GOD SUFFERS WITH US

Job lost his family, his fortune, his reputation, and his health. He works through his grief, through depression, through anger, through arguing with God and his friends who try to explain why he is suffering. Job wants God to answer his complaints.  A storm comes upon them.  Out of the storm the LORD reveals his truth.  Job wanted information, he received revelation.  Instead of a message he received a Presence.

In September, 1994, a USAir plane crashed into a ravine outside of Pittsburgh killing all 132 people aboard. The plane literally flipped over before hitting the ground.  There was little left to identify any of the bodies.  One of the most poignant remains was a man and a woman’s hand clasped together.  They only had a few seconds from awareness of the problem and impact.  One of the passengers had sung a song in his church the previous Sunday.  It was entitled, “Till We Fly to Heaven’s Shore”. At the memorial service held in Pittsburgh they played the recording made at that time.  The police chief who had been responsible for the clean-up came to the podium and told the grieving crowd how, after all had been completed at the site, it started to rain.  He noticed a rainbow appearing over the ravine and said: “I guess this is God saying, ‘It’s all right!’”

What do you want to happen when you are suffering? The solution is not just for the immediate suffering to cease.  Physical pain can end but emotional pain cannot end if the suffering is irreversible.  What is the comfort you need to endure and conquer suffering? Are you looking for answers to questions “why”?  Or are you looking for something more?  Do you want God to put his arm around you and say:  “It’s going to be all right”?

Job was looking for answers, and instead he got questions, questions he could not begin to answer, questions which showed him how ignorant he was.  He discovered that he did not begin to understand the mystery and the complexity of life. q.v.(42:1-6)

            “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things

            too wonderful for me to know….

            My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.

            Therefore I despise myself (melt into nothingness) and

            repent in dust and ashes (I am comforted, though I am

               still sitting upon dust and ashes).”  

He acknowledges that he has limited knowledge. He could not answer the questions God put to him:

            “Would you discredit my justice?

            Would you condemn me to justify yourself?

            Do you have an arm like God’s,

            and can your voice thunder like his?”  (40:8,9)

“Do you refute my wisdom? Do you condemn my justice?  Do you doubt my power?  Do you reject my voice?”   These are the eternal questions we ask:  Is God unfair in his justice or limited in his power?  In Auschwitz, three rabbis decided to indict God for allowing his children to be massacred.  Elie Wiesel’s play, The Trial of God, deals with this incident.  God reveals that every time man takes upon himself the power to play God and save himself he makes the world worse.  He portrays the hippopotamus as an example of God’s creation:  it seems ugly and useless, but it is part of God’s plan.  The crocodile is the symbol of evil. If he eliminated evil, which is also part of creation, we would lose human freedom and divine grace. God prefers a loving relationship with people who freely choose him, rather than a perfect world.  He permits evil to exist. C.S. Lewis, as he worked through his grief in losing his wife to cancer, first of all angrily questioned God. Then he came to the place where he could say,

“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of “No answer.”  It is not the locked door.  It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze.  As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question, like “Peace, child; you don’t understand.”….Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet.  We shall see that there never was any problem….The sense that some shattering and charming simplicity is the real answer.”   (A Grief Observed, pp.80,83)

Job realizes his ignorance and that he must trust God.  God reveals his wisdom and power to us so that we can trust him.  God is worthy of our trust. He is trustworthy.  God is not a cosmic sadist who delights to see us suffer.  He is the God who suffers, He is the God who experiences the suffering of his people.  He is a God of love, and you cannot love without experiencing pain. There is a cost to love.  This is why Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge, nine months before his execution by the Nazis in 1945: ‘only the Suffering God can help’.

Timothy Rees puts this well in his hymn:

            “And when human hearts are breaking under

           sorrow’s iron rod,

            then we find that self-same aching deep within the

            heart of God.”

Only this understanding of God’s revelation of himself can help us cope with human suffering. Global hunger, poverty, and war is not a matter of indifference to God.  The Cross of Jesus tells us that God himself suffers with his people.  He takes upon himself the pain and suffering of history.  The Christian believes in God because of the cross.  Many religions try to escape from pain and suffering by encouraging detachment from the reality of the world.  The God Jesus reveals to us is the One who “so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.”  This God suffers all that men and women suffer:  rejection, torture, ridicule, embarrassment, abandonment, depression, spiritual darkness. He laid aside his immunity to pain and entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us then and suffers for us now.

The playlet entitled “The Long Silence” says it all:

“At the end of time, billions of people were scattered on a great plain before God’s throne. Most shrank back from the brilliant light before them.  But some groups near the front talked heatedly – not with cringing shame but with belligerence.  ‘Can God judge us?  How can he know about suffering? Snapped a pert young brunette.  She ripped open a sleeve to reveal a tattooed number from a Nazi concentration camp.  ‘We endured terror… beatings ..torture… death!’

In another group an Afro-American lowered his collar. ‘What about this?’ he demanded, showing an ugly rope burn.  ‘Lynched…for no crime but being black?’  In another crowd, a pregnant school girl with sullen eyes.  ‘Why should I suffer’ she murmured, ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

Far out on the plain there were hundreds of such groups. Each had a complaint against God for the evil and suffering he permitted in his world.  How lucky God was to live in heaven where all was sweetness and light, where there was no weeping or fear, no hunger or hatred. What did God know of all that man had been forced to endure in this world?  For God leads a pretty sheltered life, they said.

So each of these groups sent forth their leader, chosen because he had suffered the most. A Jew, an Afro-American, a person from Hiroshima, a horribly deformed arthritic, a thalidomide child.  In the center of the plain they consulted with each other.  At last they were ready to present their case.  It was rather clever.

Before God could be qualified to be their judge, he must endure what they had endured. Their decision was that God should be sentenced to live on earth – as a man!

‘Let him be born a Jew. Let the legitimacy of his birth be doubted.  Give him a work so difficult that even his family will think him out of his mind when he tries to do it.  Let him be betrayed by his closest friends.  Let him face false charges, be tried by a prejudiced jury and convicted by a cowardly judge.  Let him be tortured.

At the last let him see what it means to be terribly alone. Then let him die.  Let him die so that there can be no doubt that he died.  Let there be a great host of witnesses to verify it.’

As each leader announced his portion of the sentence, loud murmurs of approval went up from the throng of people assembled. And when the last had finished pronouncing sentence, there was a long silence.  No-one uttered another word.  No-one moved.  For suddenly all knew that God had already served his sentence.”

(“The Cross of Christ”, John Stott, p.336)

Is this not a God you can trust with your life, with your suffering? We may have heard of God with our ears, but now, in Jesus on the Cross, “now my eyes have seen you.” It will be all right.