The Problem of Suffering
Roger Forster
The following is the first chapter of Roger's 2006 book, Suffering and the Love of God - The Book of Job.
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Job’s Innocence
There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job, and that man was blameless, upright, fearing God, and turning away from evil. (Job 1:1)
Job was the best man of his time; he did not need humbling in God’s judgement—God thought the world of him. Just in case we missed it the first time around, God reaffirms it himself in verse 8:
And the Lord said to Satan, ‘Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, fearing God and turning away from evil.’
From God’s point of view, therefore, he did not set about Job with punishment, chastisement and pain in order to bring Job to a place where he would be humbled. That view of the story is fallacious. This saga concerning Job and his suffering is one that is far, far deeper than that less than profound view, even though it is a popular one.
If you or I sin a lot, we should not be surprised if we hurt ourselves a lot. If I walk over a precipice, I should not be too astonished if, at the time I have reached the bottom, I have broken something and am in pain. But this is not the kind of suffering that we are looking at here, the kind that results from our own sin or foolishness. Here in Job, we see a man who has lived as hard as he can to be blameless, to walk in all of God’s ways, and to fulfil God’s requirements. A man of whom God’s judgement is that he is ‘blameless and upright’.
In fact, not only did Job stay away from that precipice we just thought about, he also built a fence to keep others from hurting themselves, too. After his children had feasted and drunk, he would pray and offer sacrifices for them, saying, ‘Perhaps my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts’ (Job 1:5). His religion was not skin deep; ‘Job did this continually’ (same verse) - it was not just a one-off.
It is that kind of person suffering which is the real enigma, sometimes expressed in the phrase, ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’ This is the question that plagues us whenever we see or experience first-hand the suffering of the innocent or the good. The question of suffering in general is difficult enough to understand, but it becomes a lot more acute when we see people suffering who do not deserve what happens to them. Where is the justice of God in these situations? How can he allow it? The book of Job is going to help us to come to some answers to these sorts of questions.
‘God is Love’ Under Attack
God is love (1 John 4:8, 16). This is the best one word definition of who God is that we can find. There is no greater way to talk about him. Moreover, God is revealed to us perfectly in Jesus, and his love—and therefore who he is, as he is love—is revealed to us perfectly as Jesus hangs on the cross and dies for us. Our God is a God who gives himself for us; a God who is perfect Love. As Jesus said, ‘Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life’ (John 15:13).
The fact that God is love, and that he runs the universe according to his love, is challenged by Satan at the outset of the book of Job. Whether love is the best way to run the universe or not is the question which keeps raising itself as we read the arguments of Job and his friends, and as we see the suffering with which Job is inflicted. It is the big challenge brought by Satan: is a ‘God who is love’ really fit to be in charge of the universe?
Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not made a hedge about him and his house and all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But put forth your hand now and touch all that he has; he will surely curse you to your face. (Job 1:9-11)
Here, Satan attacks God’s leadership of love by saying that the kind of God who is revealed in Jesus on the cross, the God of love, is not worth serving. He argues that none of his creatures are capable of truly loving him. There is no such thing as pure, altruistic love in the created universe. Satan’s proposal is that ‘power’ is the only language the universe understands and responds to. His philosophy of leadership could be summed up in the phrase ‘Might is Right’.
Satan does not challenge the fact that God is love—he knows this to be true. His attack is to say that a God of love, who looks like Calvary, is not a fit sovereign for the universe. If we have a God like God is in Christ, whom we see revealed on the Cross, then this sort of God is not adequate for running this universe he has created. ‘A God of love is not the final answer to the problems and needs of this world’ is the ubiquitous, whispered temptation of the Enemy.
But in spite of Satan’s lies, the fact that God is love makes love supreme in the universe. Even atheists, at times, have reacted against the temptations of the Enemy and held love in first place. Bertrand Russell, the staunch atheist philosopher, is reported as saying (perhaps in an unguarded moment), ‘Love is better than hate—but I cannot tell you why.’ Though their definitions of love may be inadequate, many who do not know our God recognise the supremacy of love.
