There is no need here to list again the many natural disasters to which our planet earth is subject from time to time. Nor can we shut our eyes to the destructive effect which they have on human life and property. One thinks of the havoc caused in recent years by the earthquakes in Japan and Turkey, or by the floods in Bangladesh and Eastern Europe, by the famines in Ethiopia and the hurricanes in Haiti and the southern United States.
However, we should not overlook the fact that the more science discovers about our planet, the more astoundingly remarkable it turns out to be.
Our astounding planet
In the first place, it supports life! And not just life, but intelligent life, minds that can turn round on the universe and begin to understand how it works, and to ask how it all began, and what the ultimate purpose is for its existence. Why does it exist at all? How long will it last? When [p 78] will it end?—and indeed, why does it suffer what we call natural disasters?
The eminent mathematical physicist, Professor Paul Davies, does not appear to believe in God as depicted in the Bible. But the sheer existence of intelligent minds on our planet moves him to write as follows:
I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate. The physical species Homo may count for nothing, but the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here.16
It is not as if planets capable of sustaining advanced forms of life were common in the universe. Professor Carl Sagan was an ardent believer in the possibility that there could be intelligent beings on other planets in the universe. But even he estimated theoretically that only 0.001% of all stars could possibly have a planet capable of supporting advanced life (and this now appears to have been an excessively large estimate). After spending a lifetime of research and millions of dollars in trying to find evidence for the existence of such intelligent beings, he found none.17[p 79]
Indeed, none of the other planets in our own solar system are able to support advanced life. And when one considers the long (and ever increasing) list of conditions that we now know must be, and are, met by our planet in order to support life, the evidence becomes overwhelming that our planet has been carefully designed and engineered for the purpose.18 From this too, it would appear that, to borrow Paul Davies’ phrase, ‘we are truly meant to be here’.
And then there is the fantastic complexity of the biochemical machinery in every cell of the human body. In their book Cosmic Life Force the Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle and the mathematician Chandra Wickramasinghe, writing about the basic enzymes necessary for life, remark:
A simple calculation then shows that the chance of obtaining the necessary total of 2000 enzymes by randomly assembling amino acid chains is exceedingly minute. The random chance is not a million to one against, or a billion to one or even a trillion to one against, but p to 1 against, with p minimally an enormous superastronomical number equal to 10 [40,000] (1 followed by 40,000 zeros). . . . If all these other relevant molecules for life are also taken account of in [p 80] our calculation, the situation . . . becomes doubly worse. The odds of one in 10 [40,000] against are horrendous enough, but that would have to be increased to a major degree. Such a number exceeds the total number of fundamental particles throughout the observed Universe by very, very many orders of magnitude. So great are the odds against life being produced in a purely mechanistic way . . . .19
Once more, then, overwhelming evidence points to the fact that our existence as human beings on planet earth is not the result of mindless forces. The occurrence from time to time of natural disasters, therefore, cannot wipe out this massive evidence (and much more besides) that both our planet and we ourselves have been deliberately designed. And that raises the obvious question: Who is the Designer?
The Bible, of course, says that God is; but that at once brings us back to the problem of pain: 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?
Humanity’s own attitude to pain
Let’s begin, then, by thinking about the attitude which, God or no God, men and women in general take towards pain. It will not answer all our questions; but it will at least help us to view our problem in its proper proportions. [p 81]
We can pass over quickly the obvious point that we do not regard all pain as bad. Some pain is preservative and therefore good. Catch your finger accidentally on the blade of a sharp knife, and the pain of the cut will make you involuntarily withdraw your finger and so prevent further damage.
Fear of pain can be preventative. Fear of getting burned stops us putting our hands into fire. Fear of contracting AIDS could even restrain some people from immorality. Such fear, therefore, is good.
Pain and suffering constantly evoke sympathy, compassion, concern and self-sacrificing devotion on the part of nurses, doctors, social workers and others and so builds up in these caring people a noble character which the mere pursuit of selfish pleasure and the determination to avoid pain and sacrifice at all costs would never produce. This too is good; and we all admire such people (though curiously the public pays them a pittance yet pays film and music celebrities a fortune).
