Fundamental cause of our sufferings

Conservative Leader, Kemi Badenoch, has told the BBC how she lost her faith in God after reading about the abuse that Josef Fritzl inflicted on his daughter Elisabeth. He had kept her locked in a basement for 24 years and regularly raped her. Ms Badenoch said of Elisabeth, ‘She prayed every day to be rescued, and I thought, “I was praying for all sorts of stupid things . . . why were those prayers answered, and not this woman’s prayers?”’. As a result, her faith in God was extinguished ‘like someone blew out a candle’.

Does Christianity offer an explanation as to why some people are subjected to so much pain, heartache and suffering, whilst others seem to get by comparatively easily? No, but it does offer a different perspective and answers deeper questions.

Generally, our world-view is that this life is all that there is and we need to enjoy it as best as we can. We are tempted to feel short-changed when our felt needs and our hopes are frustrated. How much worse when real pain and suffering come to our door and enter in.

The perspective that God presents to us is of a different order, one outside our natural mindset. Nevertheless, for many of us it isn’t something that we are unfamiliar with – it’s what the Scriptures say (Genesis chapters 1-3).

‘Sin’, i.e. rebellion against God, entered the world. The creation that God originally made as ‘good’ is thereby broken. Critically, the people he originally made as ‘very good’ are also broken and the result is that we each know suffering and death.

God has not remained aloof nor is he powerless to rescue us from our predicament: He entered into our situation personally by becoming a man - the Son of God, Jesus. He knew rejection, sorrows, grief, betrayal, pain, suffering and death to a depth that no one else has. Why?

On our behalf, Jesus was paying the ultimate penalty for our inbuilt bias that steers us from God and all of the wrong thoughts, words and actions that flow out of this. God loves us so much: He gave Jesus his most precious Son so that whoever entrusts themselves to him will not be lost when this life ends but will have new and eternal life. God himself ‘will wipe every tear from their eyes’; no more death, mourning, crying or pain.

War and Peace and God

On 15 August 1945, following the dropping of two atomic bombs, the Japanese government announced its surrender to the Allied forces. The formal surrender was signed on 2nd September. Months earlier, Germany had signed its own unconditional surrender. Going back 27 years before, we often think of the end of the First World War as being on the 11 November 1918 but this was an armistice. Technically that war ended in June 1919, with the Treaty of Versailles, when the Allies dictated the terms. If Germany had not accepted these terms, there would likely have been a resumption of hostilities. Happily, with these surrenders came peace.

Now to another sort of peace. On TV dramas we sometimes come across a character that has faced the fact that they are terminally ill and say something like, ‘I’m ready; I’ve made my peace with God.’ I guess this must happen in real life too.

Just as Germany and Japan were in no position to dictate terms by which they could be at peace with the Allies, so it must be remembered that when we want peace with God it has to be on his terms and not ours. To speak of ourselves making peace with God does rather imply that we lay down our terms and expect that he will be glad to accept them and have us as his friends. We need to guard against such delusions.

The first Christian teachers sought to show how each one of us, by nature, are enemies of God. We don’t like the idea of doing the things that God requires if they don’t coincide with our own desires. To be candid, we are in rebellion.

Our war with God is one we’ll never win and, if we will surrender, we will actually find him to be a magnanimous, divine Heavenly Father, not a harsh overlord. So what are God’s peace terms?

Some Jews once asked Jesus, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’ Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’ On another occasion a non-Jew in desperate straits said, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ Jesus’ disciples told him, ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved…’. We also are told to lay down our weapons, believe and trust in Jesus and then we will know peace with God.  

Hopeless funerals

Do we each have souls, i.e. the real you which, since conception, will exist independently of a pumping heart and a functioning brain? Put another way, when we are buried 6 feet under the earth or incinerated at the local crematorium, is that the end?

I’ve attended a couple of humanist funerals where there is no singing of hymns, nor prayers said. The celebrant, who acts as compere, won’t mention God. For me, such funerals are soulless and quite literally hope-less.

And yet… when friends and family bravely step forward at a humanist funeral to share their carefully prepared tribute we may hear things like, ‘I bet Grandad’s looking down now and having a right chuckle with us as we share these memories’ or ‘Mum, I know that you’ll still be watching over us’. Do such expressed sentiments, spoken at a time of sadness, indicate an ingrained sense that we have souls?

Henry Scott Holland’s poem, ‘All Is Well’, is sometimes read at funerals. It includes these lines: ‘All is well, Death is nothing at all, I have only slipped into the next room... there is unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner.’

By what authority is this writer speaking? The words may meet an emotional need of the moment but do they speak truth? Do all the souls of the deceased exist in rest and peace and are they indeed awaiting us just over the way?

There are many voices which want to speak ‘peace, peace where there is no peace’. God calls such people false prophets. If there is more after we die, we need to be reckoning with it now. Is there an authoritative word someone can give us and if so, who is it?

It is Jesus, who is the embodiment of truth. Following his death, God raised him from the dead and so validated Jesus’ own identity and also his words of teaching and instruction. This means we’d do well to weigh up his words on matters like life and death, heaven and hell, peace and anguish, forgiveness and just punishment.

In summary, Jesus tells us to trust that he alone can forgive us when we turn to him; he is the way to a life with God for ever.