Where is God when it hurts?
Few questions are asked more honestly than this one, and few are asked more often by people who are not arguing but bleeding. The Bible never treats it as a rude question — it puts the words in the mouth of a suffering man, and answers not with a theory but with a Person.
When the question is a taunt
In Psalm 42 the words "Where is your God?" come from the enemy, thrown at a believer who has lost everything that used to prove God's kindness to him. One writer traces what that stripping actually achieves:
J. N. DarbyThey have driven them out from the public enjoyment of blessing. And where was the sign of their having blessings from Him? But because they had ascribed it all to God and proclaimed His faithfulness and power to keep them, the enemy now taunts them with it: What can you say now? Where is your God? … But this only throws the soul back on Him. There was nothing left but what God was Himself. The enemy had driven them away from everything else — from mercies that, when misused, tended to shut God out. The enemy managed to strip the soul of these, and left it only God.
Why there is pain at all
Pain is not the original arrangement. It entered by a choice, and the whole race has lived in the results ever since:
J. T. MawsonGod is good, ten thousand times ten thousand voices testify to His goodness, but the world as such has rejected God … and has chosen to follow Satan instead of God. In Eden Adam listened to Satan's voice and turned his back on God, and by that act of disobedience sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and when sin came in, peace spread its wings and flew away.
Some try to rescue God's goodness by limiting His power — saying He is kind but cannot stop what happens to you. Commentators here reject that trade:
Alfred E. BouterGod not only allows adverse circumstances, He is even in full control and uses them to form believers in His school (Rom. 5:3-5; James 1:3). His ways ultimately and surely lead to the fulfilment of His purpose, that we should be conformed to Christ, the Firstborn among many brothers (Rom. 8:29).
Silence is not absence
The hardest part is often not the pain but the quiet. Faith has to hold a fact it cannot currently feel:
Henry Allan IronsideCircumstances may be very hard; blow may fall upon blow; disaster may follow disaster, until the stricken heart has nothing left on earth to cling to. In such an hour Satan would gladly lead the soul to think that God too is gone — that it is no longer the object of His care, that He has left it to die alone. But no! It cannot be. Faith looks up and shouts, "You, O Lord, remain!" for He stays the same yesterday, today and forever.
Where God was when it hurt most
There is one place where God really did abandon someone, and it was His own Son. That is the deepest answer the Bible gives to the fear of being left:
G. V. WigramIt was not that Christ did not feel the absence of love in Peter, or in His friends in Israel. But when everything else was gone, when all forsook Him and fled, He still had God left to Him; and when He anticipated the anguish of God forsaking Him, perfect as He was, His purpose never wavered … God forsook Him so that He might never have to forsake us.
He weeps before He acts
At the grave of Lazarus, Jesus cried before He raised him. The order matters:
The Bible TreasuryWeakness, however extreme, was therefore no reason for despair. It was rather an opportunity to prove divine sympathy … He is still the same as when He wept with the sisters of Bethany before He gave them back their dead brother. He enters into our sorrows before He delivers us out of them.
What He gives instead of an explanation
Often the trouble is not removed. Something else happens in its place:
J. N. DarbyHe comes down into all our circumstances, and for a small trouble I come to find — not the thing taken away, but — God Himself taking the place of our sorrow.
That exchange is worth more than relief would have been:
Hamilton Smith"I will be with him in trouble" (Ps. 91:15). When we are most attacked, we shall be most helped. What if we have more trouble than others, if we have more of God with us than others? It cannot go badly for the man God is with. Better to be in prison and have God's presence than in a palace without it.
The last tear
The hurt has an end date, and the ending is personal:
Edward Dennett"God will wipe away every tear from their eyes" — not a trace of former sorrow shall remain, and God Himself will remove it. What infinite tenderness there is in that! Just as a mother tenderly wipes away her child's tears, so God Himself will delight to wipe away every tear from the eyes of His people. And once wiped away they can never return.
Summary
- Cause — Suffering came in when man turned from God; pain is the world's condition, not God's original design or His indifference.
- Control — God is not a bystander who wishes He could help; He permits and uses hardship to shape His people into the likeness of Christ.
- Cross — The one time God truly forsook a sufferer was at Calvary, so that He would never have to forsake you.
- Company — He rarely explains; He comes. He weeps before He delivers, and takes the place your comfort used to occupy.
- Conclusion — The tears stop, and God Himself does the wiping — permanently.