Amelia Church of Christ - Christian Church in Amelia, OH near Cincinnati in Clermont County

This is the third installment in our Q&A series. In this series, we surveyed our church family, asking you to submit questions that you’ve been struggling with. Today we’re doing everything differently. We’ve crafted our entire service around this one question that was submitted in our survey:

Where was God at Virginia Tech?

On April 16, the worst single shooting in U.S. history occurred when Cho Seung-Hui opened fire in a Virginia Tech dormitory and engineering building. In all, 32 people were murdered and 29 more were wounded. The death toll grew to 33 when Cho Seung-Hui took his own life.

Investigators will do their work. Forensic science will give us facts. But there is an overarching question that people will continue to ask long after the investigation is over. Why did this happen? Why did a madman walk onto the Virginia Tech campus and start indiscriminately shooting? God, where were you when all this was happening? Couldn’t you have done something to stop this? God, what in the world are you doing?

George Barna conducted a national survey in which he asked a scientifically selected group of adults, “If you could ask God only one question and you knew he would give you an answer, what would you ask?” The number one answer to the survey: I would ask God, “Why is there pain and suffering in the world?”

And it’s not just us that are asking the question. Even the people who wrote the Bible asked this question.

The Old Testament prophet Habakkuk wrote, “How long, O LORD, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong?

Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.” (Habakkuk 1:2-4, NIV)

The questions of Habakkuk are so relevant to what we see almost everyday. We are forced to look at injustice. We see destruction and violence. And we ask the same question that the prophet asked.

God, why do you tolerate wrong? Habakkuk had seen the Virginia Techs of his day, and his question was the same as ours. God, why? God, what are you doing about this? God, where are you?

Today we’re tackling this question that is considered the most difficult, challenging question in our faith. This question of, “Why is there pain? Why is there suffering? Why do bad things happen?” We’re going to hit this question with a two-pronged strategy. We’re going to check out the theology of suffering. What does the Bible say about it? What can we learn about it? We’re going after some head knowledge.

But then we’re going to talk about the reality of suffering. What do we do when suffering and pain come to our house? Head knowledge isn’t enough, so we’re going after some heart knowledge as well.

So let’s pray and then we’ll jump into this.

PRAYER

The question we’re asking today is one of theodicy. Theodicy refers to the study of the question of why God allows sin and misfortune to exist in his creation.

All major world religions address theodicy. They all attempt to give answers as to why suffering and pain exist.

Judaism teaches that, in many situations, suffering is caused by sin.

Hinduism teaches that you reap what you’ve sown in this life or in previous lives.

Buddhism teaches that your suffering stems from your desires.

Islam teaches that you suffer because Allah wills it.

But how do we explain it? As believers in Jesus, how do we explain the presence of suffering and pain and evil?

There are some significant theological truths that we need to wrestle with as Christ-followers. These truths will give us some head knowledge from the Scripture that we need to answer this great question.

Truth #1 – We live in a fallen world.

When I was a kid, I was a little bit of a practical joker…especially with my grandma. It was so much fun for me to play jokes on my grandma. I know, you’re thinking, “Wow, you’ve really got to be a jerk to pull pranks on your own grandma.” You need to understand that she gave as much as she got. It was just that kind of fun relationship that we had.

One of my favorite things to do was to doctor up her coffee a little bit. When she would walk away from her coffee cup, I would grab it and add some interesting ingredients to her coffee. Anything from lemon juice, hot sauce, vanilla extract, salt, soy sauce, whatever I could get my hands on. And then it was a lot of fun to sit back and watch her unknowingly take a big swig of my new coffee concoction.

Obviously she would only take one drink and then the remainder of the cup would go down the kitchen sink. The coffee was completely ruined. It was fine until that one extra ingredient was added. The added ingredient ruined the whole thing.

When God created the world, he said that it was “good.” It had a God-like perfection about it. But then another ingredient was added to creation: sin. And this additional ingredient ruined the perfection of God’s original creation.

In Genesis 3, we see sin’s entrance into the world through Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God. The result is that God placed a curse on his whole creation.

