A few years ago, during a meeting in my Memphis, TN office, I glanced out the window onto Highland Street and noticed a wrecked pick up truck. It was my truck! Moments earlier my wife Kendra and daughter Jordan had dropped me off. Now they were in the middle of a busy street in an accident.
As I ran downstairs and across the pavement, each frantic heartbeat pumped equally frantic thoughts into my mind. Was Kendra injured? I imagined blood seeping from her forehead. What about 18-month-old Jordan? I pictured her fragile neck whiplashed.
My thoughts were worse than the accident. No injuries visited us that day, but the episode caused me to wonder: Why does God allow such things to happen? Kendra and Jordan walked away safely, but what about the 10-year-old girl crushed by a drunk driver? What about that bookkeeper immobilized by multiple sclerosis? What about that family mired in the projects? Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?
I don’t know all the answers, but I do know this: God can and will bring an end to all suffering. Paul once described how hostile religious leaders stoned him and whipped him. Yet Paul called such suffering “momentary” (2 Corinthians 4:17). He knew that, from the perspective of eternity, even the most miserable earthly life was like one night in a bad hotel. The last book of the Bible describes the day suffering will vanish: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. . . . He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death, or mourning or crying or pain. . .” (Revelation 21:1-4). God can and will bring all suffering to an end.
Then why do car accidents, diseases, and poverty still invade our lives? If God can and will end suffering, why doesn’t He end it right now? Doesn’t God care? It may seem as if He doesn’t, but the Bible records four convincing proofs that God does care.
First, God uses suffering to benefit us. Suffering is the soil which can give life to perseverance and maturity (James 1:2-4). Heartbreak is the heat which can burn away the impurities in our character and faith (1 Peter 1:6-7). Steve Flatt once spoke at the church were I preach. He told of three people who suffered from cancer. One person’s cancer entered remission. One person still battled the cancer. One eventually died from cancer. But in each case, the suffering transformed the sufferer. One person overcame self-pity through the suffering. Another overcame selfishness. The third overcame bitterness. That’s not to say that the cancer was a good thing or that God brought it about. It is to say that God was able to use that otherwise horrible suffering to benefit those suffering. God can use our suffering to benefit us.
Second, God can use our suffering to benefit others. Paul states that God “comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4). Any time we suffer, we become better equipped to comfort others who suffer in a similar fashion. Months ago, friends in my Sunday School class lost their unborn child. I had never lost a child before, and I had no idea how to comfort them. I called them and prayed for them, but I didn’t really know what to say. Others in the same class, however, did know what to say. They knew because at one point they had also lost children. Through their suffering, they had been equipped to comfort others. That’s not to say that the loss of those children was a good thing or that God was responsible for it. It is to say that God used their otherwise horrible suffering to equip them to comfort others.
Third, God has shown His love for us by suffering with us. Jesus was God in the flesh and thus experienced all of life, the good and the bad (John 1:14). Jesus faced sorrow and trouble (Matthew 26:37). Jesus faced fatigue (Luke 8:23). Jesus was distraught (Matthew 27:46). God knows what we feel like in the tough times of life because, in Jesus, God experienced those tough times first hand. Elie Wiesel, Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, witnessed the hanging of two Jewish men and a youth in a Nazi concentration camp. All the prisoners, Wiesel included, stood before the gallows to watch the spectacle. The two men died quickly, but it took half an hour for the youth to die. “Where is God? Where is He?” someone asked behind Wiesel. As the youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, the man called again, “Where is God?” And Wiesel thought, “Where is He? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows.” The precise meaning of Wiesel’s words is debated, but here’s one interpretation: God was suffering on the gallows with those men. He felt their pain. He shed their tears. God has shown His love for us by suffering with us.
Fourth, God shows His love for us by suffering for us. The Bible claims that we are separated from God because of our sins. Those sins have caused wounds in our relationship with God. But on the cross, Jesus healed those wounds. He “bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24). In his book Ragman and Other Cries of Faith, Walter Wangerin, Jr., illustrates God’s suffering for us with a story about a rag man. One Friday morning a man walked the alleys of a city, pulling an old cart filled with new clothes, and calling, “Rags! New rags for old!” The Ragman saw a woman sitting on her porch, sobbing thousands of tears into a handkerchief. The Ragman quietly walked to the woman and took the handkerchief from her eyes, laying across her hand a new clean linen cloth. As he began to pull his cart again, the Ragman put her stained handkerchief to his own face, then he began to weep. She was left without a tear. In a little while, the Ragman found a girl whose head was wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage. The child could only gaze at him while he exchanged the bandage for a yellow bonnet. The bandage on his head was soon soaked with a darker, more substantial blood–his own! “Rags! Rags! I take old rags!” cried the sobbing, bleeding Ragman. Weeping and bleeding from the forehead, he sped through the alleys of the city until he came to its limits. Then he rushed beyond to the garbage pits and climbed a hill. With tormented labor, he cleared a little space on that hill. Then he sighed. He lay down. And he died. God suffered for us.
There are no easy answers to our questions about suffering, but we can know that God still cares. One day He will bring an end to our suffering. He can use our suffering to benefit ourselves and others. And He shows His love by suffering with us and for us.
