The Problem of Suffering

If there is a loving God, why does He stand back and do nothing while the world is full of suffering?

This is a very big problem to many people. Some of them say they will never be able to believe in God or the Bible until they find an answer to this question.

I know how they feel about it. The problem of suffering used to worry me too at one time. But that was before I knew Marjorie.

When I first met her she had spent the previous five years of her life in one small room, on the top floor of a dismal tenement block in a northern city. Laid low by a painful and crippling ailment, she hardly ever moved outside her tiny home. But although she is never wholly free from pain, Marjorie is one of the few people who never wonder why God allows suffering. Her constant companion is the Bible; and she helped me to see that the Bible holds the key to the problem of suffering.

The solution is not a simple one. It is bound up with the whole history of the human race. Part of the answer lies in the distant past. Another part belongs to the present day. And part of it is concerned with the future, with the world of tomorrow.

After we have looked at each of these three aspects-the past, the present and the future-we shall, like Marjorie, begin to understand why people have to suffer.

Long Ago

The story of human suffering begins in the Garden of Eden. As we saw in the previous chapter, there is good reason to believe that Adam and Eve were real people, although they must have lived a very long time ago. There is only one way to understand their story. Take a Bible and read the first three chapters of Genesis for yourself.

It may surprise you to discover that some common beliefs about the Garden of Eden are not in the Bible at all. For instance, you will find that mans first sin was not connected with an apple, and had nothing to do with sex.

Instead, you will find a simple account of how the first man was given freedom of action, and a chance to use his freedom wisely. He lived in a world described as "very good", and he had the chance to live a very pleasant life. But poor Adam misused his opportunity: he chose to disobey God. Through this choice he started a sort of habit, the habit of sinning, which has gripped the human race like a python ever since.

Their Maker told the first human pair that two tragic consequences would follow from their sin. First, that they and their children would experience "sorrow"-which in modern English we would call "suffering".1 And secondly, that they must suffer death-the greatest and most final form of suffering there is. 2

So Genesis tells us how suffering came into the world, when the first ma n chose to disobey God. Because we are Adams children we inherit his sinful tendencies. And so we too must suffer, and we too must die.

But this only leads to another question. Since God is infinitely wise,

He must have known from the beginning what was going to happen.

Why then did He give mankind so much freedom in the first place?

Why did He not make us so that we could not possibly sin? Why

doesnt God stop us from doing harm, and making each other suffer? There is a surprisingly simple answer to this. The Bible tells us

that "God is love".3 Because of this, love matters more than anything else in the world. Gods main aim in creating men and women was to let them enjoy His love, and to give them the opportunity to return it.

For this reason God simply had to provide us with what is usually called a free will. For by its very nature, love is a voluntary thing. Even Gods almighty power cannot make men and women love Him.

If this puzzles you, think of the classic picture of the caveman. He provides an example of what power can and cannot do. The caveman can seize his bride by the hair and drag her away captive. He can compel her to stay and be his wife. But he cannot force her to love him.

Many of us will know from our own experience that it is worse than useless to try and compel people to love us. Unless it comes freely and willingly, there can be no such thing as love. And God Himself is a God of love.

So God did not want a race of man-sized puppets dancing on strings. He wanted people who would really love Him, of their own choice. So He gave us free will.

But instead of choosing to love, we choose, all too often, to act selfishly. "If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments", said Jesus.4 Every time we break one of Gods commandments, we show that in our hearts we do not love Him as we ought. And by giving way to the hatred in their hearts, many men inflict terrible trouble upon their fellows.

Many people forget this when they talk as if God were responsible for all the suffering in the world. God certainly created illnesses and death. But it was human fiendishness that invented the rack and the lash, the concentration camp and the gas chamber, the flamethrower and the hydrogen bomb. It is humiliating, but essential, to remember how much suffering in the world is man-made.

It was tragic that our race chose the path of disobedience, the way of hatred instead of the way of love. But God was prepared for this. The Book of Genesis reveals that He was ready with a plan to bring great good Out of the disaster in Eden. And in this plan, suffering plays a very important part.

God began by sentencing the whole sinful race to death. Not to immediate death, though; He allows us to live a while, before we suffer the just penalty of sin. This is really a great act of mercy on Gods part. Every single day we live is an unearned, undeserved, gift from God.

But His mercy does not stop there. God went further, and provided a way of reconciliation, so that those people who really want to love Him might learn to do so.

Later chapters of the Bible fill in the details of Gods way of life and love. "Learn to love and obey Me," He said, in effect, "and you shall be raised from the dead to live for ever."

The Reason for Death

Every engineering works has an inspection department. Here the manufactured parts are tested, to see if they measure up to the specification. Those that fail are classed as scrap and find their way back to the smelting furnace, where they finally cease to exist.

