The God Who Enters Suffering
*THE GOD THEY REJECTED ISN'T REAL* series 12-75
Every other worldview keeps God safely above the pain. Christianity alone puts Him in it.
The God With Scars
Every intellectual objection to God has a counter-argument. This is worth saying plainly before anything else, because the culture has spent considerable energy creating the impression that the intellectual case against God is settled and that only the credulous and the unsophisticated continue to resist the verdict. That impression is false. It is sustained not by the quality of the arguments against God but by the quality of the cultural machinery that presents those arguments as conclusive without engaging the responses that serious philosophers and theologians have offered to them.
For the claim that science has disproved religion, there is a century of philosophy of science demonstrating that science explains mechanisms and cannot, by its own methodological constraints, adjudicate metaphysical questions about whether anything exists beyond the physical. For the claim that the Bible is unreliable, there is the field of textual criticism, which has produced the most extensively attested ancient document in history, with a manuscript tradition that dwarfs any comparable ancient text and whose variants, when examined honestly, do not affect any central claim of the faith. For the claim that morality does not require God, there is the problem of grounding human dignity without a transcendent source, the problem that Peter Singer has followed to its logical and horrifying conclusions with more intellectual honesty than most secular humanists are willing to bring to the same premises. For the claim that the existence of evil disproves the existence of God, there is a two-thousand-year tradition of careful philosophical engagement with the problem that has produced responses sophisticated enough that the world’s leading philosophers of religion continue to debate them, which is not what a settled question looks like.
Arguments can be answered with arguments. The intellectual case against God is not closed. It is contested, vigorously and with genuine force on both sides, and anyone who tells you the question is settled has either not read the primary literature or has a reason to want you to believe it is settled before you get there.
But there is an objection to God that does not arrive in the form of an argument. It does not arrive in the form of a syllogism or a philosophical challenge or a scientific claim that needs to be evaluated against the relevant evidence. It arrives in the form of a hospital room where the news is worse than you prepared yourself for. It arrives in the form of a graveside on a day that should not have happened yet, for a person who should have had more time. It arrives at three in the morning when you are alone with something that happened, something specific and real and yours, something that should not have happened but did, and the wrongness of it is not an intellectual problem you can resolve by reading the right book. It is a weight that is simply there, pressing down, and the question it generates is not something you formulate. It is something that happens to you. It rises from the circumstances like heat from asphalt, involuntary and undeniable, and it sounds something like this:
If there is a God, and He is good, and He is powerful, where is He right now? Not in general. Right here. In this room. With this specific unbearable thing that is happening to this specific person who did nothing to deserve it. Where. Is. He.
That question is not asking for a philosophical treatise. It is not asking to be informed about the free will defense or the soul-making theodicy or the distinction between moral evil and natural evil. It is asking something more immediate and more desperate than any of those frameworks can reach. It is asking whether God is present in the worst of it or only in the manageable parts. Whether His care extends to the moments when care is most needed and most invisible. Whether the promises mean anything when the night is longest and the silence is loudest and the theology that sustains you on ordinary days does not seem to be touching the floor of this particular darkness.
Every major worldview has an answer to this question, and each of them fails in a different and specific way that is worth examining honestly before we arrive at what Christianity actually says, because Christianity’s answer is so different from everything else on offer that it requires the contrast to be fully visible in order to land with its proper weight.
Buddhism’s answer to suffering is among the most intellectually sophisticated available. The first noble truth is that life is suffering, dukkha, a term that carries connotations of unsatisfactoriness, of the inherent inability of conditioned existence to provide lasting fulfillment. The cause of suffering is attachment. The path out of suffering is the cessation of attachment, the progressive release of the grip on outcomes, on people, on the self itself, until the conditions that generate suffering are dissolved. This is not a naive answer. It is the product of profound psychological insight into the mechanisms by which the human mind generates its own distress. But what it offers the person in the hospital room is ultimately a path away from the pain rather than a presence in it. It says: the attachment that makes this unbearable is the problem. Release the attachment. The answer is a methodology for suffering less, not a companion in the suffering. The God of Buddhism, to the extent that the word God applies at all, does not enter the hospital room. He offers a technique for eventually needing the hospital room less.
