Can God Feel Pain?
Feb 02, 2008
Understanding how an all powerful, loving God can be real in a world of such suffering has been an intensely personal quest for me, as a theologian (I don't mean that in the professional sense of the word but in the sense that all of us have and are forming a set of beliefs about who God is), as a pastor who deals constantly with people broken by pain, and as a person who has experienced suffering. What will follow over the weeks will be a series of distinctly Christian answers to the problem of suffering. However, we need to first hear the weight of the question.
One of the best and most powerful statements regarding God's seeming absence in a suffering world comes in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamozov, chapter 4 when Ivan is talking to Alyosha about Russian children:
There was a little girl of five who was hated by her mother and father...This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty-shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy (outhouse), and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans!
Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark in the cold and weep her meek, unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolic good and evil when it costs so much? Why the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to dear, kind God!
Dostoevsky's description is powerful and must be answered. Many Christians have responded rightly that God Himself experienced and took on our suffering and pain on the cross, but I think we must take this a step further. I believe it is even more comforting in our pain if God not only experienced suffering but experienced the reality we feel of a God who could stop it but doesn't. As I was reading Luke 23 a few months ago I had a thought on that issue and here's my attempt to get at it. This will serve as the first of many "answers" to this problem.
We must see that not stopping suffering is a question of which God Himself has faced the pain. Take a look at Luke 23.35-38. Notice what the crowd cries out to Jesus, "He saved others; let him save Himself, if He is the Christ of God, His chosen one. If you are the king of the Jews, then save yourself!" They are calling on him, not to stop the suffering of the world but to stop His own suffering. They are mocking God for not stopping the blood-letting. Does God have the power to stop it? Of course, remember Jesus' words in Matthew 26.53, "Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?" In other words, more than 60,000 angels with flaming swords would be at His bleeding side in a moment if He called them. Now put yourself in the Father's place, watching your Son be tortured, hearing Him scream out, seeing the mocking, watching Him rise to gasp for air only to slide back down again breathless, hearing Him be rejected, and observing His death, all while you had the power to send more than 12 legions of angels to His side. You better believe if that were my son, I would move heaven and earth to be there; I would be an unstoppable force to armies, soldiers, bystanders, and weapons. And yet God watched on; Jesus died on. God Himself has faced the reality of not stopping His own suffering infinitely more powerfully than we ever will b/c He not only allows suffering to continue in our world but He allowed it for His own Son. We face the pain of powerless suffering, where we have little control over the situation, but God faced the pain of powerful suffering, that is, suffering with the full power to end it and yet letting it continue in horror. There would have to be an amazing reason to do something like that, and there is. He did that for the infinitely valuable result of the salvation of you, me, all of creation, and the display of the infinite riches of His glory. Christianity is the only religion that gives us a God who is not removed from suffering but comes and Himself takes on the suffering that should have been mine and should have been yours. He does not require your blood but provides His own. John Stott says that he personally could not believe in God if not for the cross where the One who is all powerful humbles Himself and suffers a type of punishment that you and I will never experience. So, we don't know fore sure what the reason for suffering is but we know what it isn't, what it can't be. It can't be b/c He doesn't love us; it can't be b/c He doesn't care; it can't be b/c He's aloof. God loves us and hates suffering so much that He was willing to come get involved in it personally.
Next time we'll ask if giving up believing in God all together would help us out of this problem...