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kindness and truth, keeping loving kindness
for thousands, forgiving iniquity and disobe-
dience and sin; and that will by no means
clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the
fathers on the children, and on the children’s
children, on the third and on the fourth
generation. Moses hurried and bowed his head
toward the earth, and worshiped” (Ex. 34:5-
8). It is not for us to tell God how we think He
should be, nor for us to create God after our
own image and imaginations as to how He
should be. It is for us to humble ourselves to
accept Him as he is.
Without God and the perspec-
tive of His Kingdom coming on
earth, a hope that runs like a
golden thread throughout the
Bible, the equation is not solv-
able. And so what can we do but
conclude that God has allowed
the present situation on this earth in order to
bring every humble person towards a faith in
Him and His Kingdom. It is only those who
refuse Him who will find the situation an
unbearable riddle which cannot be solved.
Accept Him and His plan in Christ- and whilst
the suffering doesn’t disappear, nor do all the
hard questions evaporate, we have at least a
personal framework for understanding our
place in this world. And the trust that finally,
all shall make the most perfect sense, and we
shall one day reflect that it could not have
been any better way. The problem of those
who have not heard remains a difficult one-
but that of itself does not in the slightest take
away from the existence of God. Perhaps one
reason for that difficult question is that it
ought to provoke each believer to do all they
can to fulfil the Lord’s parting commission to
us all- to take the Gospel to every person on
this earth. The problem of those who have not
heard may partly be explicable by accepting
that the problem largely exists because the
believers have not taken the message to all.
All have not heard because they were not
told. God always works through mechanisms,
not that He needs to, but He clearly chooses
to. He has delegated this work to us, the
church; or ‘entrusted’ us with the Gospel, as
the New Testament puts it. We have freewill.
And the church has not done its job as it was
intended. And so others have suffered igno-
rance because of our dysfunction. Just as any
human failure or dysfunction results in the
suffering of others. Any other way would mean
that God has not given us freewill and the
consequences which come along with the gift
of genuine freewill.
Suffering and the Love of God
What is so endlessly fascinating about God is
that despite all the suffering on earth, there
is a gentleness and love that also runs through
all His ways. After all, according to the Bible,
He is the God who gave His only
begotten Son for human salva-
tion- when He surely could have
thought up all manner of ways
to achieve that same end result.
The gift of His Son was to
demonstrate His love for us,
publicly displayed for all time.
And there is a beauty in His creation which
becomes the more exquisite the closer we
look. He is the God who gave Israel the law of
Moses, which reflects His intense awareness
and sensitivity towards His people. The oxen
were allowed to eat some of the grain they
were treading out. There was deep sensitivity
to every human situation. And supremely, the
manifestation of God in His Son reveals just
how much He does in fact care.
The Answer of the Cross
The cross puts a perspective on why God
allows human suffering. It certainly isn’t
because He is mean or nasty. A God like that
would not have given His Son, let alone in the
way that He did. There is in secular man a
search for love; ‘Can I find love in this world?’
is the haunting question, repeated in music
and every art form, and finding expression
both verbalized and subconsciously in every
human life. And the cross of Christ is the
answer. The fact this supreme expression of
Divine love was made within such extreme
suffering, both physical and mental, is surely
God’s way of saying that He is no stranger to
suffering and has fully participated in our
pain. We are called to not simply accept that
2000 years ago, on a hill outside Jerusalem,
on a day in April, on a Friday afternoon… this
actually happened. But to further participate
“... God is love; and
he that dwelleth in
love dwelleth in God,
and God in him.”
1 John 4:16