But let us move on to consider the attitude that many people take towards the risk of serious injury, pain and even death. No normal person is prepared to suffer pain or death just for the sake of it. But thousands of normal people are willing to run the risk of quite serious injury, and sometimes death itself, for the sake of nothing more than sports such as rugby, Formula 1 racing, hang-gliding, snowboarding and mountaineering.
Ballerinas suffer severe pain in their feet; and the pain that gymnasts and athletes voluntarily endure as they push themselves through the pain barrier in the course of their training is notorious. But the human spirit [p 82] urges them on to attain mastery of their bodies, and to achieve perfection, beauty and grace of movement; and they count the pain involved to be worthwhile.
But again, let us move on to still more serious things. No nation is obliged solely for the sake of sheer survival to engage in space exploration. Yet nations do engage in it knowing full well what the colossal risks are; and people still volunteer to train as astronauts and to go on space missions even though they are fully aware that others have already perished in similar missions.
The elemental forces of nature—fire, wind, wave, electricity, gravity, atomic power—are all vastly more powerful than man is; and being impersonal and mindless, they will destroy him without compunction if he mishandles them. Electricity will cook your dinner, or, if you make a mistake, electrocute you. It knows no forgiveness. And yet man, made in the image of God (whether he acknowledges it or not) and made to have dominion over the works of God’s hands (see Gen 1:26–28; Ps 8:6) knows in his spirit that he, with his mind and intelligence, is infinitely more significant than the elemental forces of nature. From the earliest days, he has set about the process of discovering how to harness these forces and make them serve his purposes. Fire was harnessed early. With the invention of ships and sails, the wind and waves which without them would drown a man, were now made to convey him on his voyages of exploration and discovery. Nowadays even earth’s gravity is harnessed and used to accelerate a man-made space probe towards earth, and then to fling it out into space, as a sling does a stone, on its way to some other planet.
[p 83]
Humanity’s attitude to the cost of progress
This whole scientific enterprise of harnessing the elemental forces of nature has been a magnificent expression of the human spirit. The process carried enormous risks, and achievement has been bought at the cost of endless pain and countless lives. But in the judgment of most people the vast benefits that have accrued to the whole human race have outweighed and justified the cost in terms of pain and death.
Then we should notice another very significant thing. Harnessing elemental forces does not mean removing from them their essential power to inflict pain and death. Nor would one wish it so. Fire that lost its potential to burn, would no longer be useful. Electricity that could not fry you to a cinder, would no longer be able to perform many of the tasks which, when harnessed, it does perform. Laser beams can destroy human tissue; if they couldn’t, they could not be employed in delicate eye surgery as nowadays they are. It means, of course, that use of these elemental forces always carries a certain amount of risk; but most people consider the risk of injury and death worth taking in light of the benefits to be had.
Airplanes can overcome the force of gravity. Their invention and improvement has cost thousands of lives; but we still fly in them, knowing the risk that if the airplane’s engines fail, gravity will destroy both it and its passengers. Yet nobody that I know of would think of arguing that God ought to have created our earth without any gravity, or with much weaker gravity than it now has, so that when an airplane’s engines failed, gravity did not cause it to crash. [p 84] If earth’s gravity were much weaker than it is, the planet would lose its atmosphere and life would have been impossible in the first place.
To sum up so far, then. Left to themselves, and without being forced, people in all ages have thought it acceptable to risk, and actually to incur, a certain amount of grave suffering and death in the course of developing the potentials of their planet (and nowadays of other planets too), because of the great advantages to be gained by taking the risks necessarily involved in such progress. People generally do not admire the attitude that refuses to reach out for progress, for fear that it might involve suffering and pain.
But that would seem to imply that mankind cannot in all fairness complain if God’s purpose in creating our planet and us human beings upon it, inevitably involved suffering, not only for man but for God himself as well, for the sake of conferring on man an infinitely glorious and eternal benefit.
