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Human Suffering: How Can a Compassionate God Allow It?
By Jennifer McClure | April 12, 2008
This is in response to EJ’s comment on the April 9 post. There is no short, easy, exhaustive response to this question, and by no means do I claim to fully understand this. But I’d like to share some ideas I’ve encountered while trying to understand this issue.
1. God’s original design for life, for creation, did not include suffering. Adam, Eve and creation were perfect when first created. Then through Adam and Eve’s choice to disobey the one command God gave them, death and sickness entered the world, breaking perfection and causing separation between God and mankind.
2. Part of God’s design for life is free will, and as such, mankind has the capacity to choose to do good or to do evil. So in the same way that the earth — its natural beauty and resources — have been tainted, damaged or even depleted as a result of the choices made by man, the choices of mankind over the course of all time have impacted the conditions of life.
3. Reconciling the idea of a compassionate God coexisting with a suffering world requires the belief that the compassionate God is doing something in the midst of the suffering. So naturally, that leads the question of what? Well, I propose that He uses different methods than what we think we would choose if we were God.
• God acts through our choice to ask for help. Out of God’s desire for us to turn and look up and ask Him for help, as a kid may do when working on a tough math problem or assembling a hard puzzle, God wants us to choose to seek and ask for His help and not be programmed to robotically do so. By asking for God’s help, we admit a need for Him and begin to trust and believe He can and will answer our request.
• God acts through His command for us to love one another. A New Testament writer wrote that all the commandments were summed up in this one statement: Love your neighbor as yourself (Galatians 5:14). Sometimes a key to alleviating human suffering is found in the help we can give each other. Love for one another should spur us to take action toward helping those who suffer and continuing to seek solutions.
• God acts through knowledge He gives to mankind. Many plagues, diseases, sicknesses, pains, etc., have been remedied or alleviated by medicines, technologies, herbal remedies, vaccines, all of which I believe were made possible by the knowledge, understanding and wisdom God endowed to those individuals who made those discoveries or designs.
The following are a couple additional thoughts as to why God allows suffering though He is all-powerful.
• That we might gain wisdom. Similar to a parent’s restraint to help when his or her child is struggling at solving a math problem, God sometimes sees it necessary for us to work through a problem and learn something, gain some ounce of wisdom, knowledge or understanding.
• That we might seek a relationship with God. Suffering can cause us to seek something greater upon which to depend and from which to draw strength, hope and love. God loves us and wants us to seek a relationship, a friendship, with Him. He’s not going to force anyone into a relationship with Him; He wants us to seek it voluntarily. God has a plan for everyone’s life. The choice is ours as to whether we will seek His plan and follow it or wander through life independent of Him. He wants us to seek His help, trust and obey His guidance, love Him and live dependent on Him.
In conclusion, it should be noted that the ultimate goal is to restore things to the way they were designed to be – without suffering, death or disease and nothing separating man and God. And lastly, God did not remove himself from human suffering, but rather became human. Jesus experienced pain, suffering and separation from God. Through Jesus, God has provided an answer to suffering – an eternal answer, not always the surface change or answer we may expect.
I’m sure there are many thoughts on this mystery and even opposing views to what I just shared. Feel free to discuss those openly here. But I hope that this has helped in some way to shed some light, however small.
Topics: Random Ramblings |
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:55 am
Amen brother! I agree and could not have said it better myself.