I Want to Talk About Suffering In God's World
Imagine raising your child- if you don't have one then imagine you have one. You give him the best of everything. You make sure that he is not lacking in any area of his life. And you give him some rules of life to live by explaining the consequences of not following them.
Then one day he decides to make a mess of his life. He wants nothing to do with your morals and values. He leaves the nest and goes on a pride rampage, destroying your honor as a parent in the process.
This is exactly what happened to our relationship with God. The Bible tells us that God made everything and that is was very good, including humans. However, with a slight deceptive hand, Satan played to man's free will. He assaulted his intellect with the suggestion that God had lied to man (Adam and Eve) and wanted to keep him from knowing all that God Himself knew.
It was then that man's pride was tapped and he disobeyed God's command to not eat of the one tree which was forbidden for it would surely bring death. (Man cannot say he wasn't warned). What many don't hear when they listen to this story is that God had given them a whole garden of trees to enjoy.
From the point that Adam and Eve disobeyed God, just as he said would happen, spiritual death came into the world, along with physical death.
Now let's stop here for the many who at this point see God as a ruthless and uncaring parent. Let's get back to you as the parent. Your child has a free will as well. You give him rules and consequences. He chooses to challenge you and breaks them. As a loving parent you are going to discipline him and show him the consequences so that he sees where he went wrong and why.
Now many will say here that they would never sentence their kid to death for breaking a rule. Consider that God had fairly warned them and knew that He was going to save them by His grace in the future. Death is nothing to the Creator who has power to raise you back to life. God's perspective, not ours keep in mind.
Was God out of line? Immediately after sin had entered into the world at the first act of disobedience, God quickly made the provision that would save His children from their disobedience. He did so because He knew that being human, we could never save ourselves spiritually.
So He announced right then and there after reading the judgements off to satan, Adam, and to Eve that He would save His children by the seed of a woman (Jesus).
What does all this have to do with my suffering you ask. Everything. The truth is that we live in a fallen creation brought about by our own refusal to obey God. For that reason God has pronounced a sin curse that must run it's course.
This sin curse which is in the land and in our blood accounts for everything we suffer- Decaying bodies, death, acts of betrayal, crime, deceit, financial ruination, war....
God said to Adam and Eve when He instructed them of the one tree not to eat of that doing so would bring death. And surely death today as it was back then is the proof of our defiance to follow God's rules.
See, we can't know God's love for us until we see His undeserved Grace He offers us. God doesn't want you to fixate on the temporal issues, but the eternal. The afflictions of this life are not to be compared with what God has for you in the eternal life. You and I just need to perservere through it and trust Him.
What about the suffering you may be fighting? Deaths of loved ones. Child abuse. Sexual abuse/rape. Lost job. Cutting yourself. Alcohol. Drugs. ****. Torn apart marriages. The list is endless. None of these issues are trivial for sure.
Where is God in your suffering? Why does He allow it? How could He have let such and such happen?
In Luke 19, Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem because they refused Him. He weeps over you as well even in your defiance of Him. He weeps with you when you weep. He gives a standing promise in Revelation 3:20 that if only you would just open the door of your heart to Him while He is knocking He will come and be with you and you with Him.
Jesus wept over the death of Lazarus and at the pain it had caused so many in John 11, as He weeps over everyone of us when death causes us such suffering.
The point here is that God is not absent from our situations. He has appointed a day when Judgement will come down in righteousness. A day when you can have every tear wiped away. And an eternal lifetime of pure happiness in a restored earth with no memories of this past lifetime of sorrows.
It's all about the spiritual. Not the Human perspective. We can be sure that God in His sovreignty knows everything going on, every emotion being spent, and every motive behind every act.
We tend to say through our desperation and tears, why doesn't God DO something? He has. He gave us a demonstration in that same John 11 when Lazarus died. He raised him back to life.
So, I am not dead yet you say. I am still suffering from what happened to me when.....Jesus took care of that. Trust Him. But He looked at the bigger picture too and saved you from the fate your sins condemn you to.
Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life: he that believes in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Believe this?" -John 11:25-26.
