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We've reached another chapter in our God's Book series, and today we're tackling one of the hardest of all: suffering, pain, evil, injustice, loss, and grief. The things nobody would choose or want to happen — but that happen anyway.
The question isn't whether suffering exists. The question is: what do we do with it? And if God exists, why doesn't he do something? How do we keep believing beyond theory and theology when this becomes our reality?
Imagine I handed you a single jigsaw piece — a dark, jagged piece. If I asked what picture it belongs to, you couldn't answer, because that piece only makes sense when you see the whole picture.
When we're handed one piece of the puzzle — a letter from the hospital, an unexpected phone call, an undeserved betrayal, an unanswered prayer — the deeper question becomes: how can I trust God when all I can see is this?
This isn't just a problem for Christians. Every person asks this eventually. Every worldview, religion, or philosophy must answer it when life introduces us to what C.S. Lewis called the problem of pain.
Some people ignore it — staying busy and distracted so they never have to face the deeper questions. Others deny it — some religions say pain isn't ultimately real; just breathe deeply and rise above it. Another form of denial concludes there's no meaning to the universe at all — it simply is what it is.
Richard Dawkins offers this kind of non-comfort: we live in a universe of blind chance and pitiless cosmic indifference. Atoms and accidents happen, and then you die. Suffering isn't surprising — it's exactly what we should expect.
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But something inside many of us protests: this isn't how things are meant to be, and this can't be all there is.
For some, suffering becomes an argument to demolish the idea of a loving, all-powerful God — sometimes a sincere objection, sometimes a smokescreen. I know, because it's what I used to do. I saw so many horrible things during my time in the police, and I'd wave off any "God-botherers" by asking, "Well, why did your God let that happen?" It wasn't a search for truth. It was a shield against it.
If you're carrying genuine grief today, the ideas that follow probably won't fix your pain — but I want you to know God loves you. I don't want to meet your pain with clichés like everything happens for a reason. Our job as the body of Christ is to do what Jesus did: to be with you, to walk and weep with you, to carry the burden together. Because Christianity does not offer us a list of solutions — it gives us a Saviour.```
The Bible isn't going to help us make sense of life if it's just a collection of favourite verses disconnected from the bigger story. But as you piece the corners together and step back, you start to see the picture on the box.
This is multiple books telling one big story. If we want to understand suffering, we have to see where it fits in that story — and ask what suffering reveals about God. Because the Bible is not primarily a book about suffering. It's a book about a God who is here, who is there in the suffering with us.
Again and again we meet people who find themselves in circumstances they don't understand, yet it's precisely in the valley that they come to know God in ways they never knew before.
Trials are not just tests. They can be lessons in God's classroom.
Abraham discovers God as his provider on the mountain of sacrifice. David discovers God as his shepherd in the lonely, dark valleys. Israel discovers God as Yahweh Nissi — their banner in the fight to survive. And we'll see how, in her most painful moment, Martha discovers Jesus as the resurrection and the life.
The story starts in Genesis with a good world without suffering — no natural disasters, disease, death, hate, greed, grief, or tears. Again and again God looks at creation and says, it is good.
The Bible never asks us to pretend death was part of the natural order from the beginning, or that suffering is just "the way it is" in a random, purposeless universe. We know something's wrong when things go wrong, because at the start, everything was right. Every time you say "this shouldn't be happening," you're retelling Genesis 1 and 2 in the face of tragedy.
Every story that resonates with us has a villain — and ours does too: a snake in the grass called Satan, who hates people because they bear the image of the God he hates. The only way to hurt God is to get at his children.
Sin fractures our relationship with God, with one another, and with creation. Now the world is broken, and we can't fix it — we can't even fix ourselves. Sin outworks itself through fury, fighting, pain, pride, destruction, dictatorship, greed, and grief.
But the Bible never calls suffering or evil good. Instead, it's filled with honesty about pain: Job asks a book full of questions, Jeremiah weeps a lifetime of tears, David cries "How long, O Lord?" The Bible gives sufferers language to lament, room to wrestle, wail, and wonder — because God never treats sufferers as problems to be solved. He sees us as people to be loved.
Rather than simply giving us answers, God gives us himself. Before explaining what's wrong, he walks down into the valley of the shadow and invites us to keep walking with him, following his light right through it.
The hero appears. The Word becomes flesh — born in oppression and poverty, sent into exile to avoid genocide, growing in obscurity, learning obedience through what he suffered (Hebrews 5:8). As he suffers and grows, he heals, does miracles, and announces that the kingdom of God has come.
In John 11, Lazarus — a friend of Jesus — gets sick. His sisters Mary and Martha send word: "The one you love is sick." No pressure. No manipulation.
Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days.
What? Jesus loves them — but doesn't come as soon as they call, even though he's only two miles away. Doesn't that raise our own question in the waiting: why are we waiting?
Those long, lonely, terrible days pass. Lazarus gets worse. Hope rises — is that Jesus now? No. Hope fades. More waiting. The agony of Lord, where are you, and what are you doing?
When Jesus finally arrives — too late — Martha runs to him: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." What kind of God are you, if you cared, if you could have stopped this?
Jesus answers theologically: "Your brother will rise again." Martha says, "I know he will one day" — but her pain is urgent. What about now? Far-off hope doesn't help today.
