How Could God Allow Suffering?
Do you ever wish that God would
smarten up?
So many bad things happen to people who don't deserve it. Babies get cancer. Young people get killed by drunk drivers. Wars and earthquakes and floods destroy people's homes and communities. How can we believe in a good and powerful God when all this bad stuff is going on all around us? Sin explains a lot of suffering; if but knowing that doesn't blunt our sense of the injustice of it all. What is all that suffering about? Scripture provides an oblique but very profound answer: The Book of Job.
Job is one of the greatest books ever written. While it doesn't clear up the mystery, it points us to the right response by its penetration, its sadness, and its humour—Job is a funny book as well as a profound one. Serious treatises on the pain of the world don't usually make us laugh out loud, but Job does. Funny books don't usually leave our relationship with God forever enriched, but Job does. And yet this is not so strange—as Chesterton said, we always joke about the most serious things: marriage and children and life and death are the oldest jokes in the world.
Job is a parable, not a history, as is clear from its lack of historical location; the exaggerated riches and virtue of Job (a far better man than Abraham, David, or Moses); the theatrically complete misfortune that befalls him and its even more complete reversal; and the calm narration of Satan strolling nonchalantly into an angels' meeting and having a mocking conversation with God, with no indication of how the author heard about it. Calling it a parable doesn't mean that it isn't true or isn't God's word—it is both; after all, the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan are parables too. Treating Job as history would force us to believe that God would really make a cynical wager with Satan, with Job as the victim. That isn't reportage, it's one of the jokes. The serious theology comes later on.
The problem of suffering is easy to state and hard to solve. The world was made by an all-powerful, perfectly good God: yet it is full of pain and suffering. This pain is unequally distributed, and it seems to bear little or no relation to what people deserve. Why is that?
Atheists avoid the problem by saying that there is no God, pantheists by saying that God is beyond good and evil and that suffering is an illusion. Neither of these views is satisfactory, because if the world is really as unjust as that, where do we get our sense of justice? (For the reasons that these views won't do, see the forthcoming article on Other Religions.
Suffering is hard to talk about, so hard that we may try to avoid it by being very moralistic or intellectual. The Bible won't let us. It puts a human face on the pain: the face of Job, an Old Testament saint, so good that even God boasted about him. Job was a righteous and wealthy man. He had seven sons and three daughters, many servants, and over ten thousand animals. One day God and the angels are meeting; Satan walks in. God asks him where he has come from; Satan says, `From going to and fro on the earth'. God brags about Job's uprightness. Satan replies that Job only fears God because of His gifts; and the wager is on. God takes away everything at once: Job's animals, servants, and children.
'Then Job arose, and tore his robe, and shaved his head, and fell upon the ground, and worshipped. He said, `Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.'' (Job 1:20-21, ESV) `See?' says God. Satan isn't convinced.
With God's permission Satan afflicts Job with loathsome sores from head to foot; Job sits in the ashes scratching himself with a piece of broken pottery. Still he receives this patiently and does not rebel against God. Then his four friends come along to comfort him. Seeing him, they tear their robes and put ashes on their heads, and sit silently with him for a whole week—just the right thing to do.
After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth.' (1:31) One friend answers him at first with encouragement: since Job is a good man, he can confidently expect good things from God, because it is only sinners who meet misfortune; God will heal him and restore him. Job replies that his friends do not take his suffering seriously; he is in pain night and day, and has no rest, yet they give him home-truths he already knows. He prays again for death, and asks God to show him what he has done wrong to deserve all this; he wants his day in court.
A second friend then suggests that his or his children's sin is to blame for his misfortunes. Job's misfortunes prove he has sinned, and he ought not to deny it, but turn and be forgiven. Job throws their arguments back into their teeth. It is useless to argue with God, he says, because He is sovereign; though he himself is innocent, he can only ask for mercy. His own case proves that God destroys both the guilty and the innocent. `The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; he covers the faces of its judges—if it is not he, who then is it?' (9:24)
That gets them really riled; in their anger they forget that they came to help. A third friend starts defending God by blaming Job; if he will only stop sinning, God will bless him. Job stands up for himself: `I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why thou dost contend against me. Does it seem good to thee to oppress, to despise the work of thy hands and favour the designs of the wicked?' (10:2-3) Job makes fun of them for acting so wise when it isn't they who are suffering.