Unfortunately, many Christians do not recognise it. Though the Bible tells us that ‘God is love’, and that he is motivated by love (‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son’), many Christians want to say, ‘Ah, yes; but he is also ‘almighty’ or ‘the judge’ or ‘the creator’ or ‘righteous’’ and sometimes they make these attributes equally as important as love. God is indeed those things, but he is Love above all else. Before God was ever a creator, and therefore when he had no one to judge or rule or declare unrighteous, he existed Father, Son and Spirit in an eternal relationship of love. That means he is a loving judge, a loving creator, Almighty Love. Some Christians put God’s power, his almightiness, before his love. If God’s power, and no longer his love, is supreme, then we find ourselves with a God who controls everything, good and evil, that happens in his world. And that is the answer some Christians give to the problem of suffering. But it is not an answer that makes sense of God’s love.
So, this is the question that troubles us all the way through the book of Job. Is God’s love really the best way of running the universe, or is sheer power—the ‘might is right’ philosophy—really a better way to do it?
How Can God Be Both Loving And Almighty?
One of the most common questions we are asked as Christians must be: why does a loving God allow suffering in his world? I am sure that as you have tried to answer it, you have had to take into account these two factors: God’s love and his almightiness. “If God is both loving and almighty, able to do absolutely anything, wouldn’t he do something about my little girl who is ill in hospital? Wouldn’t he do something about the tragic events that we read about in the papers? Wouldn’t he intervene on behalf of starving and oppressed nations? Wouldn’t he stop hurricanes and tidal waves in their tracks before they wreaked their havoc? If God is all-loving, and loves his people, if he is also all-mighty, surely almighty love would actually act? That is the tension concerning the problem of suffering and the justice of God. In the face of terrible suffering in the world, how can God be all-loving and almighty, at the same time?
Many people struggle with why God doesn’t stop the suffering of the innocent, so much so that they eventually turn away from God altogether. The book of Revelation paints a beautiful vision of the future where God does just that. The fact that we do not experience that kind of perfect universe right now leads some to believe that either God cannot, or that he will not, stop the suffering and evil that exist.¹ He either cannot, because he is not almighty; or he will not, because he is not all-good, all-loving.²
However, as Christians, we believe our God is all-loving and all-powerful. How, then, do we explain the existence of suffering and evil in this world? There have been two main ways of addressing this, and they both revolve around the question of which comes first in God, which is primordial: his love, or his almightiness? Is God, in the base and essence of his being, love, or is he, at the heart of who he is, power? In other words, do we believe in ‘God is love’, or ‘Might is right’?
‘Might is Right’
Many of us, if we were honest, on careful analysis of ourselves and the kind of politics that we espouse, would have to say that we believe in the ‘might is right’ God – after all, ‘might is right’ gets things done. ‘Might is right’ does not allow things that are out of order to happen; it puts them down, finishes them off, affects an immediate change. Deep down, perhaps we feel that the wishy-washy sentimentalism of a God of love allows all kinds of things to go astray, with devastating results in the world today. We prefer a God who is primarily a God of power, the ‘almighty’ God, because he can run everything better! We would rather have the law and order of being slapped down if anybody gets out of line, the summary judgement, because then bad people are no longer able to continue with their evil and cause further pain.
We like that kind of thing—don’t we? That is why we find it difficult when God does not step in and judge evil immediately. This is the other half of the problem of suffering; why doesn’t the loving God use his power to stop suffering, and furthermore, why does he not judge there and then the people who are causing it? Neither seems to happen in the world we live in, and we sometimes feel confused or angry that God does not intervene and change situations in this way.
But you see, the ‘might is right’ God runs everything according to his will. No one else has any freedom. He uses his power, his might, to force everything and every-one to do exactly what he wants them to. If we worship a ‘might is right’ God, then we have to be prepared that he may not take our wishes into account as he intervenes (or not) in the world. If you have ever read the story by Albert Camus called La Peste (‘The Plague’), you will see a parody of the ‘might is right’ God. In it, a plague carried by rats runs through a North African town, and the people are dying like flies. The humanist doctor, a man who does not believe in God, and the rat-catcher work together to stop the plague. The doctor deals with the pain in people’s lives; the rat-catcher with the source of the problem: the rats that are carrying the disease. The priest, however, stands by and does nothing. He says that it is the will of God—after all, God made the rats, he made the disease, he made it such that human bodies can succumb to the dis-ease, therefore ‘the will of God be done.’ The conclusion? God does nothing to help his people; we must abandon hope in him and look to one another to solve the problems of the world.
