The Tears of God

Preface

What the Bible Says

While We Wait

Job

A Wrong Idea of Pain and Suffering

A Question for Atheists

Eastern Religions and the Problem of Evil

 

Preface

Christians believe in a God who became a person.  And this God-man had friends, one of whom died.  And standing outside his friend’s tomb, God wept[1].  This essay, in some small way, is about the tears of God.  We will try to understand the God who wept, a God so in love with his creation that he became a part of it, shed the tears we shed, and died to heal it. 

Belief in the weeping God answers so many questions.  It explains why the universe exists, why we exist, why love exists.  It gives us hope for the future and the reality of a better life now.  But there are some questions which belief in God doesn’t seem to answer, namely the problem of pain and suffering.  Believing in God actually seems to make this question even more difficult.  Why does God who is wholly good allow evil to exist? Why does every human being seem to suffer needlessly?  Can’t God rid the world of pain?

Probably of all objections to the truthfulness of Christianity, this complaint is the most compelling.  Throughout the centuries, Christians have shaped various responses to this objection.  These responses are called theodicies, defenses of God’s goodness and love in view of the existence of pain, suffering, and evil.  I will try to develop here a biblical theodicy.  Much, though, is not original with me; I am indebted to C. S. Lewis.  His The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and A Grief Observed (diary entries after his wife Joy died of cancer) are highly recommended.  This essay only touches the hem of the garment. 

What the Bible Says

According to the Bible, God created a physical world that he valued enough to call “good.”  And in this garden, he placed Adam and Eve to work and to enjoy and to love him.  God also created natural laws to govern life so that life might exist and the environment in which we live would remain relatively stable.   He created gravity so that we would not fly off the planet and die in outer space.  At the same time, in a world which gravity works, if one walks under a crumbling balcony and a piece of concrete breaks off and comes tumbling toward your head, that same gravity which saves your life every minute of every day may end up bringing you a very serious headache.  The very act of God’s creating a stable, physical world necessitates the possibility of pain.  A world constantly invaded by the supernatural to prevent such pain would also have created a very unstable world in which to live.  Lewis illuminates this idea: 

We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it became a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults.  But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusions, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them.  All matter in the neighborhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations.  That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of the Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore, stable world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare.  In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature.  You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently.  But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him—if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking—then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of the souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once the limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible.  Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involved, and you find that you have excluded life itself. [2]   

Besides giving Adam and Eve a stable world in which to live, he gave them free wills.  He wanted their love for him to be real and thus God gave them a choice to obey him and accept his life-giving love or to reject it.  Eventually, Adam and Eve rejected God’s love and the life only God’s love can bring.  Death entered the world. 

But why did God allow the Fall to happen?  Truthfully, no one knows—except that he wanted love to be real.  Lewis suggests that God “saw that from a world of free creatures, even though they fell, He could work out a deeper happiness and a fuller splendour than any world of automata would admit.” [3]

Adam and Eve, when they rejected the source of life and were thus no longer allowed to remain in the garden, became the first to experience the painful consequences of their own choices.  But God still wanted people to choose to love him.  How could God arrange the world so that people would freely choose to love him? 

There is no better way for us to come to see our condition and to grow dissatisfied with it than to permit its natural consequences, the pain and suffering and wrongdoing that our separation from him has led to, and to make it as difficult as possible for us to delude ourselves about the kind of world we live in: a hideous world, much of whose hideousness is quite plainly traceable to the inability of human beings to govern themselves or to order their own lives.[4]  

And this is the terrible situation we face.  A world filled with pain and atrocity, most of which human beings themselves have created.[5]  Human beings who suffer.  A God who allows us to be free.  A God who loves. 

God’s love for us is much more than we ever expected.  He truly loves and wants the very best for us.  He wants us to choose him—the One who is the very best.  But as Lewis notes, “the human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it.”[6]  Unfortunately, without pain and suffering, many people will never think that they need God.  “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”[7] This “terrible instrument” may drive someone away from God but it may also cause that someone to return to the Maker.  Pain and suffering “plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.”[8]  Indeed, many people have come to God only as a last resort and denied this flag of truth as long as they could.  In God’s acceptance of anyone who will come to him, we see “divine humility”—“He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is nothing better now to be had.”[9]  What an amazing God the Bible describes.  Almost unbelievable, incredulous love.    

