suffering is change us from within. He changes our hearts and walks with us through the deep waters. This is the greater miracle when compared to the mere changing of circumstances. Only a change within us can keep intact Paul’s three excellencies of faith, hope, and love.”

“If people become skeptics about God in response to suffering, we must assume that the antidote, pleasure, must mean perpetual happiness. But that is simply not the case. Chesterton suggested that meaningless does not come from being weary of pain. Rather, meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure. In short, both pain and pleasure are experiences that remind us that without God, neither can be explained.”

“I believe God best understands why we weep and why we struggle. I recall some years ago being on a flight and, during the descent, a baby was screaming with pain; one could tell that the little one’s ears must have been hurting. I could feel the sudden descent triggering discomfort in my own ears. Everyone was intently swallowing, or trying to pop their ears, but the child just kept screaming. I turned around to see how the mother was handling it. I saw her holding the baby to her chest with her head leaned back, tears running down her face. How could she properly explain to the child that soon they would be at their destination and the pain would cease?... Tears are part of our stories, but our eternal destination point is hard to explain to us because we know only time and cannot understand eternity. But He will get us there.”

- CHAPTERS THREE – FOUR -

“[There] is a general theme in Scripture about God having certain people in mind even before they came to exist. Some verses refer to God’s choice of specific people for specific purposes. But since God has control over all that comes to be, there is also a sense in which each and every person is chosen by God—known by Him before conception, knitted together by Him in the womb (Psalm 139:13), loved by Him from all time.”

“Maybe God wasn’t interested in only perfect people. Maybe He wasn’t looking for the most impressive creatures He possibly could have created. Maybe He was just looking for someone He could love. And maybe… He just found Himself—amazingly and against the odds!—with an overwhelming love for us. Not because we deserved His love. Not because we are better or more impressive or more useful or funnier or better looking than the other people God could have created. Simply out of grace—unmerited love, the love of a parent standing over his newborn child—not with a grade book, not with an evaluation sheet, not calculating how productive you’ll be for the family business, not comparing you to anyone else’s kids. Just admiring you, just delighting in you, simply because You are His child. Simply because you are created ‘in his own image’ (Geneses 1:27).”

“We tend to think we’re worthy of love only to the extent that we’ve been impressive, successful, or beautiful… But Christianity says otherwise. Christianity says that divine love—the best form of live—is not about deserving; it’s not about what we earn or merit or accomplish. God’s love is simply about being His child. And therefore, with God you can stop competing to be loved and just enjoy it. The question, ‘Why do you love your child?’ doesn’t even make sense to a loving parent standing over a newborn infant. ‘What do you mean, why do I love her? She’s my child! I made her. She has my nose.’”

“The loving parent is not the one who never allows suffering in a child’s life. The loving parent is the one who is willing to suffer alongside his children. In creating this world, God didn’t merely accept the cost, but He suffered the cost.”

- CHAPTERS FIVE – SIX -

“There are at least three different aspects to [the problem of pain]: (1) the metaphysical aspect—what is the source of suffering and pain, or the very concept of evil; (2) the physical aspects—natural disasters are not even thought of as being of humanity’s making; and (3) the moral aspect—how can God justify the vastness of pain and still claim to be all-loving and all-powerful?”

“C.S. Lewis gives us a good analogy. He states that when a ship is on the high seas, it must answer three questions. The first is how to keep from sinking—personal ethics; the second is how to keep from bumping into other ships—social ethics; and the third is the most important of all… to know why the ship is out on the high seas in the first place—what I call the essence of ethics. Why is there life at all?”

“The struggle is deep. [Atheist] Mackie grants that an argument can be made that the constituent factors defining intrinsic good and intrinsic evil form such an intuitively unexplainable pattern that only a theistic framework makes sense out of them. And [atheist] Nielsen goes a step further when he admits that the categories of good and evil are actually rationally unsustainable by reason alone. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that there is no rationally compelling reason why we ought not to be individual egoists.”

“How does one ‘biologicize’ the choice of a mother in the peak of health giving up her life for a handicapped infant? How does one ‘biologicize’ parents who drape themselves over a child to protect them from incoming mortar shells? How does one ‘biologicize’ any self-sufficient being sacrificing themselves to protect those dependent on them? The philosophical defense of naturalism was formerly the survival of the fittest. But we are talking of the survival of the weakest at the cost of the fittest. What law of evolution demands that? Suppose we can ‘biologicize’ that by saying it is in the nature of things to sometimes make exceptions to the rule. What about a family that has been victimized by a brutal murder and looks squarely into the eyes of the murderer and says, ‘I forgive you’? What ‘biologicization’ explains that? These are called supererogatory acts. In the evolutionary scheme, that category simply does not justify itself.”

“The theist is not dying that an atheist can be good. That would be preposterous and counter to fact. Atheists can be good and beneficent, and often are. But there is no rationally compelling reason for them to be good.”

- CHAPTERS SEVEN - EIGHT -

“Many people start with extraordinary dreams, but by the time they are adults they have ceased to dream like children. We learn to set our expectations low, to bring our hopes and dreams down closer to where we already are. And in a lot of ways this makes perfect sense. We don’t want to be dreamers, hopeless romantics, naïve idealists. We were ignorant when we were children. Now we understand the harsh realities of our world. Now we understand how often expectations are unmet, and the hurt that brings. Now we’ve experienced failure. We’ve had relationships end badly; we’ve had parents divorce; we’ve had loved ones die; we’ve lost friends to suicide. It turns out that what’s outside of us isn’t what we had dreamed of, and what’s inside of us isn’t what we had dreamed of either.”

