Why God Wills You to Suffer

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PREFACE

As I write this preface in November of 2013, the media headlines are reporting the death toll from typhoon Haiyan after its swath through the Philippine Islands. Some are saying it is the most powerful and deadly typhoon ever recorded. Tornadoes in the United States this year did some nasty damage too, killing and destroying.

Both times my local church stepped in to help, and the calls went out for our Christian community to pray and give. No one can argue that praying and giving and helping those in need who are victims of these Acts of God are the right things to do.

The giving part is easy. The material needs for homes, food, clothing, and medical care are pretty obvious. The praying part is the hard part. What are we supposed to pray for? Did not God destroy these places? Our pastor says to pray for a special Presence of the Lord for the victims. He is right, of course, but isn’t God omnipresent anyway? Why, God, did these things happen?

It is a twisted, obtuse thought to suggest that God destroyed these places only to provide us with an opportunity to share the love of Jesus. Or is it?

Stepping back a little bit, natural disasters are only a small fraction of items that could be thought of as a cause for suffering. There’s external conditions, of course, like storms, famine, war, or disease; but there are internal conditions too like hate, loneliness, fear, greed, emptiness, the vast pit of sin—and a whole lot more.

What is it about suffering that makes us think about God in the first place? It seems to me that the entire human race spends every waking moment trying to avoid suffering. For most people, thinking about God only comes after suffering happens. But why? What’s the link?

Almost 20 years ago as a younger Christian believer I kept hearing about this thing called the Abundant Life mentioned by Jesus in John 10:10. To find out more I had lunch and a theological discussion with my [then] new pastor, Pastor Pat of Escondido Calvary Chapel.

I had just moved to Escondido, California, from Orange County, CA, after a devastating second divorce (from the same spouse). I was one of those naive Christians that thought that God would bless my marriage and heal our relationship if, in the second go-around, I dedicated my life to Him. The lesson I learned was that it took two to tango. One spouse dedicated to the things of God, does not a marriage make.

At that time I was new to this Calvary Church and I wanted to get to know the pastor. I wore my ‘best’ suit, which I had acquired through Goodwill. I did my best to disguise the fact that I barely had enough money to buy his lunch.

Beyond the introductory chit-chat, I pressed for answers about the ‘Abundant Life’ one can acquire through Christ. Pastor Pat was fairly strong in his assertion that the abundant life in Christ could be achieved here and now and that you didn’t have to wait for the sweet by and by. I had problems reconciling all that ‘abundant life’ stuff with my world, where I saw no evidence of it. The inquiry as to how this life was to be achieved was responded with the combinations of living a life of faith, walking the spiritual walk with the Lord, and being a good steward.

Okay. I had heard this list before and I could buy that. It makes sense. Simple causality. I am His child. I do this, God does that.

Behind this method were other notions that the Abundant Life was based upon some spiritual guarantee that my behavior, my attitude, and my faith affected my circumstances. The prayers of a righteous man avail much, right? Testimonials of people who have had prayers answered supported this notion. We also had all been taught as children that if you were good, you would be rewarded and if you were bad you would be punished. And I had also been told that if you tithe God will bless you. The problem I had was that these principles didn’t seem consistent when applied, like the other parts of the creation. I knew good people who had not had prayers answered and whose misery continued regardless of their strong faith and moral values. I also observed that there was great diversity in misery --it had many variations.

What Pastor Pat did not know was that my divorce left me homeless, penniless, and in deep debt in the tens of thousands of 1980s dollars. Looking back, the entire decade of the 1980s and half of the 1990s was a waste of time, life, and potential productivity. Those years were the worst of my life. I clung to God like a drowning man. I absorbed the Bible and soaked up the Word, since I was told that it was only in God’s Word would I find peace and relief.

But in those years the Southern California evangelical Christian community could not help me reconcile my personal experiences, my observations of others who had experienced—and were currently experiencing—suffering and hardship, with the Abundant Life that we were all supposed to be enjoying. The peace that was supposed to transcend my understanding, certainly did. So much so, I didn’t see much of it.

