Chapter 2: Why Is There Pain?

IN THIS CHAPTER, you will discover:

• The positive benefits of emotional pain.
• Scriptural explanations of the problem of suffering.
• The world as a "vale of soul-making."

AS A RESULT, you will be able to:

• Grow through accepting legitimate suffering.
• Avoid superficial solutions to the problem of suffering.
• Experience God's loving sovereignty in the midst of suffering.
   

Reading: Where Is God When It Hurts? (WGWH), pp. 47-58.
Key Scripture: "I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances" (Phil. 4:11).
Key Words: Legitimate Suffering.
In the last chapter, we noted the difference between pain and suffering. This distinction was illustrated poignantly in the lives of the lepers, Jose and Lou (WGWH, pp. 40-44). Jose harbored a profound fear that he might be considered a "freak" and lose his job. Rather than be seen as unstylish or abnormal, he allowed leprosy to destroy his toes, leaving his feet mere rounded stumps. Lou chose to ignore the infection that would cost him his thumb rather than give up the musical instrument that served as his last connection to the outside world. Though Jose and Lou felt no physical pain, they suffered intensely. Indeed, their emotional suffering was so severe that it outweighed their fear of physical mutilation.
For most of us, emotional suffering causes far more misery than physical pain. Lingering grief, chronic depression, marriage difficulties, frustration over finances, loneliness, anxiety about the future, anger, bitterness, lack of self-esteem, guilt?these types of emotional pain can sap our vital strength. They destroy our inner joy, our capacity for kindness, and our faith in God.
How should we deal with emotional pain? We must realize that emotional pain, like physical pain, is a signal calling us to pay attention. Emotional pain, an apparent enemy, reveals our need for healing and growth. If we approach emotional pain according to our model of pain as a directional signal, we should first follow the arrow pointing backward and examine the cause of the pain. We should then follow the arrow forward, asking ourselves what response is appropriate.
Philip Yancey illustrates how this strategy can be used to heal marital problems stemming from miscommunication. You should first allow your emotional pain to force you to seek out the cause of your miscommunication. What attitudes or behavior need to be changed? Next, consider appropriate responses. Discuss possible solutions to your problems with your spouse, and, if needed, a third party. By "befriending" your emotional pain, the bitterness associated with miscommunication can bring about reconciliation. It is the same with other forms of emotional suffering. Loneliness can teach us geniality, guilt can lead us to repentance, anger can teach us patience, and fear can teach us courage.
In his best-seller The Road Less Traveled (Used by permission of TouchTone, a Division of Simon & Schuster, 1978), Dr. M. Scott Peck explained that the ability to listen to and learn from our emotional suffering is the single most important key to mental health and spiritual growth. He observed: "When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us" (p. 17). Neurosis, the attempt to insulate ourselves from suffering by constructing elaborate fantasies as buffers against reality, is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
Attempts to avoid legitimate suffering always create greater suffering. Yet we regularly resist recognizing any form of suffering as "legitimate." Thielicke's criticism of the "inadequate view of suffering" among Americans is, in part, an indictment of our collective escapist attitude toward suffering. Our legitimate guilt is routinely exorcised by psychoanalysts. Our consciences are routinely anesthetized by relentless consumerism and overindulgence in food, television, alcohol, and drugs. Sadly, in nullifying the capacity to feel pain, we forfeit the ability to know the profoundest satisfactions of life.
By accepting legitimate suffering, we learn the life skills?traditionally known as virtues?that make us strong and serve as the basis for lasting emotional security and happiness. Patience, self-discipline, integrity, dignity, sacrificial love, and humility are but a few of these.
In the end, it is faith alone that upholds us in the face of life's inevitable disappointments. We must all face the emotional suffering that springs from our individual limitations. Some are born plain, some beautiful; some are born brilliant, some dull; some are rich, some poor; some are athletic, some handicapped. We are, to different degrees, naturally charming, shy, talented, and articulate. And we must all face sickness, grief, aging, guilt, regret, and death.
To respond to these conditions with envy, bitterness, or anger is a fruitless and therefore illegitimate form of emotional suffering. God made us the way we are, with the heredity, bodies, and talents we have. We cannot change these "raw materials." But we can create something beautiful with them if we humbly allow God to work through us. As Philip Yancey says, we must learn to see life "not as a problem to be solved, but as a work to be made." When we accept ourselves for what we are, we will be enabled by God to discover and deepen the unique beauty and capacity for joy He has given each of us.
Key Concepts:
1. According to Dr. M. Scott Peck, neurosis is always the result of the attempt to avoid ______________________________suffering. [See above]
2. We should learn to see life as (a problem to be solved, a work to be made). [See above]
3. _____________________is an essential component of life's most satisfying experiences. [47]
4. "When you have no experience of pain, it is rather hard to experience ________________." [48]
5. _____ True or False. A long period of struggle and effort precedes nearly all worthwhile human accomplishments. [54]
6. Jesus used the analogy of ______________________to illustrate the inseparability of joy and pain. [54]
7. ______________is a pain message to the conscience, informing it that something is wrong and should be dealt with. [55]
8. Those who lead lives of sacrificial _____________ learn about the deepest level of both pleasure and pain. [58]
Points to Ponder:

Consider ways that our culture shields us from physical and emotional pain (WGWH, pp. 47-50). For example, we are desensitized to the pain of others through constant exposure to graphic violence in the entertainment media. Can you think of other ways that we lose the capacity to accept "legitimate suffering"? How has this trend affected you personally? How has it affected your children? What can you do to reverse this process?
Remember and share times in your life when you experienced emotional and spiritual growth. Did some of those times include pain? Do you agree with Dr. Brand's "graph" analogy (WGWH, pp. 50-51)?
Think of types of emotional pain?such as guilt, fear, or loneliness?that you have "befriended" in your life. What kind of growth occurred as a result? What are your present sources of emotional pain? What are their causes? Can you think of responses that will allow you to face these challenges and experience growth?
Have you known anyone who would fit into Yancey's categories of "stars" and "servants"? Did your impression of these people parallel his conclusions? How could you become more of a "servant" and less of a "star"?
Life Application: Raised in a dysfunctional family by an abusive, alcoholic father, David Meese developed the usual coping mechanisms of children of alcoholics. But his cynicism, his detachment, and his perfectionism were merely masks hiding the anger that he felt for his father. Only after acknowledging this anger as sin could David gain the humility to forgive his father and be healed himself. Are you holding on to some hidden resentment?perhaps caused by a family member?and failing to acknowledge it as sin?

Reading: Where Is God When It Hurts? (WGWH), pp. 75-85.
Key Scripture: "I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things" (Isa. 45:7).
In this lesson we begin to address the fundamental question, Why is there suffering? We have seen how the body's pain network serves a positive role in maintaining health, and how emotional pain serves to spur us toward spiritual growth and maturity. Still, the larger question of suffering remains unanswered. We are perplexed when faced with cases of specific suffering. Why does this child have a birth defect? Why did this school bus crash? The cause of general or indiscriminate suffering also remains a mystery. Are tornadoes, floods, and senseless accidents indeed "acts of God" as insurance companies claim? And if God is responsible for these events, what?if anything?is He trying to tell us through them?
Recall the variety of theories Claudia Claxton's Christian friends set forth about the causes of her suffering. If you pondered these theories, you probably recognized that many of them were at least partly defensible on scriptural grounds. The warnings of the prophets throughout the Old Testament to "repent or else" clearly indicate that God sometimes inflicts suffering as punishment for sin. However, alternate explanations for suffering are also given in Scripture. Jesus identified Satan as the cause of a woman's deformity (Luke 13:10-16). The book of Job portrays Satan as God's tool in inflicting suffering (1:6-2:10; cf. 2 Cor. 12:7-10). Many proverbs explain suffering as the natural result of foolish conduct (e.g.; Prov. 19:15). Finally, Jesus answered inquiries about the cause of a tragic accident and the cause of a man's congenital blindness by saying that neither were punishments for sin (Luke 13:1-5; John 9:1-5). What, then, is the "biblical" explanation for suffering?
Because the answer to this question is an elusive one, some have declared that it is not to be found at all. They conclude simply that God is not loving, that He is indifferent to our pain, or worse, that He is a cosmic sadist. Some contemporary theologians speculate that God is loving, but not all-powerful. The universe is, in some sense, "out of control," and God is powerless to prevent suffering and evil. Others conclude that God simply doesn't exist.
The logic behind such thinking can be outlined like this:
1 .God and evil are contradictory realities.
2. Contradictory realities cannot exist simultaneously.
3. Evil exists.
4. Therefore God does not exist (or is not all-good or all-powerful).
The flaw in this argument lies in Step 1.The statement "God and evil are contradictory realities" excludes the possibility that evil serves some positive purpose in God's overall design. Logically, if (1) God is all-good and (2) evil exists, then it follows that (3) the present existence of evil and suffering will somehow work to maximize God's glory and humanity's happiness in the long run. We will explore this idea further when we discuss whether ours is the "best of all possible worlds." But before we do, several points should be fixed firmly in mind.
As we have seen, there is no neat and simple scriptural formula to explain suffering. Thus, we should resist the temptation to prescribe one to those who are suffering. At times God punishes us; at times God allows us to suffer; and at other times He delivers us from suffering. Why? If anyone deserved an explanation, it was surely Job. Yet even Job could not be given an answer he was capable of understanding. Instead, God pointed to the wonders of His creation, to the infinite heights and the mysterious depths of nature?much of which is incomprehensible and alien to human understanding. It was as if God said, "Can you understand the God of the starfish, of the dolphin's song, of the vastness of interstellar space? Then how can you expect to understand the architecture of My logic or the higher purposes of My ways?"
Perhaps this is why scriptural advice concerning suffering moves quickly from the question of cause to the question of response. We cannot easily or fully understand the answer to the "Why?" of suffering. But whenever we suffer, we are inevitably faced with an unavoidable decision. We can decide to trust God or to turn against Him. Job's choice?"Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him" (13:15) ?brought him great blessings. When we, like Job, choose to trust God unconditionally, God lets us see deeper into His mystery and experience more of His glory.
Key Concepts:
1. _____ True or False. The Old Testament portrays God inflicting suffering as punishment for wrong behavior. [79]
2. To be effective, _________________ requires a clear tie to behavior. [81]
3. _____ True or False. The Bible contains stories of people who suffered but were not being punished by God. [81-82]
4. _____ True or False. Whenever we suffer, God is trying to tell us something specific. [84]
5. The question ("Why?", "To what end?") is the Bible's approach to the problem of pain and emphasizes response rather than cause. [84-85]
6. _____ True or False. In every case suffering offers us an opportunity to display God's work. [85]
Points to Ponder:
A. Read the discussion of the Detroit plane crash in WGWH, p. 269-270. Which of the five positions regarding God's causal involvement with the crash do you agree with? Can you reconcile these choices with your view of God's sovereignty? With your view of His goodness? With your view of death?


