Last Sunday (July 6th) we continued our series 'Wrestling with God, wrestling with life' with the big topic of 'If Jesus is King, then why all the pain in our world'. As I said on Sunday night it's a raw messy painful topic, well beyond just 1 talk and question time. So it was great to get some follow up questions 'If God felt so much sorrow in his time on earth and healed the sick and raise the dead, why did he have mercy on those ones and not others?'. Some thoughts:
1. Sometimes this question is driven by a fragile assumption. 'I'm a good person, so good things should happen to me...i deserve God's blessing'. In fact, the Bible is very clear that everything we receive from God is a gift not a right. God gives us good things because he is generous not because we deserve it. This stops us from getting pushy with God and demanding that he bless us in everything. If we experience pain and suffering it's not unfair or somehow a sign that God doesn't care about us.
2. But you may ask, what about God being compassionate (like we saw in Luke 7:11-17) and intervening in our pain. This is the 'problem' that Jesus encountered. As he walk in the world pain and suffering were all around him. He could do so much to help people and yet the need would never end. We see this in Mark's gospel. Have a look at chapter 1. Jesus is introduced as the long awaited messiah promised by Isaiah. He has power over evil (casting out demons) and sickness. The crowds flock to him. By chapter 1 verse 45 (1:45) Jesus can no longer enter a town in the area because of all the crowds of people wanting healing. In 1:38 Jesus says he has come to preach that the kingdom of God has come and not spend all his time healing. Again in the famous incident of the paralysed man lowered through the roof by his friends, Jesus tells them he heals the man to demonstrate that he has authority to forgive sins. As you read on in the gospels Jesus deliberately turns his face not to all the pain around him but to Jerusalem where he goes to die for the sins of the world.
So (and finally here's the point) the solution to the pain and suffering in this world was not for Jesus to spend his life healing but to die on a cross to defeat sin and death. In doing so he made THE real difference in the world, not just for then and there for Israel in the 1st century but for all eternity and for everyone who puts there trust in him.
A related question raised on Sunday night was, do we see God intervening in pain and suffering now?
This is a good question, engaging with our experience of pain now. We know the love and power of God so we ask - why not just step in here and there...and here etc.
We need to understand properly just how sovereign and present in our world God is. We live in a culture that has kept on pushing 'religion' to a little corner that has little to do with our daily life. So we're tempted to think that our world runs along without God like a machine. He might fine tune it every now and then but he's basically sitting back watching. So then only when something dramatic happens (like a healing, or dramatic rescue or a disaster) we think that's the only time we really see God's presence. This leads to, what some writers have called, the 'God of the gaps' - God explains and is only real or present in the things we can't make sense of ourselves. So when we come to suffering we say 'What is God doing, he's not filling in this gap here so he's not doing anything'. But it's here where the Bible brings us back to reality - God is constantly sustaining and caring for this world (Have a look at Psalm 3:5, Hebrews 1:3, Revelation 4:11). The fact we wake up in the morning, that life is not chaos, that life is not filled with constant suffering, that this world is not as evil as it could be is God's daily mercy and protection in our lives. Sometimes that's spectacular and unexpected but that shouldn't make us ungrateful or dismissive of God's daily care and protection of us.
There's some more thoughts to wrestle with.
James
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