The Bible shows that death serves the same sort of purpose for human "rejects". Those that fail to meet Gods requirements will be sentenced to eternal death-which simply means that they will cease to exist. When machine parts are found to be no use, they are destroyed; and when men and women have finally shown that they are no use to God, He will blot them out of existence too.

This simple, sensible, teaching is found throughout Scripture. Here are three examples:

" The Lord preserveth all them that love Him, but all the wicked will He destroy."5

"Whoso despiseth the Word (of God) shall be destroyed."6

"Them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord."7

These passages are clear and straightforward. But there is a complication that must be faced. A number of other Bible passages speak of the punishment of the wicked in a different way. They say the wicked will be punished for ever in hell.

These other passages create two problems. First, they appear to contradict the passages quoted above. If the wicked are going to suffer for ever in hell, why do quite a lot of Bible passages say the wicked will be destroyed? If you are wiped out of existence, you obviously cannot go on suffering.

Secondly, the idea of everlasting suffering makes it impossible to answer the question with which this chapter began: if God is love, why does He let people suffer? The problem of temporary suffering can perhaps be explained; every surgeon creates temporary suffering for the best of reasons. But everlasting suffering would pose an everlasting problem.

Happily, evangelical Christians today can see the way out of this dilemma. The latest edition of the Inter-Varsity Fellowships New Bible Commentary refers to a verse that resolves our problem:

" Jesus said) And fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul. But rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell."8

The commentator says:

" Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell must refer to God, rather than to Satan. The soul in Biblical thought is not immortal, except when new life is conferred upon it through Christ (1 Timothy 6:16; 2 Timothy 1:10). Hell is therefore the place of its destruction as Gehenna, the valley of Hinnom, was of the rubbish of Jerusalem."9 (The italics are mine.)

The commentator is right. The punishment of hell actually is destruction. It is called an "everlasting punishment" because the destruction, once it has taken place, will never be reversed. This explains why the New Testament phrase for "hell-fire" is actually "Gehenna-fire". Gehenna was the place outside Jerusalem where the citys unwanted rubbish was burnt up-not a place where people were tortured.

In recognising these facts about hell, modern Bible-believers are not inventing a new idea. They are merely returning to the original principles of the Reformation. Tyndale, the great Bible translator, has left it on record that this was how he understood the Greek "Gehenna", or the English "hell".10 Martin Luther also at one time expressed similar views.11

The World We Live in

We have seen the reason for death, and we have seen that a large part of the worlds suffering is man-made. But this still leaves a great deal of suffering for which God is undoubtedly responsible. It is necessary now to look at the present-day world with Bible in hand, to find a reason for this.

In essence, this is what we find. Suffering actually serves an extremely useful purpose. Surprising though this may seem, the world would be worse off, not better off, if there were no suffering in it.

The truth of this statement is most obvious in connection with pain. Pain is not the only form of suffering, but it is probably the most unpleasant. And it is not too difficult to see that pain is really very useful to mankind.

The story of a nine-year-old American boy demonstrates this. Georges mother brought him to the famous Johns Hopkins medical school in Baltimore, one November day in 1937. In most respects he was a normal healthy boy, with more than average intelligence. But in one particular way he was different from any boy that you are ever likely to meet: he had been born without any sense of pain whatever.

It is tempting to think that George was a very lucky lad, and to wonder why, if God could make one boy entirely free from pain, He could not make the rest of the world like it too. But wait. There is another side to the story. "Scars were found on almost every part of the body," the examining doctor wrote in his report.

One enormous scar stretched right across his buttocks, where George had once sat on a heater, and, because he felt nothing, had not moved until his flesh was burnt almost to the bone. He was partly blind in one eye because sand had one day worked its way in, and George had never noticed it until permanent damage had been done. His left foot was permanently deformed, as he had broken a bone and then walked about on it for months before the damage was spotted by his parents. Both hands had been so badly cut that he would never again be able to straighten his fingers. Pain acts as a danger signal for the rest of us, but poor little George had nothing to warn him when his body was being injured.

Whom would you rather have for a son? A normal boy, who hurts himself, and cries, and gets over it-and takes more care next time? Or a carefree little George, with his total freedom from pain-and his multiple deformities?

Developing Character

Georges story shows that pain is necessary if a childs body is to develop into that of a normal, healthy adult. But God is even more concerned with the growth of peoples characters than He is with their bodies. And suffering also plays an important part in the development of character.

Needless to say, this does not mean that every time you have toothache you grow a little more virtuous. It would obviously be wrong to think that the best people in the world are those who have suffered the most. In the language of science, there is not a one-to-one correspondence between suffering and character.

Nevertheless there is a very important connection between them. Strong characters can only be developed in a world where suffering is always present. If there were no such thing as suffering, there would also be no such things as courage, or compassion. If nobody ever fell among thieves, there would be no Good Samaritans in the world.