Islam’s answer is submission. The word Islam itself means submission, and the theological framework it provides for suffering is the framework of divine will that is beyond human questioning. What Allah wills happens. The response to suffering is acceptance of divine sovereignty, the recognition that the human being is not in a position to evaluate the wisdom of what God permits. This is not without a certain austere dignity. It takes seriously the gap between divine knowledge and human knowledge in a way that is theologically honest. But what it offers the person at the graveside is ultimately distance rather than solidarity. It says: God is above this, His ways are beyond your understanding, submit to what you cannot comprehend. The answer preserves divine sovereignty at the cost of divine nearness. The God of Islam does not come down. He remains above, sovereign and inscrutable, and the human being below is asked to accept that inscrutability as the final word.
Secular humanism’s answer is the most honest in one specific respect and the most inadequate in another. It is honest enough to admit that suffering has no cosmic meaning, that the universe does not owe comfort or explanation, that bad things happen to good people because the processes that govern physical reality are indifferent to human wellbeing and always have been. This honesty has a certain bleak integrity. It does not patronize the sufferer with false comfort. But what it offers is ultimately nothing. It offers the company of other human beings, which is real and valuable and genuinely sustaining in ways that should not be minimized. But it cannot offer the thing the question is actually asking for. It cannot offer a presence that is adequate to the weight of the worst moments, because every human presence, however loving and however faithful, is itself finite and fragile and will eventually be ended by the same processes that produced the suffering in the first place. Humanism offers human solidarity in the face of a darkness that is larger than humanity. It is a genuine gift. It is not enough.
Stoicism, which has experienced a significant cultural revival and whose framework a significant portion of the educated secular world now uses to navigate difficulty, offers perhaps the most psychologically practical response short of the Christian one. The Stoic framework distinguishes between what is in your control and what is not, and locates the good life in the cultivation of the internal response to external circumstances rather than in the external circumstances themselves. Epictetus, who was himself a slave, developed this framework under conditions that give it genuine authority. You cannot control what happens to you. You can control how you respond. The suffering is real. Your virtue in the face of it is real. That is what matters. This framework produces resilience of a remarkable kind and the people who practice it seriously are often admirable in their ability to navigate difficulty without being destroyed by it. But the Stoic God, the logos, the rational principle underlying reality, is not a person. It does not enter the hospital room. It does not weep at the graveside. It offers a philosophy of endurance, not a companion in the endurance. The Stoic answer to where is God in the worst of it is: everywhere, as the rational principle underlying all things, which is true in a way but does not touch the floor of the question being asked.
Christianity’s answer is unlike anything else on offer in the world of ideas, and the unlikeness is so complete that it cannot be explained as a human invention. Human beings, when they construct religions, construct them in ways that serve human psychological needs. They construct gods who are powerful and transcendent and who can be approached and appeased and who reward correct behavior. They construct gods who explain what cannot otherwise be explained. They construct gods who provide comfort by locating suffering within a larger framework that makes it bearable. What human beings do not construct, because it does not serve any obvious psychological need and is in fact offensive to the natural human instinct about what deity should be like, is a God who suffers. A God who enters poverty and obscurity and physical agony and dies by torture. A God with scars.
The foundation for what Christianity says about suffering is laid not in the New Testament but in a conversation at a burning bush in the wilderness of Midian, and it is worth reading slowly because every word is doing something.
God speaks to Moses in Exodus 3:7 with three verbs that establish the divine pattern before the incarnation, before the cross, before anything in the New Testament confirms and intensifies what is being said here. I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers. And I am concerned about their suffering. Three verbs. Seen. Heard. Concerned. The Hebrew word translated concerned, yada, carries a weight that the English word does not fully convey. It is the word used elsewhere for the deepest form of knowing, the knowing of intimate relationship rather than the knowing of observation. It is not I have noticed their suffering from the appropriate divine distance. It is I am intimately acquainted with it. I know it from the inside. I have not watched it behind glass.
This is God establishing His character before the incarnation. He is a God who sees, who hears, who knows suffering from the inside rather than observing it from above. He is a God whose pattern, established at the burning bush and confirmed at every subsequent moment of scriptural revelation, is to move toward the suffering rather than to observe it from the appropriate distance of omnipotence.
And then the New Testament takes this further than the burning bush could go.