Back and forth they go. His friends accuse Job more and more; Job calls them to look with compassion on his misery, and not make it worse by blaming him for his own misfortune and lying to defend the God of truth. `As for you, you whitewash with lies; worthless physicians are you all.' (13:4) They are ignoring the evidence of their own eyes. What's the use? Once we're dead, it's all the same to us. Since God is in control, it must be God who does this.
Job laments that he cannot understand what God is doing, `Whence then comes wisdom? And where is the place of understanding? It is hid from the eyes of all living, and concealed from the birds of the air.' (28:20-21) He tells of his clean heart and recites his many good deeds: he never failed to provide for the needy, never put his trust in gold, never rejoiced at the misfortune of his enemies, never followed other gods; why won't God hear him? `So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes.' (32:1)
The fourth then speaks; he blames Job for justifying himself instead of God, and the three for their feeble answers. God does reply, in dreams and visions; He warns us many times before acting; He redeems men from the Pit over and over; if God took His spirit back, all life would cease. God is indeed just; He is the one who teaches us about justice, the one who gives us all our wisdom; and we set ourselves to argue with Him? What can Job do to hurt God by sinning, or to benefit Him by being righteous? God uses misfortune to teach us to rely on Him and turn to Him. God puts the rain in the clouds and makes the storm; He does this to correct sinners, or to maintain the land, or from love, and who can know His mind? (It's a pretty good speech actually.)
`Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind'. `Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?' Has Job fixed the seas in their place, and made the dawn to follow night? Can he stand even against God's creatures? Job replies, `I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.'(42:5-6)
God tells the three that they had better ask Job to pray for them, and make sacrifice, because they have said false things about God, whereas what Job has said is true. When Job prays for them (and obviously forgives them) all his goods are restored twice over, except the children, which were as before—seven sons and three daughters. Job dies at 140, twice the usual three score and ten.[1]
The sad irony of all this is that apart from blaming the victim to defend God, every one of the characters is speaking Scriptural truth. God does defend the needy, as it says everywhere in the Psalms. God does punish evil, and He does bring the schemes of the wicked to nothing; in the Magnificat, Mary says that `he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away' (Luke 1:53). God is sovereign; nothing can happen contrary to his will. And yet good people do suffer, some bad people prosper, the needy are oppressed, and we don't know why. You just can't argue backwards from the effect to grasp the sin, at least not when it's other people's. Jesus says as much; the 18 killed by the fall of the tower of Siloam weren't the worst men in Jerusalem, and the man wasn't born blind because of anyone's sin, but so that God's glory could be revealed in him.
It is different with our own sins; for those, God brings us conviction, from which we discern God's judgement of ourselves. Conviction is His painful and precious grace, sent to bring us to repentance. Whenever God speaks, we like Job receive His love and His judgement, and if we are not hardened, we repent. This is as it must be, for He is both Love and Righteousness.
We all tend to see God in our own image. Job couldn't see God's purpose, and in the depth of his pain, he got no further than that. Yet within his limits, his reaction was exactly right. He insisted angrily that God must abide by ordinary justice, and where was justice for him? God was not angry in return, but blessed Job's insistence, even his yelling at Him. What He condemned was the pious weaselling of the three. And there is our lesson. As Job himself says, who is wise enough to understand God's ways? Human understanding is enough to bring some light, if not great comfort. Much of our suffering is a result of human sin; because He has made us free, we can plan and carry out actions that God hates, and that harm others. Some is a part of God's retribution; but we can't know which is and which isn't, and we mustn't speculate. God is at work in all of it, turning it to ultimate good; `All things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose' (Romans 8:28).
While pain itself is bad, it can be redeemed by its meaning; childbirth is a familiar example, but we're often willing to suffer pain for far lesser goods: health, or beauty, or even money. Soldiers and firefighters, as well as lots of ordinary people, put their lives at risk to help others, often without hope of reward. Many Christians fast to hear God more clearly, and to bring some order to their unruly cravings. But much suffering appears so meaningless. What is it all for?
