Suffering 5
Four centuries before the birth of
Christ, Aristophanes wrote the play, “The Frogs.” The Greeks back in the day
were lovers of good theater. In the play, the god Dionysius and his slave,
Xanthius, are traveling through Hades in order to resurrect a dead poet. As
traveling companions sometimes do, they get into an argument and both claim to
be gods. To settle the argument they establish a test. They will both endure a
flogging; the first one to flinch is not a god.
The idea conveyed here is a very human
one: to be God is to be above pain, sorrow, and suffering. This idea is fed in
the Christian orbit by our understanding of the permanent Heaven; it is a place
with no death, no tears, and no sorrow. And it will be. But that permanent
Heaven does not exist yet. And the present Heaven is the home of the God who
has suffered and still does suffer abundantly.
Theologically, the concept that God
does not suffer is labeled the impassibility of God. It argues that because God
is entirely self-contained He cannot be influenced by any external force or
power. After all, if God is all-powerful, eternal, unchanging, and transcendent
He cannot suffer just like He cannot sin.
I think this theological concept does
an injustice to God. Yes, He is all-powerful, eternal, unchanging, and
transcendent. We learn these things in the Bible. Foundationally, the Bible is
the revelation of God. And that revelation shows us a God who suffers deeply. I
accept that God is all-powerful, that He cannot be damaged, but it does not
then follow that He is impervious to feeling, an emotionless, remote being. No,
everything I read about God in the Scripture screams that He is not untouched
by suffering, that He is not unaffected by anything outside of Himself. He is
sovereign, but it does not then follow that He is apathetic.
What proof do I offer that this is so, that God indeed suffers? If suffering is loss I would first argue that God has suffered tremendous loss in His relationships. One of His first and most intimate of relationships was with Lucifer. He was the greatest of His first creation, the angels. They worked together in sweet harmony for untold millennia. Then the devil turned on God. The Father was forced to kick him out of Heaven, and that deep, long-held relationship was shattered irreparably. Along with that loss, and directly because of it, the Father lost His human creation, man. The gulf that now exists between humanity and God is so vast it took the cross to span it. Open the pages of your Bible and read of Hosea and Gomer, a life story designed to reveal the intimate pain in the relationship between God and Israel, and tell me God does not suffer. Look at Christ hanging on the tree between two thieves, hanging there because of us and for us, and tell me God does not suffer. As Stuart Townsend said so well,
How deep the Father’s love for us,
How
vast beyond all measure
That
He should give His only Son
The
Father turns His face away,
As
wounds which mar the chosen One
Bring many sons to glory.
If suffering is loss, I would argue,
second, that sin causes the Father to suffer. The hordes of humanity produce
mountains of sin, and it grieves Him endlessly. And God saw that the
wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the
thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that
he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. (Genesis 6.5-6) Go
ahead. Try to tell me that was only before the Flood, that He is not now
grieved likewise by the enormity and plentitude of sin. In the original
language, “grieved” here means hurt, emotionally pained. Its root is the same
as that for the word “lament.” He suffered then and He suffers now.
My third argument finds it source in
that very word lament. Lament is a deeper idea than mere complaint. It is the
expression of a being scarred deeply by loss, by pain, by suffering. Lament is
what Job pours out. Lament is what the psalmist hurls at God. And God Himself
uses this language of lament, the same kind of language that Job and David
used. When Israel made the awful decision not to enter Canaan following the
spies return The Lord said unto Moses, How long will this people provoke me?
And how long will it be ere they believe me, for all the signs which I have
shewed among them? …How long shall I bear with this evil congregation, which
murmur against me? (Numbers 14.11, 27)
No, beloved, it is a grievous calumny
against God to assert He does not suffer. Yes, He is all-powerful and cannot be
damaged, but suffering is not the same as weakness. To say suffering is the
same as weakness is to take a Darwinian view of the matter. Suffering can come
through being weak, through being victimized, but it can come outside of those
means too. God is not weak, no, but He does suffer. He can be affected by us,
by our decision to turn every one to his own way (Isaiah 53.6), to
embrace the sin His nature so abhors.
Do you know why God hurts? He hurts
because He loves. To love is to open yourself up. It is to lower the natural
barriers between yourself and another person. It is to trust them, to invite
them into yourself, into your life, your heart, your soul. It is to lower your
defenses and invite another life into the center of your own. To love is to make
yourself vulnerable, to open yourself up to joy and at the same time to risk
pain. You cannot love without being hurt, without suffering loss, without
suffering. The only way to protect yourself from that hurt is to remain
detached, uninvolved, uncaring, unloving, aloof from it all. Does that last
sentence sound anything like the God revealed in the pages of Holy Writ? Ten
thousand times, no! God loves deeper than anyone you have ever met – which
means God suffers deeper than anyone you have ever met.
The saddest verse in the saddest book
of the Bible just might be Jeremiah 13.17. Although the flow of thought
is somewhat confusing, I believe God is speaking here. Listen to the raw grief
of these words. But if ye will not hear it, my soul shall weep in secret
places for your pride; and mine eye shall weep sore, and run down with tears,
because the Lord’s flock is carried away captive.
You are not alone in your suffering,
beloved.
He suffers too.
Very helpful
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