Happenings 29 October 2020

The young people asked some profound questions in church a couple of weeks ago about suffering. I was once asked a similar question by a woman called Michelle. Here is part of a letter I wrote to her outlining my thoughts on this weighty issue.
Suffering is caused by sin and its consequences (either our own or the flow-on affects of others’ sin), and by the work of Satan and his agents. The biblical understanding of sin is that it corrupts and distorts things that were originally created perfect. The Bible says that this distortion affects not just our spirits and our relationship with God, but the physical world around us (Genesis 3:18) and even our own bodies (Romans 5:12). That is why when God finally deals with sin and wraps up history as we know it, for those who love him sin and its consequences will no longer affect us. But in the meantime, we are stuck with the consequences of humanity’s wrong use of free-will … with a world and bodies and relationships that can sometimes cause pain and heartache. Why doesn’t God doesn’t wave a magic wand and remove all the tangled outcomes of sin in this world? My own view on this is that for free-will to mean anything at all, it must mean not only the freedom to choose but also the responsibility to live with the consequences of the choices we make. If God did away with sin and its outcomes in this world, he would actually be dishonouring the original gift of free choice that he gave humanity since, as with all choices, freedom and responsibility must go together. Also, if God got rid of all the sin in the world, he would also be destroying every person as well, since we all guilty. But it is also true that God sometimes allows hard things. Why? To achieve through temporary pain a lasting good. God is more concerned about our character than our comfort. A person’s eternity does not depend on the state of their body, but on the state of their spirit. So why does He allow pain? Because pain can actually be the reason for someone turning to God! C.S. Lewis once wrote that pain is God’s megaphone to wake a sleeping world (i.e. wake people up to the fact that their eternity’s are on the line). God also sometimes allows suffering to continue in a person’s life for a long time, but again it is for a good and lasting purpose. The apostle Paul is an example of this (see 2 Corinthians 2:7-10). Sometimes, however, we can’t actually see the good that God is wanting to achieve through allowing us to suffer … that’s certainly been true of my life at times, and I still don’t have all the answers about why some things have happened to me and to others I know. For me, though, I choose to believe God has a purpose in it all, even when I can’t see it. The thing that convinces me is Jesus dying on the cross, paying the death penalty for my sins even though he didn’t have to. He could have given up on this world and on me – written me off as a lost cause. He didn’t have to die but chose to so that I could know and take comfort from him in this world and spend eternity with him in the next. He decided to become part of our suffering so that he might provide the eternal solution for it.

In Him,
Murray