The Question of Pain and Suffering
In the World
If you want to know what God is like, observe His son Jesus Christ. When Jesus walked the earth there was a cruel Jewish law which said that a woman who was unfaithful to her husband should be stoned to death. The Pharisees (religious leaders) wanted to see if Jesus would approve of this barbaric law being carried out, or whether He would say the law should be ignored. They thought that either way He couldn’t win – He had to choose between cruelty or ignoring the law. Instead, Jesus neatly turned the situation round so that it put His enemies in an impossible spot. He said simply, "Let he who is without sin throw the first stone."
Everyone is a sinner in some way or other. With some people it is obvious and they are often the people who end up in court. Other people seem to get away with horrible crimes, such as beheading innocent people. And of course everybody has at least one guilty secret that they would never ever want to talk about. In other words, everybody is a sinner, though some sins are worse than others. The men who had wanted to kill the woman knew perfectly well that none of them led blameless lives (perhaps some of them were themselves unfaithful to their wives), so to throw the first stone would be impossible. Once her accusers had dispersed, Jesus was kind. He said He didn’t condemn her, but “don’t sin again”. This is typical Jesus – intelligent, kind and just.
There are people who ask, if God is as loving and fair as this, why does He allow suffering and injustice to happen at all?
It is an undeniable fact of life that, beautiful as the world can be, it can also sometimes be a dangerous place. As the earth’s crust cools down earthquakes can destroy cities; volcanoes can pour molten lava onto innocent people and rivers can burst their banks causing people to drown. In the beginning, when God designed the universe, one of the laws He made was that hot things cool down. Simple. Unfortunately a cooling down earth can result in the disasters just mentioned. Is God really responsible for all those deaths, or is it more likely He is heartbroken when He sees these things happening?
Much of the misery in the world is caused by people. When evolution reached the stage where there were now creatures with a conscience and an ability to be spiritual, mankind had arrived. The Bible calls the first two of these creatures Adam and Eve. Because God had given them consciences they had it in their capability to build a perfect society. This was what God wanted. Is it God’s fault that some people chose to ignore their God-given consciences and make life miserable for others?
Some people might ask, “Why doesn’t God intervene when people start misbehaving?” OK, suppose He did. Is that really what they’d want? Where would He draw the line? What sins would He consider acceptable? If God “took out” people who were up to no good, what would their families and dependents think? Alternatively, if God programmed everyone to behave decently at all times, we’d simply be robots. Is that what we want? Instead, God gave us free will to make our own decisions, to choose between right and wrong. To help us He gave us the Ten Commandments. When people started ignoring the commandments He sent His son Jesus into the world to show us how life should be lived.
Do we really want God to intervene randomly in the world? If you found your conscience telling you that you shouldn’t be doing something, would you really want God to step in and deal with you? Wouldn’t it be better if God intervened in the world on request? Guess what! God provides that service. It’s called prayer!! If something is going wrong in the world and you can do something to put it right, pray for God to help you. If something is too big for you to get involved with, pray for God to help those people who can make a difference. This is our world and God is happy to help us to make it a better place. To receive this help we need to give Him a sign of our faith. Our prayers are that sign. God wants us to succeed! We shouldn’t just think, What can God do for me?, but also, What can I do for God?
God recognised how difficult it is to be good all the time, so He said that if anyone reached out to Jesus and asked for forgiveness, they would indeed be forgiven. Jesus agreed to take the punishment for all the sins of all believers when He allowed Himself to be nailed to a cross on the first Good Friday. This means that when we die, provided we are sorry for the sins we passed on to Jesus, we are counted as sinless and go to heaven. Everyone else, atheist, agnostic, Muslim, Hindu, or whatever, has to be judged by Jesus on the basis of what they did with their life. Jesus said this would be like a shepherd sorting the sheep from the goats. He will send some on to heaven, but there will be many an evil person who will have to pay for all the horrible things they got away with in their life time. After that they perish.
Choose Jesus – choose Eternal Life.
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