Basic Beliefs: The Problem of Evil - AFC 1997

The Suffering God

Phil. 2:5-11; Mark 15:34; Luke 24:26; Acts 17:3; 1 Cor. 11:26; Phil. 3:10-16

The fight is real, so is the pain; and God shares it with us.

The Christian story offers no "answer" to the theological problem of evil. Rather, it invites believers into a history shaped by a reality much more difficult to grasp: God shares in the suffering wrought by evil and ultimately defeats evil through suffering.

Theology of the Cross vs. Theology of Glory
Is success better measured by crowd size or level of accepted pain?
Jesus suffered and still bears scars from that suffering. Should we expect something different?

The Necessity of the Cross
Just as love sometimes makes painful actions "necessary" for us, so God's love for his wayward creation made Christ's suffering sacrifice "necessary" for God.

Atonement
We understand Christ's achievement at Golgotha as establishing atonement for our sin, our brokenness. This is a reestablishment of relationship - "at-one-ment". We usually think of this only in the moral sense of paying for our guilt, but we may also see it as God personally reestablishing identity/relationship with his creation by coming across the chasm to suffer with us.

Victory from within
Understanding the cross as Christ's subversive victory over evil opens new perspectives on the problem of evil.

• It takes evil very seriously
  
• It shows that evil cannot write history's final chapter.

Open History
The cross challenges the idea that history is closed.

God is rejoicing with us in our moments of glory and suffering with us in our anguish. Because history is open, god can work with, and through, the anguish, weaving our pain into a tapestry that both honors our anguish and takes away the sting.

The point is this: we can trust the living God active in an open history because God joins us in that history, suffers with us, and triumphs through death.

To chew on:

• How do you handle a problem that you just cannot solve?
• Why do we take heart from singing Luther's "A Mighty Fortress is Our God"?
• If God has won the decisive victory over evil, why does suffering continue?
• What good does it do us to know that God has won a victory to be realized somewhere in the future when we are suffering now?
• What does it mean to "trust God", if it does not mean we can depend on God to prevent terrible things from happening to us?
• Is "positive thinking" at odds with sacrificial suffering?

Being there in real suffering is really being there - like God.