The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw.
O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not hear?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see iniquity,
and why do you idly look at wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law is paralyzed,
and justice never goes forth.
For the wicked surround the righteous;
so justice goes forth perverted. (Habakkuk 1:1-4)
Where is God when it hurts?
The first thing we have to do is accept that this question only makes sense if we come from a belief in a God who is involved with the world in some way. Without a belief in God or more precisely a personal God there is no way we can expect God to be there when life is hard.
I will try to provide some answers from my experience and reading – but like faith, the answers I can offer are easily rejected if you are not open or ready to receive them. One person may find coincidences where another sees answers to prayer. One may find silence an example of God’s mystery while another feels the absence of God. One understands tragedy as a sign that God doesn’t exist while another holds onto a wounded God feeling pain alongside us. Your experience may be very different to mine and words that provide me with comfort may do nothing for you
All I can offer is an introduction into the truths I believe.
O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not hear?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see iniquity,
and why do you idly look at wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law is paralyzed,
and justice never goes forth.
For the wicked surround the righteous;
so justice goes forth perverted. (Habakkuk 1:1-4)
Where is God when it hurts?
The first thing we have to do is accept that this question only makes sense if we come from a belief in a God who is involved with the world in some way. Without a belief in God or more precisely a personal God there is no way we can expect God to be there when life is hard.
I will try to provide some answers from my experience and reading – but like faith, the answers I can offer are easily rejected if you are not open or ready to receive them. One person may find coincidences where another sees answers to prayer. One may find silence an example of God’s mystery while another feels the absence of God. One understands tragedy as a sign that God doesn’t exist while another holds onto a wounded God feeling pain alongside us. Your experience may be very different to mine and words that provide me with comfort may do nothing for you
All I can offer is an introduction into the truths I believe.
The title of this evening is: Where is God when it hurts? But it could easily have been: How can a God who is supposed to be good allow suffering? The question asks in effect – how do we understand God. This is a very big topic and so I will try to deal with it in small pieces.
We will begin with pain – not just physical – emotional and spiritual too. Philip Yancey in his book (Where is God when it hurts) spends quite a bit of time showing why physical pain is a necessary part of healthy life. He spends time with Dr Brand who was responsible for most of the medical advances in dealing with leprosy. Leprosy is a condition that affects the nerves and especially the pain receptors – meaning that sufferers feel no pain. Sounds quite good until you realise that pain warns you that you have hurt your ankle and need to rest, that you have a splinter in your finger and need to get it out to prevent infection, that rats running around at night in their Indian hospital were eating the patients fingers and toes.
We need pain to warn us when things are too hot or cold and when we have an illness inside us. In fact the pain system in the human body is quite intricate – we feel far more pressure with our tongue than with our fingers and far more than with our feet.
CS Lewis famously said:
“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Pain is a crucial part of our make-up – without it we would not be able to function. But sometimes it goes too far. Sometimes the world comes crashing down on us. And we join with the common cry – how can a good God be all-powerful and allow suffering, why does God do nothing to stop the pain?
Silence, disappointment, doubt, and suffering are not things that are foreign to Christians - they are common to everyone. When we are suffering or watching others suffer and it seems like God is not there, that He is hiding His face; the feeling of abandonment can be devastating. It can feel worse than the trouble itself. Silence hurts.
The issue of how a loving God can allow suffering is a question many atheists ask. But first and foremost it is a question for believers. It is important to us precisely because we do believe in a good and sovereign God that we resolve this issue with ourselves and with God.
The fact that we do cry out to God is a sign that we recognise deep within ourselves that things should be different. We know there is a better way – God has made us in God’s image – in the midst of darkness we can feel/we know the light is there. The Christian faith points to a new heaven and a new earth – to a future where every tear is wiped away. The world has already been condemned – it will end and God’s new Kingdom has already begun to take its place.
We will talk about death in 2 weeks time – so I am not going to go into this too much – except to say that the hope we have for the future is usually not enough. When a woman is cowering in a corner, protecting her child from his father – the future is not enough.
Theoretical answers will not do – the question where is God and how God can allow suffering – is a question of who God is. And this is not one we can easily answer – especially outside the context of faith. Christianity says – look to Jesus and you will see God the Father. Jesus is Immanuel – God with us. Jesus is the Word of God that is heard around the world and through the ages made flesh as a man in Palestine. As we watch Jesus through the eyes of those who knew Him we catch a glimpse of the heart of God – in a man who heals; a man who welcomes all into His love; a man who becomes angry with those who marginalise or oppress other; a man who weeps deeply at the death of a friend; who stands alongside the grieving. And we see in Jesus a man who is terrified of the pain of His impending death and then cries out: my God why have you abandoned me.
