“Can God be all-powerful and all-good at the same time?” is one of the questions that arises amidst the pain of human suffering. The logic follows that if God were all-good and all-powerful, then He could end suffering at a moments notice. But since it’s obvious that suffering persists, God is either unwilling—making Him not good—or He is unable—making Him not all-powerful.
I get it. It’s tough. And to be honest, thousands upon thousands of pages have been written on this topic. It’s actually a field of study called Theodicy. There are lots of answers. Some of them are satisfying, and some are less so. Regardless, there is no easy answer, no matter how hard we try to make one.
Chances are, you have heard the easy answer and have been, at best, put off by it, and at worst, harmed by it. It likely goes something like this: “Well, God has a plan, and we just have to trust Him!” or “His thoughts and ways are just higher—more complex—than ours.”
Listen, if God is God, those things are true. But saying them to someone who is suffering is neither helpful nor graceful. Oftentimes, in the middle of those conversations, it is better to take the posture of God Himself. The Psalter tells us that “God is close to the brokenhearted.” Maybe the best thing you can do is simply sit with someone in their pain and bring Chick-fil-A.
However, I’d love to attempt an answer to the problem of pain and suffering, which is closely related to the problem of evil (and the problem of good). In many ways, the following thoughts are experimental. I’ve only shared them with a few people. So, let’s see how this goes. If you have anything to add, I’d love to hear it!
I’ve also decided to make this one post a series of posts. It didn’t start out that way, but the more I worked on it, the longer it got. I’d rather present it to you in several, more palatable posts than in one long diatribe. But be warned—part one will leave you feeling unsatisfied, and I’m sorry for that. I think you’ll find part two rounds it out nicely.
Defining Terms
What is suffering? Believe it or not, a Google search for a definition does not yield a widespread consensus. Most definitions involve enduring hardship, pain, or distress—both mentally and/or physically. Some include the idea that the sufferer is being subjected to suffering by someone else. While it may be hard to land on an exact definition, most of us know it when we see it.
It’ s important to pay attention to where suffering comes from.
First, there’s the suffering we inflict on ourselves. You make a bad choice, and now you must suffer the consequences, right? Touching a hot stove hurts—it causes suffering—but we can’t really blame anyone else. You get into trouble with credit card debt, which leads to overwhelming anxiety. Again, you did this, and you can’t really blame anyone else. No matter how much we try to remove consequences from our actions—and no matter what cultural ideologies say we should be able to—it’s just not the way the world was designed. Fighting with God about the consequences of our own actions is a non-starter. No good parent would allow their child to touch a hot stove on purpose because they know there will be consequences. In the same way, no good God would simply let us live our lives with no consequences.
Then there is the suffering we intentionally subject ourselves to. It hurts when I lift weights. And it should. That’s how I know it’s working. But it’s still its own kind of suffering. And yet, we go back to it over and over because we know that putting ourselves through hard things and heavy weights makes us strong. Suffering, then, is not always a bad thing.
Perhaps the most challenging form of suffering is when it is inflicted on us by someone else’s actions. Someone else chooses to do something, and now I am experiencing the consequences. Sometimes those choices are intentional, hurtful, and evil. Sometimes those choices are simply poor, yet the consequences can still be devastating. We have all suffered from these types of experiences. And I think it’s these that cause us to question the goodness of God the most because they are not fair. It’s not just.
Unfortunately, many of these still result from sin.
And not to oversimplify the idea of suffering, but we could all probably list many different ways suffering comes to us. However, the last one I’m thinking of today—for the sake of this post—is the suffering caused by natural disasters or random happenstance. We could easily think of the fires in California or the hurricanes and floods in North Carolina. Or a child who develops cancer. These things feel random and unfair and cause us to question so much about the world.
Could God do something about all this? Could He eradicate cancer and cause it to rain? And why does’t He?
Drawing Conclusions
What makes suffering so hard to define is that not everyone sees it the same way. You or I may see a celebrity who has lost a house and not feel much sympathy. Sure, it’s annoying they lost their stuff, but they have the means to fix it. But for them, it may very well be the most difficult thing they have ever experienced. That is the problem, however—we cannot define suffering for someone else.
In every tragedy, there are two kinds of people: the one who is overwhelmed and crushed by it and the one who finds the good in it. You know these people, or have been these people. Maybe you allowed tragedy to turn into bitterness, and now it resides in your soul like a boulder. Maybe your tragedy took you to the pit, and while you were there, you found God.
Suffering is in the eye of the beholder.
This means we can’t define it for others, nor can we make any claims about God through the lens of someone else’s suffering. We might look at another person’s hardship and say, “Surely, God is not good,” while the one experiencing the pain might be saying they have experienced God’s goodness in new ways. The inverse is also true. We may look at someone’ suffering and say, “Surely, God is good, we just have to trust Him,” while the person suffering is living through the dark night of the soul.
However, God is, and has been, dealing with our suffering.
Part two coming Monday…