WHY SUFFERING?

An exposition of Revelation 6: the four horsemen.

Each of us has our own story about human suffering. Whether it is about ourselves, or a loved one, or the tragedies we read about in newspapers or on television, or in the history books, there is plenty of suffering in this world. Horrors happen daily in all parts of the world. Many people cannot believe in God because of them. Either God is a monster for permitting such things to happen, or he doesn’t exist. Some feel that God, if he exists, has a lot of explaining to do!

“If God, does not exist, then we are locked without hope in a world filled with pointless and unredeemed suffering.” (William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision, pp.154-155)

St. John has seen God on the throne in heaven. Jesus has been given the scroll of human history to open. Only the Lamb who was slain, who had experienced suffering, could open the scroll and its seven seals, and so reveal the answers to the mysteries of life. As he opens each seal an image appears to explain what is going on in the world of the reader. This is what makes Christianity unique: we have a Savior who has suffered, a God in Christ who was slain – not just died but was slain unjustly by cruel men in an excruciating execution. “You, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.” (Acts 2:23) The God we believe in and follow is a sacrificial lamb for us. He is the Man of Sorrows and the God of Suffering. He knows our suffering, the suffering of all humanity, because he bore it in his body on the cross.

Each of the four living creatures representing all of creation, call for Christ to ‘Come’, reveal himself, and save his suffering people. We want Jesus to come and fulfill his promises to bring about a new age of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Rom.14:17). We pray, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The Book of Revelation ends with the promise, “Behold I am coming soon…Yes I am coming soon. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.” (Rev.22:7,20)

But that coming is delayed, to give people time to respond to his call of love. In the meantime all sorts of terrible things happen because God has made us with free will to do what we choose. Sometimes we choose according to God’s will and sometimes against it. We are created with freedom to choose to love or to hate. God will not force us to do good or prevent us from doing evil. While the creation calls for the coming of Christ in our hearts, because of sin and human rebellion against God and his Word, history reveals all sorts of suffering. As Bob Woodson declared of today, “We are in a spiritual and moral freefall.”

As the Lamb opens the first four seals there is revealed the four deadly horsemen of conquest, bloodshed, famine and plague. Jesus warned us that there would be “wars and rumors of wars…Nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.” (Matt.24:6,7) Despite our vaunted so-called progress and growth of knowledge, the history of our times, shows that we have not, and seem not to be able to, eliminate violence, the pursuit of power, revolutions, terrorism, despair and disease. During the fourteenth century bubonic plague wiped out a third of Europe’s population in a decade. Ten million men were slaughtered in World War I. Between 1918 and 1920 the influenza virus killed 50 to 100 million people.

God’s gift of freedom does not prevent us from making irresponsible and selfish choices that result in much suffering to our fellow men and women. God cannot create a world without suffering unless he creates it without people who have enough autonomy to make moral choices. We human beings cause Death and Hades. We are given power to bring peace or to take peace from the earth, to make people love one another, or to make them slay one another. We can “turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous – make ready a people prepared for the Lord” (Luke 1:17) or we can turn hearts against one another, to abuse and to attack each other.

We cannot blame God for the horrors of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Those horses stand for the wild, uncontrollable forces of our own willfulness who refuse to be accountable to anyone other than our own egos. Most of the horrors of the twentieth century were caused by those who have rejected God: Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao. In the 1930’s and forties Stalin starved the kulaks of the Ukraine to death by collectivizing their farms, and later Hitler shot or worked them to death. Fourteen million died, murdered for no better reason than that they were judged unfit to inhabit a Germanic or Soviet utopia. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve.” (Jeremiah 17:9,10)

When the Lamb opens the fifth seal there is revealed under the altar of sacrifice those who have been martyred because of their witness. They call out for vindication, for justice, on those who had persecuted them to death. In this life there is much that is unfair and unjust. The good are not always vindicated. Honesty doesn’t always pay. The godly are persecuted. Jesus warned, “Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me.” (Matt.24:9)

Justin Martyr in the second century attempted to explain why Christians were willing to die.

“We do not give up our confession though we be executed by the sword, though we be crucified, thrown to wild beasts, put in chains, and exposed to fire and every kind of torture. Everyone knows this. On the contrary the more we are persecuted and martyred, the more do others in ever increasing numbers become believers and God-fearing people through the name of Jesus.”

We should not be surprised when we are criticized for our faith. Christians are being targeted by extremists, and go in danger of their lives and reputations. For evidence read Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians, Paul Marshall, Thomas Nelson, 2013. We often have to endure the intolerance of others who regard our Christian faith and moral principles as being bigoted and narrow-minded. Persecution will continue until God’s purposes are fulfilled.

When the Lamb opens the sixth seal there is revealed the great day of God’s judgment on those who oppose him. They try to hide from God and the wrath of the Lamb but they cannot. Jesus warned, “Immediately after the distress of those days ‘the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’ (Isaiah 13:10) At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn.” (Matt.24:29,30)

They will mourn because the secrets of their hearts will be revealed for what they are. All the evil that they have done will be laid open and indict them. All the suffering they have caused others will be exposed and laid bare to the eyes of God. How terrifying that will be! No wonder, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they want to hide from the face of God. But there is no place that they can hide.

What a juxtaposition: the wrath of the Lamb? The lamb that was slain for the sin and suffering of the world. The innocent suffering for the guilty! What sort of wrath does the Lamb express? Surely it must be gentle, and merciful. Surely it will be hard to meet the eyes of the One who loves us when we come before him unless we have sought his forgiveness and received his grace. He comes to us – the lamb of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.” (Isaiah 53:7) Human suffering is redeemed by God coming for us and bearing the sins of many and making intercession for the transgressors. ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ (John 1:29). Take heart, suffering is followed by resurrection, there will be vindication for those who can endure to the end. The Lamb is on the throne.

(Excerpted from Ted Schroder, SOUL FOOD, Vol.4, 264-268)