Romans 8 says, “Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay.” (Romans 8:20-21, NLT)

We live in a fallen world. A world that is under God’s curse. The result of that curse is that life is now more challenging and more difficult. The curse introduced pain and suffering which were not part of God’s original design. Ultimately, the curse brings the reality of physical death, which was not part of God’s original blueprints for his creation.

Sin’s entrance into our world is more far-reaching than most of us realize. It is the ingredient that forever ruined the recipe. The result is that we live in a fallen world that barely resembles the world that God intended.

Truth #2 – Man has been given free-will choice. When it comes to this issue of why is there suffering and pain, you can’t overstate the importance of this truth.

In his book, The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel interviewed Dr. Peter Kreeft, a philosophy professor at Boston College. When Strobel, who was an atheist at the time, interviewed Dr. Kreeft about this problem of pain and suffering, Dr. Kreeft gave this answer.

“The source of evil is not God’s power but mankind’s freedom. Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potentiality for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin within its own meaning. It’s a self-contradiction—a meaningless nothing—to have a world where there’s real choice while at the same time no possibility of choosing evil. To ask why God didn’t create such a world is like asking why God didn’t create colorless color or round squares.” (Strobel, Lee. The Case for Faith. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 2000, p. 50.)

Some people wonder why God even planted that one tree in the Garden of Eden. There was one tree that God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat from. They disobeyed, ate the fruit from that tree, and set the wheels of God’s curse in motion. Why did God plant the tree there in the first place? The answer: he had to. If he didn’t plant that tree, there would be no such thing as free will choice. For Adam and Eve to choose to love God, they also had to have the option to reject God.

Same with us. For us to be able to truly love, we’ve got to have the option of choosing hate. If hate doesn’t exist, then love isn’t a choice. It’s a preprogrammed result because you couldn’t choose anything else. We wouldn’t want someone to love us because they have to; we want someone to love us because they want to. Same goes for God. For our relationship with him to mean anything at all, we have to be given a choice; a choice to choose God or reject God. And all of us, at some point, have chosen to reject God. And these choices to reject God and God’s principles can have devastating consequences on our lives and the lives of others.

Proverbs 19:3 says, “People ruin their lives by their own foolishness and then are angry at the LORD.” (NLT) Isn’t that true? The plain fact is that we have been given the freedom to choose. We make stupid choices. And then we, and those around us, suffer the consequences for those choices. And then we want to blame God for our choices. But that’s a blame game that just doesn’t work.

Truth #3 – God chooses how he will use his power.

When suffering and pain are present, God is using his power in one of two ways:

either his power is restrained or his power is active.

There are times when God chooses to restrain his power. Sometimes pain is present because God simply chooses not to deter a person’s free will actions. He could, but he restrains his power and chooses not to.

Sometimes suffering exists because God chooses to let the forces of nature run their course. Part of creation’s curse is hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, etc. And sometimes God restrains his power and let’s nature run.

Suffering and pain can exist because God chooses to restrain his power. At other times, suffering and pain exist because God chooses to use his power actively. There are times when suffering is actually caused by God. Sometimes he uses suffering as punishment for sin. At times, he uses pain to wake us up to our need for God. Sometimes pain is the vehicle that we need to get us back to where God wants us to be.

The Bible reminds us that, “We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us…” (Romans 5:3-5a, NLT)

At some points in our lives, God uses hard times to chip away at our character, to grow us into the kind of people that he wants us to be. To remind us that we desperately need him. Without him, we’re completely lost.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

God knows how stubborn and obstinate we can be. He knows that, if it weren’t for painful times, we’d likely never return to him, never rely on him, never pursue a relationship with him. If it weren’t for pain bringing us back to God, most of us would be doomed to an eternity in hell because we’d never give God a second thought in this life.

I realize that we’ve been treading through some pretty heady stuff. This has been more like a classroom lesson than I would prefer, but this is some basic Biblical teaching that we all need to work through. Without a basis in what the Bible teaches, there’s no need to go any further. You’ve got to have the head knowledge.