God’s purpose in creating the world
According to the Bible our earth was never designed to exist for ever; one day it will end (2 Pet 3:13–18; 1 John 2:17; Rev 20:11–21:1). But man, being spirit as well as body, will never cease to exist. Physical death does not put an end to him. He will exist somewhere and in some state, in heaven or hell, eternally.
Earth, therefore, was never designed to be mankind’s permanent home. It was intended simply as a temporary stepping stone towards the achievement of a far greater [p 85] purpose for man, which God had in mind before he even created our earth. That purpose involved two stages:
Stage 1 Man would be born into this world as one of God’s creatures. He would be endowed with body, soul and spirit; with intelligence, language faculty, moral sense and God-consciousness. But for none of this would it be necessary for God to seek man’s prior consent or even cooperation. Man would simply become eventually aware that he had been born and would gradually discover that he had these faculties.
Stage 2 Man would later be offered the opportunity to become, what he had hitherto not been, namely a child, and then a son, of God. But for this, man’s willing consent and choice would be necessary.
To understand the progression between these two stages we must be careful to notice the difference in biblical terminology between a creature of God on the one hand and a child and son of God on the other. Popular religious thinking often confuses these two things, and speaks as if all human beings were children of God. But that is not true. God certainly loves all human beings, for he is their Creator and they are all his creatures; and in non-technical language we may rightly say that he looks after them in a fatherly way. But in biblical language, while all human beings are creatures of God, not all are children of God.
The classic statement of the situation occurs in John 1:10–13. It will be worth quoting it in full:
[p 86]
He [that is, the Son of God] was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
From this passage five things are very clear:
First, a human being is not automatically a child of God, as a result of being born into this world. To be a child of God he has to become one; and you cannot become what you already are.
Second, the condition for becoming a child of God is that one must receive Christ and believe on his name: it is to as many as receive him that he gives authority to become children of God.
Third, not all human beings become children of God, for the simple reason that not all receive Christ: he came to his own, and they that were his own people (that is ethnically, in other words, the majority of his Jewish contemporaries) received him not. And many today, of all nationalities, do not receive him.
Fourth, the process by which one becomes a child of God: what it is not**.** It is not the same process as that by which we are first conceived and then born into this world through our parents. Nor is it an operation which we can perform on ourselves by our own will power.
Fifth, the process by which one becomes a child of God: what it is. It is to be begotten by God, God puts his own life in us.
[p 87]
This last description, ‘begotten by God’, points clearly to the difference between creatures of God and children of God. God’s creatures are made by him, God’s children are begotten by him. Let’s use an analogy. An electronic engineer cannot get a child by the same process as he uses to get a computer. He makes, or creates, the computer; but he has to beget the child. And, of course there is a vast category difference between his computer and his child. The computer might be highly sophisticated and able to perform wonderfully complicated operations far beyond the capability of the infant child. But the computer would not possess the engineer’s life: the infant child would. And with that life the infant child would grow up to enjoy a relationship with his father, and an enjoyment of his father’s life, love and fellowship, which the computer could never hope to enjoy.
This, then, was the magnificent purpose that God conceived in his heart even before he made the world: he wished for sons and daughters that could share his own very life and so understand him, enjoy him and he them, in a fellowship possible only in a father–son/daughter relationship of shared life. Let us hear it stated in biblical language:
He [God] chose us in him [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. (Eph 1:4–6) [p 88]
Here then is the true progress for mankind which God himself designed: from being born by physical birth into this temporary world as a creature of God, to becoming a child of God by spiritual birth while still in this world, so as to be able eventually to live in fellowship with God eternally in his world.20
A suffering God
The vastness of this project can be seen first of all by the fact that its achievement involved a change in the very Godhead itself. The one whom Christians call the second person of the Trinity was not always human. The Word, as he is called, was not always flesh. But he became flesh, became human, so that redeemed men and women might be spiritually incorporated into him, as a physical human body and its members are part of each other, (see John 1:1–2, 14; 17:20–26; 1 Cor 12:12–14). And becoming truly human he suffered, sinless though he was, just as we do; and by that very suffering was equipped to become our spiritual file leader on our pathway to eternal glory (Heb 2:17–18; 4:14–16; 5:7–9; 12:1–3). God is no static or unfeeling God!
