Is God Present, Even in Suffering?

When I was a teenager and knew it all, I got bored with Sunday mornings. I already knew that Jesus died for our sins and rose on the third day. Why did we need to keep talking about it? In some ways, I believed in Jesus and the cross like I believed in George Washington crossing the Delaware River: both were real events that shaped history but had little impact on my day-to-day life.

God seemed far off to me then. My mental picture of God was not centered on Jesus but on a cultural image of an old man sitting on a throne somewhere in heaven, handing down rules and judgments in a voice that sounded suspiciously like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. God was an impossible-to-please father, and even forgiveness seemed to be given begrudgingly. My teenage faith, though real, carried too much Law and not nearly enough Gospel.

God Gets Involved

I was reminded of my younger self’s incomplete view of God while reading The Spirituality of the Cross by Gene Edward Veith, Jr. Partway through the book, the author addresses a common and difficult question: Why does a good and powerful God allow suffering and evil? Libraries of books have been written on this topic over the centuries, with few satisfactory conclusions.

Even now, as a more mature Christian, I’m sometimes tempted to default to what Veith describes as “the transcendent, detached God of Deism” (p. 114). This detached God looks down on us from heaven, doing little to help us.

But our God is not distant or detached. He is so hands on that He enters into our humanity, our suffering, our sin, experiencing the worst a fallen world can inflict on Him. When we look to Jesus as the manifestation of God, we see a God who gets involved.

Jesus Close Up

Jesus refers to his followers as family (Mark 3:34-35) and Himself as essential to our very lives. In John 6:35, Jesus says “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to Me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in Me shall never thirst.” We chew and swallow bread, and it nourishes our bodies. Bread is no good to us until it becomes part of us. Jesus and all that He has done must become a part of us.

Later in John, Jesus uses another image to describe Himself and His relationship to us:

^“I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in Me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

Here, Jesus and His disciples are not separate but part of the same plant. As branches, we draw our nourishment and life from the Vine, and if we are cut off then we dry up. We cannot live without Jesus.

Another part of this image is God the Father as the vinedresser, or the gardener of the vineyard (John 15:1). A gardener nurtures His plants, fertilizing and watering and pruning. Gardening is a hands-on, dig-in-the-dirt, sweaty activity. God does not shy away from the care and work it takes to help us grow in His grace. Both the gentleness of watering and the ruthlessness of pruning are necessary for our health and growth.

Are we so close to Jesus that we cannot tell where He ends and we begin? Do we depend on Jesus for our nourishment? Many times the distractions of life and my own selfish sin blind me to the closeness of Jesus. I need the Holy Spirit to remind me that Jesus is as connected to me as a vine is to its branch, and that God’s love for me is as active as a gardener caring for His garden.

Familiar with Suffering

I have a deep desire to understand life, to understand God, to be able to explain everything. But I often run into my own human limitations. There are parts of the Bible—and life—that I do not understand. And when suffering, sorrow, or the unfairness of life in a fallen world comes my way, no intellectual explanation—no matter how theologically correct—can reason away pain or grief.

Veith points out that Jesus neither allows evil and suffering nor does he do nothing about it:

“Rather, He takes it into Himself. ‘With His wounds we are healed,’ both of our sin and of our suffering, as the death of God Incarnate ushers us into an eternal life, in which sin and suffering are no more.” (p. 115)

Knowing that Jesus carried our sin to the cross and that our God loves us enough to become painfully familiar with our suffering means that we are never alone.

When I can’t explain away trouble or confusion, I can look to Jesus. I remember that He is not afraid to come close, to experience the pain of life, to suffer, to die, all out of love for me. Our hope rests in our hands-on God, who offers us eternal life in His nail-scarred hands.

In this life, I may never come to a fully satisfactory answer to why God allows suffering, but when I look to Jesus, I see that God’s response to human suffering is to join us in it and take it into Himself out of profound love for us.

Quotations in blog taken from The Spirituality of the Cross, 3rd edition © 2021. Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Scripture: ESV^®

Learn more about Christianity, Lutheranism, the teachings of the cross, and Christology in The Spirituality of the Cross.