If God blesses us through hard times, why doesn't he just stop people from suffering altogether?It's a fantastic question, one which theologians have struggled to answer since the beginning of forever. If you ask most people today you're probably going to get some kind of unsatisfactory lecture on "free will" which will imply that suffering is all about your choices and not God's fault at all. We know this isn't true for a couple of reasons. First, people often suffer well beyond anything they've chosen. We don't live in a world where only good things happen to the nicest people and all the bad things happen to selfish jerks. Some of the most innocent among us suffer the most. Second, God just standing by while we exercise our "free will" puts us in charge of everything instead of him. That's never a good idea. God doesn't follow our will, we follow his.
It's always dangerous to try and guess the mind of God, but my hunch is the answer to your question has less to do with punishment, justice, and will of any sort and more to do with love.
Go back way to the beginning of time. When Adam and Eve bit the fruit they ruined all creation. The world was imperfect. They were imperfect. You can tell this by all the things that came into existence the moment the deed was done: shame, blame, accusations, toil and thorns, pain and power struggles...all that yucky stuff you read about in Genesis 3. These things were well outside God's perfect design for his creation. The world was broken.
At that point God had a choice. He could have the perfect creation he had originally intended but he'd have to start over again to make it happen...or at least make it happen right then. In essence he would have had to crumple up this world and make a new one, complete with new plants, new sky, new animals, and a new Adam and Eve (perhaps Benny and Felicia this time). The new world would have been perfect but it would have been without the old Adam and Eve. They'd have been destroyed along with everything else in the re-start.
Despite how easy re-creating the world would have been for God--just a few words required--he didn't do it. Why? There's only one possible answer. He loved Adam and Eve too much to lose them. They weren't perfect anymore. The world wasn't perfect anymore. But he loved them anyway. So God decided to live with their mistake, to fix it in his own way over time, no matter how much pain he and we would have to endure in the meantime. Faced with a choice between perfection and us, he chose us.
If you could go back and interview God it might sound like this:
You: God, you can have a spotless, shiny world right now. It's right there for the creating.
God: Will [insert your name here] be in it?
You: Well, no. You'd have to wipe away all the descendants of Adam and Eve and the sin they bear.
God: Then I don't want it.
You: But God, you can have new people! Better people! People who don't make mistakes!
God: Don't want it.
You : But these people are going to keep messing up. This is going to cost lifetimes of suffering. You'll watch them struggle generation after generation, feel their pain, see them make horrible mistakes and hurt each other badly and undergo pain and hardship. They're not going to understand you. Sometimes when they suffer they're going to get angry at you, question you, hate you. They're even going to kill your own Son when you send him to help!
God: But I still get to keep them and call them my own, right? I still get to love them and be their father?
You: I guess.
God: Deal.
Now THAT is love, right? And when God made that decision to keep us he also made the decision to keep everything that we bring, good and bad. That means he chose to endure suffering himself and to walk alongside us when we endure suffering no matter how painful it got. In essence he chose to bless us during suffering instead of getting rid of it...and us.
Of course God doesn't let suffering have the final word. The end of all suffering is death. God sent his Son so that even the road to death would lead us back to him...to heaven. In heaven there will be no more suffering or tears. Things will be perfect again. So God does do what we ask...he does put an end to suffering. It's just in a little more roundabout way than we envision...a way that lets us live instead of wiping us away.
So you see, in an odd way the fact that God doesn't just eliminate our suffering shows that he is still keeping that promise, making that decision for us instead of against us. It's weird, but even suffering becomes a sign that he still loves us. He won't destroy us in order to make the world perfect. Instead he'll wait and walk with us until we've lived our lives--until however many generations are coming after us have lived their lives--and then he'll show us the true fulfillment of that promise by giving us his perfection at the end of our imperfect road.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
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