But you’ve also got to have the heart knowledge. Because all of this stuff that we’ve talked about might make sense in this room, but when you walk out the door and suffering smacks you in the face, the theology of suffering doesn’t matter as much anymore. The theology of suffering can seem meaningless when you’re faced with the reality of suffering. So we’re going to spend the rest of our time talking about how we operate during painful times. What happens when Virginia Tech isn’t a story on the news, but a reality in your life? How do we deal with our own Virginia Techs?

This week has been a rough one. Just this week, I visited a couple who lost their son to cancer. I visited a man who is suffering in a hospital intensive care unit. My wife talked with our friends who are in a really tough spot because of a job loss. I heard about another friend who is hurting so much that he turned back to alcohol in an attempt to ease his pain. And I heard about yet another friend who is accused of a crime that he didn’t commit. And I went to a jail to visit a man who is there as a result of bad decisions he has made in his painful and broken life, but I was turned away because of a security issue and I didn’t even get to talk to him.

And do you know what? I didn’t have an answer for any of these people. Oh, I could have talked about the theology of suffering, the stuff that we just worked through. But somehow, that just seems a little empty when the suffering is so real and intense. With the theology of suffering as our foundation, let’s get to the nitty-gritty, dirty, messy details of dealing with pain and suffering. What do we do when a Virginia Tech happens in our lives?

The first thing we have to do is get real with God.

When I was a kid, there was an older lady in my home church who seemed to make it her mission to keep me and my friends in line. I remember walking into church one night and I forgot to take my hat off. I wore a ball cap all the time when I was a young teenager. I wore it so much that there were times when I legitimately forgot that I had it on. This was one of those times. I walked into the church building and I had no idea that there was a hat on my head.

In front of a large group of people, this lady ripped the hat off my head and berated me. “Don’t you know to take your hat off when you come in here? Didn’t anybody ever teach you how to act in church?” This type of thing would happen fairly often with me and my friends.

I learned the lesson…and it was a bad lesson. The lesson I learned was that I had to act differently in church then I did in the rest of my life. The hat was just a symbol of what this lady taught me. She taught me that I couldn’t be myself at church. I had to put on an act at church, and then by extension, I logically thought that meant that I had to put on an act for God. I couldn’t be myself with God. Obviously I couldn’t be real with God. How many of you have been taught that same lesson?

This is a lie that will cripple you spiritually, especially during a painful time in your life. Some of us have been taught that when life hurts, when you’re experiencing a Virginia Tech pain in your life, you can’t tell God how you really feel. Oh, you can pray about it, but you’ve really got to flower up your prayers. Make them nice and neat and pretty.

Even when we’re experiencing a painful time, we think we’ve got to pray, “God, thank you for this day.” It doesn’t fit with our theology to pray, “God, this day stinks,” even though that would be the more honest prayer.

Think about this verse that was written by God’s prophet, Jeremiah. Jeremiah was so angry, he was hurting so much in his life, that he cried out, “O LORD, you deceived me, and I was deceived…” (Jeremiah 20:7, NIV)

Now, maybe that sounds bad enough, but the Bible translators haven’t really caught the intensity of Jeremiah’s complaint. A lot of scholars believe that Jeremiah literally said, “LORD, you raped me and I was raped.”

There’s nothing pretty or flowery about that. That is gut-level, gritty reality. Jeremiah was hurting, and he poured it out to God. He held nothing back. And you know what? God didn’t strike him dead. Instead God continued to use Jeremiah as his messenger.

God can’t use someone who always speaks in religious platitudes and fakes his way through faith. God uses people like Jeremiah. People who are raw. Who are brutally honest. Who are dangerously authentic.

Earlier this year Nicki and I lost a baby through a miscarriage. And I was mad. There are babies born everyday that aren’t wanted. They’re neglected and abused. Thousands don’t even make it to birth because they’re so unwanted that their parents choose abortion. But this baby of ours was desperately wanted. I couldn’t, and still don’t, understand why God would take this away from us. And honestly, there were a few times that I climbed up into God’s lap and beat on his chest. But you know what I have found? Even if I’m beating on his chest, I’m still in his lap. At least I’m in his presence. And God is big enough to take it.

We don’t do God or ourselves any favors when we aren’t honest and authentic about our pain. God will take real over religious any day of the week. There are sometimes when suffering just doesn’t make any sense. You cannot explain it away. So instead of putting on a religious front, try getting real with God. You may not get answers, but you will get God’s presence.

