Suffering and a Good God

When a friend throws "where is God" at you, he is usually not opening a philosophical discussion. He is in pain. Scripture never treats this question lightly: the book of Job holds an entire volume for one righteous man's protest, and nearly a third of the Psalms are laments. God gathered these cries into his own book — which shows that questioning suffering is not blasphemy but a prayer the Bible itself has taught. So your first move is not to answer, it is to listen: let him finish saying where it hurts. First Peter 3:15 tells us to answer everyone "with humility and fear" — gentleness comes before content.

You also need to know who you are talking to. If the one in the dark right now is you, go back first to Volume 1, Lesson 16, "Faith in the Dark" — that lesson is pastoral care for the wounded, this one is equipment for the one answering. The two lessons hold each other's hands.

Job wanted an explanation, and what God gave him was an encounter. The chain of questions out of the whirlwind is not there to shut Job up; it is there to put him back in the place of a creature: you did not lay the foundations of the earth, and you did not hear the morning stars sing — and the one who did is speaking to you in person right now. God came, and that in itself is half the answer: he was not absent.

The other half is at Golgotha. God's final answer to suffering is not a theory but his own entrance into it: Christ endured a rigged trial, the lash, friends scattering, all the way to that cry, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34). So what we hold in our hands is not a formula that adds up, but a God with scars. Romans 8:32 stands on this: how could the one who did not spare his own Son be unmoved by the hospital room where your friend is sitting? Not every "why" of suffering gets an answer, but the deeper question — does God care — the cross has already answered.

He says, "Didn't you say God is love? Then where was he when my dad was in the ICU?" You can say, "I don't have an answer that makes this make sense, and I don't want to fob you off with a line. Tell me about your dad first, would you?" He says, "What good does talking do. If he's all-powerful and good, this shouldn't have happened." You can say, "I've carried that contradiction too, and I never found an explanation. What I found was something else: the God I believe in has been on an execution ground himself. I don't believe him because suffering adds up; I believe him because he entered it. Whenever you're willing, I'll tell you that story."

Remember three things: do not pretend to have all the answers; do not deny someone's pain in order to cover for God; end at the cross. And you can leave him one more sentence: Scripture says the whole created world is groaning (Rom 8:22) — the pain is real, but the groaning has a direction, toward the day all things are made new.