We see in Jesus a God who chooses to suffer alongside His creation to share in our life and pain and death.
The first answer we have to the question: where is God when it hurts, is that God is suffering alongside us – feeling the pain and weeping for us.
But why doesn’t God do something about it – while on earth Jesus healed and listened and shared His time and wisdom. Now we have silence and continuing heartache. In his book – Disappointment with God – Philip Yancey shares his experience reading the Bible from cover to cover – and suddenly recognising how God does make Himself completely available at one point in the Israelite journey. He provides some commandments and specific guidance for life – and yet the people break the laws and choose to go their own way over and over again. Speaking to them made no difference and neither did showing Himself to them in fire and in cloud – they just continued to run away and to do their own thing.
As you look at the story of God’s relationship with people through the Bible you will see a distinct shift – from a very intimate relationship as Adam walks with God in the garden (and then rejects God’s advice); through Abraham to Moses who meet God at regular intervals and listen and argue with God; to the arrival of the prophets who hear the voice of God in the hearts and share with the people – who ignore or reject or attack them. Finally we have the end of the OT and then 400 years of silence. It is almost as though God has had enough of us not listening. It is not the people but God who had been rejected and ignored. Like a parent with an immature child who will not listen and gets himself into trouble.
With the arrival of Jesus we have a new stage to the relationship – the Holy Spirit enters into the lives of all the disciples and they can hear God for themselves in the words of Jesus. They can see God’s compassion in the way Jesus relates to people.
Jesus also performs miracles of healing and wholeness – but almost unwillingly. It is as if Jesus is very aware that should He heal all the people or provide dramatic exhibitions of power then people will come for the show and not the words they need to hear. His resurrection is a prime example of an event that could have been a major showstopper if He had just gone and shown Himself to Herod or Pilate or to the Temple. Instead He visits only those who believe – Jesus seems to turns things around again: believing is seeing.
Power cannot create love – God is seeking faith and love. In the movie NEXT – Nicholas Cage can see 2 minutes into the future and so changes it – God can see all futures – the one where God protects us all from everything and answers all prayers as we want doesn’t work. To take another movie – Bruce Almighty – Jim Carrey answers Yes to all the prayers he gets – and disaster strikes. Oscar Wilde said: There are two tragedies – not getting what you want and getting what you want. A God who gives us everything we want is not a God but a puppet.
Of course we then have another prayer problem. Why pray if God is not going to do things for us, if God is not going to intervene? This is a different topic – but briefly the usual answer is that God does sometimes intervene; God does sometimes change things or people – but we cannot know when or why – and so we keep asking and keep listening so that we can be transformed and ask more often for the right things.
We ask, holding on to the promises God makes and the stories that speak of God’s goodness and Presence and love and mercy and compassion. There is a very important lesson we need to hold onto – don’t forget in the dark what we learned in the light. Sometimes when I go to bed the house is in darkness and I don’t want to turn on lights because I don’t want to wake anyone. But I don’t need the lights because I can remember where things are – although the darkness is hiding things, I know that they are there.
The truths I know about God, the promises I can read in the Bible, the God I meet in the stories in the OT and in Jesus’s ministry – I need to hold onto these when times are dark. I will never leave you nor forsake you; I am with you to the end of time; I will protect you; you are mine and I love you – these and so many others have to become part of my faith memory bank.
When Jesus hung on the cross He cried out – My God, why have you forsaken me? But at the end He was able to consider all He knew of the Father and say – into Your hands I commit my Spirit.
Where is God when suffering strikes – walking alongside us; kneeling with us; face down, broken on the floor with us; and through the Spirit He is praying and groaning to the Father for us.
There is another part to the answer to this question – I was visiting a friend recently whose husband has been killed – we had a supper that had been prepared and delivered by one of her Bible-study group; while there, another group member called to check up on her and to find out if there was anything she could do for her in the next day or two; another called to remind her that they were praying for her as her children went back to the eastern cape and they would love to take her out this week.
Where is God – well I hope and pray that God is working through you and me in bringing hope and comfort and Presence to those in pain and agony.
You may feel inadequate – we all are – words are often less helpful than just being present. The first thing we need to do is react in love rather than fear. Be a friend, listen, make room for their struggle. Show them by your support that it is okay to hurt, and it’s okay to have real questions.
It can be hard to hold on to trust and hope in the middle of tagedy. In times like these people don’t want explanations, they want healing, they are crying out “No!” and we need to realize that this is a good cry that God has placed in their hearts. We need to realize that Jesus did not come offering explanations, but offering his life to end suffering.
