For many years, my wife and I sponsored a needy child through the work of World Vision. Four times a year their magazine came in the mail. It was filled with stories of how children throughout the world were being helped by World Vision. But from time to time there are also heart-rending stories of the plight of millions more who needed help. Some people attribute evil to God, and claim that since he is supposed to be the author of all things that he should be blamed for diseases and poverty. I have a local correspondent who sent me a poem by Philip Appleman to bolster his argument for atheism. It included this stanza:

I think that no one ever made

a poem as powerful as AIDS,

or plagues that may in summer kill

half the bishops in Brazil

and share the good Lord’s Final Answer

with clots and cholera and cancer –

for God concocted pox to mock us,

staph and syph and streptococcus:

poems are made by bards or hacks,

but only God makes cardiacs.

Doubt rears its head in my life when I start entertaining difficult questions about the world. When I learn about primitive and poverty-stricken human beings, I ask myself how they can ever find life in all its fullness? I read about people with little hope, who live on the margins of life, like the huddled masses in Bangladesh, or the refugees in various countries of the world, and I ask what purpose God has for their lives? I see children who are crippled by land mines, or abused by parents, and I ask how God can be real and loving in the face of such evil? I see people who are mentally ill, or handicapped in other ways, and ask questions about how they can experience peace and joy in their apparent vacancy, watching television all day, doped up and chain smoking? I look at my own life and wonder how a person like myself, who has never intentionally missed a meal, who has had the opportunity of education and travel, and never been unemployed, should be privileged and others deprived? I look up into the sky and realize that the universe goes on for billions of light years, and wonder how my life, or that of anyone on this planet can be significant? Are we just numbers, I wonder? How do we make sense of life?

What questions do you have? All of us have difficult questions that affect our ability to have faith, and give us reasons to doubt. Some of you might have questions about loved ones dying. When wars occur, and accidents happen, and tragedy strikes, we ask, “Why?” If there is a God in heaven how can these things happen? Where can we go with our questions?

I go to the book of Job. You know the story. Job loses his children, his livestock, and his health. He is destitute and depressingly sick. His friends come to comfort him but end up making him feel worse. Eliphaz accused Job of unacknowledged sin. Bildad said that he needed to repent and God would restore him. Zophar chimed in with similar advice. Their answers to the questions I raised would have been that it was God’s will that other people suffer.

Job refused to accept his friends’ shopworn belief that calamity had struck him because of his sin. I refuse to believe that people suffer and die because it is God’s will, or because God wanted them in heaven, or that they are going to hell anyway. I want more of an answer than that. Just because I am a believer doesn’t mean that I settle for simplistic explanations of life’s problems. I struggle every day with the tragedies that I see on the television screen and in the newspapers. I have questions to which I have no answers as yet. I can identify with Job when he cried out to God, “Oh, that I had someone to hear me! … let the Almighty answer me.” (Job 31:35)

Job asked a lot of questions and he got his answers in the form of more questions which the Lord asked him (Job 38-41). “I will question you and you will answer me.” (Job 38:3) In essence God said to him, “You cannot understand because you are not who I am. You have not existed as I have existed. You have not created as I have created. You cannot comprehend what I comprehend.”

Gary Parker in The Gift of Doubt: From crisis to authentic faith, writes that he found three revolutionary truths in the book of Job that transformed his thinking about God’s ways in the world.

“First, I discovered that God has no obligation to answer any of our questions. God came to Job and he comes to us not because we force him to answer, but because he chooses of his own free will to share his Person with us. When God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, he did so not to give him all the answers, as if God were on trial, but to place Job on trial. We cannot hold God hostage to our questions.”

God has no responsibility to acknowledge, much less answer, all our questions. God’s ways, as Isaiah puts it, are higher than our ways, and his thoughts are higher than our thoughts. God graciously answers many of our questions, but he has no obligation to answer any. When we were children, we were asking “why?” all the time. As parents we know we cannot answer them all to a child’s satisfaction, and so we resort to having to say at times, “You’ll understand when you grow up.” Not every “why” of life has a reasonable answer. There are things we cannot understand, or as Job put it, “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.”

“Second, God does not count our questions as sin against us. Significantly, at the conclusion of the book of Job, God returns Job’s wealth to him. Then God rebukes the three friends who had counseled Job incorrectly. God never changed his initial opinion of Job as “a blameless and upright man.”