In the New Testament, the God who saw and heard and knew the suffering of His people in Egypt does something that no human religion had ever imagined and that no human psychological need had ever required. He enters the suffering. Not as an observer. Not as a manager of the situation who can see the resolution from above and is asking the people in it to trust that the resolution is coming. He enters it as a participant. He takes on a body that can be hungry and cold and exhausted and frightened. He is born into poverty in an occupied country to a family that has to flee as refugees within the first two years of his life. He grows up in obscurity in a region that was the cultural backwater of an already marginalized province. He is misunderstood by the people closest to him. He is betrayed by one of the twelve people he chose to be with him. He is abandoned by the rest when the cost of loyalty becomes too high. He is subjected to a legal process that is a parody of justice, condemned by a court that knows he is innocent and condemns him anyway for political convenience. He is tortured by professionals whose job is to make torture last as long as possible before it kills. And from the cross, in the moment of maximum agony, he cries out the words of Psalm 22 in a voice loud enough that the bystanders can hear it.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.
This is the cry of dereliction. It is the moment when the God who entered human suffering experiences the furthest reach of that suffering, the silence of God, the absence of the divine presence in the darkness, the experience that every person who has prayed in a hospital room and heard nothing knows from the inside. Jesus does not experience this from above. He experiences it from below, from inside the suffering, from the place where the silence is loudest and the darkness is most complete and the theological framework that sustains ordinary life does not seem to be touching the floor.
Christians do not worship a God who stands above suffering and offers wisdom about how to endure it. They worship a God who went down into the worst of it and came out the other side carrying the marks of where he had been.
John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus wept. The scene is Lazarus’s tomb. Everything about the scene should produce a different response from Jesus than the one it produces. Jesus has already told the disciples that Lazarus’s illness will not end in death. He knows what he is about to do. He has the power to fix this. He is moments away from calling Lazarus out of the tomb. And he stops, in the presence of Mary’s grief and the grief of the mourners around her, and weeps.
He does not say: stop crying, this is all part of the plan. He does not produce the resolution before acknowledging the grief. He enters the grief first. He weeps before he heals. He is present in the pain before he resolves it, and the presence in the pain is not incidental to the story. It is the point the story is making. The point is not that Jesus can raise the dead, though he can. The point is that the God who can raise the dead chooses to weep at the graveside before he does it. Because the grief is real even when the resurrection is coming. Because the solidarity is not negated by the power. Because the point is not only the resolution. The point is also the presence.
This is what most churches do not tell you, or tell you in a way that does not land properly, about the experience of praying in a hospital room and feeling nothing. The silence you experience in that room is not evidence that God is absent. It is not evidence that the prayer is inadequate or the faith is insufficient or the theology is wrong. It is evidence that you are in the territory that Jesus himself walked, the territory of the cry from the cross, the territory where the divine presence is most real and most invisible simultaneously, where the faith that sustains ordinary life is being asked to sustain something that ordinary life was not designed for.
The silence at the graveside is not God’s absence. It is, according to the tradition that produced the cry of dereliction as a canonical part of Scripture rather than an embarrassment to be explained away, the specific form that divine presence takes in the moments that are furthest from ordinary. The God who weeps at Lazarus’s tomb is present at every tomb. He is not managing the situation from above. He is in it. He has been in it. He knows what the inside of the worst of it feels like, not as information but as experience, not as observation but as participation.
After the resurrection, Jesus keeps his scars.
This detail is not incidental and it is worth sitting with as long as it takes for it to land properly. He could have emerged from the resurrection in a form that bore no mark of what had been done to him. He is, at this point, the resurrected Lord of all creation. The body that appears to Mary in the garden and to the disciples in the upper room and to Thomas who refuses to believe without physical evidence is a body that has passed through death and beyond it. There is no biological necessity for the wounds to remain. The resurrection is not a resuscitation. It is a transformation. And yet the scars are there. Thomas is invited to touch them. They are real. They are permanent. They are the form in which the resurrected Christ chooses to present himself to the people who need to know that the person in front of them is the same person who was on the cross.
The scars are not an oversight. They are a permanent testimony written into the resurrection body of the Son of God, a testimony that will apparently be visible for as long as that body exists, which is to say forever. They say: I know betrayal from the inside. I know abandonment from the inside. I know the experience of being in agony and crying out and hearing silence. I know what it is like to be in the worst of it with no visible sign that anything is coming. I know humiliation and injustice and the specific loneliness of suffering that is visible to everyone around you and touched by none of them. I know what death feels like from the inside. And I walked through all of it. Which means I can walk anyone through anything.
