Providing satisfying answers to this problem is necessarily a complicated task. When people are comparatively free of suffering themselves, and can take an objective and dispassionate view of the matter, they look for rational explanations that can satisfy their intellects. On the other hand, when people have suffered, or are still suffering, mental and physical anguish, or are smarting under a sense of massive injustice, mere rational explanations are scarcely enough. They look for answers that will satisfy not only their heads, but their hearts; answers that will soothe their anguish, strengthen their faith, give them hope, strength and courage to endure.
Let me illustrate the point. Suppose you are the parents of a twelve-year-old girl, and it is discovered that she has a defective spine. The doctors say that she needs a long series of complicated bone transplant operations to build up and reinforce her vertebrae. If she does not begin to have these [p 61] operations now, it will be too late when she is older, and in later life she will develop very bad and painful curvature of the spine. The question is: Shall she have the operations or not? The girl cannot be left to take the decision by herself: she is too young to understand and envisage all the issues involved. You, the parents will, in the end, have to take the decision for her. What will you tell her?
You will doubtless begin by explaining in terms she can understand the physiological reasons why the operations are necessary, and why there is no other way of making her better. You will tell her honestly that it will involve pain, but that the surgeons are very kind and very clever and that in the end the outcome will be so good that she will be glad she had the operations. In other words, you will feel it very important to prepare her intellectually to face the ordeal.
The trouble is, however, that at the moment she is not in any great pain; but, if she takes the treatment, every time she wakes up from the long drawn out series of operations to which you have committed her, and for months thereafter, she will be in excruciating pain. How will you respond when she then sobs, ‘Why did you let me in for this terrible pain?’ Mere intellectual explanations will hardly be enough. You will now need to assure her of your love, to let her feel that you are with her in her suffering, and to build up her hope that it is going to be all right in the end. And meanwhile you will do all you can to strengthen her faith in you, in your love, in your wisdom and in the doctors; for if she loses that faith, her battle against pain will be immensely harder and could even be lost. [p 62]
So it is with us adults when we face first the intellectual problem of suffering, and then the experience of suffering itself. We shall need more than one kind of answer. Let us start, however, with the intellectual problem.
The intellectual problem
It is, actually, a two-fold problem, because suffering comes upon us from two logically distinct sources (though in practice the two sources are sometimes inextricably intertwined). One source is the evil for which man is himself directly responsible, i.e. commercial, political and civil injustice, exploitation, aggression, torture, murder, rape, child abuse, adultery, treachery, slavery, genocide, wars, and such like things, and, in addition, all those wrongs, minor in scale maybe, which nonetheless account perhaps for the most widespread misery in our world, namely the hurtful, damaging things that we all do to one another. By convention we call this the problem of evil.
The other source of suffering is natural disasters: earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves, floods, landslides, avalanches, ultra-violet rays, droughts, blights, famines, plagues (e.g. locusts or malarial mosquitoes), for which man is not immediately responsible (though he may contribute indirectly to some of them by irresponsibly damaging the ecosystem) and other things like congenital deformities and personality-destroying diseases, for which again man is not immediately responsible (though he may contribute to some of them both directly and indirectly). By convention we call this the problem of pain. [p 63]
Whether from the one source or the other, suffering strongly challenges faith in God. The problem of pain says: ‘How can we believe that a world in which there are so many natural disasters has been created by an all-loving, all-powerful and all-wise, personal, God?’ The problem of evil adds: ‘How can we reconcile the existence of enormous evil, and the fact that it is allowed to continue, with the existence of an all-powerful, all-holy, God who is supposed to be concerned for justice?’ The intellectual problem, then, is certainly severe: it would be foolish to deny it, or even to underestimate it.
A solution that makes matters worse
Actually, however, there is one simple way of eliminating this intellectual problem forthwith: embrace atheism! Deny there is a God. Then there is no problem at all in accounting for evil and pain. For if there is no intelligent Creator, we must suppose that our world, and we ourselves within it, were brought into being by mindless, impersonal, forces, which unconsciously produced and developed mindless matter. Then after millions of years of random permutations, this mindless matter gave rise to intelligent minds which could protest against suffering. But it did so accidentally. It had no intention of doing it; and having done it, it did not realize what it had done. It simply continued to proceed in its thoughtless, unplanned way, without any ultimate goal in sight, untroubled by whether the result was good or bad, intellectually acceptable or otherwise. On this supposition, then, there would be no difficulty at [p 64] all in accounting for the existence of evil and pain. What else could be expected from this mindless procedure but a colossal amount of pain at every turn? (There would now, of course, be an insurmountable difficulty in accounting for the detailed, sophisticated design and the great beauty which we observe everywhere in the universe.)
