#3 When You Hurt - Where is God When I Suffer?

Dr. Ron Sumners

January 24, 2010

Psalm 42:8

We all have had those nights. The problem that just will not go away keeps us sleepless.

What is it for you? Your own pain or disability? The emotional tension of unresolved memories or fear of the future? Strained or broken relationships? Disappointment over life, yourself or someone else? Loneliness that is deeper than the absence of people? Grief over the loss of a loved one no amount of time seems to heal? Turbulent worry over what’s happening to a loved one or friend whose pain has invaded your heart? Or is it the incredible suffering in the world around you? 

We all have one of three things in common: we have known the night of suffering, are in the night right now, or are deeply troubled about someone else who is suffering. And we have something else in common: the question of why God allows it.  In the dark night of suffering the statement of Elihu to Job becomes real to us: “Where is God my maker who gives songs in the night?” 

Only one who has endured the long night and has heard the Lord’s songs in the midst of suffering has any right to answer. But the answer does come to us from Psalm 42:8. “The Lord will command His loving kindness in the daytime and His song will be with me in the night.

This is no easy, glib, pious platitude.  The writer was in the nightmare of his life when he wrote those words. Along with other captives he was led away from his beloved Jerusalem on the way to exile. During the endless days of forced march, he had been tainted by his captors and ravaged by pain of body and soul. It was somewhere on the slopes of the mountains of Hermon, where the springs of the River Jordan rush down into the valley that he and his fellow captives were allowed a brief rest. We see him sitting there with a longing, wishful gaze yearning back to Jerusalem and his cherished homeland. All he could do in the darkness of his night of despair was utter a sad soliloquy of his suffering which finally turns into a dynamic prayer. We discover how to face the questions of the night, find purpose in the night, and finally hear the song of hope in the night.

The questions of the night all blend into one. Where is God when I suffer? Why does God allow suffering? Does He send it as a punishment? If so, what did I do to deserve this? Does God send trials, sickness, and problems into my life to discipline me? Must I accept this as the will of God?

How can God be both omnipotent and loving? If He were, would He allow this suffering to occur? Either God does not care, or He is powerless to prevent it. How can God be almighty and loving if He allows this pain of body, emotion, or mind?

Indeed, where is God? It’s the question of prolonged sickness, of unexplained calamity, of life’s bitter reversals. 

We are faced with the ultimate temptation: to make God our adversary and not our advocate. We say with the Psalmist, “Why have you forgotten me?” That’s the dark night of the soul.

I remember talking with a young man who was battling cancer. He looked me in the eye and said, “Help me? I have done o.k. with this so far, but the questions of my friends and family are getting to me. It’s not what they say; it’s what’s in their eyes. Their questions about why God would let this happen have made me ask them too. I wake up in the night and think about it. I can’t take the pain without God’s help, but the questions stand in the way. I have made God an enemy when I need Him the most!”

What would you have said in response? No platitude spoken with a stained glass voice would do. It was a time for clear thinking. The false presupposition that haunted this young sufferer had to be cleaned away. God does not send suffering. But we are tempted to blame God and demand an explanation. Then we realize that we owe him an explanation. The awesome expression of his love was to give mankind freedom. The perfect creation was allowed to be tarnished by what we did with that freedom. There are few things from which we suffer which are not traceable to the headwaters of that gift of freedom. The more we discover of the source of germs and physical malfunctioning, the more we realize that our distortion of nature has its root in our rebellious misuse of what God gave us. 

But what about calamities, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes? Does God control what happens when these strike the innocent? If He doesn’t, who does? But that presses deeper questions.

Would we have done it differently? Would we have created a catastrophe free world? Is our happiness the sole criterion of creation?  Is it even the chief criterion? Is the best of all possible worlds one in which human pleasure and painlessness exist? We must say “No!” for a trouble-free existence would rob us of discovering the heart of God. Eventually, we must accept the notion that a free world in which suffering and pain are allowed is the best possible world in which to discover the joy of fellowship with God, now and forever.

What is at issue is the quality of person that God created a human being to be. Human freedom is essential for the accomplishment of this, and so is the suffering we endure. Without the pioneer of choice, even wrong choices, we become puppets. To take away human freedom, and a world in which suffering is a possibility, would cause a worse kind of chaos in which we could never know the development of the fiber of a soul fit for eternity. Is there anything the omnipotent God can’t do? Yes! Make great personalities without giving them and their world freedom!