“We want to believe that the world is on our side, that the world is going to be kind to us and give us opportunities to climb higher and higher each year. We try to convince ourselves with hopeful phrases. The world is your oyster. The sky is the limit. The only thing to fear is fear itself. You can do anything if you just put your mind to it. Things can only get better. Such nice phrases. But here’s the thing. They’re all lies! Every one of them! They are simply false. There are so many things to fear in this world other than fear itself—disease, abuse, betrayal, accidents, poverty, failure… For many millions of people in this world, poverty is the limit, or slavery is the limit, or depression is the limit, and experience suggests that things won’t get better.”

“So much of our suffering takes root not only because we are living in a world that often seems against us, but because we are not the people we know deep down we were created to be. Life is not headed for a happy ending, not only because of the harsh world outside, but also—if we’re honest with ourselves—because of what’s inside.”

“Here’s the point: Jesus Christ is in the business of redeeming expectations. He’s in the business of reviving hope. In their magnitude and beauty, His expectations for our lives have much more in common with our childhood idealism than with our adult realism; they look much more like what we once dreamed of than like what we now settle for. And here’s why. Because when you choose to live with Christ, He begins to transform you from the inside out. He begins to transform what’s within, and that begins to transform our experience of what’s without.”

“There’s a passage in the Bible that says we should not get drunk on wine, but instead be filled with the Spirit of God (Ephesians 5:18). You see, this drunken desire to go beyond oneself, to transcend oneself, to do adventurous and heroic things, is in its undistorted form a good desire and from God. It’s connected to that childhood desire for goodness that I was talking about earlier. But drunkenness, or drugs, or promiscuous sex, or pornography, or power trips, or the newest technological toy, or whatever it is that we get our highs from, is just a terribly cheap imitation of the real thing. When you decide to be a Christian, when you invite God into your life, the Bible says that His Spirit comes to live inside of you (Romans 8:9-11)—a spirit so powerful as to have raised Jesus from the dead. And it is just remarkable to experience the Holy Spirit living inside you and empowering you to be more and more the person that you long to be and that you were created to be.”

“When you are filled with the Spirit of God, you again find yourself acting in ways that you know you otherwise couldn’t, or wouldn’t. You find yourself with an inexplicable love for the person you used to find most annoying, with courage and confidence in the situations in which you know you always buckle, with patience and gentleness in the situations that usually make you angry and violent, with joy where there was sadness, with a peaceful night’s sleep where there was worry and anxiety. I used to play soccer with a guy who said: ‘You become a Christian so that you can live the life.’ Becoming a Christian is not just a matter of believing something different, but of stepping into an empowering relationship with Jesus that will give you the strength to live the life you were made for.”

“God will not coerce you; He will not change you against your will. But as a Christian, you freely ask God to give you the strength to follow Jesus, to follow the life that He lived—a life devoted to seeing others through suffering and to loving them sacrificially. When you tell God that following Him is the desire of your heart, you find yourself with a strength that is beyond your own, a strength to be more of the person you were created to be for the people you care about most, to be that person you dreamed about being as a child. Soren Kirkegaard put apt words to the experience: ‘Now, by the help of God, I shall become myself.’”

“Your God will be as big as your dreams and expectations. If your expectations are low enough, you can get away with being your own god. I did for a long time. If your expectation is to be well-connected and to run in the right circles, the city can be your god. If it’s to be rich, money can be your god. If it’s immediate pleasure, sex can be your god. But I think deep down many of us sense that we were made for more than this. The Bible says that ‘[God] has set eternity in the human heart’ (Ecclesiastes 3:11).”

“The problem of evil is in part a question about how much of reality we currently see. In the Christian understanding of reality, what we currently see is only the first few moments of life—literally just the birthing process of human history. If we assume these first moments are all there is to life, then we may very well doubt the goodness of the Creator. But this doubt will be overcome when our view is widened and becomes the view from eternity. How decisively this doubt will be overcome depends on how good God’s offer of eternal life turns out to be. Many of those who seem to know God best suspect that our tendency is to vastly underestimate just how great eternal life with God can be.”

“If God exists, He is infinite in every respect. He is even further beyond us in intelligence and understanding than my brother is beyond his cat. Our ways are higher than [a cat’s] ways. Why, then, should we be surprised when God’s ways are higher than our ways? Why should we be surprised if fully understanding God’s ways requires capacities that—at least for now—finite creatures like us do not possess?”

“[One] of the assumptions smuggled into the thought that suffering disproves the existence of God is this: If God does have good reasons for allowing the suffering that He allows, we should know what those reasons are. But why think that? God might have many reasons for allowing suffering. And we shouldn’t be at all taken aback if we aren’t able to grasp them in full.”

“Many times we do see [God’s reasons for events in our lives], but many times they are difficult for us to see from our limited, finite perspective. And as deeply frustrating as that can be, it is just what good reasoning suggests we should expect. Tim Keller puts it very well: ‘With time and perspective most of us can see good reasons for at least some of the tragedy and pain that occurs in life. Why couldn’t it be possible that, from God’s vantage point, there are good reasons for all of them? If you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world, then you have (at the same moment) a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know. Indeed, you can’t have it both ways.’”

“[Skeptical Theism is] not a new idea. We find it in the Bible in several places [e.g. Romans 11:33-34 & Isaiah 55:8-9]… It should give us serious pause if we assume that God can have good reasons for something only if we know what those reasons are. What does that assumption assume about who we are? The Bible puts the question this way: ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ (1 Corinthians 2:16) It takes an extraordinary amount of confidence in one’s intellectual abilities to claim, ‘I know the sort of world God should have created.’ Isn’t that a claim to know as much as God Himself?”