Where is God when you need him?
This world isn’t all fun and games, is it? It’s full of suffering and evil and chaos at every turn. Every time we seem to be making progress in one area, even greater problems arise in another.
In the last few years, we have been poignantly reminded that this world is a pretty ugly place to be, haven’t we? A crippling pandemic. A war in Europe. A cost of living crisis.
And our world’s problems don’t just stay “out there” in the ether, do they? Suffering and the trials of life walk right up to our front doors, knock at the door, and before we’ve had time to tell them to go away, they’re inside, making themselves comfortable in the living room of our lives.
A few years ago, I received a phone call from a friend of mine called Phil. He just rang to apologise for not having got in touch over the last few months. He said he was fine, but that he had been unwell and was recovering in hospital.
The very next day, Phil rang me again, but this time he had a different story to tell. He had just been diagnosed with Lymphoma. It was terminal, and he was told the clock was ticking fast. He asked me to ring our friends, to explain the situation, and to let them know that they should visit him. We visited him the next day, and a few days later he died at the age of 25.
It’s situations like those which beg the question that we’re thinking about this evening. Where on earth is God in all this!? Where is God when a parent has to say a final goodbye to their child?
And that question seems to crop up a lot in life, doesn’t it?
Where is God when I lose my job, or when my marriage breaks down?
Where is God when my mental health problems run away from me?
Where is God when I wake up in the morning and find myself feeling totally lost?
There is absolutely no question about it – that life in this broken world is hard. And so often it feels like no one really cares. Including God.
As the author and theologian C.S. Lewis so bluntly described it in the midst of his own grief, talking to God is like “a door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside”.
Lewis goes on to ask about God, “Why is he so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”
Where is God when I need him?
Well, for many people, the question we’re looking at this evening is like a missile and it’s headed directly at the Christian faith. You tell me that God is loving and powerful, but that just doesn’t stack up under the crushing weight of human distress. Sure, faith may work for someone who has their life in order, or for those who have nothing to complain about. But what about me?!
The Bible is realistic about suffering
Well the first thing to mention is that the Bible is totally realistic about the reality of suffering. In fact, I can’t think of a single book in history which contains as much deep and authentic reflection on the reality of suffering as the Bible does.
Here are a couple of verses from Psalm 22 in which the author is expressing his frustration at God for seeming to have abandoned him:
1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish?
2 My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, but I find no rest.
Is that not how we feel so often? God, if you’re there – if you claim to love me and care about me – then where on earth are you!?
We cry out to God, but he doesn’t seem to answer!
Getting rid of God doesn’t help
Well I don’t know how you would respond in that kind of situation.
For some, the mere existence of suffering is enough to justify removing God from the picture altogether. Suffering is the cold hard reality of life. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, no meaning, no hope, so we’re best off just accepting that nature is cruel and getting on with it. God is simply not there.
The evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins famously wrote in 1996, that the universe “has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference”. And many people have found that way of looking at the world freeing. Okay, the universe sucks, there’s no particular reason for it, so let’s just crack on and make the most of life.
But I’d suggest that any more than a moments’ reflection on the implications of that argument, and it begins to fall to pieces.
You see, if there is no good, then why do we care for the poor and vulnerable, rather than just our own best interests? If there is no evil, then why do we yearn for justice? If the sympathy we feel for those who suffer is simply a by-product of our evolution, then why should we bother empathising for those from a different tribe? Can you see the problem?
If God doesn’t exist, there’s really nothing to complain about, because there’s not really anyone to complain to.
Now, I don’t want to be flippant about this question, because there is no easy answer to the question of suffering.
But I would like to suggest this evening that uniquely, the Christian faith can help us to begin to make sense of the rawness we feel in the face of suffering, and that it gives us a path through suffering to something wonderful and lasting.
Jesus suffered like us
I don’t know about you, but when I’m going through a tough time, I am most at home around people who have been through something similar. They just get it. Particularly when words are not enough.
Well the essence of the Christian message is that God knows what it’s like to suffer. You see, the Bible describes that in the person of Jesus, God became man, and spent his life talking to the poor, the outcast, the weak and the vulnerable. He spent his life with those who suffered.