Do you see what the questions of the night have done for us? We are pressed to the precipice of thanking God for the gift of our creation, our freedom in it, and even the suffering that comes as a result. We are not the targets of the Almighty’s wrath, but we are the objects of His love. Can we praise Him for His strategy in creation? Will we surrender to Him the anger behind, “What is the meaning of this?” for the more probing question, “What is your meaning for me in this?”

The special gift of suffering is that it expresses all secondary satisfactions. We live in a world that has made a false god out of quantity rather than quality. It measures greatness by how long we love and not how well we live, in the number of breath’s we breathe instead of the breath-taking experiences we enjoy. The passion for trouble-free health has robbed us of a passion for God. Our false idea of happiness anesthetizes us from finding joy. We cannot tolerate any infractions of our prescribed agendas where everyone lives to be a hundred, is happily married, has perfect children, makes a good living, and retires to a trouble-free leisure where the only problem is how to battle boredom. We find ourselves unable to tolerate the imperfect, the incomplete, the inconsistent.

Suffering gave the psalmist a precious gift; an intimacy with God greater than the happiness of joining the procession to the Temple, better than the festival celebration. When despair finally brought him to the wrenching prayer of trust, his previous experiences of God were replaced by the penetrating experience of God in the present. The purpose of the night was to move from self-centered pity to the dialogue of God-centered praise. God did not waste the tragedy, He used it to give more than answers; He became the Answer!

The writer asks in Psalm 42:11, “Why are you in despair O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me?” It is our response to suffering that exposes the depth of our relationship with the Lord. And it is after we put Him on trial only to find we couldn’t have made a better world; that we suddenly realize that it is we who are on trial. Then the inner attitudes and values of our hearts are exposed. As the psalmist found that he loved Jerusalem and his religion more than God, so too, we are forced to admit that we have made God a support system for our cult of success, health and trouble-free life.

Be sure of this, God will never give us anything which will ultimately separate us from Him. And he never permits more suffering than will allow Him and the sufferer to know one another better. It is when we dare to ask why we are in despair and disturbed in our souls, that we are able to face our raw need for God. He will not intervene too quickly and keep us from the discovery of the meaning of our suffering. He loves us too much for that!

I have come to see that the questions of the night reveal the purpose of the night so that we can hear the Lord’s song in the midst of suffering. The psalmist heard it and so can we: “And his song will be with me in the night.” Be sure! What is this song? It is God Himself breaking through the pain, loneliness, and fear of our despair. Hope is the Lord’s song!

The Lord’s song was heard and then sung by Abraham on Mount Moriah – A ram caught in the thicket to replace his son, Isaac. God was Jehovah-jireh, “the Lord will provide.” It was the song which flooded Moses soul at Marah. God was Jehovah-raphe, “the Lord heals.” Gideon heard the song when he surrendered his impotence to the Omnipotent and heard, “Peace to you, do not fear,” and His song was Jehovah-shilom, the Lord is peace. It was Jehovah-raah to a lonely shepherd named David, and he sang, “the Lord is my shepherd,” Jehovah-tsidkenu, “the Lord our righteousness,” became Jeremiah’s song, and Jehovah-shammah, “the Lord ever present,” was for Ezekiel. The Lord’s song in the night is the whisper of his name and the assurance of His faithfulness.

But all of the lyrics of God’s song for the night of our suffering are swallowed up in one great name that swells the chorus: Immanuel, God with us! God came, comes and is coming. It is Jesus who saves us from our sins; Christ was the anointed, suffering Messiah. It wasn’t just the best of all good men suffering on Calvary’s cross for the people He loved; it was God Himself, taking our place for all time, Calvary will not let us forget this profound truth: He suffered for us so that when we suffer we might know His limitless love. And in the night, when we pray for the dawn of relief, we know the song of Immanuel, “Let not your heart be troubled…In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 14:1, 16:33). Remember that our song is not only, “When I survey the wondrous cross,” but also, “Christ the Lord is Risen!” The empty tomb becomes our assurance that no suffering can have the final word.

The Apostle Paul gave the world a final doxology to sing in the midnight hour; “for I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39)

Sing that song in your night. It sings of Christ’s victory over Satan, pain, death, and suffering. It speaks of impossible circumstances and troublesome people, our sin and failure and our depleted dreams. But nothing can drown out the Lord’s song of victory. With that greater song of hope, on this side of Calvary and an empty tomb, we can say to our souls the psalmist’s words, “Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him, the help of my countenance, and my God.”

Listen to the Lord’s song for your might. You’ve dared to ask the hard questions, and now you can hear the song of Jesus, “I will never leave you or forsake you! I am with you always!” Even in the night!