Please watch what you say to people who are struggling:
My personal worst thing to say is this one: everything happens for a reason.
In an effort to comfort others people will suggest that God has caused the suffering for some greater purpose. God is not the author of suffering or evil. Things happen – we live in a broken world – pain and heartache are part of life – there is no escape. Storms will wash homes and lives away; relationships will end; cancer will strike. The reason for it is simply that it happens. God may work good into the middle of suffering, and calls us to do the same. We can make it into something better. A disaster can lead to growth – that which doesn’t kill us can make us stronger – or it can destroy all our hope. We need to do all we can to ensure that doesn’t happen.
God does not ask us to call suffering good or tolerate when people are hurting. God does not call us to suffer, God calls us to radically love and stand with those who are suffering. Jesus did this with his whole life as He stood alongside the oppressed and the marginalized, sharing in their pain. But we need to remember that suffering isn’t good, loving is.
Another appalling phrase is: God is trying to teach you something – what is the death of a loved one teaching us – that God is capricious or abusive. Yes, we can learn and grow through the presence of the Spirit in us – but God doesn’t send this disaster to us to teach us something. Look at the places in the Bible where disaster is understood to be sent by God – after repeated calls to change, an entire nation may face an enemy that crushes them. Individuals are not treated like this.
God has taken your loved one to be with Him – yes, life ends – and then God leads us to His Presence – God does not remove life because He wants another angel.
You need more faith and then God will do it – God is not a camel who just needs one more prayer to break His back. We will never know this side of the dawn to a new life why some things happen or don’t happen.
We need to find a way to trust in love in this broken world of ours. That’s really hard, especially when we open our eyes to the struggles of others and share in their hurt. Maybe that’s why so many of us react defensively when others express doubt, because it threatens our own feelings of security. Caring requires courage. So does vulnerability. A strong and healthy faith is not one that never questions, but one that allows room for those honest questions. A strong faith is one that is not afraid to be real.
Many people leave faith due to tragedy because they feel there is no room for their doubt and honest pain in church. So often we only allow questions that we can quickly solve with some snappy answer, rather than really honouring these questions as a healthy expression of our faith. Doubt is a part of faith, just as struggle and hurt is. Church isn’t a place for people who have it all together. It’s supposed to be a place where we can bring our honest questions and doubts, our real pain and struggles, and find support and compassion.
Where is God? God is with us, weeping. God is speaking through the love of others. God is sharing His wisdom through the words of His children. God is holding eternity in His hand and longing to share it all with us. God is in the silence, clearing His throat.
We will begin with pain – not just physical – emotional and spiritual too. Philip Yancey in his book (Where is God when it hurts) spends quite a bit of time showing why physical pain is a necessary part of healthy life. He spends time with Dr Brand who was responsible for most of the medical advances in dealing with leprosy. Leprosy is a condition that affects the nerves and especially the pain receptors – meaning that sufferers feel no pain. Sounds quite good until you realise that pain warns you that you have hurt your ankle and need to rest, that you have a splinter in your finger and need to get it out to prevent infection, that rats running around at night in their Indian hospital were eating the patients fingers and toes.
We need pain to warn us when things are too hot or cold and when we have an illness inside us. In fact the pain system in the human body is quite intricate – we feel far more pressure with our tongue than with our fingers and far more than with our feet.
CS Lewis famously said:
“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Pain is a crucial part of our make-up – without it we would not be able to function. But sometimes it goes too far. Sometimes the world comes crashing down on us. And we join with the common cry – how can a good God be all-powerful and allow suffering, why does God do nothing to stop the pain?
Silence, disappointment, doubt, and suffering are not things that are foreign to Christians - they are common to everyone. When we are suffering or watching others suffer and it seems like God is not there, that He is hiding His face; the feeling of abandonment can be devastating. It can feel worse than the trouble itself. Silence hurts.
The issue of how a loving God can allow suffering is a question many atheists ask. But first and foremost it is a question for believers. It is important to us precisely because we do believe in a good and sovereign God that we resolve this issue with ourselves and with God.
The fact that we do cry out to God is a sign that we recognise deep within ourselves that things should be different. We know there is a better way – God has made us in God’s image – in the midst of darkness we can feel/we know the light is there. The Christian faith points to a new heaven and a new earth – to a future where every tear is wiped away. The world has already been condemned – it will end and God’s new Kingdom has already begun to take its place.
We will talk about death in 2 weeks time – so I am not going to go into this too much – except to say that the hope we have for the future is usually not enough. When a woman is cowering in a corner, protecting her child from his father – the future is not enough.