All the evidence pointed to a lot of good people—Christian people—getting a raw deal in life. My point of view also clouded my vision, since I fully identified as a co-sufferer with these other people and not so much with the ones who were more comfortably situated.

I reasoned: If the theory that a person’s circumstances were related to spiritual causality [a reciprocity-like sowing and reaping], then the application of this spiritual truth should be consistent.

But my observations countered these notions: Some of these people were suffering due to their own stupid mistakes and bad judgment, like me. But others had bad things happen to them, through no obvious fault of their own. Still others suffered due to the foolish mistakes of thoughtless friends, relations, or strangers. Examples of innocent people killed by texting or drunk drivers, come to mind.

At the time I believed this theory of spiritual reciprocity due to its biblical foundation. It is a popular American theology. So I thought that if I was honest, worked hard, and tried to ethically please God and man, I would be rewarded. I also believed that circumstances that presented themselves to me had to come to me as pre-approved by God the Father. As a result, I took seriously the critiques of the people I loved. When someone was critical of me, I took it seriously and sought self-improvement or correction. As in the case of my previous marriage(s) the charge made against me was that I didn’t make enough money. I held the naive belief that ‘if only I was good enough’ for the other person, things would be okay.

In truth, although I worked hard, was honest, lived a life of faith, and approached others with compassion and sincerity, I never could increase my material circumstances. I tried the tithing formulas, but these didn’t work as advertised. Strangely enough to this day I still cannot get a pastor to tell me whether or not a tithe is based upon the net or the gross of a person’s income. If you use the Abrahamic formula it is gross; but if you render unto Ceasar first, it is net. But no one will say for sure.

What they do say is that ‘he who sows little, reaps little, and he who sows much, reaps much’. And they point to the promise of a return that is pressed down, shaken together and running over from Luke 6:38. This is the common theme of the spiritual-reciprocity evangels, and although it may be true for some, it is not systemically applied to all the children of God. And it has been painfully obvious that these axioms of spiritual-reciprocity fail to fit in my situation.

Principles of spiritual-reciprocity also failed to fit those I knew who were dying of cancer, lost their jobs, stepped out in faith in business ventures that went sour, lost investments, had been injured in accidents, or were raped or robbed. They also didn’t quite fit with those who were later to return from the various wars: friends I knew who served in Vietnam, the Gulf War, and vets I had met who lost limbs (or worse) from the current, so-called ‘war on terror’.

Through these failures I was compelled to do more self-examination. I did not – and do not—doubt Jesus at His word that He came to give us an Abundant Life. So if He is not wrong, I must be. I concluded that I had mistakenly connected this Abundant Life thing to the kind of happiness known to those who are materially comfortable. Even further than this, I concluded that what I was really seeking from God was to avoid all manner of suffering.

Being honest with myself, I had to conclude—yes, that was it. I was tired of being poor, being kicked, and generally tired of this old sinful world. I was not necessarily envious of others, per se. I didn’t want someone else’s life, wife, home, car, or money. But I did want to earn my own, make it on my own, be a success, and thereby be a benefit to my community and not a burden to others.

I decided that to know my true motivations and to stay honest with myself, I had to study suffering.

Back I went to various denominations and Bible teachers who mostly pointed me to the Book of Job as the source of all information regarding the topic of suffering. But these studies did not reveal the answers I was looking for. The Book of Job is a great descriptive narrative that talks about suffering, but not suffering.

In Job, suffering is represented as part of a cosmic struggle between God and Satan, where Satan is given permission to make Job’s life a living hell to include the killing of his kids.

For me the Book of Job did not answer the question as to why these things happened. Job’s three closest advisers kept telling him that his problems stemmed from the sin in his life. And some would draw a parallel to the people I know [or myself] and allege that our sufferings were due to sin. But the Book of