Camus’ story is a devastating comment on this kind of quiescent, passive Christianity (although I’d rather call it ‘God-ianity’ as it does not seem to have much to do with Christ or his teachings) that says that almighty God is running the whole thing anyway, so let’s just stand by and watch it happen. It is a caricature, of course, but one that European Christianity deserves for the kind of thinking we have put over for many centuries. This is how many people understand Christianity, and why they abandoned it, especially after the horrors of two World Wars. It is also why many abandon it today after suffering personal tragedy. Christians have answered suffering with ‘God is somehow working in all these things’, and ‘there is a much greater, more majestic, divine purpose behind (for example) letting that little girl die of typhoid, or the devastation left from war.’ ‘There is a great tapestry being woven,’ it is said, ‘and we can only see the back of it, the ugly side. It looks a mess; but one day we shall see the glorious picture on the front—the greater, divine purpose being worked out.’ We say these things to preserve the ‘might is right’ God we think we are better off with, even though we cannot understand his actions. This view of God has almost achieved the backing of the authority of Scripture in some circles, but it is not a satisfactory answer to the problem of suffering. Nor is it a true one! And, most importantly, it is not a Bible one. Our God is not a God of ‘the end justifies the means’, who will sacrifice the lives of innocent children in order to achieve a higher purpose. I’m not sure how anybody can believe that after seeing and hearing Jesus. Nevertheless, we have sometimes been guilty of saying these kinds of things, albeit as gently as we can, to try and comfort those who have been bereaved, or who need some source of encouragement in their difficulty and their pain. ‘It must be God’s will, and so submit.’
As we have preached the gospel, we have often presented alongside it a view of God’s management of this world and his relationship with it, which is not the Christian gospel. Thus, when someone suffers terribly and dies, we say that it was ‘the will of God’; and so we contribute to the idea that everything that happens, down to the most minute detail, is ordered and ordained by God. I don’t think Jesus was really into this idea, do you? Otherwise he would not have said, ‘Pray, then, in this way: “…Your will be done”’ (Matt. 6:9, 10). If God’s will is being done all the time anyway, we do not need to pray that. Nor would he have encouraged and exhorted us to follow him, in loving our neighbours and enemies, if everything that happens is God’s will—there would be no point, as whatever we did would be God’s will.
Nevertheless, this idea is greatly comforting for many people in the West. It is very comforting for those of us who are ‘at ease in Zion’ (Amos 6:1); we feel maybe we are getting our deserts after all the privileges we have en-joyed. It can be also a comforting thought for people, after they have suffered, to look back and say they do not un-derstand it, but that somehow God was ordaining all those things, so they must have been all right.
Though we have promulgated such ideas again and again in the history of the Christian church, this approach, in the final analysis, is not satisfactory. Our view of God, and of his relationship with this world, has to change if we are to give an adequate answer to the great mass of people who left the Christian church after the Great War. They left because they did not think that anyone could possibly suffer to the extent that they had suffered, and because their Christian faith was inadequate to meet that colossal challenge. To see your mates’ skulls being eaten out by rats as they are left dead in the trenches—it was appalling for those who came back from the 1914-1918 war - and then to be told that it was God’s will! They did not know how to recover from or account for it in the terms of their inherited (so-called) Christian faith. This was one of the major contributions to church decline in Europe.
It was then tipped over the balance by the Second World War. What was left (as it were) of European Chris-tianity received the final blow, bringing unbelief and a complete disregard of the church. The church was counted as irrelevant, because of the inability of Christianity to answer the challenge of what was happening to people. As a result, that generation did not bother to teach the gospel to their children, and we now have masses of people who do not even know what the gospel is. These questions about God and suffering have contributed to the process of church decline, particularly in Europe.
As Christians, we need to recover some biblical, Jesus-like answers to the problem of suffering that do not resort to a ‘might is right’ God to make sense of it all. How does the ‘God who is love’ deal with evil in his world? How does he reconcile his promise of salvation with his apparent inaction in the atrocities we face day to day in life? How is he going to handle the problem of suffering, so that it is finished with forever?
1 There is of course the alternative, as found in certain Eastern philosophies, that suffering and evil do not really exist.
2 That is the classical problem of what is known as theodicy, the justice of God: where is justice in the universe when the innocent suffer?
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