Whatever you face, you can choose to go through it without God or with him. He longs for us to come to him, talk to him, bring our suffering to him. In this life, we might never really understand why some things have happened. But this day hasn’t yet arrived to give us all time to get our choices right before God. This is an extraordinary description of the tenderness of God and of his plans to put right all the wrongs in this world. One day there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. The Christian faith says you fix a broken story by embedding it in a much bigger story in which good wins, and evil loses. How do you fix a story that is broken? We all have our stories. Evil was defeated on that first Easter, and one day it will be removed altogether. And there is hope for today and tomorrow.īut some people ask, why doesn’t God just get rid of evil once and for all? Well, one day he will. There is comfort we never thought was possible. If we turn to Him, there is strength we never thought we had. God has not left us alone in our suffering. Suffering does not have to have the last word in our lives. He did this to give us life, so that the evils we face need not absorb and overwhelm us. Jesus absorbed the world’s evil, took it to the grave, left it there and rose to life again. Somehow, on the cross, all the world’s evil was being directed at one pure, clean target in order to defeat it once and for all. Jesus has suffered in ways that go beyond anything we can imagine. He GETS IT because He has been there.īut more than suffer LIKE US, God has also suffered FOR US. We come to someone who really KNOWS and CARES. If we bring our suffering to Him today – we don’t come to a God who is aloof or indifferent or distant. Jesus is described in the Bible as, ‘… a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering’. He was abandoned by his closest friends in his hour of deepest need. He suffered brutality at the hands of Roman soldiers. Jesus ended his days on earth nailed to a cross. If God exists, what is he like? What is his response to my suffering? At the heart of the Christian faith is a God who knows what it is to suffer. They just GET IT – especially when words are not enough.
I don’t know about you but when I’m going through a difficult time, I am most at home around people who have been through something similar. If God exists, does he care about my suffering? It is only IF God exists that our outrage at suffering finds a home.Ĭould it be that we ask ‘Why?’ because God is real? So, at first glance it seems that suffering gives us good reason to rule out God. God is good but evil is also real and has influence in the world for now. We live in a world in which good and evil are at play on the world stage and in every human being. The Christian faith makes sense of the rawness we feel in the face of suffering because it says there is something WRONG with the world. But where does that come from if this is just the way the world is? The problem with this view is that it doesn’t really help us make sense of the grittiness of life. Accidents happen, molecules make mistakes leading to diseases, and biology drives human behaviour. If you have ever found yourself asking ‘Why?’, to whom are you addressing the question? You see, if God doesn’t exist, is there really anyone to ask in an ultimate sense? Surely, this is just the way the world IS. There are no easy answers to this question. If God existed, He surely would not have let THAT happen.
Some of us may even have written God off because of the things we have been through. Whatever the particular struggle we face, the question of suffering is one of the hardest of all and one of the biggest barriers to faith in God. We might be facing illness, financial pressure, depression, relationship breakdown or be caring for an ageing parent. We have all encountered suffering one way or another. Our very natural response is to ask, ‘Why?’ ‘Why do these things happen?’ And if God exists, why would he let them happen?īut the question of suffering is also very REAL to us all.
Why is there so much suffering in life? Every day, we are inundated with news of wars, knife crime, bullying, traffic accidents, deadly diseases and the list goes on and on.
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