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Where is God when we suffer?Lamentations 3:1-9 and 19-33; Romans 8.28-39Preached at Pastor Kevin Livingston at Clairlea Park Presbyterian ChurchSeptember 1, 2019Where is God when we suffer? You’ll remember that back on Boxing Day, 2004 there was an earthquake in the Indian Ocean which caused a massive tsunami that devastated large parts of south Asia. More than 200,000 people were killed across 14 countries. It was the deadliest tsunami in recorded history. A few days later in the Globe and Mail, one correspondent spoke for many people when he asked where was God in all this? Mr. Michael Rai-Lewis wrote the following letter to the editor: Most organized religions teach that God is indeed all-powerful, all-knowing and merciful/ compassionate. This is false advertising. Either God knew about the tsunami and the resulting suffering, could have stopped it but didn't care and therefore He/She is not compassionate. Or God knew about the suffering and cared about it but couldn't do anything to stop or prevent it, and therefore He/She is not all-powerful. Or, God could have done something about the situation and would have cared about it but didn't know it was happening, ergo He/She is not all-knowing. Any rational and logical thinker cannot hold all three to be true. [Thursday, January 6, 2005, Page A18, Re Where's God In All This? (letter -- Jan. 5] Therefore God is either not caring enough or strong enough or smart enough. Take your choice. There is no God, in the classic sense of the word.We Christians, of course, believe there is. We have come with all our heart to know God and what God is like as we see him reflected in the person of Jesus Christ. But, as honestly as possible, we have to face the first question asked by those who have suffered or been touched by suffering: Why? To tell the truth, it's sometimes the first question believers themselves ask: If the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?That’s certainly the question Job must have asked. Job was a man in the Bible who was a righteous man, yet he suffered horrendous disasters that took away everything that was precious to him, including his children, his health, and his property. And in the biblical book that bears his name, Job struggles to understand his situation and begins a search for the answers to his difficulties. He had three friends who came to comfort him. Their names were Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar. And when they came, do you know what the Scripture say they did first? It says, “they sat with [Job] on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” (Job 2:13)I realize that it’s foolish for me to stand in front of you this morning and talk about suffering, about “why…” I’ve experienced so little, and many of you have experienced so much. You know the grief, the anguish, the questions, the anger, the fear. And I pray I won’t say things this morning like Job’s friends did that proved useless to Job and his situation. But in these last few days, I’ve tried to sit before God and his word and come to grips with what Scripture says about suffering. To try and define suffering in mere words trivializes it. But you who’ve suffered, you know what suffering is. The anguish of a senseless death. The wrenching pain of divorce. The slow-motion tragedy of a terminally ill patient. The irreplaceable loss of something precious in your life.It may be hard to define suffering, but we see it everywhere. Look online at the headlines or pick up a copy of the newspaper or watch tonight’s news on TV. And in a month or a year from now, the news will still be about the pain and affliction of people; wars and injustices; natural and manmade disasters; and the more personal tragedies of people: the abuse of a child, the death of a relationship, a failure in business, a crushing addiction that devastates not just the addict but the extended family around him. Suffering, as much as we would flee from it, is a basic part of life, and all of us, consciously or unconsciously, at some point or another, try to come to grips with the reasons behind these things, to wrestle with the problem of evil in our world.The first question asked by those who’ve suffered or been touched by suffering is why. Why? That’s not a faithless question; it’s as old as Job and as universal as humanity itself. Early on in Israel’s history, during the time of the judges, God’s anointed leader Gideon asked that very question. In Judges 6, verses 12 and 13, it says:The angel of the lord appeared to [Gideon] and said to him, "The lord is with you, you mighty warrior." Gideon answered him, "But sir, if the lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all the miracles our ancestors told us about?Why has this happened to us? An expert on death and dying reports an incident many of us will understand. A woman came out of the ICU room where a loved one was dying and asked in a tightly controlled voice, "Is there a room anywhere in the hospital where I can go to scream?" A doctor directed her to a place she could go. And perhaps every hospital — maybe every office and home — ought to have a room like that.The human voice that calls to God out of suffering often rises to a scream. C. S. Lewis lost his wife to cancer. And just after she died, he wrote down some of his agonizing thoughts. In his book A Grief