The Problem of Pain
This article is based on a message given by David Couchman at Above Bar Church Southampton on Sunday 15th July 2007. It may be reproduced in print or on other web sites, subject to the copyright notice below.
This is Eric Gaudion. He pastors Shiloh Church in Guernsey. For ten years or more, he has suffered a great deal of long term pain with pancreatitis. He’s been in and out of hospital for countless operations, and has almost died
Eric has recently written this book called ‘Braving the Storm,’ and I recommend this to you as a practical help when we go through tough times. Jeff Lucas says in the cover blurb:
‘Here is warm hope, honest empathy, faith that is gritty and authentic.’
Order
from the UK
Order
from the USA
It may be that you are going through some horrible suffering, and you’ve seen the title of this article, and you’re hoping that you’re going to find something that will relieve your pain. This may not happen.
Understanding what the Bible says about suffering doesn’t relieve us of that suffering.
What may help us to cope with it is knowing that there are people who love us and care about us, and that they are praying for us. Knowing that there are other people – like Eric Gaudion – who’ve been through what we go through. Knowing that we are not alone.
So – the problem of pain:
“If God was loving, he would not want his creatures to suffer. If God was all-powerful, he could do what he wants. But we do suffer, therefore either God is not all-powerful, or he is not loving… or he isn’t there at all.” This is the problem of pain in a nutshell.
It’s the biggest problem for Christian faith, and the biggest objection to Christian faith. It’s a vital question, and there are important things to say about it.
But in this article, I want to come at it from a different angle.
If we’re followers of Jesus Christ, if we take the Bible seriously, then God really is good and loving and powerful. So when we go through all kinds of pain and suffering, he must have some good purpose in it. There must be something he’s setting out to achieve in our lives. So the question we’re looking at here is: what could this something be?
What is God doing through our pain and suffering?
So we’re thinking about God’s purpose for our suffering, rather than about the cause of suffering.
So what is God doing through our suffering? The Bible gives several answers to this, and in this article we’re going to highlight just two of them.
We’re going to be looking at a range of passages from the New Testament, which touch on this question of what God is doing through our pain and suffering. We’ll only look at each one quite briefly, and I’ll just be flagging up one key thing that it says.
Let’s start by looking at Romans chapter 8 verses 18-39. In the New Living Translation, Romans 8 verses 28-29 say this:
‘We know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the first born among many brothers and sisters.’
We love to quote these words, don’t we: ‘God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love him.’ We find them very reassuring when we go through tough times – and it’s right that we should.
But what kind of good is Paul talking about when he says ‘God causes everything to work together for good’? Does he mean that we won’t suffer?
Of course not. If you look at verse 35, you’ll see that he talks about trouble and hardship and persecution and famine and nakedness and danger and sword. Clearly, God’s design for our good does not rule out all kinds of seriously unpleasant things happening to us.
So what kind of good is Paul talking about? Well, in verse 29 he says God’s purpose is that we shall become like his Son – like Jesus. This is the good for which God is working out everything.
If you are a follower of Christ, this is God’s destiny for you. To make you like Jesus. It’s where you’re going.
Here's what James says, in James chapter 1 verses 2-4:
‘Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect (or mature) and complete, needing nothing.’
It’s the same idea. Suffering develops character – and the kind of character James has in mind is the character of Jesus Christ.
So what is God doing through our pain and suffering? He is forming our characters. He is making us like his Son, the Lord Jesus. And here’s the crunch: God will do whatever it takes to make us like his Son. If it takes pain to achieve that, he will send us pain.
This could so easily make it sound as if God is a cosmic sadist, who enjoys inflicting pain on his creatures. But this isn’t it at all. God loves us, and longs for the best for us.
When our daughters were younger, my wife and I would take them to the dentist. Sometimes the dentist would inflict all kinds of pain on them – he’d attack them with a drill, or a chisel, or with other instruments of torture!
What was I doing, as a loving parent, standing by while this stranger inflicted such grief on them? Didn’t I care? Couldn’t I do something about it?
