The text below is taken from Dave Jackson’s book Is Your God Good? Searching for Why We Suffer (Castle Rock Creative, Inc., 2024). Used with the author’s permission.
Introduction
My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too difficult for me.
But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.
. . . Put your hope in the Lord both now and forevermore.
—Psalm 131, by David
The problem is, when it comes to suffering, we are all involved in great matters too difficult for us to fully understand. If we could leave them alone, as the psalmist advises, we would.
But we can’t! We wonder if God causes suffering—or at least doesn’t care enough to stop it. Might God be more intent on executing specific plans than avoiding collateral damage? Is suffering always traceable to someone’s sin? “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” asked the disciples about the man born blind—the same presumption made by Job and his friends.
The reason we can’t help but ask these questions goes beyond the demands of our own suffering to include the wrong answers we have received from others, even wrong answers believed by some ancient biblical characters. Answers that characterize God as so much harsher than Jesus Christ, as though we’re supposed to amalgamate two different deities.
To unravel this dilemma, we need to revisit the earliest characterization of God’s attributes as portrayed through the stories of Noah’s flood, God’s interaction with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Israelites’ Exodus and sojourn in the wilderness, the Law given through Moses, and the conquest of Canaan. In those reports, God was said to either bless or curse people based on their behavior; God was willing to annihilate his enemies and even encourage his followers to conduct genocide.
If from those stories we believe—even subconsciously—that God proved his sovereignty through violence, control, and retribution, where does that leave us? When we suffer or see others suffer, do we think God is behind it all? Such a view differs so sharply from who God showed himself to be when he dwelt among us as Jesus Christ that we are compelled to ask: Why this big difference?
That contradiction doesn’t work for a lot of people. Research by the Barna Group shows that the percentage of agnostics and atheists among the Gen Z population is 174 percent higher than among Boomers.[1] Even among older people, I just spoke to a friend who grew up in the church, who said, “Hey, Dave, you know that book you’re working on? Well, I don’t believe God is good! Not anymore. Not after what’s happening in the Middle East.” But it wasn’t only that, and she’s not alone. People of all ages, and maybe you’re among them, have a hard time believing that a good God would allow so much evil or suffering in the world.
In this book we’ll dig into the arc of Scripture’s narratives. Only in its full sweep do we begin to see how God’s character was initially misunderstood and why he did not redact those early characterizations. Instead, God began to make known his true character until, in the promised Messiah, we find the full revelation of himself as truly good, a God of unfathomable love. The implications may not explain all suffering, but we’ll be less inclined to blame God.
This search for why we suffer discloses four important theses:
- Biblical inspiration. We cannot equate the descriptions of God’s character recorded by the prophets of old with God’s immeasurably more perfect self-revelation through the words, actions, and attitudes God exhibited as Immanuel, God with us in Jesus Christ. If any disparity appears, we must embrace the more perfect revelation of God’s love in Jesus, and humbly accept that the ideas we gathered from other sources, even the patriarchs, may not have conveyed the full picture.
- Humans were made in the image of God. And therefore, God honors our ability to make choices. We may not understand all their consequences or be free from all pressures, but God will not violate our agency to choose. God invites, explains, appeals, warns, scolds, even disciplines. But he does not coerce or lobotomize us. Even though numerous biblical passages affirm this truth, we often overlook the implications of God’s gift of freewill for ourselves and others, hoping—even praying—that God would intervene in ways that would violate someone’s freewill.
- God’s purpose. God operates inconceivably beyond our experience of the passage of time. Before the creation of the universe, he had a purpose for humanity and for each of us. But we tend to envision the way God pursues his purposes according to how we humans execute our plans by micromanaging everything over which we have sufficient power. Our plans are finite; but God’s purposes are infinite. God doesn’t need to control everything to achieve his purposes. Even in the context of an active cosmic war, God is not surprised by Satan’s attacks, the seemingly random dangers in nature, or the consequences of human freewill. Therefore, God does not need to micromanage the universe. Instead, Scripture documents God’s adjustments and willingness to embrace us as partners in achieving his purposes. When we fail (or don’t listen), God never leaves us, but forgives and adjusts.
- God does not gaslight. God never asks us to deny the reality of suffering by calling it “good.” Instead, God respects the sincere seeker’s ability to “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” as the psalmist said. And Jesus reminded us, “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” We can recognize what’s good and not good, and that means we don’t have to deny our suffering.
As you will discover as you read, I am not qualified to address the topic of suffering based on my personal experience of suffering in any intense manner. Yes, I’ve had cancer, undergone open-heart surgery, and nearly lost my sight. And at my age, I can keep pace with other seniors swapping tales of daily aches and pains or contemplating this life’s approaching close. But all of that is very different from people who have lost a child, endured years of excruciating pain from disease or wounds or faced constant discrimination, abuse, enslavement, poverty, or hopelessness. Nor have I endured war, famine, persecution, homelessness, or a major natural disaster. My suffering has been rather pedestrian.
However, I care about and am deeply moved by people who have suffered far more than I have and feel compelled to make some sense out of what’s happened to them. I am also someone who recognizes the profound and undeserved grace I’ve received to escape such suffering, to the point that I can empathize with a friend who struggled with why he should thank God for his food when the same God has not fed the nine million people who die of starvation each year—perhaps a form of survivor syndrome—until he pretty much gave up on God.
So, I wrestle with all of this in the context of a God who I experience as active, who I believe speaks personally to me (when I’ll listen), and who on more than one occasion saved me from death.
Nevertheless, if you are looking for the fits-all answer for why we suffer, I’ll save you some time: I don’t know! Some suffering involves mysteries I don’t understand, and neither do far greater thinkers who have tackled this subject over the centuries. But I’m convinced there are some very popular as well as some very ancient answers that confuse us and compound our suffering by causing us to conclude that the God we want to believe is good is neither good nor trustworthy if we apply the logical consequences of those traditional answers. Those answers imply that our suffering is what we deserve, and we should therefore just embrace it.
C.S. Lewis, the renowned twentieth-century author of The Chronicles of Narnia and nonfiction works of Christian apologetics such as Mere Christianity said, “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”[2] But if misguided Christians translate God’s shouts as: “I control all things, including causing you to suffer,” “It’s your fault—your sin and lack of faith,” or even “I don’t care about human pain,” then that bad theology will drive people away from the church and any trust they may have had in a good God.
There are several kinds of suffering and several sources of suffering. They are not the same. Some people wrongly blame God, and some wrongly blame the victim, even if they are the victim. But both indictments separate us from the love of God and his promise to be with us always. Nothing can make suffering worse than to face it alone! But we don’t have to.
So, join me in this search to clear out some false answers—some bad theology, if you will—and identify some other answers that, while not comprehensive, are at least more understandable. Then we can be still and quiet our souls like a weaned child with its mother and put our hope in the Lord both now and forevermore, leaving what mysteries remain in the hands of our good God.
[1] Barna Group, “Atheism Doubles Among Generation Z,” 2018, https://www.barna.com/research/atheism-doubles-among-generation-z/.
[2] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 93.
At age 80, Dave Jackson says he has nothing to lose by asking hard questions: Why do we suffer? Does God cause our suffering? Is it our fault? That’s what he does in Is Your God Good? He and his wife, Neta, have authored over 120 books, including historical fiction about great Christian heroes, an exposé of a white supremacist murder, novels of racial healing, stories of Christian martyrs, and a memoir of LGBTQ inclusion. They write from their life in Christian community, peacemaking, and multicultural friendships.