Jesus himself suffered brutality at the hands of Roman soldiers. He was abandoned by his closest friends in his hour of deepest pain. The Bible says in the book of Isaiah that Jesus was “a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering”.
And so if we bring our suffering to him, he’s not like a therapist giving us CBT, or a GP who gives us 7 minutes of their time on the phone, or a YouTube influencer who offers their 10 top tips on dealing with anxiety at the other end of a screen. No, Jesus really gets it. He knows our suffering and he really cares. He gives us himself and puts his arm around us and says “I know what you’re going through and I’m here for you”.
Jesus suffered for us
But not only did Jesus experience suffering like us, he also – the Bible says – suffered for us.
You see, if we acknowledge that evil is real, then we have to be honest with ourselves. The evil in this world exists within each of us too. We have all done wrong, haven’t we? I know I have. We’ve let God down. We’ve abandoned him. And there’s a sense therefore, that it would be right for God to abandon us.
However, rather than abandoning us, the Bible describes that Jesus came down to earth, and willingly found himself nailed to a Roman cross – one of cruelest instruments of torture that mankind has ever devised. And on that cross, Jesus experienced the starkest form of suffering imaginable – the true horror of abandonment by God.
In fact, on the cross Jesus cries out those very same words that I read out earlier from Psalm 22, he says:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
You see, Jesus knows what it is to be forsaken – abandoned – by God, and according to Jesus, he did that for you. So that you could know him and be near to him and be forgiven by him. He experienced being forsaken by God, in your place, so that you can experience peace with God.
So suffering isn’t an embarrassment to God. Rather, it’s the very thread by which Jesus’ death is stitched into our lives. It’s the very means by which we can experience forgiveness and peace with God, even though we don’t deserve it.
Jesus turns suffering into hope
Okay, you might be thinking, that’s all well and good. But why doesn’t God just get rid of evil and suffering once and for all!? Here’s the bottom line – according to Jesus, that’s exactly what he will do.
We all have stories to tell in our lives don’t we? We all have highs and lows. If you’re fortunate, you may well feel like your life has mostly been full of highs. But be in no doubt, that won’t last. Others of us may feel like, while our lives have had their moments, we’ve also had our fair share of low-points, and many of our stories are ones of suffering.
So the question which Christianity is concerned with answering, is this: how do you fix a story that is broken? Because, the Christian faith says that no story is beyond fixing. And the way that you fix a broken story, is by embedding it within a much bigger story in which good wins out over evil.
In John’s gospel in the Bible, Jesus is found talking to a lady called Martha. Her brother Lazarus has just died, and all she wants is to have him back. Martha says to Jesus, “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died”. She’s clearly in distress and is confused about why Jesus wasn’t there to help Lazarus. He can see it in her eyes.
But Jesus responds to Martha with these famous words:
“I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. ”
Martha longs to have her brother Lazarus back. But Jesus looks her in the eye, and says, “I am the resurrection and the life”.
If you know the story, you’ll know that Jesus does actually raise Lazarus from the dead, proving that Jesus has the power to give us life. He wants us to have confidence that he is “the resurrection and the life” and that “whoever lives by believing in [Jesus] will never die”. In the face of our immediate suffering, Jesus says there is a way to find the hope of eternal life, and it’s in him.
That’s the hope that my friend Phil had, and it gave him tremendous peace in his final days. And that hope has now become a reality for him, because I believe he is more alive now than he ever was before.
Conclusion
Well it is the case that God doesn’t always give us answers in this life. There is much we might never understand about why life is the way that it is. But I think we can know this. That there is more to this world than blind pitiless indifference.
You see, the message of Christianity, is that God has not remained distant from our sufferings. But rather, in the person of Jesus, God became man, and dwelled among us. He suffered and died in our place, in order to give us the hope of life with him forever.
This means that if you choose to follow Jesus, you can have joy, because the God of the universe loves you and died in your place. You can have peace with God because you can be forgiven. You can have confidence that in this world of evil, there will be ultimate justice. You can see the bigger, more glorious story, that your life fits into, and you can have hope that one day there will be no more death or crying or pain or sickness and God will wipe away every tear from your eyes.
Where is God when you need him? Well, look up, and see him nailed to a cross, and receive the joy, the peace, the confidence and the hope that he won for you there. That’s what God offers in your moment of need.
