In high school, my baseball coach loved making us do wind-sprints. For those who’ve never had the “pleasure”, a wind-sprint is when you run as hard as you can and just before you pass out, slow down to a jog until you catch your breath and repeat this insanity all over again for about fifteen more times. My coach would line up our team in pairs and then have us jog around the gym. The first two in line would then have to sprint as hard as they could around the gym until they caught up with the back of the line. When they did, they’d yell and the next two up front would go. We would do this over and over until we were delirious from exhaustion.
I dreaded doing wind-sprints. It was a pain like few others I’ve ever experienced in life. For the twenty minutes or so we’d do them (which seemed like twenty hours), I remember feeling so light-headed and nauseous that I thought I wouldn’t be able to take another stride without collapsing dead on the spot. In fact, at that point, death seemed like a better option!
The thing is, though, as painful as they were, wind-sprints never made me question God. I never felt the need to cry out “Why? Why, O Lord, do you allow wind-sprints?” I knew perfectly well why we did wind-sprints: they made us better baseball players.
But this is exactly what suffering does. It makes us question if God is real and if He really loves us. There are two distinct things that happen when we suffer: the actual pain of it; and, the “existential angst” this pain creates—the fear that there is no God, no meaning, no point to our lives; that we are, after all, just fleeting blips on the cosmic radar screen.
Of course, those religions that believe in a personal God have an answer for suffering: a loving God gives human beings free will so they can genuinely love Him in return. But this freedom also makes evil possible and this is the source of suffering. In principal, this answer works. And it explains much of the suffering we see around us.
However, much of the other suffering we see is utterly incomprehensible.
How could a loving God allow children die from cancer?
How could a loving God allow mass shootings, genocide, or tsunamis?
We will never get a good answer to these questions. The enormity of such suffering is just too staggering to make any sense of it whatsoever.
Suffering is, hands down, the biggest obstacle to belief in a loving God.
It’s what led me to reject God in college and go on a quest for Truth. I determined that I wouldn’t believe in God unless I could find a logical answer to this question. I needed to know the “how” and “why” of suffering if I was ever going to consider the possibility of a loving God.
But as I pursued my quest for Truth, I never found that answer. I never got the “how” and “why”.
Instead, I got something exceedingly better.
I eventually came to see that Jesus—who He is and what He’s done—is the definitive and only satisfying answer to suffering.
In the face of the incomprehensible mystery of suffering, Jesus Himself embodies the answer we’re really looking for. Instead of telling us why He allows suffering—something finite human beings probably can’t comprehend anyway—He shows us a depth of love that no suffering, no matter how incomprehensible, can ever call into question; a depth of love that we would have never thought possible. In the face of suffering, Jesus—astonishingly—does the only things that could ensure God really loves us, the only things that could possibly remove the obstacle suffering poses to belief in a loving God.
The answer I got wasn’t a why, but a Who.
And ultimately, we don’t need a logical explanation. At the heart of our “existential angst” is the need to know that God is real and that He really loves us. Given the reality of suffering, Jesus couldn’t make this any clearer. This is far better than any explanation; any explanation we could find would only be a means to this end anyway—we seek an intelligible answer only to know how a loving God could exist despite all the apparent evidence to the contrary.
Jesus bypasses the question and goes (literally) right to the heart of the matter.
It is precisely IN the midst of His own incomprehensible suffering that Jesus makes God’s love unquestionably clear. He does this in three profound ways, which will take more than one blog to unpack. I will, however, start with one of these ways in next week’s blog.
Christianity makes a radical claim: for the Christian, suffering is no longer an objection to belief in God. It’s no obstacle to the belief that God is real and really loves us.
To be sure, for those who believe in Jesus, suffering is still a formidable challenge: agonizingly painful and utterly perplexing.
But it has no power to create existential angst. No power to create doubt about God’s love for us.
Jesus meets suffering head-on. In the light of who He is and what He’s done, the seemingly insurmountable challenge incomprehensible suffering poses to the existence of a loving God evaporates in an instant.
The way Jesus deals with our suffering only serves to reveal astonishingly greater depths of God’s love for us.
More on this subject next week. I hope you come back and join me as we unpack this topic.
I’d love to hear your comments or questions. You can go to the “Contact E.J.” page of this website or the Raising Jesus Facebook page and leave them there. Thank you!
