By Bryan Babcock
Yesterday we examined Matthew 27 to better understand how God suffered as the atonement for the sins of humanity. This work, by God through Christ, was completed with Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.
Why is it important that our God suffered? Today, we will attempt to address this important topic.
We have in Jesus an innocent God who endured ultimate suffering. In no other religion does a god experience more pain and suffering than humanity…Christianity is unique. To understand the importance of Christ’s selfless act, we need to unpack the biblical understanding for the cause, effect, and resolution of suffering. The journey takes us all the way through the Bible beginning in Genesis.
The Bible begins in Genesis 1-2 depicting mankind as created and placed into a world without death or suffering. God calls his creation “good” meaning that the earth, the animals, and humanity are all perfect (Gen 1:3, 10, 12, 21, 25, 31). All of humanity’s needs are cared for and suffering is not present.
Adam and Eve are created to enjoy and care for the earth and its animals. They are also created to be in fellowship and to worship God. The paradox here is that to be able to truly worship God humanity must also be able to choose to reject God. Otherwise mankind is merely robotically following a pre-set program.
Our God is a God who risks rejection in order to allow for worship. Eve and then Adam fall to temptation and reject God showing us the world’s darkness and how it unfolded out of our refusal to let God be our lord and king.[1]
After Adam and Eve disobey their Creator, God describes what the fallen world will look like. It is virtually a catalog of all forms of suffering—including spiritual alienation, inner psychological pain, social and interpersonal conflict and cruelty, natural disasters, disease, and death (Gen 3:17ff). All this natural and moral evil is understood as stemming from the foundational rupture of our relationship with God. Their exile is the original infliction of suffering as judgment.
The fall brings the wrath of sin in the world, on the world and throughout humanity. No one is spared. The doctrine of the Fall gives us a remarkably nuanced understanding of suffering. On the one hand, this teaching rejects the idea that people who suffer more than others are in any way worse than people who suffer less.
That was the self-righteous premise of Job’s friends who sat around him and said, “the reason this is happening to you and not to us is because we are living right and you are not.” At the end of the book, God expresses his fury at Job’s “miserable comforters.” The world is too fallen and deeply broken to divide into a neat pattern of good people having good lives and bad people having bad lives. The brokenness of the world is inherited by the entire human race. As Jesus says, the sun shines and the rain falls on both the just and the unjust (Matt 5:45).[2]
After the fall, the relationship between humanity and God is strained to the breaking point. Humanity now follows a path of sin and rebellion. To facilitate a restoration of the relationship between a perfect God and humanity there needs to be a form of judgment. Keller argues that “many people complain that they cannot believe in a God who judges and punishes people. But if there is no Judgment Day, what about all the enormous amount of injustice that has been and is being perpetrated? If there is no Judgment Day, then there are only two things to do—lose all hope or turn to vengeance.”[3]
Essentially, Keller is saying that a just God needs a judgment upon humanity for the acts of rebellion. Peter van Inwagen adds that “at some point, for all eternity, there will be no more unmerited suffering: this present darkness, ‘the age of evil,’ will eventually be remembered as a brief flicker at the beginning of human history. Every evil done by the wicked to the innocent will have been avenged, and every tear will have been wiped away.[4] Only the God of Christianity is will to endure the judgment upon himself through the work of Jesus on the cross.
Paul speaks mysteriously that we who know Christ and the power of his resurrection also know “the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings” (Phil 3:10–11). Alvin Plantinga believes that because of our fall and redemption, we will achieve a level of intimacy with God that cannot be received any other way. And therefore, the angels are envious of it. What if, in the future, we came to see that just as Jesus could not have displayed such glory and love any other way except through his suffering, we would not have been able to experience such transcendent glory, joy, and love any other way except by going through a world of suffering?[5]
God has a two-part solution to atone for sin and restore his relationship with humanity. The first step is to atone for the sins of mankind in the past, the present and the future. This is no small matter and a perfect sacrifice is necessary. God knows that the only sacrifice is to suffer in the same way as all humanity and the world have suffered.
As we explored in the analysis of Psalms 22 and Matthew 28, the key is that the incarnate God is a God who suffers. Keller writes that “Without this suffering, without the agony of the cross, the incarnation would not provide that solution of the problem of suffering to which, we could contend, it owes its immense potency…Only the sacrifice of an innocent God could justify the endless and universal torture of innocence. Only the most abject suffering by God could assuage man’s agony.”[6]
The New Testament teaches that Jesus was God in the flesh—“in him all the fullness of the Godhead dwelled bodily” (Col 2:9). He was God yet he suffered. He experienced weakness, a life filled “with fervent cries and tears” (Heb 5:7). He knew firsthand rejection and betrayal, poverty and abuse, disappointment and despair, bereavement, torture, and death. Therefore, he is “able to empathize with our weaknesses” for he “has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet without sin” (Heb 4:15).