Jesus doesn't try to fix her problem or offer an apology. He begins with himself:
"I am the resurrection and the life... Whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?"
That's the test. And it's also the classroom.
A couple of Sundays ago, I got word that my son Joel, out in Nigeria, had become seriously ill. He got worse and worse. I preached two services here while praying and worrying in the background, then got a text from my wife: "You've got to go now."
I flew out on Father's Day — four hours on the plane not knowing if he'd still be alive when I landed. I don't know if I've ever prayed so much in such a focused way. The lady next to me probably thought I was strange, praying in tongues with my head down the whole flight.
Jesus said, "Whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?" It wasn't the answer I felt I needed right then — but it was a deeper revelation that came through desperation, an invitation to know Christ more deeply than ever.
On that plane, I made a decision: whatever happened when I turned my phone back on, I would praise him — not because I had all the answers, but because I trusted him to do what was right.
When Mary comes and says the same thing as her sister, we reach the shortest verse in the Bible:
Jesus wept. (John 11:35)
Those tears tell us something about the kind of God revealed in Jesus. The classic problem of pain asks: how can suffering exist if God is all-powerful and loving? Here in Bethany, suffering is happening. Yet he is all-powerful, and tears are falling because he is all-loving.
He knows resurrection is coming — not in some distant future sense, but now, because he is here, absolutely powerful. He knows it all — and still he weeps.
I cried that messily too, when I got to intensive care and found my son lying weak in that bed, unresponsive. I couldn't even touch him — I could only squeeze his toe through the sheet, and pray. I pray to a God who weeps when I do, because knowing the end doesn't eliminate compassion in the middle. God isn't distant from suffering — he enters it fully, feels it, and shares our pain.
The next morning, reading my Bible plan, this verse jumped out:
"Go," Jesus replied. "Your son will live." The man took Jesus at his word and went. (John 4:50)
I had my promise to bring back to God in prayer. By God's grace, at midnight on Thursday, we were flying home together. I don't know for certain how God would have answered if things had gone differently — but I know he's not a slot machine where you insert a prayer and out pops a miracle. There are no unanswered prayers if, through the tears, we manage to pray, "Lord, whatever happens, give me more of you."
A few chapters later, God's own Son enters a tomb himself. The resurrection and the life dies on a cross. The Son of God suffers as demonic evil is unleashed. He bears our sin and sickness, our sorrow and our shame.
The center of Christianity is not an explanation. It's an execution. The Bible's answer to suffering is not a philosophy — a theodicy — it's a suffering Saviour.
We ask, "Why does God allow suffering?" But the Bible answers something far deeper: What kind of God suffers? What kind of God sends his own Son to suffer, and weeps with us?
When we reach the final chapters, Revelation 21, we finally see the picture on the box — and it's beautiful.
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
Evil is gone; the devil is thrown into the lake of fire. Jesus still bears the scars that healed us — the cross remains at the center of the story. Calvary was never plan B; it's the hinge on which all human history turns.
The Bible doesn't simply return to Eden — it moves beyond it. In Genesis we know God as Creator. In Revelation we know him as Creator and Redeemer, a Saviour and King, the Bridegroom who loves us, the Lamb who was slain for us, the resurrection and the life.
Right now we live in the waiting — looking at the silent phone, hoping and praying, not knowing when or how the answer will come. We're flying, it seems, far too slowly between the beginning and the end, where the only one we can talk to is the only one who can help — the Alpha and the Omega.
On that great day, every piece of the puzzle will find its place. But the Christian hope isn't just that suffering will make sense one day. The Christian hope is that suffering does not have the final say today. Jesus does, because he is the resurrection and the life. Do you believe this?
Throughout God's Book, the deepest revelations of God come in the darkest times of people's lives. Many of us can testify to that — some of you in this church have gone through so much and are still here. You met the Good Shepherd in the valleys, and you're still walking. The light shines in the darkness and will never be overcome.
Maybe someone here is barely hanging on today, holding just that one dark piece that makes no sense. But our inability to see a reason for something does not mean a reason can't exist. The Bible doesn't promise every question will be answered immediately — but it tells us God is not yet finished making all things new, and the one putting everything back together can be trusted.
I know he is all-powerful and all-loving because before he wipes away our tears, he shed his own. Before he destroyed death, he tasted its bitterness. He who wept for the pain of the world also died for the sins of the world, and he who redeemed the world will remake and restore it — better than ever, forever.
So there is hope, whatever happens, sooner or later. For me now, the hope that helps most is not that one day we'll understand everything — it's that today, I know him. We may not find all the explanations we wanted, but we find the God we needed.
He loves us in situations we'd never have chosen — not merely as our solution, but as our Saviour; not as our fix, but as our friend — the resurrection and the life.
Do you believe this?
Father, thank you for sending your Son to suffer. Lord Jesus, thank you that you were and are never distant from our suffering. You hate the death and pain that sin has brought into your good creation even more than we do, and you came to defeat it all. Now, when we don't understand, help us to know you and trust you and pray anyway. When we don't have answers, help us to know you are with us always. You hold the keys. And one day, the same Jesus who wept will wipe away every tear. Until that day, may we see you more clearly, love you more dearly, and follow you more nearly, day by day. Amen.
