PHYSICAL SUFFERING
One of the most common ‘hurts’ that people share with us is to do with physical suffering. This includes answers like ‘suffering from cancer’ and ‘watching my wife’s Alzheimer’s deteriorating and knowing that I can’t do anything about it’. Being ill or in pain, as well as watching others who are ill or in pain, is very difficult to live with. Unsurprisingly the older people get the more likely they are to give this kind of response.
Here are some key statistics:
While other issues have gone up and down this category has come up with broadly the same frequency over the past 9 years.
Almost 8% of responses come under this category, making it the sixth most common.
It’s the third most common responses for over 65’s, and gets more prevalent the older people get.
For many years before I was a Christian I struggled with the idea that there was too much pain in the world for there to be a loving God, but slowly over time that objection started to melt away. I began to accept two key things that challenged my thinking and persuaded me the other way; let me share them with you.
1. Our brokenness suggests we are broken not that life is meaningless
As soon as you say that there is something deeply wrong in the world, you are implying there is a way things should be, not that the world has no meaning. CS Lewis put it this way: “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?” 16
Our brokenness suggests we are broken not that we are meaningless. If I break something I might in a moment of despair and frustration exclaim that “everything is pointless” but the reality is not that things are pointless, it’s that things haven’t gone the right way. And there is a big difference. The Bible teaches that the world has a purpose but that the world and its people have become broken because of our selfish hearts.
2. Our brokenness breaks God’s heart; it does not reveal he is heartless
If God were unmoved and did nothing about our plight then I think that would disprove the idea of a loving God.
The message of Christianity is altogether different to what many people think.
“There cannot be a God of love, men say;
Because if there was and he looked on the world
his heart would break.
The Church points to the Cross and says it did break.
If God made the world, men say,
it’s him who should bear the load.
The Church points to the Cross and says he did bear it.” 17
The Bible teaches that Jesus was fully man and fully God. The God of the whole universe so loved us that he came and suffered with us. He literally left heaven, a place of perfection, safety and beauty, for us. What did he do when he arrived? What did he do when he met the sick? The Bible describes something remarkable; “Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds he had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd”. 18
We read in the gospels that Jesus healed the blind, the deaf, lepers, paralytics, a person with a withered hand, a bleeding woman of 12 years and that he even raised the dead. God’s compassion and care for the sick is given huge emphasis. As we think about these passages we must remember that the Bible is telling us that these healing hands are God’s hands. Does God care about the sick? According to the Bible he reached out and touched them and made them well. Our hope in sickness is therefore grounded in the compassion of God himself.
There is hope for today because Jesus heals
Jesus still heals. His healing hands have not left us because Jesus still has a body on earth. One day after he had gone back to heaven Jesus appeared to a man called Saul who was persecuting Christians and said “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting”. 19 Jesus so identified with his people that to persecute the church was to persecute him. The Bible goes on to say explicitly that the church is the body of Jesus. 20
If so, Jesus’ healing hands are still available on planet earth today. Jesus said “he who believes in me will do what I have been doing” 21 – a clear reference to his miracles. Not everybody gets healed, even Jesus didn’t heal everybody. Sometimes, unlike the situation we saw described in Matthew’s gospel, he just healed one person such as at the Pool of Bethesda 22. John Wimber who in his life prayed and saw countless people healed said “When we prayed for no one, no one was healed. Now we pray for lots of people, not everyone’s healed, but some are”. 23
There is hope for today because Jesus helps
There is hope too for those who never get healed. The famous 19th Century preacher, Charles Spurgeon once said “He will either make the burden lighter, or the back stronger; He will diminish the need, or increase the supply”. Countless Christians can share of how Jesus has helped them through sickness. Peace, joy and hope are possible even when enduring the deepest possible pain. They are even possible when those we love are enduring the deepest possible pain. We rely on God in our pain and in their pain.
That’s not to say there will never be days when God seems distant and close friends let you down. Jesus was once found in a situation where his friends deserted him and he wept alone, asking his father to change his circumstances. For the Christian even those darkest moments contain glimmers of hope because we realise we are living out the life of Jesus and becoming more like him.
There is hope for eternity because Jesus saves
One Christian leader tells the powerful and moving story about his sister Sharon and the untimely death of her husband Dave:
During those last few weeks, Dave’s bed was set up in the centre of their living room, where a parade of caring people visited him. Sharon would often sit beside him and stroke his hair and, whether he was conscious or not, speak into his ear, telling her ‘bud’ what a wonderful, godly husband and father he was.
On one occasion, a relative of Dave visited, a man who was not a Christian. As he watched Sharon caring for Dave and thought about Dave’s relative youth and the children he would leave behind, anger seemed to well up from within him – anger directed at God whom Dave and Sharon were professing to believe in.
He asked Sharon, “Why aren’t you angry?”
She turned to him and answered with the truth of the gospel: “Dave deserved hell for his sins, just like you and me, and yet God, in His mercy, forgave him because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Dave is going to heaven,” she said. “How can I be angry at God for taking him to Heaven?” 24
The Bible gives us a new perspective; in this story the friend was angry but the wife was able to be thankful because she had hope. Heaven is a real hope because Jesus died and rose again. It was the greatest victory. The world is not simply a cold dark place where you live, get sick and die. There is hope for resurrection for all of us. Death is not the end. Death has been defeated and if we love and trust Jesus this life is the worst things will ever get. The best is yet to come.
Jesus is our only hope
There’s a choice we all face. Sickness and suffering can cause us to run to Jesus the healer or to become bitter and even seek help in unhelpful and sometimes dangerous places. Desperate people will turn to anything and there is a whole host of non Christian spiritual forms of healing. A great deal of alternative therapies have non Christian spiritual origins – I implore you please do not try something without checking it out. If it has even a hint of something spiritual that’s not Jesus centred, the Bible says that we should run from it. It’s not worth the risk.
We also have the choice as to whether we will suffer with or without purpose. One author says “When you suffer – because the question is not if but when you suffer – will you suffer in a way that is purposeful or purposeless? Will you suffer in a way that God could do a good thing in you? Will you suffer well? Will you waste your sickness, and your poverty, and your hardship, and your loneliness, and your tears, and your grief, and your sadness, and your sorrow, and your suffering?”
Suffering for the Christian is an opportunity to share your faith and encourage other Christians. I have a friend with Parkinson’s disease who does just this. When people say ‘I feel so sorry for you’ he replies “Don’t pity me I have the peace of God, who can heal me. And if not he’ll get me through it”.
I want to be like him. His life reminds me of something a missionary once said: “Don’t bear trouble. Use it. Take whatever happens, justice and injustice, pleasure and pain, compliment and criticism, take it up into the purpose of your life and make something out of it. Turn it into a testimony”.
16. CS Lewis, Mere Christianity
17. William Temple, quoted by J John in Dead Sure?
18. Matthew 9: 35-36
19. Acts 9: 5
20. See 1 Cor 12: 27
21. John 14:12
22. See John 5: 1-15
23. Quoted on Alpha, ‘Does God heal’?
24. Taken from Humility by CJ Mahaney