Men who have suffered greatly are sometimes the first to recognise that this is true.

Paul, the apostle, was such a man. A mob once set upon him, stoned him, and left him for dead.12 He survived this terrible ordeal, and not long afterwards he returned to the very town where it had happened. There he told the disciples, "We must through much tribulation enter into the Kingdom of God."13

Paul obviously knew what he was talking about when he spoke of tribulation. Yet perhaps the very fact that he was a Bible character makes him seem rather remote. It is hard for us to realise that these are the words of a real human being like ourselves.

But there is no such difficulty about the woman I mentioned at the start of this chapter. Marjorie is a British citizen, still very much alive today. One day, while lying on her sickbed, she startled me by remarking, "Do you know, I often thank God for treating me like this!"

I asked her what she meant and in reply she told me a little about her past. "Twenty years ago I was a typical, healthy young girl. I was too busy enjoying life to have any time for God. Besides, I felt that I had no need of Him. I could get along quite well on my own.

"Then came the day when God decided to show me whether I needed Him or not. He put me here, on my back. For a few years I was miserable. All the joy had gone out of my life and I could see no point in going on living.

"That's how I was when a woman came to see me, with a Bible in her handbag. In the old days, when people talked about religion I used to shut my ears. But this time I was prepared to listen. And so I came to hear about the offer of a place in God's Everlasting Kingdom."

Marjorie raised herself up a little in her bed, and spoke with great emphasis.

"Now I know that these are the best days of my life. If you offered to take me out of this bed, free me from pain, and put me back where I was twenty years ago, I just wouldn't thank you. Without this pain, I should never have come to accept God's Way of Life. He knew that I needed this illness, and so I can only thank Him for the way that He has shaped my life."

The Sufferings of the Innocent

It is easy to see a reason for Marjories sufferings. But there are many people whose sufferings appear to serve no useful purpose at all. The native in the Amazon jungle who has never heard of Jesus Christ, but is bitten by an alligator and dies after weeks of agony; the baby in an English village who dies when his pram is crushed by a falling tree. They are not being prepared for Gods Everlasting Kingdom by their sufferings, so why, we may wonder, does God let them suffer?

One way to answer that question is to ask another one. If God did decide to protect such people from suffering and to allow nobody but Christians to suffer, what would the result be? Can you imagine anybody ever becoming a Christian in such circumstances? Obviously a system like that would never work.

So God has adopted a more practical scheme. He has created a world subject to certain natural laws, where a measure of suffering is bound to come to everyone, sooner or later. We live in a world where, as the Bible expresses it:

" Time and chance happeneth to them all... so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them."14

The problem of suffering is most likely to worry us when we ourselves are in great distress. At such times a comforting Bible passage is Hebrews 12:1-13. It is too long to reproduce here but it is worth reading, several times over, in your own Bible. It hinges about verse 3 which says:

" Consider Him that endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds."

This tells us that whenever we feel sorry for ourselves we should think about Jesus. He suffered dreadfully-very much more than most of us are ever likely to suffer. And He was as innocent as a new-born babe. Yet He accepted His agony without complaining. He knew there was a good reason for it. As it says a little earlier in the same book, He "learned obedience by the things which He suffered".15

If only we can accept this advice and think about Jesus, we shall find our own troubles much easier to bear. Many people say in their distress, "But why should all this happen to me? I have never done anyone any harm. I am not a wicked person. Why should I have to suffer so much, while the wicked get off Scot free?"

Yet Jesus, the only man in all history who might have been excused for talking like that, never did so. Jesus Christ, alone among mankind1 could truly have said, "I have never done any harm." But He never once asked, "Why should all this happen to Me?"

"Consider Him," the Bible advises. If we think of how the righteous Jesus was willing to accept such terrible suffering, we are much less likely to feel indignant about our own hardships.

Summing Up

Before we start to look at the future it will be useful to take stock. We have learnt from considering the past and the present world that:

(1) God gave man free will, so that he would have the opportunity to love.

(2) But man chose hatred rather than love, thus bringing suffering into the world.

(3) Death and hell put an end to both sin and suffering. This is Gods way of wiping out of existence those who do not choose to love Him.

(4) But there is a hope of life after death for those who do try to love God.

(5) A very useful purpose is served by pain. Without it we could not develop healthy bodies.

(6) In much the same way, suffering is of value to us. We could never develop strong characters fit for eternal life if this world were free from suffering.

(7) Our own sufferings become much easier to bear if we think about some other persons-especially those of Jesus.

The World to Come

A man and a boy were walking past a building site. Young Johnny

looked at it with a puzzled expression, then turned to his father.

"Look, Dad, is that the new town hall going up there?"

" Yes, thats it my boy."

