1 Peter 4:19

SUFFERING ACCORDING TO THE WILL OF GOD

‘Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to Him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator.’

1 Peter 4:19

There are occasions when the commonplaces of consolation fail; when our hearts, appalled by the extent of the evil and suffering which we see around us, or overwhelmed with our own personal grief, are disposed to cry out in despair: ‘To what purpose is all this misery, all this waste? If God be, as we are told that He is, all-merciful and all-loving, as well as all-powerful and all-wise, could He not and would He not have so framed the world and so constituted human nature as to have rendered His creatures exempt from all this woe?’ To reply that suffering and death are the natural and inevitable consequence, the wages (to use St. Paul’s word) of sin, is an answer to this question, but it is only a partial answer. It is not a complete solution of the problem.

How are we as Christians to deal with the difficulty? We may do so in one of two ways. We may refuse to argue or reason about it altogether. We may adopt the old mediæval standpoint that faith demands the absolute surrender and subjection of reason; that we are bound to believe in a Christian doctrine, however unreasonable and impossible it may appear; and the greater its impossibility and antagonism to reason, the greater is the merit of our faith in it. I do not believe in this attitude. I believe in the other way of meeting the question; that of bringing to bear upon it, to the best of our ability, the reason which God has given to us. But then we must do so humbly and reverently, and under three conditions.

I. With a deep sense of our own sin and unworthiness.—This is taught us in that book of the Old Testament which discusses the problem now under our consideration. We all remember the narrative of Job. An exceptionally righteous man was subjected to exceptionally severe afflictions. His three friends were convinced that he must have deserved them, and that, in spite of his apparent uprightness, he must really have been a very bad man, or else God would not have permitted him to endure such suffering. They were wrong, and were shown to be wrong. But at the same time Job was shown that, however superior in goodness he was to his fellow-men, yet he fell far short of God’s standard of perfect holiness. Compared with this standard, he was forced at last to cry, ‘Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.’ Although, therefore, suffering and sorrow are not measured out in this world in proportion to each man’s merits or demerits, yet the very best of us has no right to say, when even the very heaviest affliction overtakes him, ‘This is a visitation greater than I deserve.’

II. But while, if we know our own hearts, we dare not murmur at what befalls ourselves individually, this does not prevent our minds being exercised by the problem of the existence of evil and suffering in the innocent brute creation and the human race generally. Here, however, we are bound to remember the limited nature of our knowledge and reasoning powers. Even the unbeliever must admit this. He may say that God ought to have created the world differently, and ought to have secured perfect and unbroken ease and freedom from pain for all His creatures. But when we ask our objector how this could have been done without the sacrifice of something higher and better, he is unable to tell us. If he is honest he will admit that heroism is better than painlessness, that self-sacrifice is better than ease, and virtue than pleasure. He will admit that freedom of will and of choice is a higher condition than bondage to Fate. But if we ask him to tell us how heroism and self-sacrifice and virtue could have been displayed in a world where there was no labour or suffering or pain, and how freedom of will and of choice could exist concurrently with the impossibility of willing what is evil and choosing what is bad, he will be unable to tell us. Modesty, therefore, if nothing else, would seem to require of us, worms of the earth, that, so far as we are taught by our reason alone, we should suspend our judgment as to the Almighty and His ways, and should be content in this life to say, with the Apostle, ‘Now we see through a glass darkly … now I know in part.’

III. But thirdly, we are not left to our unaided reason in this matter.—The Incarnation, the coming of God in the flesh, has put an entirely new complexion upon it. As long as we conceive of Him as an Almighty Creator, Who has called into existence countless millions of beings, all subject to more or less of sorrow and pain and death, from which He is Himself wholly exempt, we may abstain from irreverent questioning; we may bow our heads and our minds in awe before an insoluble mystery; but we can hardly regard Him with feelings of active love. When, however, we realise that, whatever sufferings He has allowed His creatures to endure. He has borne and felt to the uttermost Himself, the case is entirely different. The prophets of old had some dim conception of this. One of them could say, ‘In all their affliction He was afflicted’ (Isaiah 63:9). But it was reserved for Christianity to reveal the truth in its full measure. We have learnt that God Himself, in the person of our Blessed Saviour, Jesus Christ, has not only taken our nature, but has undergone the utmost sorrow and suffering that any of His creatures has ever been called upon to endure. We have learnt, further, that He feels all the pains and woes to which His children are subjected as acutely as if they were inflicted on Himself personally. We have learnt, too, that He can, and does, bring good out of evil, joy out of sorrow, and benefit out of suffering. With this knowledge all doubt as to His wisdom and love in permitting evil and suffering must necessarily vanish. While it still remains true that at present we only see darkly and only know in part, yet enough of the evil has been lifted to afford us the certainty that the whole mysterious scheme of the world is based on deepest, truest love, and to enable us, when we suffer, to realise that it is according to the will of God, and to commit the keeping of our souls to Him, our faithful Creator. Truly, as St. Paul has said in language repeated and reiterated in more than one passage (Romans 5:10; 2 Corinthians 5:18), ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself; not reconciling Himself to the world—there was no need for that—but taking from the world the smallest semblance of an excuse for looking upon Him as its enemy and for remaining in hostility to Him.

—Chancellor P. V. Smith.

Illustration

‘We know how unbelievers deal with this difficulty. They maintain that it proves either that there is no God, or else that He is not such an One as we believe in, both all-powerful and all-loving. If God exists, they say. He must be deficient either in power or in love. Otherwise He would have created a world in which moral evil and unhappiness would have been impossible. The difficulty is one which we cannot ignore. As described by one of our greatest living statesmen (who has, however, himself no sympathy with it), “it lies in the belief that an all-powerful Deity has chosen out of an infinite or at least an unknown number of possibilities to create a world in which pain, bodily or mental, is a prominent and apparently ineradicable element. His action on this view is, so to speak, gratuitous. He might have done otherwise. He has done thus. He might have created sentient beings capable of nothing but happiness. He has, in fact, created them prone to misery, and subject by their very constitution and circumstances to extreme possibilities of physical pain and mental affliction. How can One of Whom this can be said excite our love? How can he claim our obedience? How can He be a fitting object of praise, reverence, and worship? So runs the familiar argument accepted by some as a permanent element in their melancholy philosophy: wrung from others as a cry of anguish under the sudden stroke of bitter experience.” ’