Well, of course I cared, and of course I could have done something to stop it – but it was precisely because I loved them and wanted what was best for them that I didn’t do anything.
There was no other way for their teeth to be fixed, than for them to go through this horrible experience in the dentist’s chair.
Perhaps, on a much more serious scale, there are some things in our lives that can only be fixed as we go through bitter pain and suffering.
One of the most important things God is doing through our pain and suffering is to make us like Jesus, to make us ready to live with him in eternity. When we get hold of this, it doesn’t stop the pain and the suffering – it doesn’t stop it hurting, but it does change how we look at what’s happening to us.
So what do we need to do about it? We need to respond in ways that line up with what God is doing. We need to let the suffering do its work of developing our character in the way God intends.
We need to ask what attitude God wants me to develop as a result of this?
Because you see, this being made like Jesus doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t happen automatically. The suffering gives us an opportunity to grow, but how we respond to it makes all the difference. We can respond in two different ways:
We may respond with self-pity and bitterness and resentment. It’s natural, isn’t it? Let’s face it, we’ve all been there. We’ve all done it.
Or we may respond in a way that pleases God, trusting him that although I can’t understand it, although this hurts, and although I hate it, yet somehow, through it all, he is still working things out for my good.
So we can sincerely sing ‘Though there’s pain in the offering blessed be the name of the Lord.’ Blessing his name doesn’t do away with the pain. It takes faith to sing that.
So what attitude does God want us to develop?
James says:
‘consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds…’
Paul says the same thing in Romans 5 - that we rejoice in our sufferings. Now, it isn’t that we are in love with the pain itself, but we can rejoice that God is doing something in our lives through it.
So this is one thing God is doing through our pain and suffering – forming our characters, making us more like the Lord Jesus. Our response must be to ask: ‘what attitude does God want me to develop in the face of this?’ What trust? What endurance? What joy?
I would like to invite you to pause for a moment or two, to reflect personally on this, and to offer your own individual response to the Lord. Here are three questions that may be helpful:
- What am I going through at the moment?
- What is God doing through what I am going through?
- What attitude does God want me to develop in the face of what I’m going through?
I wonder if you've been following the story of Alan Johnston? He’s the BBC reporter in Gaza who was taken hostage by the Army of Islam, and held for 114 days before he was released. What Alan Johnston suffered was a direct result of the job he had been given.
It was a horrible experience, and I don’t want to downplay it – but at the end, he did walk away from it in one piece.
This story was widely reported in the media – especially by the BBC, perhaps because he was one of their own.
While Alan Johnston was being held captive, something else was happening, which you may have missed, because it wasn’t so widely reported:
In April, two Turkish Christians and a German missionary were tortured and killed.
They had gone to their office to have a Bible study with some enquirers.
Five Muslim men arrived, and when they sat down to start the study, these men attacked them. They tortured them for several hours, and then murdered them in a particularly brutal way.
For more on this story, and a collection of news report links, go here.
Like Alan Johnston, what they suffered was a direct result of the job they had been given. Unlike Alan Johnston, they didn’t walk away from it at the end. And unlike Alan Johnston, their story didn’t get a storm of media coverage.
Like that German missionary and those Turkish Christians, we have been given a job – a job that involves the risk of suffering. Look at what Paul said, in Colossians chapter 1 verse 24:
‘I am glad when I suffer for you in my body, for I am taking part in the sufferings of Christ that continue for his body, the church.’
I’m sure Paul didn’t think he could add anything to Christ’s sacrifice for us – that was a done deal. But because he was willing to suffer for the good news, people were hearing the message about Jesus and coming to faith in him, and in that sense, he was sharing in the sufferings of Christ.
And if one thing God is doing through our pain and suffering is to make us more like Jesus; to make us into the kind of people who can live with him, another thing he is doing is to advance the good news of Jesus Christ in the world.
Just as the price of making us like Jesus is suffering, so also the price of advancing the good news is suffering. And just as God is totally committed to making us like his Son, he is also totally committed to bringing this good news to the world. He will do whatever it takes.