The question where is God when we suffer has one Christian answer. It does not point to a theological framework. It does not point to a promise about the future. It points to a specific historical event on a specific hill outside a specific city on a specific afternoon, and it says: there. Right there. In the worst of it. Not watching from the appropriate divine distance. Not managing the situation from above. Not waiting for the suffering to reach a level he can address without compromising his dignity. Bleeding.
That is either true or it is not. The question of whether it is true is the most important question available to a human being, and it deserves the most serious investigation available to a human being, and the investigation has been conducted by serious people across twenty centuries with results that are not nearly as settled as the culture would like you to believe.
But this much can be said without resolving the question of truth. No human religion invents a God like this. A God with scars is not the kind of deity that human psychological need generates, because human psychological need generates gods who are powerful and distant and can be approached through the correct ritual rather than gods who entered poverty and were tortured to death and kept the marks afterward. A suffering God is not what the human religious impulse reaches for when it constructs its own objects of worship. It is not what Greek philosophy arrived at after centuries of the most rigorous metaphysical investigation in the ancient world. It is not what Roman religion produced. It is not what any of the great Eastern traditions produced. It is not what human beings, left to their own religious imagination, tend to come up with.
Every other worldview keeps God safely above the pain. At a distance that preserves his majesty and his power and his inscrutable sovereignty and his freedom from the limitations and indignities of embodied suffering. Every other worldview looks at the cross and sees a problem to be explained or a tragedy to be noted or a limitation to be overcome. Only one worldview looks at the cross and says: that is exactly what God looks like when he decides to show you who he is.
That one showed up with scars. He kept them on purpose. And he is still, according to the tradition, in the business of entering hospital rooms and graves and three in the morning silences, not as a manager of the situation but as the one who has already been in the worst of it and knows the way through.
The question is not whether you feel him there. The question is whether he is there regardless of whether you feel him.
The scars say yes.Arguments can be answered with arguments.
But there is an objection to God that does not arrive in the form of an argument. It arrives in the form of a hospital room. Or a graveside. Or 3am alone with something that should not have happened but did.
It is not a question you formulate. It is a question that happens to you.
And it sounds something like this: if there is a God, and He is good, and He is powerful, where is He right now?
Christianity’s answer to that question is unlike anything else on offer in the world of ideas. It does not say suffering is an illusion. It does not say suffering will be explained eventually so endure it now. It does not say God is distant but He cares.
It says: God came down. Not into comfort. Into agony.
Exodus 3:7 is the foundation. God speaks to Moses from the burning bush: “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.” Three verbs. Seen. Heard. Concerned. The Hebrew word translated “concerned” is yada, to know in the deepest sense. Not observed from a distance. Intimately acquainted with. This is God before the incarnation, before the cross, already establishing His pattern: He does not watch from behind glass.
But the New Testament takes this further. In the New Testament, God does not merely observe human suffering with infinite intimacy. He enters it. He enters poverty, obscurity, exile, misunderstanding, betrayal, physical agony, injustice, abandonment, and the silence of God. He cries from the cross: my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Christians do not worship a God who stands above suffering. They worship a God with scars.
John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the Bible: Jesus wept. The scene is Lazarus’s tomb. Jesus is about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He knows it is coming. He has the power to fix it. And He stops and weeps anyway. He does not say, stop crying, this is all part of the plan. He enters the grief before He resolves it.
Because the point is not the resolution. The point is the solidarity.
After the resurrection, Jesus keeps His scars. He could have emerged flawless. He chose to appear still marked by crucifixion. Those scars are not an oversight. They are a permanent testimony: I know betrayal, I know abandonment, I know humiliation, I know grief, I know death. And I survived all of it. Which means I can walk anyone through anything.
The question “where is God when we suffer?” has one Christian answer. It points to a Roman cross and says: right there. In the worst of it. Not watching. Bleeding.
That is either true or it is not. But it is not a small claim, and it is not a comfortable one. No one would have invented a God like this. A God with scars is not the kind of deity human religion tends to manufacture.
This one showed up that way.