‘But what’, says someone, ‘has all this got to do with the problem of pain and suffering which we are meant to be discussing?’
Why, this! Becoming a child of God depends on a person’s willing consent to receive Christ. For that reason (in addition to the other reasons we earlier discussed) [p 89] man had to be created, at what we have called the first stage, with a genuinely free will. Yet, as again we have already observed, God in his omniscience foresaw that man right from the beginning would use his free will to set his own will against God’s will, to disobey God, and to lead himself and the whole human race on a downward path away from God. God also foresaw that the only way of redeeming humans, and bringing them back and making it possible to proceed with stage two of the project, was for the Son of God, not only to become human himself but to offer himself as humanity’s representative Redeemer and Saviour, to bear the colossal cost, suffering, pain and penalty of human sin, and thus as the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world. God foresaw it, and for his own sake and for humanity’s sake, the Godhead was prepared to undergo the suffering involved in achieving the project on which God’s heart was set. The Lamb was foreknown before the project was begun, before in fact the foundation of the world (1 Pet 1:18–21).
Two observations flow from this
First, how vast must the benefit and the glory be both for God himself and for redeemed humankind, if God himself thought it worthwhile for the Godhead to be involved in the incarnation and then in the suffering of the cross in order to achieve it.
Second, intellectual answers to the problem of pain are necessary and helpful. But the thing that soothes the heart of believers and gives them the courage themselves to face whatever sufferings God may allow them to encounter, [p 90] is the fact that God has not remained aloof. As we saw when we considered the problem of evil in the previous chapter, God has not set out to achieve his purpose by allowing them to suffer without suffering anything himself. Precisely because the Son of God has himself suffered, being tempted, he is now able to help believers when they in turn are tempted (Heb 2:18). And because God has given his Son to die for them, believers are taught by the Spirit of God to know and feel in the depths of their being that:
He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? . . . Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? . . . No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:32–39)
The consequences of humanity’s rebellion at Stage 1
We must now turn back in our thinking to what we have called Stage 1 in God’s project for humankind; for, [p 91] according to the Bible it was humanity’s rebellion at this stage that has resulted in much of the suffering in the world ever since.
We have said that Stage 1 was only the first necessary stepping stone towards the achievement of God’s major purpose; but that does not mean that Stage 1 was of no particular value or significance in itself. On the contrary, the position and role given by God to man in relation to planet earth was, and still is, noble and magnificent in the extreme. Man was to be God’s viceroy, made in the image of God, set over the earth and all its contents, as God’s chief administrator, to develop earth and all its potentials. That was a marvellously challenging, exciting and responsible task, calculated to develop not only his technical abilities but also his moral character. In spite of humanity’s rebellion and estrangement from God it still is; but done in unbroken and constant fellowship with the Creator and according to his moral directives, it could have turned the whole world into a paradise.
The biblical account has it that to start humanity off, God planted a garden at a certain spot on earth and put his newly formed viceroy there. That shows, however, that the rest of the planet was not a garden; and man’s terms of reference would have obliged him and his descendants eventually to go out and develop the potentials of the whole planet over which God had given them dominion.
That task would not have been altogether without danger and possible pain, as we see from the fact that God in his foresight had provided man’s body with various defence and repair mechanisms: an immune system, for instance, to resist disease, and a blood clotting system to [p 92] repair wounds and stop fatal blood loss. All God’s creation was good, as God himself pronounced it (Gen 1:31); but it was not all necessarily safe, unless handled properly.
But man rebelled. It was not that he immediately descended into vice: it was something far more fundamentally serious than that. He was tempted to think that life could be developed more intelligently, more beautifully and more satisfactorily, if he dared to be independent of God. He decided, as many do still, that God’s warning, that certain attitudes and behaviour would lead to death, was restrictive nonsense; and he deliberately stepped outside moral and spiritual dependence on God.
