Faith and Suffering
Is there anything we associate more with being human than suffering? Our ability to feel, and yes hurt, is one of the things that make us most human. There is no denying we live in a broken, painful world. We all experience it: mental illness, relationship struggles, the death of family and friends. Faith is a struggle to understand God and continue to trust him in the midst of this suffering.
Many people have spilled a lot of ink on his struggle. I don’t want to rehash all of the things we could say about this topic, but I want to put forward two ideas I find powerful about faith in suffering.
The Psalms
The Psalms are the people of Israel’s song book. Paradoxically, these are the words of humans to God, but also the Word of God to us. The Psalms show us how faithful people interact with God in both the good and the bad.
Psalm 102 is a good example. The subscript for the Psalm reads, “a prayer of one afflicted, when he is faint and pours out his complaint before the Lord.” I love that as a description. As humans we are afflicted, which naturally leads to exasperation. The great news is that in our exasperation we can pour out our hearts to God. This prayer was written down to instruct us on how to approach God when we feel similarly!
We actually have a whole book devoted to this kind of interactions with God—the book of Lamentations. Lamentations is a recording of the people of God weeping bitterly to God after the destruction of Jerusalem. They even accuse God of hunting them down and destroying them. If you are struggling, read Lamentations and be encouraged by their boldness in expressing their feelings to God. He can handle our anguish.
The Incarnation
The incarnation—Jesus taking on human flesh—fundamentally changed how God related to us. Since the beginning of time, God and humans were two distinct categories. Humans experience pain, suffer, are fallible. God was above that. He didn’t suffer. And in our experience of Him, He could feel aloof, too distant to really understand our perspective. In the incarnation, God takes on our perspective. For the very first time God experiences human pain. He shows us that while we thought he was aloof; he was actually suffering with us the whole time. Jesus suffers frailty, confusion, anguish, and death just like we do. God experiences suffering and through that redeems suffering for us. Our suffering is no longer meaningless.
Jesus will come again to set all things right. But for now, God’s answer to our suffering is that He is with us. He weeps with us. He desires peace and healing just like we do.