Last Sunday we noted several ways in which people over the centuries have tried to make sense of human suffering. They were: 1) Man gets what he deserves, 2) God is trying to teach us a lesson, 3) It was an appropriate time, and 4) God has a specific plan for each life. I want to add a couple of others. These points are discussed in When Bad Things Happen To Good People, Harold Kushner, 1981, 1-30.

The potter hits only the strongest pots. In an open market, the potter taps his pots to show that they are strong. But he knows the weakest ones and never taps them with his rod. Some believe that God chooses some people to suffer because he knew that they could endure it. He does not put such suffering on those who cannot bear it.

One sufferer and author wrote these personal words about the death of his wife. "(My wife) was the first of her immediate family to die. Perhaps she died first because she would not have been able to bear the death of others. Though this is speculation, it is certain that God knew I could (and her family could) bear the burden since he permitted it to happen, and God does not permit us to be tempted above our ability." (Gospel Advocate, "Divine Providence and Human Lives (II)," John Mark Hicks, 261.) He was saying, in effect, God only hits the strongest pots. But is this always true? What about those who break down mentally? Or commit suicide? Haven’t some people been crushed by grief?

A neighbor of ours in the Cayman Islands suffered a great tragedy. She lived in Cayman Brac during the 1930s when a terrible hurricane swept the island. There was only one high mountain with a cave near the top. People in the low-lying areas all gathered in the cave for protection. As the water surged, people were pulled out of the cave into the wild ocean currents. This survivor had to live with what she saw during that storm. She was emotionally wrecked by it. Were her problems her fault? Should we blame her? Get over it woman! God does not tempt you above, etc, etc.! Did God really do this?

Evil is not really evil. Others try to make sense of it all by saying that good will always come from bad things. Therefore, evil is not really evil at all. They liken it to a team of surgeons performing open-heart surgery. If someone walked in the OR who did not know what was going on, they might conclude that these men in their white robes were killing the man. Yet, we know that they were trying to save his life. Some view suffering that way. Bad things are not really bad things; they are good things in disguise. Tell the families of those who died in the World Trade Towers that. After the surgery, the man lives.

It is true that good things can come from tragedy and sorrow. Discipline is painful, but afterwards it works the peaceable fruit of righteousness. (Heb. 12:11.) But we should not confuse the cause and the effects. If we respond to suffering in the right way, good can come from it. This does not mean that the event is good. Neither does it mean that this is the reason for the suffering. Good things have come to us from the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. What the Jews and Romans did to him was cruel and sinful. Jesus did die so that we might live, but every incident of suffering is not on that level.

Last time I mentioned several books that have been written on suffering. Most of them came into being due to the personal suffering of the authors and his family. While all of these books are profitable to ready, there are some faulty explanations given as well. Here are a couple of examples:

Creation is not yet finished. Kushner asks, "But why cancer? Why blindness and diabetes and hypertension and kidney failures? Why mental retardation? Why do some people have faulty chromosomes? I have no satisfying answer to those questions. The best answer I know is the reminder that Man today is only the latest stage in a long, slow evolutionary process. . . As life evolved from the simpler to the more complex, we retained and inherited some of the weaknesses of those earlier forms." (Kushner, 66.)

Likewise, Gregory Knox Jones wrote, "The Bible begins with these words, ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’ Some take that to mean that there was a moment, in the distant past, when God created our world. Past tense. God created, and that is why it now exists. However, the Hebrew words cannot be translated that precisely. In fact, the words can also be translated, ‘When God began to create. . . ‘ This second translation carries with it the notion that God has not stopped creating but is continually creating." (Jones, 63.)

The Bible does not teach that creation is ongoing. Genesis reflects upon the creation in this fashion: "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them. And on the seventh day, God ended his work which he had made, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made." (Gen. 2:1-2.) "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God." (Heb. 11:3.) "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. . . For he spake and it was done. He commanded and it stood fast." (Psalm 33:6, 9.) There are many statements in the Bible about the creation and they all convey the idea that it happened in the past, in the beginning.

I believe that this is a faulty explanation for the suffering of man and for faulty genes. After each day of creation, the Bible records that God saw what he had made and said that it was good. On the last day, he said that it was very good.

God wills it or allows it. One position that some embrace strongly is that God has a purpose for everything that happens. He permits it and wills it. Any strong advocate for the sovereignty of God ends up saying that nothing happens without the permission of God. This causes many conflicts theologically. The most obvious is the tension between the free will of man and the sovereignty of God. "Free will" means that man can do some things that God does not will. Man can choose to accept the gift of God in redemption or reject it. An extreme view of the sovereignty of God denies that man is really free, that God has chosen some to salvation and others to condemnation. When that same extreme view is applied to suffering, the result is that man suffers because God has some purpose or reason for it. He wills it and causes it.

Brother Guy N. Woods wrote an excellent article titled, "God Takes The Rap." He wrote:

"A broken-hearted man, his body torn with uncontrollable grief, weeps before the bier of this beloved wife. Well-meaning, but pitifully misguided friends gather about him, and in an effort to soften the blow which has brought the world crashing down upon his shoulders inform him that his immeasurable loss is to be ascribed to the will of God. . .