When man did that, he was not dismissed from his role of manager of planet earth; but two great changes occurred.
First, creation was subjected by God to frustration (Rom 8:20).
Two metaphors are used to describe it. First, creation is likened to a woman in childbirth: creation labouring in pain in order to bring forth the splendid result which under humanity’s tending she was designed to produce. But she has never been able, so far, in spite of her pain and humanity’s efforts, fully to produce it. That is because, secondly, creation, like a slave, is subject now to the bondage of corruption (Rom 8:20–22). The Bible hastens to explain that this condition, imposed on nature, is not to last forever. One day creation would be set free, and realize her full potential and reach her glorious goal.
But when man foolishly grasped at independence of God, it was for man’s good that he should be made aware of the folly of his attitude. The world after all was not his. He did not invent it. It belonged to his Creator. If creation’s [p 93] frustrations, frustrated him and caused him pain and sorrow to the point where he repented and turned to God, that would be a good and healthy thing.
Chest pains in our bodies that warn us that our heart is sick and needs attention are good! And if creation’s frustrations and groaning constantly remind the world that humankind is in rebellion against God and needs to be reconciled to him, that is good as well.
Second, man himself was subjected to death (Gen 2:17; 3:17–24).
Disobedience to the Creator and alienation from the source of life inevitably changed man himself, his attitude to God, and his attitude to creation. It also brought him decline, ageing and eventual death at every level. Lovely as much of creation continued to be, glorious as humanity’s physical, emotional, aesthetic, intellectual and practical life at its best still is, man had to learn by experience that man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God (Deut 8:3; Matt 4:1–4). To have all the delights of a painless paradise without personal fellowship with God, even if it were possible, would be a spiritual disaster.
But, of course, it is not possible. Humanity’s alienation from the Creator, and our disobedience to the Creator’s moral commands, has perverted humans as administrators and stewards of earth’s resources and elemental forces. The result is that often (though of course not always) it is not the inherent danger of earth’s elemental forces, nor natural disasters by themselves, that bring pain and death to the greatest number, but humanity’s perverse use of those forces and resources. Take a few examples.
[p 94]
In this century man discovered how to split the atom, and then how to induce nuclear fusion. That was a brilliant achievement of humanity’s scientific intellect. But the first use humans made of this discovery was to destroy hundreds of thousands of our fellow human beings. Thereafter for several decades East and West built thousands of atomic warheads at enormous cost, ruinous to their economies, and threatened each other with them. Had they been used, it could have led to a vast, worldwide, natural disaster, if not the complete devastation of the planet. Now unused and idle, these decaying warheads and atomic power stations have proved to be both actual and potential sources of hideous human malformations, sicknesses and death.
In recent decades famine killed thousands of Ethiopians. In the West, however, the application of advanced scientific methods to agriculture had resulted in the production of great mountains of cereals, meat and butter, which were not needed and were stored up unused in specially built warehouses. But when people were dying in their thousands in Ethiopia, the European countries for a long while refused to give any of these vast amounts of surplus food to save Ethiopians from dying of famine, in case it should upset their economies!
The leading nations spend prodigious sums of money on armaments in the hope that the threat to use them may deter aggression. If only the nations could trust each other, they could invest this money in ridding earth of its poverty, plagues and deserts. But they cannot and dare not trust each other. So the poverty, plagues and deserts remain, while enormous sums of money, intellect and time continue to be employed in producing ever more sophisticated weapons.
[p 95]
The industrial processes of our modern world produce harmful emissions of chemicals that are creating a hole in the ozone layer and threatening to produce global warming, which if unchecked will lead to severe worldwide natural disasters. In spite of that, some of even the rich countries refuse to undertake to reduce these harmful industrial emissions; the insatiable consumerism of their people will not allow them.
We do not know whether in fact it is possible to have a planet like ours without the internal forces and processes that lead to the shifting of earth’s tectonic plates and to occasional earthquakes and volcanoes. What we can see clearly is that this world would be far nearer the paradise it could be if it were not for the sinful perversion of humanity’s stewardship and development of earth’s elemental forces and resources.
