My Refuge & Strength

To prepare for the questions we might face in the Czech Republic (which is coming up extremely fast!), our team has been asked to read The Reason For God by Timothy Keller. It asks the big questions: how can a loving god send people to hell? How can there only be one true religion? Doesn’t science disprove Christianity? All that and more. And since Czech is one of the most religiously skeptic countries in the world, I thought I’d work on giving reasons why I believe in an age of skepticism.

Question Number One: How could a good god allow suffering?

I know there are a lot of people who believe the God of Christianity doesn’t exist because He allows terrible suffering in the world. He might be either all-powerful but not good enough to end evil and suffering, or else He might be all-good but not powerful enough to end evil and suffering. But just because you can’t see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn’t mean there can’t be one.

Many assume that if there were good reasons for the existence of evil, they would be accessible to our minds… but why should that be the case? … Why couldn’t it be possible that, from God’s vantage point, there are good reasons for all of them?  -Timothy Keller

Take, for example, myself. Now, I’m not the epitome of human suffering by any means; I’m an American teenager who has eaten more food and watched more television than most Ugandan kids my age will ever experience. But I’ve had to go through a good portion of my life dealing with depression. Long story, short: not easy stuff. It’s still not easy. Yet when I think back to when I was at my worst, I laugh. It’s incredible how far I’ve come. I’ve had the opportunity to share my story with people who have been struggling with the same problems and actually help. I’ll never forget what a girl said to me after I shared - I didn’t know her, and she didn’t know me, but she still came up to me and said, “Thank you for being so honest. It really helped to know someone else has gone through the same thing and actually made it out.” Now maybe this is just me, but that comment alone made all my pain worth it.

Oh, come on Sarah? You really think that every single bad thing that happens in the world - every soldier killed, every natural disaster, every cancer diagnose - has a silver lining that God provides?

Yeah, it’s crazy. And it may even seem cold and irrelevant to a real-life sufferer. But think about this:

… The philosopher Peter Kreeft points out that the Christian God came to earth to deliberately put himself on the hook of human suffering. In Jesus Christ, God experienced the greatest depths of pain. Therefore, though Christianity does not provide the reason for each experience of pain, it provides deep resources for actually facing suffering with hope and courage rather than bitterness and despair.  -Timothy Keller

I can guarantee that Jesus experienced more pain and suffering on that cross than anyone else has ever experienced on this earth. Crucifixion was designed to be the most painful and longest way put people to death. But not only did he suffer the physical torment of the cross, he also had the burden of mankind’s sin weighing down his heart. Every sin ever committed; past, present, and future. I know the guilt and pain of my own sin is too much for me to bare, but every sin, ever is more pain and suffering than any human could ever endure on this planet.

So, okay. Maybe there isn’t always a conceivable good that will come out of a very real bad, but there is always a hope for a life that the Lord had meant for us to live all along. 

And another thing that I always come back to is: God did not want us to be robots. He wanted us to have the free will of choosing whether or not we wanted to live in sin. In the beginning, humans were living the good life, with no knowledge of the reality of good and evil. But Adam and Eve chose to disobey God, and become aware of what they were previously blissfuly unaware of. And now, even with the curse of sin upon us, we still face the same choice: to live in sin without grace - refusing God’s gift of love and salvation despite our imperfect ways, or to live [still] in sin with grace - and choosing to live for God. The way I see it, God didn’t make the world evil, he just made us with the ability to make decisions for ourselves - particularly to live in ignorance, or to live with the knowledge of good and evil.