Pastor Glenn McDonald: God on the Hook

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There is no more exasperating and wrenching human reality than suffering.

It’s safe to say that “the problem of pain” has historically been the number one obstacle to trusting God. 

Theologian John Stott put it this way: “The fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith, and has been in every generation. Its distribution and degree appear to be entirely random and therefore unfair. Sensitive spirits ask if it can possibly be reconciled with God’s justice and love.”

Is it possible to get God off the hook?

Here’s a collection of quotes – beginning with skeptics and moving toward people who have bet their lives that God’s existence and the world’s pain are not irreconcilable. 

“Suffering is fatal to Christianity” (Philosopher John Stuart Mill).

“If God exists, then he is the devil” (Poet Charles Baudelaire).

“The only excuse for God is that he doesn’t exist” (Author Marie-Henri Beyle Stendhal).

The universe has “precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference” (Biologist and “New Atheist” Richard Dawkins).

“If God were small enough to be understood, he wouldn’t be big enough to be worshipped” (Catholic mystic Eveyln Underhill).

“God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake” (Rabbi Abraham Heschel).

“If you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world, then you have (at the same moment) a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know. Indeed, you can’t have it both ways” (Author and pastor Timothy Keller).

“The only effective antidote to the wickedness around us is to live differently from this moment on” (Archbishop of Philadelphia Charles Chaput, concerning the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings).

“The Lord never seems to get there when you want him, but when he arrives he’s always right on time” (Essayist and social critic James Baldwin).

“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” (Theologian C.S. Lewis).

“You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good” (Joseph, son of Jacob: Genesis 50:20).

“Is everything sad going to come untrue?” (Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings).

It may seem incredible, but the Bible never presents what one might call “the answer” to the problem of suffering. We encounter instead the Answerer: Jesus addresses pain and evil by taking it upon himself.

So, is it possible to get God off the hook? It’s clear that God has never had the least intention of cooperating with such a project.

Instead, God’s mysterious and unexpected answer to suffering is to put himself on the hook – on the cross, that is. 

What does Jesus do about our suffering? He shares it. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he screams (Matthew 27:46).

Tim Keller points out that as Jesus is dying he doesn’t scream, “My friends, my friends,” or “My head, my head.” He shouts, “My God, my God!” This is the language of intimacy. Think of the way we might say, “That’s my Jennifer,” or “That’s my boy.” 

Keller writes: “If after a service some Sunday morning one of the members of my church comes to me and says, ‘I never want to see you or talk to you again,’ I will feel pretty bad. But if today my wife comes up to me and says, ‘I never want to see you or talk to you again,’ that’s [overwhelmingly] worse. The longer the love, the deeper the love, the greater the torment of loss.”

Think about the fact that “this forsakenness, this loss, was between the Father and the Son, who had loved each other from all eternity. This love was infinitely long, absolutely perfect, and Jesus was losing it… Jesus, the Maker of the world, was being unmade. Why? Jesus was experiencing our judgment day.” 

A special word was even coined to express such pain. It’s “excruciating” – which literally means, “out of the cross.” 

It’s hard to fathom how or why the true King, if he really were at the heart of God’s will, could ever suffer like this.

Here’s what we know: If you have ever felt utterly abandoned; if you’ve been betrayed by someone who once promised you, “I will love you forever;” if you’ve been cut off from the health and the hope that used to sustain you – then you can know that the Savior to whom you are entrusting yourself this morning actually knows how you feel. 

And he alone knows how to heal and save you.

May God bless you richly on this weekend in which his love, his sacrifice, and his victory over Death are deservedly on center stage.

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