God’s program for the restoration of creation
But there is hope! Real solidly based hope! The Bible affirms that creation’s subjection to frustration is only temporary: one day ‘creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption’ (Rom 8:21).
Indeed, the restoration has already begun. For when man in his blindness murdered Jesus Christ, the author of life, the Son of God himself, God raised Jesus Christ bodily from the dead. That resurrection carries implications for the whole of creation.
The risen Christ, says the Bible, is the firstfruits of them that have fallen asleep (that is, have died). The harvest will comprise all the redeemed of every century from [p 96] the beginning of time (1 Cor 15:20–28). Creation itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption (Rom 8:21). There shall eventually be a new heaven and a new earth (2 Pet 3:13; Rev 21:1). And who knows how many further projects the God of all ingenuity and creative power will embark on thereafter?
‘But why do we have to wait so many centuries for this promised restoration to happen?’ says someone. ‘Isn’t the real reason that the promise was never anything more than the wishful thinking of religious people?’
Well, that’s certainly not the reason which the Bible itself gives for the delay. It says that what the restoration of creation is waiting for is ‘the revealing of the sons of God’ (Rom 8:19). What use would it be for God to restore creation and then put it back into the hands of the same kind of weak and sinful human beings as before? In other words, creation is waiting for the completion of what we have earlier called Stage 2 of God’s project: for the production of children of God, and then their development into fully grown up sons of God (Col 1:28; 1 John 3:1–2), fit to take over and run the administration of the new heavens and the new earth as Christ’s executive Body (Col 1:13–20; Eph 1:9–10, 19–23).21
The first step in this process is, as we earlier saw, that human beings having been created by God, should then become children of God. When that happens it does not mean that they are thereafter exempt from the suffering that those who are not children of God normally [p 97] experience. ‘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’, says the Bible (Rom 8:23). They may, in fact, find that becoming children of God additionally involves them in suffering persecution and even death for Christ’s sake (John 15:18–16:4; 1 John 3:13–16), as has happened so very often to Christians all down the centuries in totalitarian countries. What is more, there is an additional problem for believers, and that is the disproportion of sufferings’ distribution.
Disproportionate suffering
Whether it is suffering that comes from man’s evil and unjust behaviour towards his fellow man, or suffering that comes from accident, illness or natural disasters, some people suffer vastly more than others. It is not merely the suffering by itself that overwhelms them but the sense that it is grossly unfair that they should suffer so much and others so little. ‘Why me?’ they say.
The Bible, of course, recognizes the problem and recognizes also that this is an aspect of suffering that tests the faith, even of believers in God, to the limit. The writer of Psalm 73, for instance, was a believer in God; but he admits (vv. 2 ff.) that his faith in God’s justice almost collapsed when he observed that all too often evil, unscrupulous, violent men prosper, become wealthy and have few health problems, whereas many good people suffer enormously by comparison (vv. 3–4). Similarly, the man whose story is told us in the Old Testament book of Job [p 98] was a believer in God and a person of exemplary character and social concern. Yet he suffered an extraordinary succession of natural disasters, loathsome diseases and excruciating mental and physical anguish beyond what even wicked people normally experience. His faith in both the love and justice of God was almost completely destroyed, though in the end it triumphed.
Now the Bible does not call attention to these problems without having answers to give. But we should notice two things. The Bible does not attempt to give a full and final answer to these problems now. In the nature of things, such an answer cannot be given until the whole of history with its almost infinite complexities comes to an end, and the details of each person’s case can be considered in the light both of life’s total context and of its visible eternal results. And secondly, while the Bible gives us some answers that satisfy our intellects meantime, it concentrates more on answers that speak to our hearts; for the Bible’s main aim in this context is to buttress our faith in God and to maintain our courage until God’s ways with us are fully explained and vindicated at the final judgment. (Remember the beginning of chapter 5 and what the parents had to do for the girl suffering from a faulty spine?)
