Suffering – God Played By His Own Rules

When it comes to human suffering, some have noted that it’s like God is playing this cosmic game and they don’t want to play. But whatever game God is playing, if you want to phrase it that way, He Himself has played by His own rules. Because when Jesus, God’s Son, came into the world, he knew loneliness, pain, and suffering. He is not above the quandary of unanswered questions and life’s deepest hurts. God played by His own rules.

John Stott says that one of the reasons he’s a Christian is the cross of Christ… “In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? (Why I Am a Christian).” The Cross represents our broken and pain-filled world and a God who has chosen to meet us there.

The problem of pain has hindered many people in their faith journeys. One writer referred to the problem of pain as “a question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart (Strobel, The Case for Faith).”

But whatever else you may say about suffering and evil, one has to admit that “God played by his own rules.”

Free Will and Evil

God is not a chess-player God, moving both his pieces and our pieces too. God does not force his will upon us. God created human-beings with free moral agency – a freedom to choose. We are not wind-up toys that regurgitate back to God what he wants to hear when you pull our string. We are humans. “The only way God could create beings that are fully human was to take the risk that they would use their freedom to choose evil (Colson).” We can make decisions that may or may not please Him. To have made us any other way would have meant creating robots that could spit out all that God wanted to hear from them. No. God made us with the capacity to surprise and delight Him or reject and disappoint Him. Evil comes from the abuse of free will.