We have to begin from the character of God; He does not only judge, He also redeems. His purpose towards Job is to bless and redeem, though both Job and the three miss this. God does not waste suffering. He is Emmanuel, God With Us; He endures our pain and never leaves us. God's presence with suffering people is sometimes very obvious; many early martyrs went to their deaths singing psalms of joy, and the same joy can be seen at many a hospital bedside today. Jesus seems always to have healed people when they asked, but when Paul found the thorn in his flesh, `Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.' (2 Cor 12:8-9, RSV)
God gives meaning to our pain, by our love for Him; Job saw God, and was no longer angry. When we accept suffering in faith with thanksgiving, the Holy Spirit produces in us charity and fortitude such as can come in no other way. Our pain becomes a living bridge joining others to God. Hurting people are often helped most by those who have also suffered. They can reach those far gone in sin or despair; prisoners, alcoholics, cancer patients. After all, Jesus reaches us through His suffering, and by our suffering we come closer to Him. Anyone can wave a careless branch on Palm Sunday, but charity born of pain makes us able to walk with Jesus on His way to Calvary. This costly intimacy is an everlasting gift to those who endure. The virtues last forever, while the suffering, however intense, has an end. Pain keeps us from being too much at home in the world, and it teaches us to rely on God.
All this is true; but so much horror and mystery remains unexplained, and all that pain still has to be endured. It's hard to see how the pain of animals and infants could be for purity or correction, and it's terribly hard to have to watch as they suffer. Job teaches us to sit with the suffering and not try to explain it away. `...When they saw him from afar, they did not recognize him; and they raised their voices and wept; and they rent their robes and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great' (2:12-13).
Job learned to glorify God in a way he had never known, and this even before his fortunes were restored double. He never did get a straight answer to his questions, but he was content with God's reply, `Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?' The only answer is the person and the character of the God who made us; if we receive suffering in love, as God's uncomfortable gift to us, it brings transformation and ultimately joy. If we do otherwise—if we rage, or sulk, or despair, our sorrow may fester into bitterness and hardness of heart. `Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice.' We can't do this alone—it's quite beyond the human range—but Job shows us that with God's spirit we can do it, and when we do, the result is victory.
[1] This is a clue to the Resurrection in Job: the first ten children weren't lost like the animals, they were only dead.
So many bad things happen to people who don't deserve it. Babies get cancer. Young people get killed by drunk drivers. Wars and earthquakes and floods destroy people's homes and communities. How can we believe in a good and powerful God when all this bad stuff is going on all around us? Sin explains a lot of suffering; if but knowing that doesn't blunt our sense of the injustice of it all. What is all that suffering about? Scripture provides an oblique but very profound answer: The Book of Job.
Job is one of the greatest books ever written. While it doesn't clear up the mystery, it points us to the right response by its penetration, its sadness, and its humour—Job is a funny book as well as a profound one. Serious treatises on the pain of the world don't usually make us laugh out loud, but Job does. Funny books don't usually leave our relationship with God forever enriched, but Job does. And yet this is not so strange—as Chesterton said, we always joke about the most serious things: marriage and children and life and death are the oldest jokes in the world.
Job is a parable, not a history, as is clear from its lack of historical location; the exaggerated riches and virtue of Job (a far better man than Abraham, David, or Moses); the theatrically complete misfortune that befalls him and its even more complete reversal; and the calm narration of Satan strolling nonchalantly into an angels' meeting and having a mocking conversation with God, with no indication of how the author heard about it. Calling it a parable doesn't mean that it isn't true or isn't God's word—it is both; after all, the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan are parables too. Treating Job as history would force us to believe that God would really make a cynical wager with Satan, with Job as the victim. That isn't reportage, it's one of the jokes. The serious theology comes later on.
The problem of suffering is easy to state and hard to solve. The world was made by an all-powerful, perfectly good God: yet it is full of pain and suffering. This pain is unequally distributed, and it seems to bear little or no relation to what people deserve. Why is that?
Atheists avoid the problem by saying that there is no God, pantheists by saying that God is beyond good and evil and that suffering is an illusion. Neither of these views is satisfactory, because if the world is really as unjust as that, where do we get our sense of justice? (For the reasons that these views won't do, see the forthcoming article on Other Religions.
