Light on the Dark Passages of Scripture by Mark Giszczak

Author:Mark Giszczak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor
Published: 2015-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Innocent Suffering

“Why, God?”

That’s a question we like to ask when things go wrong, especially when they go way wrong. If, apparently for no reason, something bad happens to us or to someone we love, we feel deep inside that it is not fair. Bad things shouldn’t happen to good people. Innocent people shouldn’t suffer. The question arises in millions of gut-wrenching scenarios: It’s not fair that some people are born into the lap of luxury, while others are born in the slums of Haiti. It is not fair that many children die of terminal illnesses, while many others develop into healthy adults. Hurricanes and tornadoes strike randomly, unfairly. There is no logic, no reasoning, no explanation that will make the pain of these situations go away. When someone dies in an accident or a terrorist attack or from a disease, we can’t ignore the pain, the loss, the sorrow of it.

The pain of suffering has prompted many people to shake their fists at God, to shout at him, to complain that in his all-powerful might he did nothing to stop the evil from coming, did nothing to fix it once it came. The Bible gives us an example of this kind of pain in the Book of Job. Job is “blameless and upright” (Jb 1:1), but God allows him to suffer terrible loss. His children die in a storm. His servants are killed. His wealth is plundered. His body is covered with sores. In his plight, his wife advises him, “Curse God and die” (Jb 2:9), but Job remains stubbornly faithful to the Lord. In the midst of his suffering, he seeks an answer to the problem.

God’s Power and Goodness

The problem of suffering boils down to a showdown between God’s goodness and his power. If God were good but not all-powerful, we wouldn’t be too bothered. He would just be smaller than the evil in the world, but that would be evil in itself—to have an evil force bigger than God. If God were all-powerful, but not all-good, then he would sometimes use his power to do arbitrary or evil things, which would be bad. So if God is both all-good and all-powerful, we have a problem. It seems as if he should put a stop to any and every evil, injustice, and innocent suffering right now. But we know that many injustices persist, many innocent people die, many bad things happen to good people. What are we to make of this inexplicable reality?

So if God is both all-good and all-powerful, we have a problem. It seems as if he should put a stop to any and every evil, injustice, and innocent suffering right now.

Some suffering is caused by people. Wars, terrorism, human-caused accidents, and crimes can be explained as human problems, the results of human evil or human error. Bad people do bad things, and sometimes good people suffer as a result. We can lay our petition of complaint at the feet of human beings who are directly responsible.

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