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 The creation that God originally made as ‘good’ is thereby broken. Critically, the people he originally made as ‘very good’ are also broken and the result is that we each know suffering and death.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