"Well I dont think much of it. What a mess!" He pointed to the piles of sand, heaps of bricks, concrete mixers, reinforcing wire and wheelbarrows all mixed up together. "And look at that ugly scaffolding all over the outside. I think the man in charge doesnt know his

" Youre in too much of a hurry," his father chuckled. "You must wait until next year before you decide whether the architect is any good. That ugly stuff will have done its job by then, and will be cleared away. You cant judge the building until it is finished."

" But surely, Dad, there must be some way of seeing what the finished building will look like?"

"Yes, son, there is, but you wont be able to see it here. Youll need to go down High Street to the public library. Theres a large picture hanging on the wall there, labelled, Artists Impression of the New Town Hall. That will give you a pretty good idea of whats coming."

Johnny is like the people who cannot imagine why God allows so much suffering in the world. They fail t o realise that pain and death are like the scaffolding and the ugly piles of building materials. These things are only temporary. They are here until their purpose has been served, and then God will do away with them.

Our Bible explains that God is planning a glorious future for the world. It provides a kind of "Artists Impression" of what this world will be like when God has finished developing it. It tells how Jesus is coming back again, to judge the living and the dead, and to set up Gods Everlasting Kingdom. The faithful followers of Jesus will enjoy everlasting life in that Kingdom, serving Him for ever in a perfect world.

For the time being suffering is needed in the world, whilst God is buildin g the characters of those men and women who want to live for ever. But when enough characters of the right type have been formed, there will be no more need of suffering. Eventually Gods plan of redemption will be complete; then there will be no more pain, no more suffering, no more sin, and no more death.

At that time, when all these temporary things have been cleared away, there will be no doubt that the Architect of the Universe has been building wisely.

Marjorie Chooses a Chapter

At the time when I first met her, Marjorie was never free from pain. But on some days she suffered more than others. Once I called to see her on one of her off days, and she was obviously relieved when I said that I would not stop long.

" But before you go," she asked, "would you read my favourite chapter for me?"

When I asked her what it was, she replied, "Isaiah 35." "I might have known," I said to myself as I found the place in my Bible, "that it would be a chapter about the world to come."

Marjorie listened expectantly as I began to read.

" Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart Be strong, fear not; behold your God will come and save you.

" Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing; for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert . .

"The redeemed shall walk there, and the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs, and everlasting joy upon their heads.

" They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away."

She wished me Godspeed, and I walked slowly down three flights of echoing stone stairs to the street. I thought of the woman lying upstairs with her pain and her Bible. She was stronger now than when I had gone in. While I had been reading to her a tranquil expression had lit up her face. The furrows of constant pain were less noticeable when I left. Marjorie was thinking of the dawn of Gods new age, and she was well content.

Three Men Suffered on Calvary

Three crosses stood on the hill of Calvary. Three men hung there, dying. In the centre the Lord Jesus Christ; on either side a condemned thief.

These three were face to face with the problem of suffering in its most intense form-death by torture. It was too much for the two thieves. They began to curse Jesus.

Nowadays when people are in trouble they are liable to say, "If there really is a God, why doesnt He put a stop to all the suffering in the world?" At Calvary the thieves said something very similar:

"If you really are Christ, then save yourself and us too!"16

At last one of the thieves became silent. He turned and rebuked the other thief, who was still cursing Jesus.

" Have you no fear of God? You are under the same sentence as He. For us it is plain justice. We are paying the price of our misdeeds. But this man has done nothing wrong."17

He then turned to Jesus and pleaded, "Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy Kingdom."

And Jesus promised to do so.18

Those two thieves were two real people. But they also form a kind of parable of the whole human race. All of us are represented there, on Calvary. Like the two thieves we are all suffering, dying people, and, as the thief said, "For us it is plain justice." We are all condemned sinners, who deserve to die.

Just like the two thieves, we all start off as Gods enemies. The problem of suffering is too much for us in our early years, as it was for the thieves. We think that God has been unfair to us, and complain about our pains.

After a while the problem of suffering sorts us into two different groups, just as it distinguished between the two thieves.

The first thief stands for those who never learn any better. Such people go through life asking, "Why doesnt God deliver me from my suffering?" They die in their ignorance like the first thief, with no promise of a future life.

The other thief represents all those who come to accept the problem of suffering, and its answer in Jesus Christ. They come to recognise that God knows best; that He is wise and just and loving in the way He directs our lives. Like the wise thief they learn that this present world of suffering is only temporary, a training ground for the Kingdom to come. They cease to be wrapped up in their present troubles, and concentrate on asking, "Thy Kingdom come. Remember me when Thou comest!"

Death is still an enemy, even to these people. But it is no longer a conqueror. They can face death unflinchingly, with the promise of a place in Gods Everlasting Kingdom ringing in their ears. They are the people referred to in this New Testament vision of the age to come:

" These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve Him day and night in His temple. And He that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them.

"They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters.

"And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes."19