On the cross, he went beyond even the worst human suffering and experienced cosmic rejection and a pain that exceeds ours as infinitely as his knowledge and power exceeds ours. There is no greater inner agony than the loss of a love relationship. We cannot imagine what it would be like to lose not just a human relationship that has lasted for some years but the infinite love of the Father that Jesus had from all eternity. The separation would have been infinitely unbearable. And so, Jesus experienced God forsakenness itself on the cross when he cried out, “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?”[7]
Here we see the ultimate strength—a God who is strong enough to voluntarily become weak and plunge himself into vulnerability and darkness out of love for us. And here we see the greatest possible glory—the willingness to lay aside all his glory out of love for us. It cannot be that he does not love us. It cannot be that he does not care. He is so committed to our ultimate happiness that he was willing to plunge into the greatest depths of suffering himself.[8]
Paul summarizes the fall and God’s plan when he writes:
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. (Rom 8:18-21)
The world is now in a cursed condition that falls short of its design. Human beings were not created to experience death, pain, grief, disappointment, ruptured relationships, disease, and natural disasters. The world we were made to live in was not supposed to be like that. A frustrated world is a broken world, in which things do not function as they should, and that is why there is evil and suffering. [9]
But Paul adds that this judgment does not represent God’s abandonment of us. Rather, his judgment of the world was purposeful. Even as he judged the world with suffering, he had in view a plan for the redemption of all things.
God judged the world of Adam and Eve. However, he held “the hope” of a final redemption from evil that would be glorious (cf. Acts 17:31). This little verse in Romans 8:20 has an enormous depth behind it. It suggests that once human beings turned from God, there were only two alternatives, either immediate destruction or a path that led to redemption through great loss, grief, and pain, not only for human beings but for God himself. There is even a hint here that the future glory will be somehow even greater for all the suffering. Nevertheless, for the present, we live in the shadows.
Our God is a God who suffers — Jesus has fulfilled the first step in the process of redemption. He has endured our pain and suffering for the sinful nature of humanity. We can have confidence that, in Christ, we are separated from our sin and will live for eternity with the Father.
There is a second step. One that we anxiously await. And, that is the restoration of the world and living without suffering. We look forward to a day described by John when he wrote: “‘Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat down on them, ‘nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; ‘he will lead them to springs of living water.’ ‘And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’” (Rev 7:16-17)
The restoration of the earth is found in book of Revelation. This book, written by John, depicts the “new heaven and new earth” (Rev 21:1). We find that after the final judgment there will “no longer be any curse” (Rev 22:3)—the curse that fell on creation at the Fall is lifted.
Jesus, at the Second Coming, “will wipe 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” (Rev 21:4). The restoration will be complete. Evil and suffering will be defeated. The suffering of Jesus has ended suffering. Our God is a God who suffered for a purpose – the restoration of relationship between humanity to God and the eternal defeat of suffering.
Revelation chapters 21 and 22 presents that the future is not an immaterial “paradise” but a new heaven and a new earth. Matthew 19:28 and Acts 3:21 speak of the “regeneration” or “restoration of all things.” Peter says that we look for the day in which we will have a new heaven and new earth (2 Pet 3:13), and Paul teaches that the creation will gloriously be liberated from its bondage to decay and death (Rom 8:19–22).[10]
In this book, Christianity holds out a hope unlike any other religion. The secular view sees no future good of any kind, and other religions believe in an eternity or heaven that is a consolation for the losses and pain of this life and all the joys that might have been.
But as Keller argues:
Christianity offers not merely a consolation but a restoration—not just of the life we had but of the life we always wanted but never achieved. And because the joy will be even greater for all that evil, this means the final defeat of all those forces that would have destroyed the purpose of God in creation, namely, to live with his people in glory and delight forever.[11]
Without a God who suffers the anguish that we have experienced and the message of the cross is lost. In this case, the world may not hold any meaning. At our present point in human history the kingdom of God has both already and not yet arrived. The payment for sin and suffering has been paid in full by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Further, this God who suffers has given us a confident hope:
- Hope that, in time, we will see how God intends good to come from our suffering while Satin intends evil.
- Hope that God will meet us in the depth of our pain.
- Hope that God has a plan for our lives.
- And, the ultimate hope that a new heaven and a new earth is coming without the need for death and suffering.
[1] Timothy Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering (New York: Penguin, 2013), 114.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 116.
[4] Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil: The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of St. Andrews in 2003 (Oxford: Oxford University, 2006), 89.
[5] Alvin Plantanga, “Supralapsarianism, or ‘O Felix Culpa,’” in Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil, edited by Peter van Inwagen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 18.
[6] Keller, Walking with God, 119.
[7] Ibid., 120.
[8] Ibid., 121.
[9] Ibid., 131.
[10] Ibid., 314.
[11] Ibid.
People passing by were convinced of Jesus’ guilt. Like an angry mob they shook their heads and hurled insults at him. According to Wilkins, “the expression ‘hurled insults’ is literally ‘blasphemed,’ indicating that they deride him for his blasphemous claims and for the bogus charge that he would destroy the temple and build it in three days (cf. 26:61).”
In verse 45, Matthew records that “from noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land.” Darkness is often found as a symbol of impending judgment (Exod 10:21-22; Amos 8:9-10). Symbolically, light often symbolizes God and darkness suggests everything that is anti-God. “The time of God’s ultimate judgment, the Day of the Lord, is a day of darkness (Amos 5:18, 20; Joel 2:2; Zeph. 1:15; Matt. 24:29; Rev. 6:12–17). Darkness here displays a limitation on the power of Satan (cf. Luke 22:53), God’s displeasure on humanity for crucifying his Son, and God’s judgment on the sins of the world.”
At the death of Jesus, we find three testimonies to the identity and importance of the event. First, the curtain separating God from the people is torn testifying to a new age of access between God and His people. The second testimony is from the earth. At the new era, the earth shutters and shakes. A third testimony is from the dead. Because of Jesus’ defeat of death, some of the holy in Christ were risen and able to be seen in the city.
