Bible Stories

American GIs join in prayer with a chaplain during a lull in fighting during the Vietnam war.

Times of war have often brought people to question the mays of God. Warfare causes such grief and pain that a reaction can come which says: ‘If life is as evil as this, how can we believe in a God who both has all power and also wants the best for us?’ This perplexity becomes worse when, as in the 1914-18 world war, both sides claim the support of the same God.

Something of the same reaction can come in times of mass epidemic, or great natural disaster. The French sceptic Voltaire wrote a famous piece along such lines after a severe earthquake in Lisbon in the eighteenth century. Butpersonal suffering sometimes causes loss of faith at the more immediate level of family and local community.

There is no glib, simple answer to the problem of suffering. Wars, torture, oppression and so on are caused directly by the evil in human nature. This evil has resulted from God’s gift to humanity of freedom to choose. He has not created robots, but independent beings with freedom to follow right or wrong.

Suffering that comes independently of human evil is even harder to reconcile with belief in a loving God. Disease and natural disaster seem to come precisely from the area where God should be unrestrictedly sovereign. The Bible hints that humanity’s fall into sin brought a curse on nature, that will only be removed when the renewing work of Jesus is complete.

These shadows of an answer do not fully and finally resolve the age-old problem of suffering. The Bible nowhere claims to provide a solution at the philosophical level. But at the deepest level Christian faith has something totally positive to say: in Jesus Christ, God shared the experience of suffering. When he entered the arena of our human lives, God did not avoid pain. Jesus bore all the failure, the weakness and the agony that men and women can know. There is no suffering we can endure that he has not already experienced.

Why doesn’t God do something about suffering, we cry. In Jesus, he has. He has taken the responsibility for it on himself. In the new age, for which he died and rose again, sin and suffering will be no more.

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