Where is God in Your Suffering?

A very dear friend shared this with me last year. Obviously suffering is all around us, soldiers have seen the young cut down and many ask why? I can not expound on it as well as my friend does below.

Where is God in your suffering?
A funeral message in honor of Marilyn Peterson. (1947-2014)

My mom’s life changed when we had our first boy, Micah, six years ago. She fell in love with him and tried desperately to will herself to health so that she could spend 2-3 day stretches at our house, playing and loving on him. My mom and I were able to spend much more time together and the majority of it was spent talking about the Bible and about Christ. She soaked in the Word of God and read the whole Bible several times, listened to countless sermons, and asked incredibly thoughtful and challenging questions. In honor of those talks with her, in honor of her and for the honor of Christ, I would like to spend a few minutes on an issue that we talked about many times. As most of you know, I am an engineer who sits in a cube all day. I am not a pastor or a very good speaker. My qualifications are simple. I know God. I love God and I know and love His Word. I have written this message out as I know it may be difficult to get through. Thank you all very much for being here and hearing this message.

My mom was a wonderful beautiful woman who loved me every second of my life for 43 years.
God is a wonderful beautiful God who has loved me every second of my life for 43 years.

My mom suffered as a child and was torn apart in the divorce of her parents.
My mom was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at age 30 and was bed ridden and racked with pain much of her remaining 40 years.
At 48, she lost her precious daughter, Jill, in a car wreck, and she never emotionally recovered from that.
At 63, the doctors told her that she had multiple myeloma, (bone marrow cancer), and that she had at most a couple years left.
At 66, she entered the hospital with unbearable pain and ten weeks later at 67, she lay on a hospital bed in her living room, unrecognizable, and gasped her last breath at 3 in the morning last Thursday night.

Is God really such a wonderful loving God? It is quite easy to accept the fact that God is loving when we are young and have never experienced hardship or tragedy. But when we meet evil and pain, tragedy and suffering face to face, the loving God of our youth does not seem so loving.

There is great tension in the statement that God is love and that He allows evil, tragedy and suffering to exist and even to flourish.
This tension if left unexplored and unresolved will at best cause a person to become ambivalent or indifferent towards God. At worst, it will cause a deep anger and resentment toward God.
The tension can be resolved, but it must be resolved alone with God and in His Word. Much of the world does not really wish to resolve this tension because it gives them a convenient and rational reason to live as they please and to be their own God. But for those who eagerly desire to know Him, He is also eager to teach and He has taught me. He taught me on September 18, 1995, in a hospital bathroom at 1 am after I had collapsed on the floor in grief over my dying sister.

My begging, pleading, and anger exhausted, I lay in silence on a cold hard bathroom floor knowing that He was not going to perform a miracle that day and that my sister would be dead in hours.
Empty of myself, God taught me. He taught me the true heavenly perspective of tension and it wasn’t “how could a loving God allow good people to suffer”. It was “How could a Holy and Just God give so much love, so much mercy, so much grace, and so many blessings to a rebellious and thick headed people such as we are-such as I was”. It was at that moment that I realized I had not deserved such a beautiful, kind-hearted sister and instead of pleading for her life as if I was entitled to something, I began to, with great emotion, pour out my thanks to the God who gave me a sister and as I prayed, I was met with as best as I can describe it- a hug from God, and that hug had just redeemed the worst day of my life and made it beautiful.

The Bible is very clear as to why suffering and tragedies occur. They occur because we are rebels and we desire to be our own god. We broke off our relationship with God and there were great consequences, the worst of which was separation from Him forever. In His great mercy though, He promised that He would save us and therein lays the great tension and greatest mystery of the Bible. How can God save a doomed people that He loves and still be just. Even our corrupt earthly judges have to issue forth justice and demand payment when laws are broken. -How much more the Great and Perfect Judge. Where do perfect love and perfect justice meet?

Almost every page of the Bible hints and points to this answer. God did not ask Abraham to kill his son Isaac to teach us about faith. He was asking Abraham to rehearse and point to what He (God) was going to do in a thousand years on that same hill. God would lead his own Son up the hill to be killed as a sacrifice for many. The Bible does not record that Isaac carried his own wood to His sacrifice for the sake of our curiosity. It was recorded so that when we saw Jesus carrying his own wood (cross) up the hill for his sacrifice, we might know that it had all been carefully planned out from the beginning.

Where do perfect love and perfect justice meet? They meet at the cross of Christ.
For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.
The Father sent his Son to us, to live a sinless life, to die on a cross, and to be raised to life 3 days later to prove true His claims and our redemption.
Our sins have been paid (perfect justice), our redemption has been purchased (perfect love) and they are offered to us as a free gift.

Why does the Bible record that Jesus was crucified between two thieves? Once again God is painting a picture for us to look upon, to contemplate and to take wonder in.
We are those two thieves. We stand rightly condemned for our rebellion and many sins. We have no recourse. We have no way down…no way to rescue ourselves just as they did not.
The Bible tells us that both thieves mocked Jesus, but at some point, one of them turned to Jesus and humbly and simply asked to be saved. Jesus said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise”. The most important question in all the world is this-Which of those two criminals are you?

Psalms 90 says, God teach us to number our days. What that means is that as you look upon my mom’s casket today, please realize that you will be there very soon. It was just a few moments ago that my mom was holding a baby boy in her arms and now he is 43 and speaking at her funeral. Time is so very precious and short and the Bible is very clear that you only have this lifetime to make a decision to follow Christ. If you do not know Christ, I urge you to humble yourself at the foot of the cross and ask Him to save you. He is indeed Mighty to save and he turns no one away. If you already belong to Christ, I urge you to recommit your life to Him and surrender your whole self to Him as He is deserving and most worthy of it.

I will close with this thought. For those who belong to Christ, suffering is allowed for a season. We are told to expect it, but we are also told that He will be there with us and that He will turn it into something beautiful. Last Thursday night at 2:45 AM, my mom was dying and gasping for air. It was as horrible as anything I could have imagined. But God was there and He was holding us close. Marilyn’s sister was lovingly by her side. I was stroking my mom’s forehead. My dad was holding her hand and I glimpsed both wedding rings and realized that ‘til death do us part’ was happening in front of my eyes. She breathed her last and my dad put his head down into Marilyn and cried and cried and then said, “God thank you so much for my wonderful wife.” God was there and we gave mom to Him at 3am and she entered glory not because of her good works but because of Christ’s finished work on the cross. Praise be to Him who is mighty to save.

Where is God in your suffering? God is on cross 2000 years ago bleeding and dying for you.
The question is not where is God in your suffering.
The question is where are you in God’s suffering.

Closing Prayer:

Dear Heavenly Father,
We thank you for blessing us with your beautiful daughter Marilyn.
We mourn that we will be apart from her for a while, but we are eternally grateful that we have the hope to see her again in glory.
We would not have this hope apart from your precious Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
To Him be all honor, glory, majesty and power.
Maranatha. Lord come quickly!
-Amen.

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