19. Are we satisfied with God’s answer about suffering?

Any explanation of our suffering would not satisfy our relentless questioning of why this or that happens. We hear it around us, and we hear it in our own heads. We place our lives in His hands at baptism, yet there is still no plausible knowledge in our spiritual experiences in Christ or even in our logical stance of fairness that would allow us to understand all His ways.

So God does not try us with answers too hard for us. God Himself does not give us an answer. He supports us in the suffering but the suffering itself is too hard for us to understand. If we attempt to answer there are too many inconsistencies that do not follow our pattern of logic. When God stepped into my life, into my time, then I perceive, in my understanding that God has to exist by my rules. Not so. He steps in and out of time as I know it, so I cannot comprehend it.

Is man even capable of understanding how God works his physical and moral world? No.

Can man understand the greatness of God, the creation by God, His omnipotence over the universe, over all of the heavens as we now know we are part of? No.

Can man understand the time from before time and into future time? No.

Can we, who live in the present, and remember the past, and wonder about the future, ever understand the whole picture of what He surveys and controls? No.

When we say God is in control, we have to cast our minds into an unknown infinity with a unexplainable time frame, which does not resemble anything that we are familiar with. We are in the realms of impossibility for our finite minds cannot comprehend it. We cannot understand sound and colour if we are born deaf and blind. So then Job’s questions, and our questions of the same measure, belong to another place rather than our customary place. It is a higher point of view, a more complex and unseen place, beyond our comprehension, and a place forbidden to us yet. So the answers to those questions and the answers about space and time, belong to God who formed them. We can partially understand them but He can move about in them, we cannot. He looks at the whole of history and the present and on into the future. He talks to us about them, for he says “one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day”, but He cannot explain them to us. He talks about eternity but in our finiteness, we cannot understand the infiniteness of eternity. Understanding God’s truth of eternity is far above us, but in His graciousness He comes to us and allows us to exist in a time and space, which is only a small part of His time and space, a place which we can understand, but still an overall unseen place. That is why we are limited in our understanding of suffering.

We look at the past, the present and the future in a sequential series of frames, one after the other. God sees the whole collection at once from above in a great pattern of His creation. Perhaps some of us can better understand the view from above than others can, but no one can understand the ultimate details of the view.

God told Moses to record the creation in different styles, and gave us different measures of understanding of His creation. God gave Job as much as He considered Job could comprehend, about that same creation. Job was honoured with that gift of explanation, and then barely comprehending, was at last content with God’s stated position that Job’s rules could not apply to God. Now Job understood God’s request that he could leave the rest to Him.

Theologists have debated, without much success or understanding, the different positions of foreknowledge and predestination and things that we cannot foresee. In another life we may understand these puzzles but for now because we do not have that skill, we are entrapped in our time, where space and time and the other mysteries are not revealed to us and we cannot foresee. Our perception is warped, but we may not call God unfair. We do not understand the success of evil, the unfair events, or the sadness that overcomes us, and when so often righteousness is overcome with unrighteousness. So we remain unsatisfied, yet trusting Him.