God’s love—a love that is not satisfied with the way we are, a love that is not satisfied with our being something less than what we has made us to be—allows the suffering.  I forget God so easily so often and it seems God has to keep shouting through his megaphone of pain so that I will hear.[10]  Lewis sums up the matter by analyzing his own tenuous relationship with God:

I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down.  At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys.  Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times.  I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ.  And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from my right sources.  But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days.  Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear.  God has had me but for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me.  Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed.  And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.[11] 

Besides God allowing human beings to suffer in order that they will return to the source of Real Life, God begins to remedy the problem human beings created.  He does not simply abandon us and the abnormal world the Fall created.  He promises Eve that one of her children will crush Satan’s head (Gen. 3:15).  He gives them coats of animal skins (Gen. 3:21) to protect them from environmental conditions they before had never encountered. 

And as one turns the pages of the Bible, one sees that God is slowly working his plan to remove the death and suffering that sin brought into the world. In the early pages of Genesis, one sees that God is very patient with his fallen creation. Most, though, continue to ignore his life-giving love and their rebellion goes to such an extreme that they are killing each other. “Every inclination of the thoughts of humanity’s heart was only evil all the time” (Gen. 6:5).  At this point, God makes a very difficult decision.  Before they completely destroy themselves, God chooses to destroy all those in rebellion to demonstrate his complete holiness and the judgment that will one day come against humanity.  But even in this act, God has compassion on Noah and his family.  Through Noah’s preaching before the flood, God apparently gives humanity an opportunity to repent.[12] 

God continues his plan for healing the world by choosing Abraham to be the father of a great nation that God himself would miraculously bring into existence.  Through this nation, God promised that “all peoples on earth will be blessed” (Gen. 12:3).  This nation would bring the One into the world who would crush Satan’s head.  For many centuries, God creates, protects, nurtures, and teaches this nation.  He gives them a law through Moses that will improve their quality of life and bring much more fairness into their daily affairs, a law that often stood in stark contrast to the nations around Israel.[13]  God constantly warned Israel to change their evil ways since they often forgot his love and his law.  They rarely listened.  After tolerating their wickedness for so long, God would allow or even cause the suffering of his people to try to cause them to turn to him.[14]  Sometimes they listened to his megaphone.  Sometimes not.

He gives special messages to people called prophets who predicted a new king will come to heal the pain of the earth.[15]  With the advent of his reign, the “wolf will live with the lamb” (Is. 11:6), a sign of unity and healing.   But the healing will come at a great price for this king.  “The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed” (Is. 53:5). This king will not be like any other king.  He will be a suffering king.  A king whose wounds will bring healing. A king who would dare to weep.

 And Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth is this very one the prophets predicted.  Through God’s becoming human and dying on the cross, God entered into human suffering, embraced it, brought it into himself, and there defeated it.  With the substitutionary[16] death of Jesus, God would begin to heal people and even the earth[17] itself.  This healing begins with our relationship to God being fully restored by having faith in Jesus.  One day, the Bible promises, the healing will be made complete.  When Jesus returns to receive those who are waiting for him and to make heaven and earth new, there will be no more tears.[18]   

While We Wait

While we wait for that return, God is using his gathered people—the church—as a conduit for his restoring love.  All over the world throughout the centuries, the real church—the people who are called by God to be followers of Jesus and not the organizations which wear this name—has been making the world better.  Christians have cared for the poor, fed the hungry, built hospitals and schools, and been involved in innumerable kindnesses and acts of generosity to demonstrate to the world that God is not silent.  He speaks through his people.

The official organizations which call themselves churches have not always been the church of God’s desire, the called out redemptive community.  The institutional church has too often been involved in politics, wars, and greedy struggles for wealth and power.     

Job

The Old Testament book Job speaks especially to the problem of pain and suffering.  Job was a follower of God and one day, unknown to Job, Satan came to God and claimed that the only reason Job was a follower of God was because life was so easy for him.  To show that Job was not such a person, God allowed Satan to take away much from Job.  He lost his possessions, his children, even his health.  His wife told him to curse God and die.  In the middle of this misery, Job’s three friends come to visit and offer their counsel.  Their counsel is the bulk of the book.  Mainly, they insist Job is being punished by God for something he has done wrong. The reader knows, though, that such is not the case.  Job insists he has done nothing that deserves this suffering and begins to question God.  God then decides to interrogate Job.  God inquires: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?” (Job 38:3) and “Have you ever given orders to the morning or shown the dawn its place?” (38:12). For four chapters, God hurtles these unanswerable questions at Job.  But God never directly answers Job question.  He simply reminds Job that Job is the creature, and God is the Creator.  Job finally realizes that “he spoke of things [he] did not understand, things too wonderful for [him] to know” (Job 42:3).  The creature will not be able to fully understand the ways of the Creator. 

