The Problem Of Pain
Any attempt to justify pain will invariably evoke a bitter response towards the writer. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear from the outset. I am not arguing that human pain and suffering are not painful. I am however arguing, that those hurts are both necessary and inevitable in this fallen world. No matter which system of thought you believe, it must answer this question, “How do you explain the source of evil and suffering in the world?” If you believe in an all-loving, all-powerful God, the question becomes even more troubling, “How do you reconcile this pain and suffering in the world with this concept of God?”
The problem of reconciling an all-loving, all-powerful God with human pain is insoluble, if we do not accept the truth about the fall of man. Not only are we imperfect creatures because of the fall, we are inherently rebellious towards God. The rebellious human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender itself, provided all is well. Both error and sin have this characteristic. The deeper they are, the less their victim suspects their existence. Pain however, is unmasked and everyone knows that something is wrong when they are being hurt (unless they are a sadist). As C.S. Lewis put it, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world”. Most people know how hard it can be to turn their thoughts toward God when all is well. Why ask for your daily bread, when you own the bakery, right? To say we “have all we want” is a terrible statement when that “all” does not include God.
The problem becomes even more insoluble, if we do not understand fully what it means to have free will. Free will is the ability to make a choice without outside coercion or pressure. When God created human beings He gave them free will. This of course means that we can choose either good or evil. There is no such thing as creating a free creature that has no possibility of choosing evil. You may attribute miracles to Him, not nonsense. If a thing is free to be good, it also has to be free to be evil. Someone will probably ask, “Well was it better to create or not to create given this possibility of evil? Why create in the first place if He knew people like, say, Hitler would exist?” I do not know what the best theologians or philosophers would say to that, but this is what I think. We are here, so obviously He thought it was worth the risk. Free will, even though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes life worth living. Try to exclude the possibility of evil (which the existence of free wills involve), and you very quickly find that you have excluded life itself. When children do bad, are their parents responsible? Parents are not morally responsible because human beings are free moral agents not robots. If we do not haul parents before the law courts to answer the charge of “bringing someone into the world who chose to break the law”; then we should not point an accusing finger at God because He created people who chose to do evil.
Another important point to understand about free will is that a thing can be in accordance with your will one way and not in another. It may be quite sensible for a parent to tell their child, “I’m not going to make you do your homework, you have to do it on your own”. Then they realize that the child is not doing the homework. This is against the will of the parent. They would prefer if the child did its homework. But on the other hand, it is their will which has left the child free to be delinquent. It is the same in the universe. God has not willed evil, but His will (that we have free will), has made evil possible. It is men, not God, who are responsible for slavery, genocide and every unspeakable evil that one can imagine. The gift of free will then is like a two-edged sword. Not by nature of the giver, but by the nature of the recipient.
The problem remains insoluble so long as we define “love” from a purely human standpoint. We attach an extremely trivial meaning to the word “love”, compared to Divine love, which is how God loves. As Traherene in Centuries of Meditation put it, “Love can forbear, and Love can forgive…but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object…He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored.” The restoration process, albeit painful, is for our own good and ultimately His glory.
In this fallen world that is still under the dominion of sin, everyone will be rejected and hurt in some way. The beauty about God’s goodness is that, even when we are wounded He can still use it for our good and the advancement of His redemptive purposes. So that we can all say to those who choose to serve like Judas, rather than John, what Joseph told his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good…” (Genesis 50:20).
The problem of reconciling an all-loving, all-powerful God with human pain is insoluble, if we do not accept the truth about the fall of man. Not only are we imperfect creatures because of the fall, we are inherently rebellious towards God. The rebellious human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender itself, provided all is well. Both error and sin have this characteristic. The deeper they are, the less their victim suspects their existence. Pain however, is unmasked and everyone knows that something is wrong when they are being hurt (unless they are a sadist). As C.S. Lewis put it, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world”. Most people know how hard it can be to turn their thoughts toward God when all is well. Why ask for your daily bread, when you own the bakery, right? To say we “have all we want” is a terrible statement when that “all” does not include God.
The problem becomes even more insoluble, if we do not understand fully what it means to have free will. Free will is the ability to make a choice without outside coercion or pressure. When God created human beings He gave them free will. This of course means that we can choose either good or evil. There is no such thing as creating a free creature that has no possibility of choosing evil. You may attribute miracles to Him, not nonsense. If a thing is free to be good, it also has to be free to be evil. Someone will probably ask, “Well was it better to create or not to create given this possibility of evil? Why create in the first place if He knew people like, say, Hitler would exist?” I do not know what the best theologians or philosophers would say to that, but this is what I think. We are here, so obviously He thought it was worth the risk. Free will, even though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes life worth living. Try to exclude the possibility of evil (which the existence of free wills involve), and you very quickly find that you have excluded life itself. When children do bad, are their parents responsible? Parents are not morally responsible because human beings are free moral agents not robots. If we do not haul parents before the law courts to answer the charge of “bringing someone into the world who chose to break the law”; then we should not point an accusing finger at God because He created people who chose to do evil.
Another important point to understand about free will is that a thing can be in accordance with your will one way and not in another. It may be quite sensible for a parent to tell their child, “I’m not going to make you do your homework, you have to do it on your own”. Then they realize that the child is not doing the homework. This is against the will of the parent. They would prefer if the child did its homework. But on the other hand, it is their will which has left the child free to be delinquent. It is the same in the universe. God has not willed evil, but His will (that we have free will), has made evil possible. It is men, not God, who are responsible for slavery, genocide and every unspeakable evil that one can imagine. The gift of free will then is like a two-edged sword. Not by nature of the giver, but by the nature of the recipient.
The problem remains insoluble so long as we define “love” from a purely human standpoint. We attach an extremely trivial meaning to the word “love”, compared to Divine love, which is how God loves. As Traherene in Centuries of Meditation put it, “Love can forbear, and Love can forgive…but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object…He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored.” The restoration process, albeit painful, is for our own good and ultimately His glory.
In this fallen world that is still under the dominion of sin, everyone will be rejected and hurt in some way. The beauty about God’s goodness is that, even when we are wounded He can still use it for our good and the advancement of His redemptive purposes. So that we can all say to those who choose to serve like Judas, rather than John, what Joseph told his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good…” (Genesis 50:20).
