Introduction:
Good day to you ladies and gentlemen. Tonight is the second of the ten questions that we are studying at Church. I have been taking notes and I am going to try and portray what I heard at Church onto here. The second question of the ten questions is this: How could a good God allow suffering?
Everybody, even Christians have asked this question from time to time. Unfortunately there is no easy answer to this question. There is no straight up answer that you can give to this question. There are many different forms of suffering that there is no easy answer.
All throughout The Bible people have asked God why they need to suffer or how much longer they need to suffer.
Psalm 6:3 NIV
My soul is in anguish. How long, O LORD, how long?
Job 2:13 NIV
Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was.
Now most people, if not all, should know the story with Job. Job's friends did the best thing they could have by not saying a single word to him. Just when you thought that Job couldn't suffer any more than he already had, his friends start ripping into him.
Some people write down songs about their suffering and anguish. One well known song is titled "Everybody Hurts" by R.E.M. You are not alone in suffering because everybody suffers at one point or another. We each have our own individual story about how we have suffered.
Brooke Faser C.S. Lewis song
"If I find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy,
I can only conclude that I was not made for here"
Now we like to ask why because that is our natural reaction, is to ask why. Now why is it that we feel that it's wrong?
Why is it that we feel that suffering is wrong? Everyone has that spark inside them that says "Hang on, someone should be in charge around here." That, of course is referring to God. Why do we assume that this world should be perfect?
To answer this we need to go back to the Fall once again.
Genesis 3:17 NIV
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
God cursed the man, the woman and the ground. The story in a nutshell goes like this. God creates the perfect world and puts man in charge of it to look after it. With the fall, God curses the man and woman but if he doesn't curse the ground then the ground would rule over man so he also curses the ground so man can still rule over the ground, if that makes sense.
The mistake that Adam made is the same mistake that everybody from then on has made, not trusting God and wanting to live in a world without God as a part of their life. We have allasked for a world without God. We see the result of that in the suffering. Our time here on Earth when we want to live in a world without God, is just a taste in eternity without God. Now you do not want that full scale in Eternity because that would be Hell.
Remember when God made the world he saw that it was very good as it says in Genesis.
Genesis 1:31 NIV
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
The issue with suffering has been dealt with anyway as you will see.
Romans 8:18 NIV
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
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Now what is our solution to suffering? Do we want to wish it all away in a heartbeat? Do we want this to happen...?
John 11:35:43
Jesus wept. So the Jews were saying, “See how He loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind man, [a]have kept this man also from dying?”
So Jesus, again being deeply moved within, *came to the tomb. Now it was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus *said, “Remove the stone.” Martha, the sister of the deceased, *said to Him, “Lord, by this time there will be a stench, for he has been dead four days.” Jesus *said to her, “Did I not say to you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” So they removed the stone. Then Jesus raised His eyes, and said, “Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. I knew that You always hear Me; but because of the [c]people standing around I said it, so that they may believe that You sent Me.” When He had said these things, He cried out with a loud voice, [B]“Lazarus, come forth.”
First and foremost Jesus wept. That is very significant because it shows that Jesus was not an unmoveable person. It also showed that he cares about our suffering. He is going to do something about it. Now at the end of that story Jesus calls out "Lazarus, come forth!" Lazarus is resurrected. So that problem of suffering is solved right? That is half true. Lazarus did come out alive but he would die once again. He would have to die again as he certainly isn't here today. In the end, death will take us all one day. Each of us carries death within oneself. The problem is much deeper than we imagine. If we realize that the problem is much larger than what we see, then that means that the solution to our problem is also much deeper than we can imagine.
There is a temporary solution and there is an eternal solution. Jesus came down to be a part of suffering and saw it all. He takes all our suffering and nails it to the cross. It MUST happen in Jesus' words.
Luke 9:22 NIV
And he said, "The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life."
Luke 22:44 NIV
And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.
Jesus was in anguish because he knew that shortly he was going to be captured by the Romans. He suffered anguish and he prayed earnestly to God.
1 Peter 3:18 NIV
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit.
Jesus not only suffered but he suffered more than anybody ever has. He had to reach so far down, more than anybody else, to grab all the suffering that everybody has and will ever endure and nail it to the cross.
In the end though, the suffering will stop. We will see a new world.
Revelation 21:4
He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
We have received our eternal solution to suffering. As for what has happened recently, well let's list a few things that has happened which has caused suffering.
1945 WWII, the atomic bomb dropping on Hiroshima.
1972 Napalm Girl (easy google image if you want to see it)
2001 Terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre.
2011 Floods in Australia
2012 Connecticut School Shooting
Now how do we explain all of those and answer to all of them? If we knew then we'd be God. That was the problem to begin with, us wanting to be God. We don't know so therefore we aren't God. What God did, he treated our suffering seriously by entering it here on Earth and dealt with it once and for all.
The permanent solution, the eternal solution is taken care of. That is the one that matters. As for the here and now, we don't know what the plan is for us but God has a plan, that you can be sure of.
This post was edited by CPK001 on Feb 10 2013 06:26am