"How Satan must grin with sardonic glee at such accusations leveled against the Judge of all the earth! How he must rejoice to hear the character of the great Jehovah slandered, his motives impeached, and his will thus prostituted by those who affect to be his friends! With what satisfaction must he contemplate the ever-increasing multitudes of infidels to which such reasoning inevitably leads! And how comfortable it is for the casual observer in such instances to blame God for what he cannot or will not explain in any other way.

"This disposition to let God bear the blame is a common one to humanity; and it finds expressions in many ways. Wars, famine, pestilence and death are regularly laid at his feet. When the heavens withhold rain and the earth becomes dust; when crops fail and cattle die, men read in the disaster traces of the will of God. The law of the land solemnly takes cognizance of the fact that some matters are to be attributed to ‘an act of God.’"

I do not believe that both moral and natural evil should be attributed to the will of God. Does not Satan do some things? Do not evil men by free choice do some things? Do not accidents happen? Is God to be credited (faulted) with everything that happens in this world? The Psalmist said that he looked unto the hills from whence comes his help. (Psalm 121:1.) One writer noted that the verse did not say that he looked to God from whence came his problems. Help comes from God.

John Claypool wrote Tracks of a fellow struggler, 1974, after the death of his eight-year old daughter, Laura Lue. In relating his experience to the church where he preached, he was careful to say that he did not know all the answers. But he allowed his audience and readers to think along with him toward some conclusion about innocent suffering.

He told the story of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis 22. God had commanded Abraham to offer his only son on an altar. Abraham passed the test of his trial because he trusted so implicitly in God. He believed that God would raise him from the dead if need be. He told the servant, The lad and I will go yonder and worship and we will come again to you. (22:5.) Claypool said, Lucky man that Abraham was. He was able to come down the mount with his son by his side. But how do we come down the mountain without our son or daughter by our side?

He offered three possibilities, denying the first two as viable options. They are: 1) We can come down the mount in silent resignation, or 2) We can try to come down with full intellectual understanding, or 3) We can come down in gratitude. Claypool wrote, "I need you to help me on down the way, and this is how: Do not counsel me not to question, and do not attempt to give any total answer. Neither one of those ways works for me. The greatest thing you can do is to remind me that life is a gift---every particle of it, and that the way to handle a gift is to be grateful." (page 83.) He also wrote, "Courage is worth ten times more than any answer that claims to be total. We cannot absolutize in such a way that either the darkness swallows up the light or the light the darkness." (page 78.) And "There is more honest faith in an act of questioning than in the act of silent submission, for implicit in the very asking is the faith that some light can be given." (page 74.)

Another reasonable conclusion comes from Gregory Knox Jones’ Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It. Though from a Calvinist’s tradition, he rejected the concept that "every drop of rain falls at the command of God." The title of the book comes from a rule decided upon for playing golf by some British businessmen in India. They had a difficult time with the monkeys around the golf course. They loved to run away with the golf balls. The owners tried to put high fences around the course; they tried capturing the monkeys and carrying them away. Nothing seemed to work. Finally, they decided to follow a new rule. Wherever the monkey dropped your golf ball, there you would put it in play. Sometimes, after a good drive the monkey would carry your ball and drop it in the rough. On another occasion they would move your ball from the rough and drop it near the green. Jones then applied this to life. Sometimes, things go well for us. We get some good breaks. On other days, nothing seems to go right. But wherever we find ourselves, whatever the circumstances of life, we must play the ball where the monkey drops it! We must live our lives by faith with whatever hand we have been dealt.

Thirdly, I believe that it is biblical to say that the world today is not the same world that was originally created. That is, the world before sin entered was a paradise, but now the whole creation is cursed by God. In the beginning, God made man upright, said the wise man Solomon. "Lo, this only have I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions." (Eccl. 7:29.) This is a very different view than thinking that the world is evolving into a better place. The fall of man is a great divide in considering our world. If you have a "small fall," then you have small consequences to that fall. If the fall is great, then the whole creation has been affected. Paul wrote, "The whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now. Not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body." (Romans 8:22-23.)

One author declared, "That is the Bible’s explanation of why creation is as it is, and it is the only adequate explanation. The earth, the creation, was cursed because of the sin of man. This is of vast importance. You do not understand the world in which you live if you do not grasp this, and if you do not believe it. We have never seen this world, this creation, as God made it." (Romans 8:17-39, D. M. Lloyd-Jones, 53.)

To argue that a better world could have been created is an exercise in vanity. God did make a better world in the beginning, and we are promised a better world after this life. However, man is not qualified to speak to God about how to make a world. God’s conversation with Job showed the inability of man to converse with God about how to make a world. If we tried to tamper with just one thing, we would get in over our heads! Suppose a man were to say that drowning in water is a bad thing---this danger should be removed from our world. How would you go about doing just that one thing? The same water that gives life to us can enter into our lungs and drown us. If we tried to remove water and substitute something else, we would affect so many things that we could not handle the situation. If we tried to make ourselves so that we would not drown, we could not do it. Making just one change affects so many other things. Man who wants to talk to God about how to make a world does not know whereof he speaks.

Let us allow God to be God, and let us just be humans. It works much better when we trust God and obey Him. Some have argued that this world with both blessings and trials is the perfect world for man to grow spiritually. Some call the world "the vale for soul-making;" that is, the soul of man is challenged and matured best in this present world.