Of course, answers that speak to the heart will prove effective with people who have already experienced the love of God in Christ as a reality before they encounter severe suffering. They will not necessarily have any weight with atheists whose unbelief has never allowed them any personal experience of Christ’s love. But that merely exposes the bleakness of the atheists’ position, which [p 99] forces them to accept that the disproportionate distribution of suffering is simply one more irrational effect of a basically irrational, amoral, and ultimately unjust and hopeless universe.
With believers it is otherwise. When it comes to the unjust suffering inflicted on them by evil men, they dare to rely on God’s promise, guaranteed by his character and affirmed by the resurrection of Christ, that there is going to be a final judgment where all wrongs shall be put right. Like the writer of Psalm 73 they consider the final end of evil men, and, in spite of the believers’ sufferings and the apparent prosperity of the wicked, believers would not even now change places with them for anything (Ps 73:17ff).
Moreover Christians are not surprised when they find themselves suffering at the hands of evil men enormously more than ordinary citizens do—as happens in many countries still. For Christians know it from the start that they are called upon to follow the example left them by Christ who ‘committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly’ (1 Pet 2:22–23).
Confident that at the final judgment God would see to it that justice was done, Christ accepted suffering from evil men; and more than that: he prayed for his executioners and suffered the penalty of sin at the hands of God for them that all might be saved, if they would.
Christians are therefore called in their turn to suffer for Christ their Saviour’s sake as they declare boldly their faith in him, and to suffer for their fellow men’s sake as they take God’s offer of peace and forgiveness to a world [p 100] that at heart is hostile to God. But Christians do not find such suffering a cause for doubting God’s love or his justice: they find it a confirmation of Christ’s forewarning (John 15:18–16:4) and an honour (Matt 5:10–12; Acts 5:40–42; 1 Pet 4:12–14).
But what about the other kind of suffering that comes not from evil men, but from natural causes, accidents, disasters, ill health, bereavement and such like things? The Bible does not explain why some believers suffer disproportionately far more than others. What it does do is, to take a most extreme case, that of Job’s suffering, and point out how God allowed and used his suffering to demonstrate that his faith was genuine, to purify and strengthen it, and then to enlarge it. Faith, the Bible explains, is like gold (1 Pet 1:6–7). A valuable lump of genuine gold may nonetheless have impurities in it; a goldsmith will therefore put it through the heat of his crucible in order to remove the dross. The lump of gold will then be more valuable still. So faith needs to be demonstrated as unfeigned and genuine (2 Tim 1:5). It needs also to be purified so that we love and trust God for his own sake and not merely for the benefits which we receive from him (Job 1:9). In addition faith can vary in quantity (little or great, see Matt 14:31; 15:28) and in quality (weak or strong, see Rom 4:19–20). And like muscles in the human body faith grows and develops by being exercised and tested in increasingly difficult situations. God does not explain to us why he puts some of his people through what seems to us to be disproportionately severe testings: only the coming eternity will reveal that, when the results of that testing are revealed. All testing of faith, the Bible assures us (1 Pet 1:7), [p 101] mild or severe, will be discovered to have produced praise, glory and honour, when Jesus Christ is revealed at his second coming. But the greater the test, the greater the glory and honour.
Here on earth a trained first aid worker does a very valuable job; but he is not put through such severe examinations as a student surgeon. Every few months airline pilots are placed in a simulator where they are put through every conceivable kind of hair-raising emergency situation to test their skills until even strong men break down in tears. But no one troubles even to question why their testing has to be so vastly greater than that of a would-be car driver. According to Christ, position and responsibility in his coming kingdom will depend in part on a disciple’s suffering here on earth (Mark 10:37–39). The greater the suffering, the greater the eventual position of responsibility.
The best approach to the problem of suffering
In these last two chapters we have spent a long time—too long, some would feel—trying to face and to think through the many problems connected with suffering. But the best approach is not to try by ourselves to solve all our problems first and then to come to our Maker and put our faith in him. Rather we should come and put our faith in our Maker first, and then let him help us to think through our problems.