Theoretical answers will not do – the question where is God and how God can allow suffering – is a question of who God is. And this is not one we can easily answer – especially outside the context of faith. Christianity says – look to Jesus and you will see God the Father. Jesus is Immanuel – God with us. Jesus is the Word of God that is heard around the world and through the ages made flesh as a man in Palestine. As we watch Jesus through the eyes of those who knew Him we catch a glimpse of the heart of God – in a man who heals; a man who welcomes all into His love; a man who becomes angry with those who marginalise or oppress other; a man who weeps deeply at the death of a friend; who stands alongside the grieving. And we see in Jesus a man who is terrified of the pain of His impending death and then cries out: my God why have you abandoned me.
We see in Jesus a God who chooses to suffer alongside His creation to share in our life and pain and death.
The first answer we have to the question: where is God when it hurts, is that God is suffering alongside us – feeling the pain and weeping for us.
But why doesn’t God do something about it – while on earth Jesus healed and listened and shared His time and wisdom. Now we have silence and continuing heartache. In his book – Disappointment with God – Philip Yancey shares his experience reading the Bible from cover to cover – and suddenly recognising how God does make Himself completely available at one point in the Israelite journey. He provides some commandments and specific guidance for life – and yet the people break the laws and choose to go their own way over and over again. Speaking to them made no difference and neither did showing Himself to them in fire and in cloud – they just continued to run away and to do their own thing.
As you look at the story of God’s relationship with people through the Bible you will see a distinct shift – from a very intimate relationship as Adam walks with God in the garden (and then rejects God’s advice); through Abraham to Moses who meet God at regular intervals and listen and argue with God; to the arrival of the prophets who hear the voice of God in the hearts and share with the people – who ignore or reject or attack them. Finally we have the end of the OT and then 400 years of silence. It is almost as though God has had enough of us not listening. It is not the people but God who had been rejected and ignored. Like a parent with an immature child who will not listen and gets himself into trouble.
With the arrival of Jesus we have a new stage to the relationship – the Holy Spirit enters into the lives of all the disciples and they can hear God for themselves in the words of Jesus. They can see God’s compassion in the way Jesus relates to people.
Jesus also performs miracles of healing and wholeness – but almost unwillingly. It is as if Jesus is very aware that should He heal all the people or provide dramatic exhibitions of power then people will come for the show and not the words they need to hear. His resurrection is a prime example of an event that could have been a major showstopper if He had just gone and shown Himself to Herod or Pilate or to the Temple. Instead He visits only those who believe – Jesus seems to turns things around again: believing is seeing.
Power cannot create love – God is seeking faith and love. In the movie NEXT – Nicholas Cage can see 2 minutes into the future and so changes it – God can see all futures – the one where God protects us all from everything and answers all prayers as we want doesn’t work. To take another movie – Bruce Almighty – Jim Carrey answers Yes to all the prayers he gets – and disaster strikes. Oscar Wilde said: There are two tragedies – not getting what you want and getting what you want. A God who gives us everything we want is not a God but a puppet.
Of course we then have another prayer problem. Why pray if God is not going to do things for us, if God is not going to intervene? This is a different topic – but briefly the usual answer is that God does sometimes intervene; God does sometimes change things or people – but we cannot know when or why – and so we keep asking and keep listening so that we can be transformed and ask more often for the right things.
We ask, holding on to the promises God makes and the stories that speak of God’s goodness and Presence and love and mercy and compassion. There is a very important lesson we need to hold onto – don’t forget in the dark what we learned in the light. Sometimes when I go to bed the house is in darkness and I don’t want to turn on lights because I don’t want to wake anyone. But I don’t need the lights because I can remember where things are – although the darkness is hiding things, I know that they are there.
The truths I know about God, the promises I can read in the Bible, the God I meet in the stories in the OT and in Jesus’s ministry – I need to hold onto these when times are dark. I will never leave you nor forsake you; I am with you to the end of time; I will protect you; you are mine and I love you – these and so many others have to become part of my faith memory bank.
When Jesus hung on the cross He cried out – My God, why have you forsaken me? But at the end He was able to consider all He knew of the Father and say – into Your hands I commit my Spirit.
Where is God when suffering strikes – walking alongside us; kneeling with us; face down, broken on the floor with us; and through the Spirit He is praying and groaning to the Father for us.
There is another part to the answer to this question – I was visiting a friend recently whose husband has been killed – we had a supper that had been prepared and delivered by one of her Bible-study group; while there, another group member called to check up on her and to find out if there was anything she could do for her in the next day or two; another called to remind her that they were praying for her as her children went back to the eastern cape and they would love to take her out this week.