Observed, he writes:Not that I am ... in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not "So there's no God after all," but "So this is what God is really like. Deceive yourself no longer."Lewis mentions the times he and his wife had prayed for a cure. What they got was wrong diagnoses, false hopes, strange remissions, and even one astonishing recovery. But it was only temporary, and the God who held Joy Davidman and Lewis in his hands did fearful things with those hands. Again, Lewis writes:Step by step we were led up the garden path. Time after time, when [God] seemed most gracious, He was preparing the next torture.... I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought.A yell rather than a thought. We don't think clearly when we are in pain. We cry out.And it's not unbelief that shouts its hurt or bewilderment at God, but our belief. Unbelievers shout their fury at the blind, impersonal workings of fate. But believers have to speak somehow with a faithful and sovereign God who seems at times so absent, so willing to tolerate our pain and distress, so far from helping. Generation after generation, believers turn toward heaven to shout their one great question: Why, Lord?As the psalmist cries out: "My God, why are you so far from helping me?" (Ps. 22.1). Or in the words of Gideon: "If the lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?" Or in the words of Job: “Why is light given to those in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, to those who long for death, but it does not come...? (Job 3:20-21).Our suffering questions are why questions. Why did God permit Adam and Eve to sin if he knew what evil would come from it? Why does God allow this, or this much, pain? Why does God permit children to suffer? And why do the righteous suffer? Why did Beethoven lose his hearing while rock fans manage to keep theirs? Why is this gentle person so sick and that careless scoundrel so healthy?Some believers, like Job's friends, think they have answers to these questions. God is testing you, they say. God is punishing you for cheating. God is doling out his judgement on unbelievers. God foresaw that if your child had lived longer, she would have left the faith. These are plainly inadequate and false answers.Other explanations make a bit more sense to me, from a Christian sense. Sometimes suffering appears to be a part of God’s wise plan. Or that God sometimes allows us to suffer that he can teach us. And surely the lessons we learn through suffering can be used to comfort others when they suffer. And yet…The truth is we seldom know any of these things in the midst of the suffering. We may know a little. We may know why a person has a hangover. We may know how a person gets a communicable disease. We may know why a man who lies can't get anybody to trust him.But even here there are surprises. Some liars become presidents and prime ministers. Some folk who abuse their bodies stay amazingly healthy. Some drunks seem to rise and shine every morning. As a biblical writer puts it, sometimes “the wicked prosper.”The most truthful answer to our why questions about suffering is that we don’t know. We commit ourselves to a God who loves and cares, and by his grace God’s covenant faithfulness to us stays fastened even though the mountains shake and the storms blow in. We know that in all things God works for good.But let's face two facts. One is that this good is often hard to find. We can't see it. God has reasons for allowing these trials and tests and sufferings, but we don’t know what the reasons are. It often seems that we’re given a renewed courage rather than much knowledge.But let's also face another fact. On the day Jesus died, our Lord cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Yet two days later he appeared alive to his disciples and said, "Peace be with you." The apostle Paul put it well when he said that in this world, we see things imperfectly like in a poor mirror, and all that we know is partial and incomplete. (1 Cor. 13.12, NLT).People sometimes suffer because of their own sin and folly; but just as often we suffer because of the sin or folly of others.In fact, the New Testament tells followers of Jesus to expect suffering at the hands of others "because of the Gospel" or "for the sake of Christ." We who are disciples of Jesus aren’t greater than our master. Anyone who tells the truth or practices mercy among the unmerciful will sooner or later be opposed. If we do right, we may suffer for it. It's therefore sobering to think of "Christ, our example," and especially in the context of a verse like 1 Peter 2:21: "For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps." Or as Paul puts it earlier in Romans 8: “We are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ — if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” (16-17).A few Christians have followed in Jesus’ steps with the sort of strength that leaves the rest of us in the dust. For example, Father Damien, the Belgian Catholic priest who devoted his life to missionary work at a leper colony on the island of Molokai in Hawaii. Damien was deeply loved by these suffering people who’d been sent there to die. But one Sunday a whole new world reached out and took them in. It happened when Father Damien opened his sermon with the words, "We lepers,” because now, under his own robes, was a body also dying with their disease. In