6.1 Where Was God?

Whether I’m talking to students in school, or friends I grew up with or even people I meet in day-to-day life, there is always one objection to believing in Christianity that comes up time and time again and, for many reasons, it’s the hardest one to respond to. The question they ask is that, ‘If God is all-loving and all-powerful then why is there so much suffering and evil in the world?’. There are no easy answers to a question like that. While other questions or critiques of Christianity can be openly debated and discussed, suffering is something that we feel and so the conversation will always have an emotional dimension to it. When we talk about suffering, we could just take God out of the discussion and argue that most of human suffering is just part of evolution. It’s ‘survival of the fittest’ which has required for the weaker ones to be weeded out. But we don’t talk about suffering that way in the 21st century. Like, could you imagine somebody at a funeral, getting up, and as part of a eulogy saying, ‘The weaker ones die, the fitter ones survive, that’s just life!’ People there would turn and whisper to each other, is that guy being serious?! Or sometimes we’ll do weird things like get angry at a God we don’t believe in because it seems to us that the world should be a certain way and it’s not. Suffering and evil are disruptive to us because we have this shared view that life is valuable and that our existence is meaningful. So the questions that we have regarding suffering actually make more sense when God is in the discussion and the question of ‘is there a God?’ changes to ‘where are you God?’ or, even truer, ‘where were you, God?’ Suffering has a powerful way of cutting us to our core and raising questions that we didn’t even know we had. These core questions need to be asked and need to be wrestled with. For some people their questions are short and to the point, Why, God?! Why? And for others, it's relational. God, how could you let them do that? When those that are close to us suffer, it is, in a weird way, our love that causes us pain. If we didn’t love or care for them, would it really faze us? This is the price of a world in which a meaningful expression and experience of love is possible. Because love is a choice. If someone tells you that they love you, it means something because those words are freely given. But if you find out that that person is forced to love you or programmed to love you then the words are hollow. In such a world, there is also the possibility of choosing a course of action that is unloving, or even deliberately destructive. And so, on the one hand, I thank God for the free will that he has given us and on the other, I struggle that we are left dealing with the consequences of human choices, like drunk driving, murder or the actions of extremists. Some questions are always going to remain tough to answer, particularly when suffering goes beyond human choices like natural disasters or sickness, like cancer. What does give me hope though, is the unique perspective that Christianity offers. A God entering human history and suffering for us. In Jesus, we see God coming into the world and experiencing our pain. Jesus knows what it’s like to be misunderstood, to be betrayed, to be beaten, and on the cross, he experiences what it’s like to be alone. One Bible writer puts it like this; he says that Jesus is someone who sympathises with our weaknesses. Because he knows what it means to go through everything that we do. (Hebrews 4). Suffering and faith can be tough to hold together if you think that God is a heavenly sociopath looking down on painful lives and saying, ‘Suck it up.’ But that’s not the God that I find in Jesus nor is it the God I read about in the Bible. C.S. Lewis describes friendship as being ‘born at that moment when one friend says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one ...’” In Jesus, we see a God who responds to our suffering by saying, ‘I know. Me too.’