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If we do not believe in God there is no problem in pain and suffering. The world is a matter of chance and there might as well be pain as there is happiness. But if God exists then why doesn't He do something to remove pain and save the sufferer? Perhaps, you might say, there is only an evil god; perhaps he is a devil who delights in seeing his creatures suffer. But if we believe this then we have to explain why a devil should create beauty and allow his creatures to be happy, and this is more difficult to explain than why a good God should allow suffering.
Most of us are willing to acknowledge that some of our troubles have come to us owing to our own inadvisable actions. We have acted rashly or imprudently and we have reaped the results. But so much suffering seems to come either to ourselves or to others for which we feel neither we nor they are responsible.
To some extent we can see the value of pain. It warns us that something is wrong: without this warning we could be severely injured, as when we are too close to fire. But this does not explain why there is so much pain. Of suffering we can say that it ennobles the character of the sufferer and draws love and sympathy from others. But this does not explain why some people suffer so much and others so little. Nor is it true to say that suffering always ennobles the character. Sometimes it embitters and leaves the sufferer irritated and irritating. It is when we ponder on things such as these that we wonder at God's seeming lack of concern.
There are different kinds of suffering and they cannot all be explained in the same way. There is the wrong which men suffer at the hands of other men, as when six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Why, it is asked, if God is love did He not strike down the murderers and save the innocent?
God did not intervene because He wants men to have free wills. It would be contrary to His nature if He did not allow them this freedom. Man is only free if he can choose to do good or evil, and only if we have the ability to do right or wrong are we capable of becoming good characters. God could, had He chosen to do so, have made us like men on a chess-board whom He could move as He wanted. But would we then have been human beings or merely models made of flesh and blood? We cannot have it both ways. If we are free to choose our actions then there is the risk that we will choose to do evil - and that is what many have chosen to do, to the detriment of their fellow men.
But what of illness and deformity? Is God not responsible for these? Men, you may say, do all they can to overcome disease. But often men do not. A simple and obvious case is where, despite all warnings, a person poisons his body with tobacco. Can he, when he is dying of lung cancer, blame God? Most of us should blame ourselves for some of our physical discomforts and ills.
In days long past, people suffered and died owing to filthy living conditions and lack of sanitation. Today, conditions are more favourable to health but now we live under the strain of the modern rush and rat-race, and most of us think nothing of consuming the refined foods which civilisation offers us, but still we expect our bodies to function healthily. Though we complain that we cannot help being caught up in it all yet the idea of a simple and back-to-nature life rarely attracts us. It would require more physical effort and would lack the advantages of the soft, foam-rubbered, civilised living to which we have become accustomed.
Yet even if all the rules of healthy living were obeyed, still a perfect physique would not be acquired. Why so? And can men, in any way, be held responsible for inherited weakness and for the birth of deformed and idiot children?
No man can live to himself. We affect others and each of us is affected by those with whom we live and by those who have gone before us. Our forbears, from the very beginning, have not lived as God intended them to live. Sin has been added to sin, wrong ways of living to wrong ways of living. Nature has been thrown out of gear and it has even become pestilential and man's enemy. So, disease, physical weakness and deformity have arisen in the human race. These have sometimes become hereditary and here and there they show themselves in their ugliest forms. The innocent child suffers because of the wrong doing of his forefathers.
Unjust? But how often do we cry out at the "injustice" of our benefiting from the good done by our forefathers? As a corporate body we are affected by their wrong doings, but as a corporate body we are also affected in many ways by the good they have done. Their scientific and other knowledge affects nearly every hour of our daily living. It is not only the sin but also the goodness of the fathers which is visited upon the children.