Where is God – well I hope and pray that God is working through you and me in bringing hope and comfort and Presence to those in pain and agony.
You may feel inadequate – we all are – words are often less helpful than just being present. The first thing we need to do is react in love rather than fear. Be a friend, listen, make room for their struggle. Show them by your support that it is okay to hurt, and it’s okay to have real questions.
It can be hard to hold on to trust and hope in the middle of tagedy. In times like these people don’t want explanations, they want healing, they are crying out “No!” and we need to realize that this is a good cry that God has placed in their hearts. We need to realize that Jesus did not come offering explanations, but offering his life to end suffering.
Please watch what you say to people who are struggling:
My personal worst thing to say is this one: everything happens for a reason.
In an effort to comfort others people will suggest that God has caused the suffering for some greater purpose. God is not the author of suffering or evil. Things happen – we live in a broken world – pain and heartache are part of life – there is no escape. Storms will wash homes and lives away; relationships will end; cancer will strike. The reason for it is simply that it happens. God may work good into the middle of suffering, and calls us to do the same. We can make it into something better. A disaster can lead to growth – that which doesn’t kill us can make us stronger – or it can destroy all our hope. We need to do all we can to ensure that doesn’t happen.
God does not ask us to call suffering good or tolerate when people are hurting. God does not call us to suffer, God calls us to radically love and stand with those who are suffering. Jesus did this with his whole life as He stood alongside the oppressed and the marginalized, sharing in their pain. But we need to remember that suffering isn’t good, loving is.
Another appalling phrase is: God is trying to teach you something – what is the death of a loved one teaching us – that God is capricious or abusive. Yes, we can learn and grow through the presence of the Spirit in us – but God doesn’t send this disaster to us to teach us something. Look at the places in the Bible where disaster is understood to be sent by God – after repeated calls to change, an entire nation may face an enemy that crushes them. Individuals are not treated like this.
God has taken your loved one to be with Him – yes, life ends – and then God leads us to His Presence – God does not remove life because He wants another angel.
You need more faith and then God will do it – God is not a camel who just needs one more prayer to break His back. We will never know this side of the dawn to a new life why some things happen or don’t happen.
We need to find a way to trust in love in this broken world of ours. That’s really hard, especially when we open our eyes to the struggles of others and share in their hurt. Maybe that’s why so many of us react defensively when others express doubt, because it threatens our own feelings of security. Caring requires courage. So does vulnerability. A strong and healthy faith is not one that never questions, but one that allows room for those honest questions. A strong faith is one that is not afraid to be real.
Many people leave faith due to tragedy because they feel there is no room for their doubt and honest pain in church. So often we only allow questions that we can quickly solve with some snappy answer, rather than really honouring these questions as a healthy expression of our faith. Doubt is a part of faith, just as struggle and hurt is. Church isn’t a place for people who have it all together. It’s supposed to be a place where we can bring our honest questions and doubts, our real pain and struggles, and find support and compassion.
Where is God? God is with us, weeping. God is speaking through the love of others. God is sharing His wisdom through the words of His children. God is holding eternity in His hand and longing to share it all with us. God is in the silence, clearing His throat.
Following the iDoubt talk on "Where is God when it hurts - part 1", Stephen sent the following meditation:
What Is Suffering?
Pain teaches a most counterintuitive thing—that we must go down before we even know what up is. In terms of the ego, most religions teach in some way that all of us must die before we die, and then we will not be afraid of dying. Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as whenever you are not in control.
If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform this pain, we will most assuredly transmit it to others, and it will slowly destroy us in one way or another.
If there isn’t some way to find some deeper meaning to our suffering, to find that God is somewhere in it, and can even use it for good, we will normally close up and close down. The natural movement of the ego is to protect itself so as not to be hurt again. The soul does not need answers, it just wants meaning, and then it can live. Surprisingly, suffering itself often brings deep meaning to the surface to those who are suffering and also to those who love them.
Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality
Richard Rohr
What Is Suffering?
Pain teaches a most counterintuitive thing—that we must go down before we even know what up is. In terms of the ego, most religions teach in some way that all of us must die before we die, and then we will not be afraid of dying. Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as whenever you are not in control.
If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform this pain, we will most assuredly transmit it to others, and it will slowly destroy us in one way or another.
If there isn’t some way to find some deeper meaning to our suffering, to find that God is somewhere in it, and can even use it for good, we will normally close up and close down. The natural movement of the ego is to protect itself so as not to be hurt again. The soul does not need answers, it just wants meaning, and then it can live. Surprisingly, suffering itself often brings deep meaning to the surface to those who are suffering and also to those who love them.
Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality
Richard Rohr