B. Read the statements about tornadoes and earthquakes in WGWH, No.2, p. 270. Do you think God protects believers from natural disasters more than He protects nonbelievers?


C. Read the following passages: Luke 13:1-5, 10-16; John 9:1-3; 1 Corinthians 11:29-30; Acts 5: 1-11; 2 Corinthians 12:7-10. Who is causing the suffering in each case? How does each Scripture confirm or refute the theories put forth by Claudia Claxton's friends?


D. Since death is a certainty for us all, what was Jesus getting at when He said, "Unless you repent, you too will all perish" (Luke 13:3)? Do John 8:24 and 11:26 shed any light on this matter? How would you characterize the "general" message of suffering (WGWH, p. 84)?


Life Application: Despite the crippling emotional pain following her divorce, Carol Le Mon gained the confidence to trust God as she overheard her three-year-old son singing "Jesus loves me. ? We are weak but He is strong." Through Jesus' strength, Carol was able to forgive her ex-husband and release her bitterness. Forgiveness is one of the most godlike acts humanly possible. Perhaps for that reason God often calls us to respond with forgiveness to the emotional suffering caused by others. Is there suffering in your life right now that God wishes you to overcome through forgiveness?


 

Reading: Where Is God When It Hurts? (WGWH), pp. 87-100.
Key Scripture: " 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned,' said Jesus, 'but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life' " (John 9:3).
When something painful happens to us, we instinctively ask, "God, why did You do this to me?" But if we examine occasions in the Bible when God inflicted pain as punishment, we see that punishment is invariably preceded by warning. The Old Testament prophets spent much of their time warning Israel to repent of some form of disobedience or else face divine retribution. At the very institution of the Mosaic covenant, the blessings that would accompany obedience (Lev. 26: 1-13) and the curses that would accompany disobedience (vv. 14-39) were clearly spelled out.
It is important to remember that God's purpose in inflicting punishment is always redemptive (Lev. 26:40-45; Heb. 12:5-8). The prophets announced God's coming judgment far in advance so that His people would have the opportunity to repent. Every parent knows that punishment is ineffective unless it is connected to the offense in the child's mind. Yet Christians routinely assume that random misfortune, tragic accidents, or disease are punishments directed at them or others by God because of sin. Job's accusers relentlessly leveled this charge against him. But Job had received no prophetic warning and no specific inner conviction of sin. He rejected their argument. At the conclusion of the book of Job, God Himself vindicates Job and angrily informs Job's accusers, "You have not spoken of me what is right" (Job 42:8).
Two important lessons are apparent here. First, we must be careful not to imitate the error of Job's accusers when we observe pain and suffering in the lives of those around us. Second, unless God reveals otherwise, it is also unwise to interpret suffering in our own lives as punishment by God.
Job's friends maintained: "Common sense and all reason tell us that a just God will treat people fairly. Those who obey and remain faithful, he rewards. Those who sin, he punishes" (WGWH, p. 88). But such "common sense" and "reason" do not see deeply enough. No one deserved to suffer less than Job, yet few have suffered more. Quite simply, neither God nor this world appears to be "fair" in the conventional sense. Christians can neither assume that all suffering is punishment for sin nor that righteousness and faith excuse us from all suffering.
God's "explanation" to Job for His apparent unfairness was that conventional human judgment?which is ultimately earthbound, time-bound, and situation-bound?is incapable of grasping God's higher purpose in permitting suffering. To have any hope of understanding why God allows suffering, we must begin to think of human existence as a process through which God is working to achieve some definitive goal. We must stop looking backward and asking, "Why is there suffering?"; instead we must look forward and ask, "What end does suffering serve?"
One excellent way to deepen our insight into this question is to read carefully John Hick's description of a "perfectly fair" world in WGWH, pp. 93-94 (from Philosophy of Religion, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice- Hall Publishers, copyright @ 1963; Chapter 3). In the world Hick describes, irregularities in the laws of physics act in a magical fashion to avert harmful accidents and to compensate for human violence and immorality. But such a world would allow no causal consistency, no science, no basis for establishing objective truth. It would be a world without any need for?and thus empty of?courage, generosity, kindness, or love.
