Many of the sick people Jesus healed had been suffering for a long time and must have started to feel forgotten or unloved by God. Millions since have finished their lives without relief from cruel diseases. If God wanted to heal people, why didn't Jesus just heal the whole world? In fact, why does God allow any form of suffering to continue?
The book of Job addresses the question of suffering and shows the inadequacy of human thinking in this matter. We need to be distrustful of ourselves in this issue. Job remained loyal to God while experiencing a full range of suffering, and his theology was commended by God: . Yet he was rebuked by God for his thinking (). God's rebuke lasts four chapters, pointing out human ignorance of divine ways. When Job responded in , he admitted his ignorance. “I was talking about things I did not understand, things far too wonderful for me” (NLT).
The question of suffering is such an insistent and important question in theology that there is a temptation to present premature answers as adequate. It may simply be that the answer is not available to the human mind. Two theologians who tried to comfort other people's suffering only to go through bereavements and find that their earlier words seemed hollow are C. S. Lewis and Harold Kushner. Their thinking on suffering led them to quite different ideas of God. Lewis concluded that suffering damaged his ability to connect with God. Kushner concluded that God is not all powerful. These cases show that answering the question of suffering may fail to provide any comfort those who need it most. I don't expect my thoughts to be necessarily comforting to people in pain either.
Any thoughts I have will only address a part of the question of suffering. My thoughts are bound to be incomplete, inadequate and misguided to some extent, but they are an attempt to extend my understanding a little, to summarize the Bible and synthesize a few ideas about the human condition. Any ideas or objections you have could help me see the limitations of these thoughts, so please let me know.
The aspect of the suffering question that the book of Job deals with is the need to show to the rest of the universe what human character is capable of. Other aspects that could be considered are the need to remind us that the world is not perfect and we need God to put it right (“God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world” as C S Lewis called it), and the need to remain humble as individuals (). The aspect that I want to highlight is the need for humanity to have so fully experienced the effects of sin so that we never try it again. A number of the texts I use refer to our fallen condition but are being used to indicate the way we were intended to function in an unfallen state.
At Creation, God gave us two very significant qualities that are essential to human nature: a sense of free-will; and creativity (; ). Those qualities require a number of sophisticated attributes: the ability to form theoretical models of the world; imagination to play with the models; enough freedom and physical ability to provide us a range of choices to respond to the situations we are faced with; and a level of unpredictability. All this provides the human being with a level of intelligence and awareness that will need to connect with the real world, and will seek enjoyment by interacting with its social and physical environment. For this enjoyment to be able to last for eternity, it requires a rich and interesting world.
But to make a world sufficiently rich and interesting, I believe, requires making it also delicate and highly complex (), in fact more complex than our minds can grasp (). If we were endowed with high enough intelligence to immediately understand everything in our world, our sense of involvement and wonder would be lost and we would grow bored and dissatisfied. But in our more satisfied but less endowed condition, there arises the risk of human choices leading to disastrous mistakes () that can affect innocent people ().
But disasters are not part of God's original plan. In God declares the world as originally created “very good”, and describes the restoration, when there will be “no more death ... sorrow ... [or] pain”. Death is an invader () that needs to be eliminated (). So in God's plan there would be no death, no disasters.
To avoid disasters, we humans must completely trust a Source of wisdom adequate to guide us around the dangers that we either underestimate or completely miss (). Within that guidance, we are free to explore the universe God has made, even make a few non-disastrous mistakes, and thus be firmly connected by experience with reality, cause and effect, and personal responsibility. Thus, continuously trusting and obeying God is an integral and necessary aspect of our design. But our free-will and creativity are to some extent in tension with the requirement to check everything with God. We need - even in God's original design - to love and trust Him enough to choose His guidance at every step. To bypass God is to head for disaster.
If God immediately fixed or prevented every problem afflicting humanity, it would negate His decision to entrust human beings with real responsibility. We would be left with the impression that our actions were not fully connected to reality, and life would take on a game-like sense of unimportance. We have to go through the long process of living with the consequences of human disobedience so that in the restored world our choice to trust God will be complete, unforced and permanently settled. Human trust in God is a fragile thing, as history shows, and we don't always see the connection between human choices and the suffering they cause. But God has still given us the dignity of making free choices and living with the consequences.
Jesus came into this mess of our making, and showed God's character in dealing with individuals. By accepting and healing everyone who came to Him, Jesus showed that there is no reason to feel excluded from God's care, even now with Jesus gone. What Jesus wanted to teach through those healings was faith (see A Turning Point in Theme) - faith in God's love for us even when we don't have overwhelming evidence of it. Many apparently innocent people suffer, like Job, because of the fact of living in a fallen world. We have no explanation for individual cases, just the reassurance that suffering doesn't imply rejection by God. We should never be judgmental of others faced with suffering, or of ourselves.