Suffering is hard to talk about, so hard that we may try to avoid it by being very moralistic or intellectual. The Bible won't let us. It puts a human face on the pain: the face of Job, an Old Testament saint, so good that even God boasted about him. Job was a righteous and wealthy man. He had seven sons and three daughters, many servants, and over ten thousand animals. One day God and the angels are meeting; Satan walks in. God asks him where he has come from; Satan says, `From going to and fro on the earth'. God brags about Job's uprightness. Satan replies that Job only fears God because of His gifts; and the wager is on. God takes away everything at once: Job's animals, servants, and children.
'Then Job arose, and tore his robe, and shaved his head, and fell upon the ground, and worshipped. He said, `Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.'' (Job 1:20-21, ESV) `See?' says God. Satan isn't convinced.
With God's permission Satan afflicts Job with loathsome sores from head to foot; Job sits in the ashes scratching himself with a piece of broken pottery. Still he receives this patiently and does not rebel against God. Then his four friends come along to comfort him. Seeing him, they tear their robes and put ashes on their heads, and sit silently with him for a whole week—just the right thing to do.
After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth.' (1:31) One friend answers him at first with encouragement: since Job is a good man, he can confidently expect good things from God, because it is only sinners who meet misfortune; God will heal him and restore him. Job replies that his friends do not take his suffering seriously; he is in pain night and day, and has no rest, yet they give him home-truths he already knows. He prays again for death, and asks God to show him what he has done wrong to deserve all this; he wants his day in court.
A second friend then suggests that his or his children's sin is to blame for his misfortunes. Job's misfortunes prove he has sinned, and he ought not to deny it, but turn and be forgiven. Job throws their arguments back into their teeth. It is useless to argue with God, he says, because He is sovereign; though he himself is innocent, he can only ask for mercy. His own case proves that God destroys both the guilty and the innocent. `The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; he covers the faces of its judges—if it is not he, who then is it?' (9:24)
That gets them really riled; in their anger they forget that they came to help. A third friend starts defending God by blaming Job; if he will only stop sinning, God will bless him. Job stands up for himself: `I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why thou dost contend against me. Does it seem good to thee to oppress, to despise the work of thy hands and favour the designs of the wicked?' (10:2-3) Job makes fun of them for acting so wise when it isn't they who are suffering.
Back and forth they go. His friends accuse Job more and more; Job calls them to look with compassion on his misery, and not make it worse by blaming him for his own misfortune and lying to defend the God of truth. `As for you, you whitewash with lies; worthless physicians are you all.' (13:4) They are ignoring the evidence of their own eyes. What's the use? Once we're dead, it's all the same to us. Since God is in control, it must be God who does this.
Job laments that he cannot understand what God is doing, `Whence then comes wisdom? And where is the place of understanding? It is hid from the eyes of all living, and concealed from the birds of the air.' (28:20-21) He tells of his clean heart and recites his many good deeds: he never failed to provide for the needy, never put his trust in gold, never rejoiced at the misfortune of his enemies, never followed other gods; why won't God hear him? `So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes.' (32:1)
The fourth then speaks; he blames Job for justifying himself instead of God, and the three for their feeble answers. God does reply, in dreams and visions; He warns us many times before acting; He redeems men from the Pit over and over; if God took His spirit back, all life would cease. God is indeed just; He is the one who teaches us about justice, the one who gives us all our wisdom; and we set ourselves to argue with Him? What can Job do to hurt God by sinning, or to benefit Him by being righteous? God uses misfortune to teach us to rely on Him and turn to Him. God puts the rain in the clouds and makes the storm; He does this to correct sinners, or to maintain the land, or from love, and who can know His mind? (It's a pretty good speech actually.)
`Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind'. `Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?' Has Job fixed the seas in their place, and made the dawn to follow night? Can he stand even against God's creatures? Job replies, `I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.'(42:5-6)
God tells the three that they had better ask Job to pray for them, and make sacrifice, because they have said false things about God, whereas what Job has said is true. When Job prays for them (and obviously forgives them) all his goods are restored twice over, except the children, which were as before—seven sons and three daughters. Job dies at 140, twice the usual three score and ten.[1]
The sad irony of all this is that apart from blaming the victim to defend God, every one of the characters is speaking Scriptural truth. God does defend the needy, as it says everywhere in the Psalms. God does punish evil, and He does bring the schemes of the wicked to nothing; in the Magnificat, Mary says that `he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away' (Luke 1:53). God is sovereign; nothing can happen contrary to his will. And yet good people do suffer, some bad people prosper, the needy are oppressed, and we don't know why. You just can't argue backwards from the effect to grasp the sin, at least not when it's other people's. Jesus says as much; the 18 killed by the fall of the tower of Siloam weren't the worst men in Jerusalem, and the man wasn't born blind because of anyone's sin, but so that God's glory could be revealed in him.