From God’s perspective—in some ways--we are like the little ants, building our glorious anthills.  Our work as ants is tremendous, or so it seems to us.  We have accomplished much in digging our intricate tunnels and developing a vast underground civilization.  We know much about dirt and digging.  But outside the little anthill world, we know almost nothing.  We the ants know nothing of nuclear physics, or macroeconomics, or literary theory.  Little ants God loves, but little ants we are nonetheless.  Sadly I often forget I am one of those little ants.  My ego convinces me that I can understand so much and when I come to a problem like the problem of pain and suffering, I blame God instead of realizing that the problem is with me, in my limited ability to understand.  We can understand some truth about God, ourselves and the world.  We will simply not be able to understand everything.  If we could, I the creature would become God. 

A Wrong Idea of Pain and Suffering

Job’s friends claimed that Job sinned and was thus being punished for his sins.  His friend Eliphaz asked:  “Who, being innocent, has ever perished?” (Job 4:7).  Of course, Job is innocent; sometimes the innocent do perish.  Eliphaz was wrong.  Living in a fallen world means that we will all suffer and have pain.  We do all deserve punishment for our sins.  But God is gracious and forgiving.  The pain we suffer in life may or may not be a result of our personal sins.  Sometimes, when we sin, we may suffer because the natural consequences of that sin yield suffering.  If people contract AIDS from sleeping around, these sins yield suffering.  But this is not God causing them to suffer for their sin.  It is God allowing us to experience the natural consequences of our own choices and sins. 

Jesus clearly taught that God does not punish people with pain and suffering because they have committed sins.  God sends rain on both the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45) according to Jesus.  He taught that the person in John 9 was not blind because of his sins or because of his parents’ sins.  He taught in Luke 13 that the Galileans who suffered terrible deaths at the hands of the oppressive Roman government were not “worse” sinners than the Galileans who did not suffer terrible deaths.  Instead, Jesus calls us all to repent.  Jesus’ teaching is clear: we cannot say that our personal suffering is God punishing us for our sins.    

A Question for Atheists

Atheists often attack the Bible by saying: “How can your God allow so many wrong and unjust things to take place in the world?”  While the question is a very important one, only the believer (the theist) is justified in asking this question.  The atheist—who has no real absolute universal foundation for good and evil—cannot really claim that God is being unjust in not stopping human suffering since justice—to the atheist—is entirely relative.  A true atheist believes that all that exists is a product of time and chance.  Thus, morality and our notions of justice, of right and wrong, are simply the product of time and chance.  And thought atheists find the categories useful to perpetuate life, in truth, the categories are completely relative.  There is nothing absolute or constant about them since they are a product of blind chance.  Thus, on what grounds does the atheist ask God about right and wrong?  Whose concept of right and wrong is the atheist using?  How can some notion of good which is entirely a product of time and blind chance be stable and strong enough to stand upon in order to accuse God of real and ultimate unfairness?  It is like trying to stand on a cloud.  At least the Christian has something to stand on. 

Eastern Religions and the Problem of Evil

Some religions, especially those of the East, suggest that evil and suffering are simply illusions.  That if one changes the way one sees the situation, evil can become good, pain can become joy. Christianity and our human experience tell us though that evil and suffering are real; they are not illusions.  Any other religion or belief system (such as most forms of paganism and pantheism) which claim that what is (nature, the cosmic life force, a universal energy) is right also fall short on the problem of suffering and pain because they have no way of saying that the pain and suffering in our world is wrong or bad because it is a part of what has always been. 

The biblical doctrine of the Fall says the pain and suffering in our world is abnormal.  Christianity is the only major world religion in which God willingly participates in humanity’s suffering in order to destroy it. It is through the tears of God that we are given joy in this life and the hope of the wiping away of all tears when Jesus returns.