Nothing is harder to take or comprehend than the death or suffering of the innocent.
Across the globe, the whole world shared in this sentiment beginning last Friday when, suddenly in the afternoon, images of incomprehensible destruction and loss of innocent life in Japan began appearing on afternoon television. It is this kind of event that, for many, proves or indicates strongly that a loving God, as Christians describe him, cannot exist.
The argument against God, because of what has been called the problem of pain and suffering, is probably the greatest and oldest of the arguments which conclude that a loving God intimately concerned with the welfare and fate of each and every human being cannot possibly exist. What the alternative to this very understandable view, grounded in real distress for the suffering of others, actually is is never quite spelled out. But it seems to be a simple acceptance of or resignation to the apparent fact that if there is no God then this is just the way life is. But for the person of faith in the God of Israel and of Jesus, a person who believes in a God who dies in agony on a Cross for love of us all, while the suffering of the innocent is so distressing the view that this is just the way life is is the most incomprehensible belief of all.
The simple truth is that there is no such thing as an easy answer to the question of death and pain, but most especially of the innocent. A part of the problem is that in our own thinking we perceive immediately that there is something fundamentally wrong, something that does not make sense at all about such events. But we are not accustomed to thinking deeply about such things as death and often spend a lot of our lives trying to run away from it in our thoughts and our actions.
Another part of the problem is that in modern life we have become powerfully conditioned by the pervasive but often moronic pitch of Hollywood that good always triumphs over evil. Actually, it doesn’t. For Christians, there is only one time when we know for certain that good will triumph decisively and there will be no more suffering. This will be the end of the world. Until then, while God is always in our midst, almost anything is possible.
Interestingly, this moment of triumph began, in a perfectly real sense, with another triumph over evil, real evil, which occurred when Jesus died on the Cross. Christ’s perfect sacrifice for us was the triumph which relegated death to a bothersome status it can never overcome and reunited us with God.
The truth is that there is nothing in the fine print of the Cross that says we can avoid our own crucifixion, our own suffering. And it is possible, perhaps likely, that our own individual paths to heaven are through our own viae dolorosae. But even saying this does not satisfy the questions about the suffering of others. People may accept that we have a philosophical explanation for our own cares and travails but to appear to write off the sufferings of others by the thousands with such explanations can look dismissive, dogmatic and cold.
The real problem, ultimately, is that death entered the world through man’s rejection of God’s love. The essential facts of what happened are recorded at the beginning of the Book of Genesis in the Bible. It is also passingly interesting that in a sense the Bible begins its history of salvation with all the unpleasant material. In this way, one can say that the Bible is setting out the real nature of the problem from the very beginning, rather than seeking to run away from it, as so many modern atheists so mistakenly assume, by seeking an easy answer to the problem of existence. But the great English journalist, satirist and documentary-maker, Malcolm Muggeridge, once wrote that while he could not tell which parts of the account of the tempting of Adam and Eve and their Fall were literally true (perhaps, he mused, it was a village, a city, or a nation and, if so, what was the apple?), the Genesis account remained the single most profound explanation he had ever seen anywhere for why we human beings are the way we are.
Muggeridge was referring more to sin and the capacity for humans to carry out great evil (he had, among other things, witnessed Stalin’s deliberate genocide of the Ukrainians while serving as The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent) but his point is also applicable to suffering.
Whatever it was that Adam and Eve did, however it was that they actually rejected God’s will, their action, jointly agreed and carried out together, had such catastrophic effects that not only sin but death entered the world. Nor was the effect limited to death. Rape, infanticide, cancer, the death of children, jealousy, famine, hatred, murder, sexual abuse, and the genocidal policies of the 20th century’s marxist and national socialist tyrants, to mention only a few, also did as well.
We human beings are often naive in our attitude to life. We think that this world in which we live is normality. We accept that death is normality as much as the winter flu. Actually, these things are abnormality. The effect of Adam and Eve’s rejection of God was so calamitous that it also impacted nature. A tsunami of death, a famine, an earthquake is not the way life is supposed to function at all. It is remarkable to reflect upon the fact that one single human decision had this effect on the world. Because we do not think of these things very often, our daily assumptions are suddenly, and rightly, shaken when we see the horror and scale of the loss of life in Japan – or Haiti, or Sudan; the horror of the children and the parents and the elderly crushed by the debris or swept out to sea. All these things are inexplicable and they are certainly unfathomable, because we cannot see the will of God. Here we may get at least one point right: He never wanted these things to happen at all. The horror of Japan is that, really, it was human sin that made the world the way it is. They probably didn’t realise that for their rejection of God’s love, all of us, as was seen so awfully in Japan, would one day have to pay.