It is different with our own sins; for those, God brings us conviction, from which we discern God's judgement of ourselves. Conviction is His painful and precious grace, sent to bring us to repentance. Whenever God speaks, we like Job receive His love and His judgement, and if we are not hardened, we repent. This is as it must be, for He is both Love and Righteousness.
We all tend to see God in our own image. Job couldn't see God's purpose, and in the depth of his pain, he got no further than that. Yet within his limits, his reaction was exactly right. He insisted angrily that God must abide by ordinary justice, and where was justice for him? God was not angry in return, but blessed Job's insistence, even his yelling at Him. What He condemned was the pious weaselling of the three. And there is our lesson. As Job himself says, who is wise enough to understand God's ways? Human understanding is enough to bring some light, if not great comfort. Much of our suffering is a result of human sin; because He has made us free, we can plan and carry out actions that God hates, and that harm others. Some is a part of God's retribution; but we can't know which is and which isn't, and we mustn't speculate. God is at work in all of it, turning it to ultimate good; `All things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose' (Romans 8:28).
While pain itself is bad, it can be redeemed by its meaning; childbirth is a familiar example, but we're often willing to suffer pain for far lesser goods: health, or beauty, or even money. Soldiers and firefighters, as well as lots of ordinary people, put their lives at risk to help others, often without hope of reward. Many Christians fast to hear God more clearly, and to bring some order to their unruly cravings. But much suffering appears so meaningless. What is it all for?
We have to begin from the character of God; He does not only judge, He also redeems. His purpose towards Job is to bless and redeem, though both Job and the three miss this. God does not waste suffering. He is Emmanuel, God With Us; He endures our pain and never leaves us. God's presence with suffering people is sometimes very obvious; many early martyrs went to their deaths singing psalms of joy, and the same joy can be seen at many a hospital bedside today. Jesus seems always to have healed people when they asked, but when Paul found the thorn in his flesh, `Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.' (2 Cor 12:8-9, RSV)
God gives meaning to our pain, by our love for Him; Job saw God, and was no longer angry. When we accept suffering in faith with thanksgiving, the Holy Spirit produces in us charity and fortitude such as can come in no other way. Our pain becomes a living bridge joining others to God. Hurting people are often helped most by those who have also suffered. They can reach those far gone in sin or despair; prisoners, alcoholics, cancer patients. After all, Jesus reaches us through His suffering, and by our suffering we come closer to Him. Anyone can wave a careless branch on Palm Sunday, but charity born of pain makes us able to walk with Jesus on His way to Calvary. This costly intimacy is an everlasting gift to those who endure. The virtues last forever, while the suffering, however intense, has an end. Pain keeps us from being too much at home in the world, and it teaches us to rely on God.
All this is true; but so much horror and mystery remains unexplained, and all that pain still has to be endured. It's hard to see how the pain of animals and infants could be for purity or correction, and it's terribly hard to have to watch as they suffer. Job teaches us to sit with the suffering and not try to explain it away. `...When they saw him from afar, they did not recognize him; and they raised their voices and wept; and they rent their robes and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great' (2:12-13).
Job learned to glorify God in a way he had never known, and this even before his fortunes were restored double. He never did get a straight answer to his questions, but he was content with God's reply, `Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?' The only answer is the person and the character of the God who made us; if we receive suffering in love, as God's uncomfortable gift to us, it brings transformation and ultimately joy. If we do otherwise—if we rage, or sulk, or despair, our sorrow may fester into bitterness and hardness of heart. `Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice.' We can't do this alone—it's quite beyond the human range—but Job shows us that with God's spirit we can do it, and when we do, the result is victory.
[1] This is a clue to the Resurrection in Job: the first ten children weren't lost like the animals, they were only dead.
very interesting,
alothough i am not a christian, i allways thought that without suffering nobody would believe in God, it is suffering that makes us hope for better times and look for protection. Suffering reminds us of the horrors of hell.
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