Atheism, then, undeniably gets rid of the intellectual problem of suffering: but it does not get rid of the pain, nor help us to bear it. In fact, it can make the pain harder to bear. For if there is a personal God and he created us, then there is solid ground for believing that suffering is not simply destructive and ultimately meaningless but can be used by God for our eternal good. And the reasoning behind this deduction is simple enough. Normal human parents accept moral responsibility for the children whom they have brought into the world, love them and seek their good. Such parents, moreover, find this concern for their children in-built in their very nature. It is highly unlikely, then, that the God who created them and placed this concern in their hearts, is himself utterly unconcerned for his creatures and accepts no moral responsibility for having created them (Luke 11:13). Here then is solid ground for hope; and when people are in the midst of suffering pain or injustice, such hope is often the one thing that can comfort, support and help them to endure. It is in contexts like this that the Bible comments:
And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that [p 65] is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Rom 8:23–25)
But atheism removes such hope altogether. It leaves people in their pain, injury and grief, without comfort, either emotional or spiritual, while their intellects have to submit to the tyrannous irrationality of pointless, hopeless suffering brought on them by mindless, heartless, forces which are unfortunately their masters.
Take a young mother of thirty-three years, whose husband has just been shot by criminals, and she herself has been diagnosed as having terminal cancer. What can an atheist say to her? Her sense of justice has been outraged by her husband’s murder. But the atheist, if he is honest, will have to say that her sense of justice is no guarantee that there is any objective justice in the world or in the universe. Her husband did not get justice in this life; and he will get no justice in the life to come either, for there is no life to come, nor any God to see that ultimately justice shall be done. Hope of justice has proved for him an empty dream. And as for her, the atheist will have to say that there was never any ultimate purpose behind her existence anyway; nor is there any goal beyond her very short life for her to look forward to; her suffering and pain are utterly valueless. There is, therefore, no hope. Atheists are, as the Bible puts it, ‘Separated from Christ, . . . having no hope and without God in the world’ (Eph 2:12).
Atheism’s solution to the problem of evil and pain thus adds to the pain. Emotionally, morally, and intellectually it is simply destructive. [p 66]
There are other attempts to solve the problem which fall short of atheism—but which also fall short of the picture of God which we get in the Bible. The most common of them is that of admitting that God is all-good, but denying that he is all-powerful. However this ‘solution’ is no real solution at all because once more it solves the intellectual problem to some extent but totally fails in the same way as atheism does to provide someone who is capable of helping us face our suffering.
This leads us then to a key question: is there any ground at all for thinking that suffering, from whatever source, is not incompatible with the existence of an all-loving, all-powerful, and all-wise Creator, who in spite of the suffering he allows, is loyal to us his creatures, has a glorious destiny for us, if we will have it, and can use the pain the better to prepare us for that destiny?
An answer to the problem of evil
Let us begin with the problem of evil, since the evil perpetrated by man on man is actually responsible for vastly more suffering than natural disasters are. Take the twentieth century and up to the present. The millions that have perished in natural disasters have been few compared with the billions slaughtered by two world wars, and countless other wars; by right-wing and left-wing dictators, by Hitler and Stalin, Pol Pot and warlords in the DR Congo and other countries in Africa; by religious and political persecution; by Mafia and terrorist organizations; by the sophisticated violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and by the sub-human savagery of Yugoslavia [p 67] and Rwanda; by democratic nations who boost their economies by manufacturing arms and selling them to repressive governments who have no respect for human rights; by industrialists who make fortunes by manufacturing millions of landmines which they then sell to Afghanistan and Angola where they will blow the legs off thousands of innocent civilians including children; by the exploitation of poorer countries by richer countries and by corruption in poor countries which puts millions of dollars of international aid into the pockets of their dictators while they leave their own people in squalor and poverty. Compared with all this deliberate evil, a natural disaster like a volcano seems innocent.
The understandable reaction of many people to this unending flood of evil is to say, ‘Is not God supposed to be concerned for justice? And is he not supposed to be almighty? Why then, if there is a God, does he not put a stop to all this evil?’
Well, the Bible says that he will most certainly put an end to it one day. God ‘has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead’ (Acts 17:31).
‘But what use to us’, many people say, ‘is the promise that one day in the distant future, at the end of the world, God will put a stop to all evil? Why, if God really exists, does he not do it now by intervening and destroying, or somehow putting out of action, all bad and evil men? He is supposed to be Almighty, isn’t he? He could do it. Why doesn’t he?’
Well, he certainly could do it, and in some extreme cases he does. The Bible records that at one stage in [p 68] history God blotted out the whole human race (except eight people) by a gigantic flood (Gen 6–8), as he will eventually do again, only this time not by water but by what sounds from the description of it (2 Pet 3) like atomic fusion.15 Similarly, when the extreme immorality of Sodom and Gomorrah became intolerable, God judged these cities by incinerating them (Gen 19).
