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Transcript 285A — Why Does God Allow Suffering?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Yes. A question arose amongst my friends, a very dear friend of mine. I've talked to him about Christ, and so on, and he understands that God is supposed to be love. That's what the Bible teaches. Okay. And I said, "That's right.'' Okay, so if God is love, now I have a wife, who's been in the hospital. I believe today is about the 135th day. The doctor has given up on her. She has a brain tumor. I've called in for prayer. Okay, I have faith. But they have no more hope. They say she's going to die. And she's a very good person, as far as I know. I've been married to her a long time. She has done very right. She's very devout, a dear Christian, she prays every day. And here she has to suffer this pain. And so he tells me, "How can God be love? And I have really no answer. I told him to read the Book of Job, and he says, ''I did. But that doesn't satisfy me."
And the question is, how do you explain to someone circumstances like this, like the condition of my wife, who is still living today, but according to the doctors, she must die because of a brain tumor? But I still have faith and hope. I do believe in Christ. I believe that He is all powerful, if it is His will. She was a very very devout and good person all her life, as long as she's been married to me. She's taught me many things about the scripture. But what does a man say to a question like that?
HC: All right. I'll try to help you. Let me summarize your question. The question really is this: If God is a God of love, how can He afflict a person by allowing that person to suffer for a long period of time and then eventually die? How can God do this if He is a God of love?
Well, we have to get a little larger picture in answering this. First of all, we must remember that this earth was created perfect. It was created good. There was no sin. There was no curse of sin. Mankind was created with every blessing, to have fellowship with God and to enjoy God forever.
But man, of his own volition, rebelled against God and said, "I don't want to obey You." And it began with Eve in the Garden of Eden, and expanded to Adam. And this has been the condition of mankind ever since.
And so the fact that man has rebelled against God has estranged him from God, and it has resulted in the fact that God has cursed this earth, so that this earth is a place of tears and toil and suffering and sorrow, because man does not live by God's rules.
Actually, as I've said so many times, God ought to destroy all of us and remove us into hell because of our sins. Here we're created in the image of God, to love Him. And by nature that's the last thing we want to do. We want to go our own way. We don't want to be obedient to this wonderful Creator, and we deserve to suffer, and we deserve to go to hell.
But God in His love has provided a marvelous way of escape. Now this is not an easy way. It wasn't something where God could just say, "Well, I'm God, and I can change the rules any time I want to. And therefore, I have decided that I love you. And if you'll only do 'so and so' you can go into Heaven. You won't have to endure My wrath for your sins." God couldn't do this, because He's not only a loving God, but He's a just God. And His justice demands that the price of hell be paid before we can go into Heaven.
Now there was no one on earth to pay for our sins. So God Himself—now just think of this love, God Himself came to this earth in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, He took on a human nature, perfect God—and He allowed Himself to be aligned and slandered, and then He was spit upon and He was beaten. And then, worse than that by a million times, God Himself poured out His wrath on Him for my sins, punishment so severe that it was the equivalent of me spending an eternity in hell. Now that's love. That's what Christ did for me, in order to save me.
Now after I'm saved, I'm still a part of this creation, and the curse of sin is still present. And it may be God's provision that I will spend the last year of my life in a coma, or suffering with cancer, or whatever. This is because we're living in this kind of a world. And if I'm a Christian, God will show the victory of the cross in this kind of situation also, even as He showed the victory of the cross through Job, as God allowed all kinds of things to happen to him.
But if we're a child of God, none of these things are really meaningful. And to die is the most wonderful thing in the world, because to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. If this dear lady is a child of God, death will be that marvelous moment when she will be freed from all of suffering and sorrow. And she'll be living and reigning with Christ in Heaven. And nobody could ask for anything more wonderful than that.
And she will spend an eternity with the Lord Jesus Christ. And so you see, there is all kinds of love that shines through. Now if she is not saved, then of course it's a different matter altogether. Her suffering on this earth is just a drop in the bucket compared with the suffering she must undergo throughout eternity for her sins. And we can't understand that, because we are not sufficiently sensitive to the holiness of God. But this is what the Bible teaches, that there is eternal damnation for those who are unsaved.
CALLER: Brother Camping, thank you for this encouragement, and you've increased my faith.
HC: Thank you.