Suffering

It is important for human beings to understand that they will not, in their mortal context, understand fully either the thoughts or actions of mankind or God.  No matter how extensive and well-ordered we may be in managing the circumstances of our lives, we are without complete answers in our thoughts about some major life factors.  They are so incomplete in the light of complexity and evidence that it becomes easy to doubt any proposals or answers suggested.  We have words like paradox, contradiction, conflict, mystery, even atheism to cover our ignorance or inability to explain some of the largest factors of nature, conscious life, and God.  God, if God exists, is the most difficult theme for us to manage.  By definition God would have a different context than mortals.  Mankind can create gods in nature, but there is a prevailing concept about monotheism that presumes there is creative God that is beyond nature and creation but responsible for the creation, and responsibility of the creation to him.  Even the use of the gender pronouns (he, his or she,her) reflects our limited knowledge in that God is not truly identified in gender as human beings acknowledge physical gender, but we have no other way to manage our mortal communication system in reference to persons.  We believe God is known to us through the personhood of God.  God is more than his personhood.  The somewhat sophisticated atheist, holding what is perceived as a fatalistic acceptance of death (so is perceived to be strong minded), appears to have the easiest time of it in nature’s context in a thought pattern making mankind nothing more than a thinking animal whose end is concluded like any other vertebrate body.  That person can manage life by simply accepting whatever occurs as natural. The believer in God is perceived to be too fragile (perhaps fearful) to accept death as the end (so is perceived to be weak minded).  In God’s interpretation the weak may be strong.  (2 Corinthians 12:10)

From this point of view the atheist faces life in a weak position, avoiding the hard work of evaluating life in its mystery, and resigning from the work of thinking through life meaning, investigating the mystery, and arriving at some affirmation that better explains what is known in life and nature.  Those who look for the affirmations must surely be stronger than those who quit by simply accepting whatever appears.  To accept whatever seems to be the case for general nature is not enough for the serious thinking person who recognizes there is something in self-conscious mankind that is greater than nothingness or other earth life. We deserve a different scenario related to being.  Scripture offers a blessing to genuine seekers – the ones strong enough to seek what may be found and so to find their reality.  God promises aid to them in the management of the vision of the Kingdom of God and the human part in it.

Even without all that work of cognition we remain stunned at the reality of suffering.  Why the suffering of the innocent, the handicapped, the weak, the broken-hearted?  Why the monumental suffering caused by a Hitler or Stalin?  Why even the suffering of aged persons given long life find it so burdensome they seek legal ways to escape the life they nurtured.  They now want out.  Why does God permit the scenario?  Permitting it for a time, and seeing its increase in a growing population, why does he permit it to continue?  Scripture makes clear that God takes responsibility for some of it. (Exodus 4:11) Jesus made a central part of his ministry the healing of suffering persons, some with blindness or crippled from their natal days – suffering for which God takes on the cause of it in his management as Creator.  We cause much of it. Even in the face of suffering the Christian accepts the extensive meaning that faith can grasp immortality and God’s meaning in all without knowing enough answers related to great questions of humanity.  Those engaged in ministry are humbled by most suffering persons.  They are far more related to eternal verities than most of the pedestrian public accepts.  We may find that suffering has become a gift in that it drives us to prayer, to reliance on God for relief and hope.  It points truth to our imperfection.  We are touched about the sense of tranquility in many suffering persons – so to crowd out in their personal ordeals the follies to which non-suffering masses take on to crowd out the suffering Christ and relief.  Having observed and studied suffering, I feel it relates in some ways to the fellowship of mankind with God.