his desire to love and serve them, he had become one of them. And now, in his words, these people heard the voice of Christ.How shallow we look by comparison! Our culture doesn’t want suffering; we want success. We identify with winners! We don't like lepers or losers very well; we prefer climbers and overcomers. For Christians, the temptation to be conformed to this world is seductively powerful and strong.Yet the apostle Paul says we are children of God if we suffer with Christ. Not many of us can go where Father Damien did. God doesn’t give his hardest assignments to his weakest children. But a life with no suffering, no embarrassment, no inconvenience for the sake of Christ is not a Christian life.As Paul says in Romans 5, verses 3-5, “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”The honest biblical answer to the question of suffering is that we don’t know why God permits it. Yet we do know that Christians must suffer for the sake of the Gospel. Father Damien knew it too. Sometimes we think we can see what God has been doing, especially as we look back on our lives… Like looking at a tapestry from the backside, life can appear to be a senseless jumble of strings, yet we turn the tapestry over to the other side and we see the beautiful and purposeful design of the artist come into focus. And that’s how it is for us too. We see the picture the Divine Artist was making out of our lives. And sometimes it appears that suffering can be a mysterious part of God’s wise plan. Through a particularly painful experience, God was helping us learn to weep with those who weep. In a particular defeat, God was breaking an addiction or an idolatry that was holding us captive. In bringing us face to face with our disappointments, God was showing us that his love will sustain us and never let us go.But let's be honest. God's ongoing good work in our lives of making us more like Jesus is often hard for us to understand. It’s sometimes hard to measure or to see. We have to spot the goodness of God with the eyes of faith, and sometimes we strain to see it.But it’s there, and sometimes in strange places. Douglas Nelson tells of visiting a terrible little cell in the dungeon of an old English castle. No light had ever come there from outside. On one wall the stone had been worn into the shape of a hand, because men dying of thirst leaned there while they licked the filthy moisture that leaked from the moat through one small crack. In that blackness someone had scratched — with a belt buckle, perhaps — the old words of Jacob: "The Lord was in this place and I knew it not." Even here. Even in this. You see, the question isn’t why but where. Where is God when we suffer? And the answer the Bible teaches is that the Lord is with us for good as we suffer, and in fact God suffers with us.Our understanding of God is inadequate if we see God only over and apart from us in times of suffering. For the truth is, like those nameless prisoners in that English castle dungeon, God is right beside us, weeping with us in the midst of our tears, just like Jesus did with Mary and Martha in front of the tomb of Lazarus.In the Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis takes his character Digory through a painful experience, one in which he makes the discovery of God's fellow-suffering. Digory approaches Aslan the Lion, creator of Narnia, to ask for some magical fruit to make his ailing mother well. He fears that the matter might be considered insignificant to the Lion, but he gets up. the courage at least to ask.When the Lion doesn't even answer, Digory is stunned. It appears that Aslan doesn't care at all about Digory's anguish or his mother's illness.At first Digory can't say anything, but then as he recalls all of the great hopes he had had and how they now were dying away, tears fill his eyes and he approaches the Lion a second time. But to his surprise, Digory finds that he and his mother hadn't been the only ones suffering:Up till then he had been looking at the Lion's great front feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion's eyes. They were such big bright tears compared with Digory's own that for a moment he fell as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his mother than he was himself.?After this experience Digory never again doubted the love of Aslan: "whenever he remembered the shining tears in Asian's eyes he became sure." (The Magician’s Nephew, p. ++).My brothers and sisters, let us look into the shining, tear-filled eyes of Jesus, who weeps with all who suffer. In some mysterious way, and especially through his death on the cross, Jesus has identified with us, and with all the world, in its suffering. His cross doesn’t give us a rational explanation for our suffering and the suffering of this world, but it shows us where God is in a world of suffering – a God who has entered into our world and suffered himself for our sake – a God who is embracing suffering, and saving his people through it. “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”A Prayer: O Lord our God, we see in a mirror darkly. But we see there the face of your Son, who suffered for us. Though at times our faith fails and hearts sink, we know that he has led the way through suffering to a peace that passes understanding. And for this we praise your holy name. Amen. ................
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