The questions Job raises with God are legitimate. They are questions any human being in pain would ask. The Bible is full of examples of seekers after the truth that are asking good questions about the struggles of life. There is no attempt in the Bible to silence discussion or debate. Christianity has always been at the forefront of enquiry, research and education. Our God delights in us using our minds to understand his creation, the nature of grace and the problem of evil.

“Third, the questions we ask can carry us into a deeper understanding of God than we have ever previously enjoyed. Job would never have known God on such an intimate level if he had not dared to express his pain and uncertainties. In Genesis 32 we read how Jacob wrestled with God. In that encounter Jacob moved from a superficial relationship with the Lord into a face-to-face fellowship. At the conclusion of that dramatic episode Jacob said, “I have seen God face to face.” In a similar fashion, Job admitted, “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.” (Job 42:5) When we wrestle with God honestly and openly, we have the grand opportunity to develop a deeper intimacy than does anyone who stands at a distance and waves a cheery hand.”

“The honest struggle of Job with God can become helpful to us in our movement from doubt into faith… Through Job, and through other biblical stories, we see that God does not condemn us for our uncertainty. Instead, through the Job story we learn that God would much prefer our honest doubts to a dishonest faith. After all, God is the only one big enough to handle our uncertainties… Dr John Carlton once said, “God can stand our questionings much better than he can bear our indifference.”

When we find ourselves questioning the inequities of life, and we cry out in protest at the tragedies we see, God does not resent our questions, but welcomes them, for he cries out with us. It was God who heard the groaning of his people enslaved in Egypt and mounted a rescue operation using Moses. It was Jesus who reached out to the hungry, the poor, the crippled and the oppressed to heal them and give them hope. It was Jesus who wept over Jerusalem: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (Luke 13:34)

The playlet The Long Silence, says it all.

“At the end of time, billions of people were scattered on a great plain before God’s throne. Most shrank back from the brilliant light before them. But some groups near the front talked heatedly – not with cringing shame but with belligerence. ‘Can God judge us? How can he know about suffering? snapped a pert young brunette. She ripped open a sleeve to reveal a tattooed number from a Nazi concentration camp. ‘We endured terror… beatings… torture… death!’

In another group an Afro-American lowered his collar. ‘What about this/’ he demanded, showing an ugly rope burn. ‘Lynched… for no crime but being black!’ In another crowd, a pregnant schoolgirl with sullen eyes: ‘Why should I suffer,’ she murmured. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

Far out on the plain there were hundreds of such groups. Each had a complaint against God for the evil and suffering he permitted in his world. How lucky God was to live in heaven where all was sweetness and light, where there was no weeping or fear, no hunger or hatred. What did God know of all that man had been forced to endure in this world? For God leads a pretty, sheltered life, they said.

So each of these groups sent forth their leader, chosen because he had suffered the most: a Jew, an Afro-American, a person from Hiroshima, a horribly deformed arthritic, a thalidomide child. In the center of the plain they consulted with each other. At last they were ready to present their case. It was rather clever.

Before God could be qualified to be their judge, he must endure what they had endured. Their decision was that God should be sentenced to live on earth – as a man!

‘Let him be born a Jew. Let the legitimacy of his birth be doubted. Give him work so difficult that even his family will think him out of his mind when he tries to do it. Let him be betrayed by his closest friends. Let him face false charges, be tried by a prejudiced jury and convicted by a cowardly judge. Let him be tortured.

At the last let him see what it means to be terribly alone. Then let him die. Let him die so that there is no doubt that he died. Let there be a great host of witnesses to verify it.’

As each leader announced his portion of the sentence, loud murmurs of approval went up from the throng of the people assembled. And when the last had finished pronouncing sentence, there was a long silence. No one moved. For suddenly all knew that God had already served his sentence.” (John Stott, The Cross of Christ, 336-337)

God did not stay in his ivory tower and issue pronouncements about the world. He came in Christ to suffer and die with us. “Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8) His followers walk in his steps, and walk the way of suffering, not knowing the answers to all the questions that they and others have asked down through the centuries. Anybody who has walked with Jesus has wrestled with pain and suffering, and the dread of insignificance. That is why we walk by faith and not by sight. We follow despite not having all the answers. Because God allows freedom in the universe there will be tragedies, and God does not directly cause them. In fact, he actually grieves with us when we suffer them. The answers will come as we experience the love of God in the Cross of Jesus. For the Creator is also the Savior.