“How can a good God who loves me allow me to feel so depressed and despairing? Why would He allow me to experience such terrible pain and suffering?

A Lay of the Land

Over that last few of months, we’ve been tackling this knotty question. We started by getting to the root of the question by challenging the faulty assumption that God’s love exempts me from pain and suffering. Then we laid out how the problem of pain gets personal but that there are some really good reasons to doubt our doubts about God’s goodness. We called these reasons theodicies and the argument of God’s inscrutability. Today, we are going to start looking at our first theodicy.

Theodicy #1: Pain is a megaphone in that it leads us back to our need for God.

Catch up on the other Blogs in this Series Here:
#1: Knowing Why Won’t Make You Feel Better
#2: When the Problem of Evil Gets Personal

God Shouts in Our Pain

This idea is famously stated by the skeptic turned believer C. S. Lewis. He writes,

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt… And pain is not only immediately recognisable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shovelling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world… (this is an excerpt from The Problem of Pain, chapter 6)

Pain Shatters our Delusions

“Pain insists on being attended to.” What an insightful statement. Pain is something that cannot be ignored, and God knows it. We are lulled into a deception about our own sinful condition, but God uses pain and suffering to wake us from our stupor—“to shout” to us. In other words, God allows for suffering and evil to get our attention so that He might draw us back to Himself. For in reconciliation with Him is the promise of healing and the wiping away of every tear.

Pain shatters the illusion that we are in control of our lives and that we can be happy and whole apart from God. When pain breaks through the illusions that we hold, we begin to look for what truly meets our needs. Thus, pain can lead us to faith. This dynamic is often present in conversion when we first come to know Christ. We come to the end of our rope with nowhere to look but up. However, it is no less operative as we continue our walk with Christ. Often, God brings about difficulty in life so that we are reminded of our dependency on Him. Pain in this life should continually drive us back to God and cause us to long for a future in which He has completely and finally solved the problem of pain.

When Life is Least Agreeable, We Often Search for God

Jesus uses a form of this argument in Luke 13:1-5 showing that the suffering in the world should remind us of the ultimate consequences in life. This suffering and evil point us to our greatest need to find life and redemption in Jesus Christ.

Now on the same occasion there were some present who reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. And Jesus said to them, “Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. –Luke 13:1-5 (NASB)

C. S. Lewis goes on to say,

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call ‘our own life’ remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make ‘our own life’ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness? It is just here, where God’s providence seems at first to be most cruel, that the Divine humility, the stooping down of the Highest, most deserves praise…