Since Jesus preached that the human heart was the true arena of moral action (Matt. 5:21-22; 27-28), we can even improve on Hick's scenario. We can imagine a world where not only the external effects of violence or evil are negated, but even the intent to commit such acts is automatically neutralized. In such a world, there would be no free will and no freely given love.
We can all agree that Hick's "perfectly fair" world would be, in many ways, the "worst of all possible worlds." Its inhabitants would be soulless, loveless phantoms devoid of character. What type of world would be conducive to fostering freedom, dignity, and love? Surprisingly, the answer is a world much like our own?one that is concrete, dangerous, and full of real rewards and challenges. The poet Keats revealed something essential about the providential nature of suffering when he called our world a "vale of soul-making" (WGWH, p. 94) .For only through temptation is lust overcome. Only through acceptance is sorrow transcended. Only by learning the "art of dying" can we discover the secret of life (Matt. 16:25).
Above all, God wants us to learn to love Him freely. For this to be a possibility, He must refuse to "bribe" us with His blessings, so that our love may be authentic and unconditional. For the sake of our own eternal blessedness, God made our world a "cancer of evil in the universe?for a time" (WGWH, p. 90). While, as C. S. Lewis said, "it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny," we must not limit God in this way. For by doing so, we are "wishing not for more love but for less" (The Problem of Pain, Harper/Collins Publishers, copyright by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1940, p. 42).
Key Concepts:

The Bible shows that when God inflicted pain as punishment, it was invariably preceded by __________________. [See above]
_____ True or False. Unless God reveals otherwise, it is unwise to interpret suffering as a punishment by God. [See above]
The Bible's most exhausting treatment of suffering appears in the book of ________________. [87]
Job's (friends, wife) argued that no one suffers without cause. [88]
_____ True or False. God wants us to choose to love Him freely, even when that choice involves pain. [91]
_____ True or False. God ranks life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the highest values. [95]
_____ True or False. Church history has grievously shown the consequences of attributing all suffering to God's punishment. [96]
_____ True or False. The best response to generalized forms of suffering such as AIDS, polio, or cancer is resigned fatalism, since they are God's will. [97]
The mortality rate for Christians and non-Christians is _____________ percent. [99]
The argument that becoming a Christian will guarantee health and prosperity was effectively set forth by __________________ in the book of Job. [99]
Points to Ponder:
A. AIDS is a modern plague that some people see as a punishment from God. What do you think? Is it a general message? A specific message? Not a message from God at all?


B. Why does God place such a high value on freely given love? Does being a parent allow you any insight into this question? Are we really able to love the "Giver" apart from His "gifts"? Do you experience this kind of unconditional love in human relationships?


C. Discuss John Hick's scenario of a painless world (WGWH, pp. 93-94). Do you think he has stated his case too strongly? How do you think heaven would differ from such a world? Do you agree that our world is well-designed for the purpose of "soul-making"? What do you think is "made" in the process of "soul-making"?


D. Sometimes God will respond to our cry of pain with a physical healing. At other times, such as in the case of Joni Eareckson Tada or Paul (2 Cor. 12:8-10), God brings about a different kind of healing. Do you believe that one type of healing is better than another? Do you think both "display the work of God" in an equal way? The chapter mentions "two great errors" that the church may fall into. Which is the greater danger in your spiritual community?



E. What do you think of J. I. Packer's concept of death (WGWH, p. 100-101)? How do you respond to his concluding statement? What is the "art of dying"? Is this an art we learn only at death, or one we learn in day-to-day living?
 

Life Application: Have you tormented yourself unnecessarily by interpreting some general form of suffering as a specific punishment for sin? Cease doing so. Is God presently warning you to give up some sin or face punishment? Repent now. Are you suffering punishment from God as a result of disobeying such a warning? Know that God can redeem your suffering and renew you, even in the midst of your pain, if you repent and allow Him to work in you.