Where God cannot be, He is

Every now and then you encounter from the pews as well as the world the familiar complaint about God and the presence of suffering.  How can God allow it?  Tolerate it?  Where is God when suffering takes place?  Like the disciples of old, it is our nature to presume that suffering bespeaks and absent God and an absence of God and His grace.  When they asked Jesus "who sinned" at the encounter of the man born blind, it was tacit admission that God could not have been in the mix of things.  If God had been, there would be no blindness and if God was, it was surely to assigned judgment.  This is our default position since the Fall in Eden.  God cannot be where pain lives or suffering exists -- except in judgment as the One who inflicts pain and suffering as punishment for sin.

The cross is the shock of a God who is not merely present in suffering as a spectator but who comes for suffering.  God is in the pain of the whip and the nails and even to the final breath exhaled in surrender to death.  God is not merely there as victim, though surely as victim, but as the One for whom this pain and this suffering were planned before the foundation of the world.  He is the God whose mercy is not revealed in the absence of pain and suffering but there in the midst of it all.  His work is not to condemn and to assign punishment of pain and suffering but to use the pain and suffering to extend His mercy and grace.  This He most surely does in Christ, in His righteous life, in His suffering to end suffering, and in His life-giving death. Where we presume God cannot be, there He is and there He is doing the redemptive work that delivers us from sin and judgment, from pain and suffering, to righteousness and everlasting life.

We constantly ponder why a good and powerful God allows suffering, pain, and evil?  Is He impotent to eliminate it for us?  Does He not wish to forego this for us?  Is He complicit in it?  Does He send it?  For us the great temptation is to presume our God is a detached God, an aloof God, who watches us while looking down from heaven but who either cannot or wills to do nothing to help us.  God's surprise is that He comes for suffering, enters into our pain, takes the evil of our sins upon Himself, and bears the full weight of that sin and death for us that we might be redeemed.  He thirsts that our thirst might be quenched.  He fasts in hunger so that our hunger might be satisfied.  He lives to die that by dying in baptismal water we might live.  God enters into suffering not as an experiment to see what it is but to end its reign over us.  Isaiah tells us.  His wounds are our healing and His sacrifice is our gain.  

We are so fixed upon the question of why this suffering comes to us and why we as Christians face such pain that perhaps we miss how God has come to suffer with us and, more importantly for us, and by this suffering redeems us from the condemnation of suffering and pain.  He is present with us not as an antidote to what we endure but that these sufferings might have a redemptive and sanctifying purpose even in us.  We do not suffer aimless pain but in Christ all sufferings have their end, find their meaning, and have purpose.  Where we think God cannot be, there He is.