At least, you may say, man cannot be responsible for the tragedies of earthquake and other natural disasters. Only God can be blamed for these. But we cannot be physical beings such as we are, living in a physical world such as we do live in, unless we are ruled by physical laws. Our earth could never have had the beauty of mountain and vale unless deep down within it there was movement. The land mass would have been a bog. And if there is that movement then in certain parts of the world earthquakes must inevitably occur. The community of man chooses to live where it is known that earthquakes occur, and, moreover, man erects houses in those areas which are known to be unstable and subject to inevitable destruction when the earth quakes. Individuals living in these circumstances may be helpless, too poor to move away or build better houses, but their poverty has come as a result of man's mismanagement of a fruitful earth.
Similarly, violent storms and hurricanes inevitably arise from time to time owing to the atmospheric conditions which must prevail if our world is to be the physical world it is. But many floods would have been avoided had man not deforested the land.
What about accidents? Why are good men injured and killed through no intentional fault of their own or of others? Some accidents can be explained by carelessness but they cannot all. Here again we have to consider the physical world in which we live. We are held to the earth by the force of gravity. If we climb a ladder or a mountain, gravity is operating, and if we slip then we are drawn back to the earth with obvious results. Supposing gravity could be switched off when the climber was falling? Then the rest of us would falloff the earth.
We must have a stable environment where we know what to expect if we act in a certain way, laws of nature which we can trust. We cannot have heat which will warm us without heat which can burn. We cannot have water to drink which is not an element which can drown. We cannot have high powered engines moving vehicles at fast speed which will stop dead if their passage is impeded, and we cannot have bodies made of flesh and blood which can withstand violent collision. In a physical world we must have physical laws.
But it would be so easy, perhaps you think, for God to prevent many of the dreadful things which happen. Surely He can work miracles? There is no doubt at all that God can break through nature, as it were, or He can extend nature or He can change circumstances so as to allow what we would call a miracle. Many feel that God has clearly intervened and made things possible in their lives which, in the normal course of events, would not have been so. Through prayer we can ask God to intervene. But as when a child asks a request from his father he is not able to make the answer yes, so neither can we arrange God's answer. If the answer is no we must not think that we have no answer at all. We must accept that God knows better than we do. We see only the present. God sees eternity .
That is why our attempted answer to the problem of suffering must leave so much unanswered, why we cannot attempt to supply an answer for any particular case. It is as though we were looking over the countryside, but part of the scenery is hidden by thick mist. We see one end of a battered and insecure bridge, but the other end we cannot see nor where it leads. If the mist were lifted we would know the purpose of a traveller crossing the bridge. Human life is like the part of the landscape which we see. As Christians we believe that this life, which is a testing and character-forming time, is not the end, that God has promised immortality to those who trust in Him and that the eternal life of happiness will bear no comparison with the life which we now have. Only then shall we be able to see what lies at the end of the battered bridge, and why it was necessary for the traveller to cross it rather than another bridge which, to the human eye, seemed to offer greater advantage. God sees the whole landscape and He alone can direct man's steps.
Our problem is not new. Hundreds of years before Jesus was born men were asking the same questions. While one writer in the Bible could say that he had not seen the righteous forsaken nor his children begging for bread, others saw that often the good suffered from distress and poverty as much as the evil-doers. Sometimes it seemed that time and chance happened to all, that "As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me…" and that "there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever." We find the good and faithful crying out to God at this apparent injustice. "Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?" and "Wherefore…holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?" The only answer which could be given was the answer of eternal life when all wrongs would be righted. "…many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament…"
Those who trust in God today have the same answer. It is only when we can attune our minds to the idea of eternity that we can find absolute security in the midst of an insecure world. We can be sure, then, as the apostle Paul was sure, that nothing in this life, not even death itself, can separate us from the love of God.
We asked, "Why doesn't God do something about it?" Surely He has! He has opened for us the way to immortality in a new age when all physical disability, pain and suffering will be gone for ever.
Ought not our question to be, "Why doesn't man do something about it?" Why doesn't man himself do what he can to prevent suffering? And why do so many continue in their wickedness and turn away from the offer of God?
It is man who couldn't care less - not God.
Edinburgh Christadelphians
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