In the book of Job, God allowed his servant, Job, to experience a myriad of different kinds of suffering. The intensity of the pain grew more and more, until Job had finally lost everything. He had lost his wealth, his children, and his own health.

Near the end of the book, Job tears loose on a rant against God. In chapter 30, Job says, “With a strong hand, God grabs my shirt. He grips me by the collar of my coat. He has thrown me into the mud. I’m nothing more than dust and ashes. I cry to you, O God, but you don’t answer. I stand before you, but you don’t even look. You have become cruel toward me. You use your power to persecute me.” (Job 30:18-21, NLT)

Job goes on and on from here, pouring his heart out to God. He lists the ways that he was living for God, trying to please God, but now this incredible suffering has come into his life. God, how could you do this to me? God, why is this happening? He’s asking real, gut-level questions. And God answered.

God said, “Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand.” (Job 38:3-4, NIV)

And God goes on and on from there. He asks Job question after question that Job can’t answer. Job, were you there when I did this? Job, can you explain how I do this? Job, can you understand this?

But one thing God never does: he never told Job why he was suffering.

And Job, after he met God, was content not to know. Because God’s presence was enough.

When you drop the pose and get real with God, you will experience the honest, raw, authentic faith that he wants for you. You may not get answers to your questions about suffering, but you will get God’s presence. And there is an unexplainable sustaining power in God’s presence.

A second thing that we need to do when we experience suffering is get a glimpse of God’s pain. When you choose to get real with God, honestly pouring out your pain and hurt to him, it also forces you to get an honest glimpse of God’s pain.

God’s pain came in the incarnation. When Jesus came to earth, fully-human and fully-God. The Bible tells us that he wasn’t an attractive man. He came from Nazareth, which meant many people perceived him as a hick, a stupid country bumpkin. He grew up knowing the sweat and pain that comes from the hard work of a carpenter. In his adult life, he was a homeless nomad. His friends were rejects, who would eventually reject him. He was accused of crimes he didn’t commit. Went through a kangaroo court, was beaten without mercy. When given a choice, an angry mob chose for the government to release a terrorist instead of the innocent Jesus. He was forced to carry his own cross, the instrument of his execution, through the dusty streets of Palestine. And finally, God’s pain came to a crescendo on a hill called Calvary. It was there that God in human flesh hung on a cross.

What does this have to do with our suffering and pain? Everything.

Speaking of Jesus, the Bible says, “Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6, NIV)

I can’t explain how this happened, but somehow when Jesus was on the cross, every sin, every moment of pain and suffering in all human history, past, present, and future was laid on his shoulders.

The Bible says “he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows.” (Isaiah 53:4, NIV) God “laid on him the iniquity [or the sin-guilt] of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6, NIV)

The cross was the most searing, intense, painful moment in history, not because of the beating Jesus received, not because of the spikes in his wrists and ankles, but because when he hung on the cross, every moment of suffering, every instance of pain, every tear that was or would be shed, every sinful thought, word, or action in all human history, all of that was thrown onto his bleeding shoulders.

John Stott said it better than I can. He wrote, “I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross…In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through his hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes diving suffering.” (quoted from Strobel, Lee. The Case for Faith. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 2000, p. 74-75.)

Where was God at Virginia Tech? Where was God at Pearl Harbor, or Oklahoma City, or on 9/11? Where was God in the Asian tsunami or in Hurricane Katrina?

Where was God when your child was taken from you far too early? Where was God when your marriage fell apart or your investments crashed or your job was lost or your home was destroyed? Where was God when you were diagnosed with cancer? Where was God when you suffered abuse at the hands of people who were supposed to love you? Where was God when Virginia Tech left the TV screen and became a reality in your life?

Where was God?

He was on the cross. You’ve never experienced a hurt that God hasn’t already felt because he felt it on the cross. It’s the cross that bridges the gap between us and God. God feels your pain, God paid the price for your sin, and God gives you the promise of eternal life with no more suffering or pain…all through the cross of Jesus Christ.

Mike Edmisten

Tags: pain, evil, suffering, Virginia Tech