On Human Suffering and the Will of God

I do not wish to be perceived as glib or disconnected from the experience of suffering. I, like most, have had my share of it, perhaps even somewhat more, as a fool generally collects more of it.

I repent the fool gladly, as there are now new pains in my age which haunt me from my youthful foolishness. There are some whose sufferings have been so intense however, as to wilt any hope I should have of facing. I like all, wish for no pain in life.

But as is so often the case in life, suffering emerges against the backdrop of God’s will. Why does God allow suffering? Especially as a loved one or even an innocent child may have to endure its imposition, it is a natural question of the mind; why did this happen? Why, when God is all powerful ‘why’ wouldn’t he make it go away?

I believe there is a big part of this question answered in the last chapter of Revelation. Here, the answer is that suffering will end, and end permanently soon. This is comforting, but perhaps it does not fully eliminate the question as to ‘why’.

I too have heard the usual arguments, some with which I agree, and some with which I fervently disagree, on qualified grounds. I do not believe that we can, nor should we, assign the cliché pat answer to the suffering in our midst, that, “It is the will of God.” This imperious remark seems too willing to place God into a sphere of arbitrary elitism. Though we have no say as to God’s right to be imperial, arbitrary or elite, it is His manifest will however, to share His power of will with us. Albeit far smaller in scale, we call this ‘the power of choice’.

The will is an inscrutable thing. Prisoners are punished by having personal will minimized by a compelled order. Children will have tantrums when it is denied. Love will not blossom without its exercise and our ability to learn and develop character and personality are integral to its use. One need only introduce the hypothetical, of a world wherein all unpleasantness and discomfort would be reversed by a miracle of God, to see one result.

One obvious danger is that the endless perseveration of Divine intervention to prevent suffering, would create the illusion that cause and effect were ultimately charmed somehow. People would eventually be jumping off of cliffs for the mere thrill of falling. Virtually any impulse would encounter a positive end no matter what the intention.

Perhaps something of learning is necessary in this plane of physical existence, for which the determinism of cause and effect puts natural limits on bad behavior and bad ideas. Conversely, this also allows for the exhibition of good effects from deliberate acts which spring from virtue.

The human will must be allowed to exercise itself as a process of self discovery and as development unfolds, however we know also from the record, that God’s will is not excluded from the exercise of miraculous intervention, especially as it reveals his nature as a just and merciful participant in our lives.

Miracles therefore, come mainly as exceptions in our affairs. Every time a miracle unties one of our predicated sufferings, the set of cause and effect must not lose its predominance, for without it, free will may not be accorded relevant information from the same.

Physics seem to be affected as well, when intention is taken into account. For every paradox in nature, a new consequence emerges as reality. There is a classic experiment in quantum physics, which was originally designed to prove one way or the other, on the singular corpuscular nature of light versus its observed counterpart as a dynamic wave entity. In this experiment, single photons can be observed as a wave function if two paths are allowed as possibilities, but if one path is closed, its singular corpuscular nature is observed and not its wave nature. Simply put, the outcomes from this experiment illustrate how we can influence the results on even the most quantum level of temporal reality with our imposition of choice.

The will, of which choice is a manifestation of our personal intelligence, is integral to who we are, and in this essential regard tangled into the issue of our suffering, almost as if we have somehow chosen to endure it on some level. Our God-given nature, the nature to choose, to exercise our will, produces not only a chain of events from cause and effect but an implicit chain of potentialities which interact with others.

We know from history that it repeats itself when conditions are repeated. We can even foretell our own futures based on the trends we have learned from history. If personal experience were to be our only teacher in life we should all die with only retarded ambitions or perhaps worse, we should all simply die very young. We die young enough.

Moses’ farewell address to Israel, before his death, punctuates the entire purpose of his long recitation of the law “. . . they are not just idle words for you – they are your life . . .” (Deuteronomy 32:44) The meaning here, is not that God will kill you if you disobey, but that the law is the condensation of successful human behaviors. To disregard the laws of human behavior ‘would’ result in death. “The Sabbath (law principle) was made for man and not man for the Sabbath” (Jesus).

So, in essence, I believe there is ample evidence that the Bible is largely provided as a condensation of vital human experience, of which we should take note, so as not to retard our progress with only the limited experiments afforded by our short lives, with only our direct results from cause and effect. We have in the Bible a vast repository of true history, millennia of human behaviors which we may absorb to our benefit.

We live in a vastly complicated biochemical organism. Risks continually abound all around us. We cannot eliminate all risks to our existence. A cosmic ray may collide with a cellular nucleus and scramble our DNA. Cancer may be the end effect from this random cause. A good person may indeed suffer thereby. A malevolent sociopath wrapped in hatred may be conscripted by men of like creed thousands of miles away to commit mass murder in the name of his demented god. Towers have burned and fallen; thousands have died needlessly and most, no doubt, were innocent good people.

We live on this earth for a season. Jesus partook in the suffering of man in a deliberate exhibition of solidarity with us and this is also integral to our ultimate salvation. He lives and in this fact, we may live as well. He suffered with us. Why wouldn’t he also redeem us? Redemption from happiness is nonsense. Redemption from suffering has a vastly different weight of meaning.

But he left us a path of righteousness which we should follow if we are to be truly free from the evil effects of our own poor behavior. Our own minds will also exact a toll on our happiness if we do not conform to His principled life. Jesus was a happy Man/God. He spread happiness with his mere presence. He attracted children. People would follow Jesus for long distances without food or drink just to hear him speak. From the narrative in the gospels, He appears to have healed almost endlessly, a procession of invalids and lepers. And he forgave. The prescription for producing a state of happiness seems to have littered his every step in this life.

Our faith is the “substance of things not seen”, not the ‘substance of things never seen’. The Bible exists as a Divine attempt to arrest human attention from chaos and attract it to purpose. Faith is purpose exercised and we can believe in God's Divine purpose.

And the purpose is: Ultimate happiness and freedom from suffering. Eternity would be too cruel without it.

But while we are here you have my loving prayers.

Milton