We see suffering as something to be avoided at all costs. Jesus sees suffering as the unavoidable cost of bringing his good news to people. It goes with the territory, just as it did for Alan Johnston.
When we think about God forming our characters, we can see that suffering may be needed, however unpleasant it is.
But when it comes to the advance of the good news, surely the suffering is just a side effect? Surely it would be OK to do without it, if we can find painless ways to advance the good news?
It’s tempting to think like that, but I’d like to suggest that it’s wrong. In a messed up and fallen world, if the good news is going to advance, we as God’s people can’t escape suffering. It goes with the job.
So what do we have to do about it?
I used to travel a lot in the Russian-speaking world. One time, I was visiting a young family of missionaries living in one of the major cities of Central Asia. For the last twenty four hours of my stay with them, we didn’t have any electricity, or any water. This was a family trying to bring up a baby. You can imagine what that was like. To me, it was a small inconvenience during a journey. To them, it was a way of life. They had chosen to embrace this way of life so that the people there would have the opportunity to hear about Jesus. And they were paying the price for making that choice.
When we were talking just now about God using suffering to make us like Jesus, I said that how we respond matters. We need to line ourselves up with what God is doing.
Well, it matters here too. Here too, we need to line ourselves up with what God is doing.
The question then was: ‘what attitude does God want me to develop?’ The question now is:
‘What suffering does God want me to embrace?’
This is what Paul says in 2 Timothy 2 verses 8-10:
‘Always remember that Jesus Christ, a descendant of King David, was raised from the dead. This is my Good News, for which I am suffering and have been chained like a criminal. But the word of God cannot be chained. 10 So I am willing to endure anything if it will bring salvation and eternal glory in Christ Jesus to those God has chosen.’
Did you get that? Paul was suffering so that the Good news would be advanced. He says, ‘I am willing to endure anything if it will bring salvation… to those God has chosen.’
Paul had a choice. He could have stayed at home, and lived a comfortable life. Perhaps he could even have become a famous rabbi. But he chose to embrace suffering for the sake of the Good News. You can read a list of some of the things he suffered in 2 Corinthians 11, verse 23 onwards – we don’t have time to look at those verses now.
When it comes to the spread of the good news, God gives us a choice whether to embrace the suffering or not.
Most of us probably won’t face torture and death, but are we prepared to endure insult and discomfort, or disruption to our way of life?
Are we ready to suffer people being rude to us – or about us, because of our faith? It’s becoming more and more common in this country.
You may have seen this advertisement in the Independent last year. It’s an advertisement by the Gay Police Associations.
It claims that that in the past 12 months, the Gay Police Association had recorded a 74% increase in the number of homophobic incidents where the ‘sole or primary motivating factor was the religious belief of the perpetrator.’ The advertisement clearly portrayed Christians as violent towards homosexuals.
In a year which saw more complaints than any previous year, this advertisement attracted more complaints than any other, and the Advertising Standards Authority upheld these complaints.
But in the years ahead, we can expect increasing hostility to the Christian faith. Are we ready?
God asks us individually: what suffering will you embrace for the sake of the Good News?
Maybe he asks us the same question as a church.
As a church, what suffering will we embrace so that the good news of
Jesus Christ will reach more people? What pain?
What inconvenience? What discomfort? What disruption? There are
thousands of people outside our doors, and most of them don’t
have the least idea what the Good News of Jesus is about. What suffering
is God calling us to embrace for them and for the good news of Christ?
We began by asking, what is the purpose of our pain? What is God doing through our suffering?
We’ve seen that:
- He is forming our characters. He is making us like his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ
- He is advancing the good news of Jesus Christ, in the world
The key question is: How will we respond? Will we line ourselves up with what God is doing?
- what attitude does he want me to develop?
- what suffering does he want me to embrace?
In Philippians 2, Paul writes this:
‘You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had.
Though he was God,
he did not think of equality with God
as something to cling to.
Instead, he gave up his divine privileges;
he took the humble position of a slave
and was born as a human being.
When he appeared in human form,
he humbled himself in obedience to God
and died a criminal’s death on a cross.’
And he says ‘You must have the same attitude that he had.’
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