Why must we Suffer?
Can Pain possibly have meaning?
Can God exist in a world so full of pain and suffering?
These questions will not go away.
They have found their echoes in the hearts of millions of people throughout the centuries. Every age is marred by hate and suffering. And so we continue to ask the question. In these sessions we’ll be using some material from Chris Wright and Sue Haines book “Matters of Life and Death” that ask the question “Why, silent God, why?”.
We’ll look at the nature of the problem, the way other religions have approached the dilemma, question the mystery and purpose of suffering, look at the dark side, the experience of the Holocaust and other atrocities. We’ll review the Bibles teaching – ask what Job may teach us and conclude by presenting some specifically Christian perspectives on suffering.
The Nature of the Problem: WHERE IS GOD?
"I'd like to see God.
I'd like to tell him a few things.
I'd like to say:
'God, why do you create people and make them suffer and fight in vain,
and have brief unhappy lives like pigs,
and make them die disgustingly, and rot?
God, why do
the beautiful girls you create become whores,
grow old and toothless,
die and have their corpses rot so that they are a stench to human nostrils?
God, why do you permit thousands and millions of your creatures,
made in your image and likeness,
to live like crowded dogs in slums and tenements,
while an exploiting few profit from the sweat of their toil,
produce nothing, and live in kingly mansions?
God, why do you permit people to starve, hunger,
die from syphilis, cancer, consumption?
God, why do you not raise
one little finger to save mankind from all the.., suffering
on this human planet?.'
That's what I'd say to God
if I could him him hiding behind a tree.
But God's a wise guy. He keeps in hiding!"
Christian minds have been vexed with this problem. It is one that cannot be ignored and will not go away. It raises questions about the very existence of a loving Creator God. C.S Lewis, in his book “The Problem of Pain”
“If God were good, he would wish to make his creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty he would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness or power, or both.”
In her book Celebration, Margaret Spufford raises the problem in relation to the suffering of her daughter from cystinosis, a very rare, genetically-caused, metabolic disease. It is life-threatening. The following extract is taken from the part of the book where she is recounting the time spent in the Hospital for Sick Children:
“Now the existence of Belsen and its like, that is, of humanly created evil, I could, as a historian, cope with intellectually. Genetic evil, creation malfunctioning from birth or from conception (as it was in my daughter's case), was more than I could account for or understand. These children suffered - and small children suffer very acutely, and worse, because no explanation is possible to them - because they were made wrong.
The evidence of divine activity in, and through, creation and the minute ways we share in it has always been particularly important to me. Now here I was, living week after week surrounded by the evidence of failed creation, the rejections of our heavenly Father, the pots on which the potter's hand did indeed seem to have slipped.
I think the bottom came for me one day when I tried to comfort a tiny anguished child (words are useless, only touch will do), and as I reached out to stroke his head a nurse said hastily, 'Don't touch him, his skull might fracture.' That same day a 'pious' friend called, and said enviously, 'Your faith must be such a comfort to you.' It was not. Belief in an omnipotent and all-loving Creator who is capable of producing results like those I was observing, produced for me at least as many problems as it solved.
So there was I, a Christian, committed to the doctrine of a loving, omnipotent Father, a Creator. And there was I, living in surroundings which persistently denied this omnicompetence, amongst the 'failures' of God’s creation.”
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Some people say that there cannot be a God if there is so much suffering. What do you think?
2. What reasons could a good God have for allowing a world to exist with both good and bad in it?
3. Look again at the poem ‘Where is He?’
How does this make you feel?
If you were able, what questions would you like to ask God?