known to use it in extreme circumstances—tough love. Some suffering may come from being forcibly punished by God for sinning. However, God typically chooses to begin with the softer love option, patience over sheer power. God’s heart is love and love’s first option for dealing with our sin is persuasion not coercion. It’s usually patience before power.
Philip Yancey puts his finger right on this biblical anchor of truth. The Bible is full of examples of much divine patience going before direct and coercive punishment. “The people of Israel knew why they were being punished; the prophets had warned them in excruciating detail. The Pharaoh of Egypt knew exactly why the ten plagues were unleashed against his land: God had predicted them, told him why, and described what change of heart could forestall them. Biblical examples of suffering-as-punishment, then, tend to fit a pattern. The pain comes after much warning, and no one sits around afterward asking, ‘Why?’ They know very well why they are suffering.”25
Anchor #3. Looking Forward.
We must get beyond any preoccupation with demanding answers to the “why” questions of suffering. We suffering humans typically ask the wrong questions. We want to know why something bad has happened. Where did it come from? Who’s responsible? Am I guilty of something? The Bible, however, consistently moves to another question, the forward-looking “What now?” in favor of the backward-looking “Who caused this?” and “Why me?”
Suffering, whatever its unclear cause in a given instance, has the capacity of producing something of value if that’s where our focus goes. Pain can be newly woven into something freshly beautiful. What is bad can be channeled into something good never possible before. Since that’s precisely what the loving and redeeming God is always about, surely that’s where our attention should be.
We’ll consider in later chapters how suffering can be managed constructively and even used for our training in Christ-likeness—a major goal of all biblical revelation. In the meantime, we should avoid the “why” in favor of the “what.” I may not know why this or that is happening, but with God’s help I can learn what good might come out of it if my focus is in that direction.
Anchor #4. Hope Persists Regardless.
Shaking loose of the disabling “why” questions and looking forward expectantly is possible because God is at work in this world whatever the circumstances. The point of the empty tomb of Jesus is that the worst that can happen in this life never has to be the end of the story. We are emboldened to believe that new possibilities exist because of the grace of God. Even death can die!
The call of Christ is for the faithful to fix their gaze on the positive potential lodged in the negative. Suffering has been overwhelmed by victory, and even can be used as a tool that helps bring victory. Jesus has died and also risen. New can emerge from old.
This is illustrated repeatedly in the Bible. The final editors of the present Bible appear to have had a structural agenda designed for our encouragement. The major units of the biblical material all tend to end on the same note. The worst has happened, but . . . . Here’s a quick run through the whole Bible, pointing out this repeating note at the end of each major unit of material.
1. Torah. Moses dies, but Joshua lives! God’s people will enter their promised land even though Moses will not (Deut 34:4).
2. Prophets. For those who finally honor God, sunrise is coming. The arrogant will be burned up and God’s people will burst with energy and dance with joy! (Mal 4:1–3).
3. Writings. The Exile has been long and awful, but suddenly the new king Cyrus says, “Now it’s time to go home and rebuild. It’s over. You are free!” (2 Chr 36:22–23).
4. Gospels. Do you want to be part of God’s coming future? Be good stewards of today. Feed my sheep! (John 21:17–19). Meanwhile, I go to prepare an eternal place for you. Knowing that, you can go on with your work here.
5. Letters. How can we be sure that we can manage in evil times and that the future is secure? Because the God who promises is full of glory, majesty, strength, and rule before all time, and now, and to the end of all time. Yes! (Jude 1:24–25).
6. End of All Ends. When will relief be real for us who still wait and suffer? Says Jesus, the Alpha and Omega, “I’m on my way! I’ll be there soon! Yes! Come, Master Jesus! The grace of the Master Jesus be with all of you. Oh, Yes!” (Rev. 22:20–21).
It’s a constant note in the Bible. Hope persists regardless of circumstance because the loving God persists, prevails, and promises.
Anchor #5. Head Toward the World’s Suffering.
God is love in eternal being and thus in earthly action. The people of God are to join the divine action by being filled with God’s Spirit and focusing their attention where God’s attention is focused. We are to love as God loves.
Whatever the philosophical debates about the origins of suffering, God’s focus is on doing something about it in the present that we are experiencing. Suffering is central to the fact and meaning of God-with-us in Jesus. It’s also central to the intended reality of our lives of faith. We are to represent Jesus in this evil-laden and suffering world by relieving the suffering of others, even at the cost of our own suffering.
Some pain is intended by the Creator. There is, after all, a pain that makes becoming possible—see chapters ten and eleven. But much of the suffering that now exists surely was not intended by a loving God because it works only toward destruction. It’s just “evil,” “live” spelled backwards. Again, we must put an end to the “why” questions and shift to doing God’s healing work. What did Jesus tell his disciples on that Mount of Transfiguration? I’ll paraphrase. “You can’t stay here forever absorbing this spiritual high, protected from the pain. Go back down to the masses who suffer. Get your hands dirty and feed my sheep!”
The Heart of Biblical Revelation
The resurrection of Jesus made plain that God had been with us and for us as the Son hung and died on the cross. The empty tomb means that the cross is never the end of the story of Jesus or of ourselves and our suffering. We certainly haven’t been given all the explanations about the causes of suffering in particular cases. Mystery remains. What we do know is that darkness already has been overwhelmed by light. Given the resurrection, even the cross glows with glory! That doesn’t answer all of our questions, admittedly, but it does point in the right direction and brings hope to the jaggedness of our faith journey.
This is the heart of biblical revelation and thus of Christian faith. What’s God’s primary response to human suffering? It’s God’s personal identification with it in Christ. The main answer to the problem of pain is the pain of God. We must not shy from the thought of God in pain. You’ll find this quote elsewhere in the book: “God’s problem is not that God is not able to do certain things. God’s problem is that God loves! Love complicates the life of God as it complicates every life.”
This loving complication means that God’s power ultimately reveals itself “in divine solidarity with the sufferer, that is, in the ‘weakness’ of suffering love.”26 God really was with us in the suffering of Jesus. God wasn’t only remotely with us in Jesus’ suffering and death, there by proxy and at a safe distance, only illustratively. God really and fully was there as Emmanuel, “God with us.” We typically speak of the sacrifice of Jesus when actually we should dare to say more. God in Jesus was self-sacrificing as an act of amazing love.
The Cross of Jesus, high point of suffering and divine revelation, looks back to the fall in Genesis and forward to the day when there will be no more tears.
The cosmic significance of the cross is this. God the Father was choosing to meet our suffering with that of his own, addressing the suffering caused by our sin with presence and personal pain. Because of the depth of divine love, God was voluntarily participating in our suffering, the innocent suffering for the guilty, in order that the pain of our guilt could be purged of divine judgment and cleansed of final power over our existence and destiny. The big words are incarnation, voluntarily assuming and suffering in our flesh, and atonement, suffering in our flesh so that we again could be at one with God.