The Bible, in a helpful metaphor, tells us that we are all like sheep who need a shepherd. And our Maker has provided us with the Great and Good Shepherd who laid down his very life for the sheep. Now risen from the dead, he [p 102] guarantees to all his sheep eternal security far beyond the few short years of our life on earth (John 10). He knows how to ‘anoint our heads with oil, to lead us through the valley of the shadow of death without fear of evil, and to bring us at last to dwell in the house of the Lord forever’ (Ps 23). Meanwhile nestling close to him we shall find rest to our hearts and soothing for our sorrows even while we must wait for the final answers to our problems.
A final contrast
We have pointed out several times that atheism can offer no hope. But the atheist’s position is worse than that. His refusal, or inability, to believe in God does not mean that God does not exist. The atheist believes that death ends everything for the individual: that there is no afterlife. But his belief does not make it so. Death does not mean extinction. After death comes the judgment (Heb 9:27–28). Christ died so that all who repent and believe may be saved and enter God’s heaven at last. But he did not die needlessly. To die unsaved is not the end of suffering: it is the beginning of the eternal anguish of being shut out from the presence of God forever. Suicide is most definitely not the answer to suffering. For the unbeliever death is, according to Christ himself, the doorway to eternal pain (Luke 16:19–31). In the nature of things, it could not be otherwise.
By contrast, for the believer suffering, of whatever kind, is never merely destructive: it is, as we have seen, one of the processes by which God develops those who have become his children into the moral and spiritual maturity of full-grown sons of God (Heb 12:1–13; Jas 1:2–4; 1 Pet 1:6–7). [p 103] There is no need to pretend that believers enjoy suffering; but they learn to adopt the attitude expressed by the Christian Apostle, Paul:
So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Cor 4:16–18)
Moreover, for a child of God physical death takes on a different aspect. Believers do not enjoy the process of dying, and they have no need to pretend they do. But they do not fear death itself nor what it leads to. Christ for them has broken the fear of death (Heb 2:14–15); for them to depart from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor 5:1–8).
The believer, therefore, is in the best position to see what life’s true values are and to act upon them. There are some values in this life that are more important than physical life itself. Supreme among them is loyalty to the truth, to the Creator, to the Son of God, to the Holy Spirit and to all the moral and spiritual implications that flow from it. It is the man who believes that there is nothing after physical death that will be tempted to compromise what he knows to be true for the sake of clinging to life.
Believers in Christ take seriously the reality of a future resurrection of their bodies, just as Christ’s body was raised, from the dead (cf. 1 Cor. 15). And Christ’s resurrection, as we [p 104] have noted already from the Apostle Paul’s words (Acts 17) is God’s guarantee to the world that there will one day be a day of judgment. Of course, some people find the very idea of Christ’s resurrection from the dead to be laughable, while yet others feel they don’t know enough about it and would like to hear more, just as they did in Paul’s day (Acts 17:32). For both groups, and because of the seriousness of the implications of this central claim of the Christian gospel, we will now consider some of the evidence for the resurrection of Christ.
Notes
16 The Mind of God, 232.
17 Information taken from Hugh Ross, ‘Earth, the Place for Life’, The Creator and the Cosmos, 131–4.
18 e.g., to have the light and heat necessary for life, the planet must revolve around a star (our sun is a star); but it must neither be too near the star, or else it would be too hot for human life to survive, nor too far from the star, else it would be too cold. Its rate of daily rotation must neither be too great, otherwise vast destructive winds would be generated, as on Jupiter, nor too slow, otherwise the temperature on the night side would become too cold, and on the day side too hot. Astrophysicist, Hugh Ross (pp. 138–45), lists 33 such examples of the exactitude with which our planet has had to be engineered for the purpose of supporting human life.
19 p. 134.
20 Very different this from the miserable progress proposed by Darwinian evolution: from protozoon, by means of mindless, purposeless changes, to life doomed to eventual oblivion!
21 Note that the Apostle Paul is not using the term ‘sons’ in a gender-exclusive sense but in a technical one that reflects the status that first-born sons had in the society his readers knew. We follow that usage here.
English (US) · 