The
Curse Causeless?
Stephen
Terry
Commentary
for the November 5, 2016 Sabbath School Lesson
“Put
on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s
schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the
rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and
against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on
the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to
stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm
then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of
righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes
from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith,
with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the
helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”
Ephesians 6:11-17, NIV
Perhaps the most profound question that the Book of Job
attempts to address has been one that has challenged believers since the dawn
of time. Is suffering simply due to random events or is there purpose and
meaning to our woes? We try to determine this because it makes a difference in
how we assimilate what has happened into our experience. Even our criminal
courts make a distinction between acts that happened because two volatile
people happened to be in the same place at the same time and those committed
after deliberate, premeditated calculation. The penalties for the latter are
much more severe. In Job’s case, his suffering seems to be the result of prior
planning between God and Satan. As a result, we have little problem with mentally
putting Satan on trial for his crimes and have few qualms about his eventual
termination for capital offenses. But we have to also question God’s
involvement. Having the power to protect Job, was His acquiescence to Satan’s
crimes against the man and his family enough to make Him an accomplice?
No doubt, questions like this make us uneasy. Some may
find it easier to walk away from God rather than deal with such thorny moral
dilemmas. But this does not resolve the dissonance we carry in our hearts and
minds as we struggle with the idea of a God who is love[i] and Someone who would
allow Job to suffer so. The entire book is about Job’s challenge to the
fairness of what has happened to him. While in the end, the only answer he
receives is a challenge to his right to even question God, for many that falls
short of satisfying the question of suffering. Does the question even have an
answer? Or is the whole issue so ineffable we can only stand around paralyzed
and dumbstruck because the depth of our perception is inadequate to penetrate
to the level of understanding?
The Old Testament portrayals of the character of God are
widely divergent. On the one hand we have the God who is quick to punish miscreants,
from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden,[ii] to the wiping out of
virtually the entire human race along with most of the animals, save eight
human beings and a menagerie in a lone wooden vessel tossed like a cork on a
chaotic sea for months. Interestingly, though the third chapter of Genesis
gives us a serpentine antagonist, working subtle evil in paradise, eventually God
comes to be considered the source of both good and evil. For instance, though
it was an evil act, God is said to incite King David to take a census of Israel
in 2nd Samuel.[iii] This is of interest because
Job and Genesis which are often considered earlier works identify someone other
than God as the instigator of evil. There is a parallel account to the one in 2nd
Samuel which lays the blame for the same incident on Satan rather than God.[iv] So which is the correct
account? Was it a situation like Job where God allowed Satan to attack someone
He considered a “man after my own heart?”[v] If so, then David apparently
failed the test, bringing calamity upon his people.[vi]
This mixed bag containing conflicting characterizations
of God seems to only cloud the picture with a scrambled attempt to resolve the
question of suffering with a schizophrenic God, loving yet willing and capable
of mass destruction on an apocalyptic level. Perhaps we would do well to
understand that the Old Testament is a record of men’s attempts to understand
the character of a God who had become ever more remote since the Edenic fall.
Attempting to approach Him in their sinful state, they could “feel the burn”
much as a fanciful vampire might feel when exposed to the sunlight. Our sinful perspective
may be our biggest obstacle to understanding not only suffering but God’s
character as well. So how is understanding to come? Since we could not approach
God because of our sinfulness, it could only happen one way, for God to find a
way to approach us without destroying us by His presence. That gateway to
understanding was Jesus, Immanuel,
God with us.[vii]
What did Jesus say about suffering? He said it was not a
punishment from God for our sins.[viii] Perhaps it is the
result of our own evil toward one another. A greedy contractor taking short
cuts in the quality of the materials he is using may cause the building he has
erected to collapse unexpectedly bringing pain and suffering to others.
Defiance of a civil ruler may bring sudden death to those engaged in the
defiance and those associated with them. Perhaps this is why we are repeatedly
admonished to show respect toward the civil authorities[ix] and to care about others
as much as we care about ourselves.[x] We are admonished to be “perfect
as God is perfect,”[xi] so it may not be too much
of a stretch to see in these directives things that are illustrative of the
character of God. In the person of Jesus, He submitted not only to the civil
authorities in the persons of Pilate and Herod, but to the religious ones as
well in the person of Caiaphas. How strange this is compared to the God of the
Old Testament. In that case we have the wrathful Thunderer, waging righteous
warfare against every malefactor to root out every evil from first the Earth,
then Israel, His chosen people. In spite of the deaths of millions, that job
never seems to be accomplished. Even when there are only eight supposedly
righteous people alive in that tossing boat of Noah’s crafting, they were soon
going adrift on the shoals of drunkenness and disrespect once the crisis was
over. It became apparent that although myriads had died, sin had not, and since
sin remained, so did suffering.
So how should we relate to the issue of suffering? Of
course we could choose to play the blame game and seek to judge the Devil or
God, whomever we feel is responsible. But if we are to be perfect like God,
like He created us to be,[xii] we won’t do that. We
will do as He does, and the Bible tells us that He is all about love. Jesus
came to love, not to condemn.[xiii] He spent much of His
time here on Earth relieving suffering for those who would come to Him. He healed
them all if they were willing. This is quite a contrast between the God portrayed
in the Old Testament as one who inflicts death or encourages suffering on
innocents like Job and sinners, like Judah’s sons, Er
and Onan.[xiv]
But in contrast to the popular image of God, Jesus refused to inflict
suffering.[xv]
Perhaps this is a clue that in spite of those characterizations of Him in the
Old Testament, He is not the source of suffering. If anything, He is the source
of relief from suffering.
Who then is responsible for it? It would be facile to lay everything at the
feet of the Devil. Surely he has found ways to tempt and multiply the suffering
of mankind. But if he were truly the source of all suffering then God would
only need to eliminate him and everything would be perfect and loving again. We
know better than that. Like Paul in Romans, chapter seven, we know that our
desire to do good will not make it happen,[xvi] so suffering continues,
and the responsibility for it is ours. Each day, each moment, we choose to
either relieve suffering in the image of God, or we choose to increase it,
either actively or through indifference. In this we build an image to our own
perfidy. In some instances, we make great strides as in relieving a great deal
of the suffering of childbirth. But in others, like discrimination against
women, we make the suffering worse.[xvii] On the one hand,
through science and technology we have teased abundant harvests from the Earth
that can feed the entire planet when allowed. But on the other hand we have
overworked the Earth and stripped it of its natural cover, contributing to the
Dust Bowl of the 1930s when many thousands suffered from drought and
displacement.
Some want to view the Christian faith like the picture at the top of this page –
a battle where we seek, as warriors, to do damage to the enemy. But even though
they are couched in terms of armor and weaponry, we are not called to go forth
to fight, but to defend. We are not commanded to attack, but to stand. Truth,
righteousness, peace, faith, salvation and the word of God are the armor and
weapons with which we are to relieve suffering. We are to bring the truth that
suffering will end, because the righteousness of God through Jesus has made a
way of salvation. We can have faith that peace will come. This is the promise
and hope of the word of God. In the meantime, as much as is in our power, we
can, like Jesus, work to relieve the suffering that surrounds us, for this is
the image of God.