The problem with indiscriminate judgment
But there is a problem, which the Bible itself explicitly mentions in connection with Sodom and Gomorrah. When gross sin and evil infect a whole society, how can a righteous God destroy the comparatively innocent along with the extremely guilty? With a small city like Sodom it was moderately easy to arrange for the few comparatively innocent people to escape the general destruction. But sometimes gross evil infects whole nations, countries, empires; and then millions of people get caught up to differing degrees in the cruel and arrogant policies of their rulers. School teachers are obliged to inject the minds of their pupils with, say, rabid fascism and genocidal hatred of minorities (as in Hitler’s Germany), or with God-defying atheism (as in Marxist countries). Men are forced, by a false patriotism, to engage in cruel ideological wars of imperial expansion. University professors are pressurized into reinterpreting history (and sometimes even science) in accordance with government policy regardless of what [p 69] they know to be the truth. And in that case how could a righteous God destroy whole nations without simultaneously destroying masses of comparatively innocent (though still sinful) people along with the guilty?
‘But that’s just the point’, says someone. ‘If God is all-wise as well as all-powerful, he could conduct a selective judgment of everybody individually, eliminate the bad, and leave the good. Then why doesn’t he?’
Well, suppose he did. Suppose he intervened today and destroyed all bad and sinful individuals everywhere throughout the world without exception. Where in fairness would he stop? And how many would be left? Where would he draw the line between the bad and the good? And who are the bad people anyway, and who are the good? ‘Get rid of the capitalists’, say the communists ‘and you will have a good world of good people.’ The capitalists, of course, say the opposite. And bringing it down to the personal level, what would God have to say to each one of us?
And there are other considerations. Let’s imagine two men who are selfish, cruel, given to bad temper and violence, to lies and treachery. One man is a private citizen and has little power; but his evil behaviour blights his wife’s life, breaks up their marriage and does his children serious, if not irreparable, psychological damage. The other man is the dictator of his country. He has immense power, and because of it his evil behaviour leads to the suffering and death of thousands. What would the first man have done, if he had had the same power as the second? Which, therefore, is at heart the worse man?
According to the Bible, God’s verdict on us as individuals is in fact that we have all sinned, I, you and everyone [p 70] else. Judged by God’s absolute standards we are all bad; not all to the same degree, but all to some degree. None of us is guiltless (Rom 3:10–20, 23).
But God is not only just, he is compassionate and merciful. The people of the ancient city of Nineveh, and especially their rulers, were notoriously cruel, and to strengthen their imperialist power engaged in mass deportation of the populations whom they conquered. God threatened them with destruction because of it, but he was prepared to delay the execution of his judgment in order to give them opportunity to repent; and he rebuked the Israelite prophet, Jonah, for demanding their immediate destruction (Jon 1:1–2; 3:1–4:11).
On similar grounds the New Testament explains why God is prepared to wait what for us is a long time before he brings the world to an end and puts a complete stop to evil: ‘The Lord is not slow to fulfil his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord [= Day of Judgment] will come . . .’ (2 Pet 3:9–10).
‘But if God is going to accuse us all of being bad and sinners,’ says someone, ‘he is supposed to have created us, isn’t he? Then why did he not create us in such a way as we could not sin and do evil?’
The glory and inevitable cost of being human
Well, he could have done; but that would have meant denying us any kind of free will and genuinely free choice. In that case we should have been, not morally responsible [p 71] human beings, but more like preprogrammed humanoid robots. And I don’t know any human being who would prefer to be a robot.
To be a genuinely moral being you have to be able to understand the difference between good and evil, and then to be able to choose freely either to do good or to do evil. A computer can have an enormous amount of ‘knowledge’ stored within it, but it has no understanding of what it ‘knows’, nor any moral choice. A computer can only choose to do what it is programmed to do. If it makes the wrong choice, or breaks down, it cannot be blamed for it. It has no responsibility for it. It feels no guilt. It does not understand what guilt is, or what it feels like to be guilty. It cannot even tell you what it feels like to be a computer, let alone a guilty computer (or a happy computer for that matter). Human beings, as we can all observe, are not in that sense programmed by their Creator. They have the ability to choose and generally pride themselves on it. When a man has chosen, for instance, to face danger rather than take the cowardly way out, he likes to be regarded as having been responsible for the choice and to be praised for it. Most people would feel it an insult to be treated as a baby, or as mentally incompetent or as a machine that was not responsible for its actions. It is only when we have done something very wrong that we are tempted to deny responsibility and to say, ‘I couldn’t help it.’
