The Problem of Pain

Among the arguments against the existence of God which have been put forward over time this is one of the big difficult ones to deal with. The question goes something like this, the Church affirms the goodness of God and that God is all powerful which would seem to indicate that God, being good, would not want suffering in His Creation, and since He is all powerful would eliminate it so what gives?

Let me begin by saying that this question is enigmatic to say the least and that some brilliant thinkers in Church History have said some pretty spectacularly stupid things trying to answer it. See Leipzig and Candide.

The issue is that any attempt to answer the big question does nothing whatever to deal with the fact that pain is a big issue experienced personally and that big answers do not play well at the hospital bed of a friend or the grave of a child. So as to not "attempt to handle at arms length problems to deep for my reach" I want to be perfectly clear that my answer is I don't know. The purpose of this post is not to attempt to alleviate the suffering of one who hurts but to explain my own understanding of this problem. This is how I deal with it and I do not make the slightest pretext that this is going to solve the issue for anyone who reads it, but rather this is to try and explain what gets me out of bed when I am having a rotten day.

I will explain in three points,

1. What do you mean by good and all powerful?

2. God is better than we think

3. And we all know it

First off I think the person who says that a good God would not allow suffering has zero understanding about the God put forth in the Bible. Christ teaches more on Hell than all the other people in the Bible put together and He does so without apology. He also emphasizes emphatically (alliteration cool huh?) that Hell is a place of suffering and that it is God who sends people there. "Do not fear the one who can kill the body, but fear the one who can destroy both body and soul in Hell" Since Hell is a place of punishment prepared for Satan it stands to reason that we are not being admonished to fear the Devil, but rather the God who will send us to Hell. The Bible also says that God sends people to Hell BECAUSE He is good not in spite of it. The question Abraham asks God when judgment is pronounced on Sodom and Gomorrah is, "Shall not the Judge of the Earth do right?" That is Abraham is surprised by the judgment and is wanting to save Lot and any others who are innocent, but the question is answered that yes God will do right. God has mercy on Lot and spares him and destroys the cities of the plain, in doing both things God has done right?

Why?

Because God is holy. God is separate utterly from sin and is righteously indignant with sin. When God says that He hates sin He is not confessing a sin but rather is expressing His own absolute rightness. There can be no other expression of God's rightness in Scripture than His furious anger and indignation over our sin which is a direct rebellion and affront to His glory and holiness. Nothing that a sinful man could ever do will earn him a hearing with the Almighty and God does not listen to the pleas of the condemned. Since all men are guilty before God, any and all calamity which befalls them is a righteous expression of the goodness of God.

But God is also merciful. God spares Lot and not because he is good, remember Lot offers up his daughters to the mob to be gang raped... not a good guy. And when he escapes promptly gets drunk and commits incest with both of them. So let us set aside the notion that Lot must have been good in some way because God spared him. Not so. Lot was a rat amongst the rats and deserved the same condemnation which befell the cities, but he received mercy from God for God's own purpose (I think because Lot is in the Messianic Line because one the children of incest is Moab, Ruth was a Moabitess and the great grandmother of King David and thus also a great grandmother to Jesus) and in so doing God revealed again His goodness. And if we want to continue to use this example, I would say the presence of the Dead Sea where Sodom used to be speaks pretty highly of God's power over Creation.

So the first point is that I don't think it contradicts the goodness or power of God that we suffer.

Second off, I think we take this very goodness for granted every single second of our lives.

How do I know?

Because we are surprised by suffering. When things like tsunamis, hurricanes, disease, war, poverty and suffering take place we are surprised. We are affronted that planes are flown into buildings. Shocked that hurricanes flood cities. And appalled that entire peoples can be wiped out by fire, flood, earthquake and disease. We have no frame of reference for dealing with these things because we do not expect them to happen. We are "standing on a planet that's revolving at approximately 1100 mile an hour" around a star which could kill us at any second with a solar flare, protected by the cold blackness of outer space by a layer of atmosphere which is infintessimal when compared even to our planet with comets and meteors flying by at several thousand miles an hour which could wipe us all out in a blink, living among quadrillions of germs which could mutate at any second and kill us all, etc, etc, etc, and we never think about it. We assume the basic goodness of Creation, so much so that we get pissed when it backfires on us.

But why should we be? Why shouldn't the "planet shake us off like a bad case of fleas?" If we are assuming that there is no God then we are stupid to assume that universe prefers our existence over our non-existence, and yet that is exactly the assumption we make when we blithely carry on day by day without the slightest thought that any second the whole thing could go radically different. Notice I did not say wrong, because to say wrong assumes that not suffering is right, which brings me to my last point.

We all know God is good.

I have never met even a hardened atheist who will not say something to the effect of "look at the world, something is wrong." Innately we all know that we are not supposed to suffer. We know it is not normal.

A quick word. I am not going to argue that God exists because evil exists. I think to do so assumes that there is such a thing as evil and that this proves the existence of good. While I do believe that this is valid, it assigns a value to 'evil' and 'good God' which some here may not agree with, which ya know is why I'm trying to explain the problem of pain in the first place.

I want to instead posit the existence of human beings and suffering. I think everyone in the room can agree these things exist. The point is this. We, all of us, know that there is human suffering, and we have a difficult time explaining it. There are those who will say that God is good don't worry, and there are those who will say there is no God and suffering doesn't matter, but the adults in the room know these arguments are equally flawed. Rather, we know that suffering is wrong. We know that when nature kills us it is because something is wrong. We know that when dictators sanction the rape and murder of their populace that it is wrong. And those who will say that it is cultural and we shouldn't make such judgments about other cultures... shut up you're stupid. Its wrong. Period.

We know this suffering is wrong, and we can't explain how we know, but we know that the answer is not here. Education, ecclesiastical rule, totalitarian rule, socialism, communism, social welfare, charity, theocracies, all of the institutions of men have failed to alleviate suffering. I think deep down we know the reason why is that people are in charge of them. People seek good and want good, but cannot ever find it. And yet we know that it exists. And the reason we know is that we know God exists and that He is good even if we won't admit it. We have not found this good in and amongst ourselves because goodness does not exist in a sinful world. And we may speak platitudes about the basic goodness of humanity, but such words are empty as soon as they are spoken because in order for something to be basically good it must must also be partially, even basically bad. Its like meat that is sort of rotten. It may not kill us to eat it, but it isn't a heck of a lot of fun either. There is no such thing as goodness among men, but we know that goodness exists and is desirable, and this goodness must therefore exist outside of and apart from us.

And that goodness I think is best described as God.

And our frustration when things go bad is that we see this not as a badness in God, but an inability toward goodness in us. We see the suffering in Sudan, and Nazi Germany, and Cambodia, and name it, and we know that inside if the fetters were removed, there are some among us if not we ourselves who would not find sympathies toward a cause which brutalizes another in the name of our own advancement. It is the beauty of Heart of Darkness when Marlow realizes that he is not so different from the aboriginal peoples upon whom he has looked with such disdain.

This frustration toward wickedness wells up inside us because it violates our natures which long for goodness. A goodness found only the God who made us.

The God we long for.

The God we know is good.

I have no idea why God allowed my friend to have a stroke, I have no idea why God has allowed my family member to begin that slide which apparently will claim her life. I don't know.

But I do know the frustration and sorrow that I feel about these things is proof to me that God is good and things are not as they were meant to be. But I believe there will come a day when they will be. Because the God who is good may allow us to suffer for a season because it serves His ultimate goodness, but that He in mercy will wipe away every tear one day.