God, then, could certainly have made us like robots; but in that case, again, we should have been incapable of true, mature love freely given and received. If you were sitting in your room and a robot entered, flung its arms [p 72] round your neck and said, ‘I love you’, you would either laugh at the absurdity of it, or else push it away in disgust, or both. A robot has no concept of love in the first place; and even if it had, it would not be free to decide by itself either to love you or not to love you: it could only do what it was programmed by somebody else to do. It has no independent personality.
Here then is the glory of being human. God has created man as a moral being, able to perceive the beauty of his Creator’s holiness and the moral splendour of his character. God has also endowed him with free will and the ability to love so that he can freely choose to love, trust, worship and obey his Creator, and enjoy true friendship and fellowship with God both here on earth and eventually in God’s heaven (John 4:22–24).
But, of course, the choice God gave man was not, and could not be, a choice between two equally good alternatives. God is the totality of good, and there can be no permanent good apart from him. To say No to God, the source of life, is by definition to say Yes to ultimate disaster and death. There are not, and cannot be, two paradises, one with the Creator, and one without him. From the very beginning, therefore, God warned man of the fatal consequences that would inevitably follow if man chose to disbelieve and disobey God and to go his own way. The Bible says, however, that the first man, Adam, did precisely that: he chose to disobey God, to go his own way, to take what he felt was a better course (Gen 2, 3; Rom 5:12). And we all have to a greater or lesser extent done the same thing (Isa 53:6; Rom 3:23), with the evil results that we see everywhere around us, and within us, today. Thus, [p 73] according to the Bible, evil is evil because it is rebellion against God. But whose fault is that?
But once more someone objects: ‘Is not God supposed to be omniscient and able to foresee all possible eventualities?’
Yes, of course.
‘Then did he not foresee that if he gave man free will, man would abuse it, choose evil, and bring disaster on himself and the whole world?’
Yes, God did foresee it.
‘Then how could God possibly justify going ahead and giving man free will in the first place?’
God’s safety net
Because even before he created mankind he had decided to provide a safety net, available to all, so that in spite of their rebellion, waywardness, sin and evil, none of them need perish permanently. He would, in fact, take the occasion of man’s sin to demonstrate, not merely in words, but in action, that with a Creator’s heart he loved all his creatures even while they were still sinners. He puts it this way in the Bible:
For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Rom 5:7–8)
A way was to be made for man, when he discovered the ruinous results of sin, to repent, to come back to God and be forgiven, to be reconciled and restored into fellowship [p 74] with him. God himself, through his Son, Jesus Christ, would pay the penalty of man’s sin for, and on behalf of, man. And the cost of all the reparations made necessary by the damage caused by man’s sin, which man’s own resources could never pay, would be borne by God. What is more, the guarantee would also be given that when the final day of judgment comes and God rises up to punish the unrepentant and to put an end to evil for ever, then those who have repented and put their faith in God and his Son, Jesus Christ, would not come into condemnation but enjoy eternal life with God (John 5:24). What is still more, once reconciled to God, man would be introduced even here on earth into the majestic purpose which God originally had in mind when he created the universe.
Of that purpose we shall have more to say presently; but for the moment let us pause to concentrate on the centrepiece of God’s salvation activity for mankind in history—the suffering, pain and death of Christ himself upon the cross. For, if this is really God, as the New Testament claims it is, then God has not remained distant from human suffering but has himself become part of it. And it is precisely this fact of the nearness of God that can begin to cut through the tears and anguish and bring the suffering person real hope. Not of some simplistic solution to their pain but of the possibility of coming, in spite of that pain, to have the confidence that Christ the Son of God understands their suffering and so can be trusted for the future.
Before we leave the topic of the suffering and death of Christ, we should make sure that we are clear about the conditions attached to God’s offer of reconciliation through [p 75] that death. The whole package of salvation is a gift; it does not have to be earned or merited in any way. But the conditions for receiving it are:
First, repentance towards God (Acts 20:21). ‘Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon’ (Isa 55:7).
Second, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ (Acts 20:21). ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life’ (John 5:24).
But with this we are back with the question of man’s free choice. God will not force anyone to believe. He will not remove a man’s free will, not even in order to save him. For if he did, the end product would not be a saved and glorified human being but a robot.
On the other hand, with all his heart God beseeches men and women to be reconciled. There is no reluctance to save on his part (1 Tim 2:3–6):
In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them . . . we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor 5:19–21)
If, in spite of that, man uses his free will, not only to turn from God in the first place, but then in addition to [p 76] reject the forgiveness and redeeming love of God, how can God be blamed for the resultant disaster?
But now we must turn to that other source of suffering, namely, natural disasters, and to what we have broadly called the problem of pain.
Notes
15 Sceptics often deride such biblical statements; and yet they will then turn round and point to evidence that at one stage in history almost all life on this planet was in fact extinguished.
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