Suffering With My Thoughts on Suffering, Part 2

So suffering is our problem. But God makes it his.

The Christian story is of a God who takes on flesh. He wades into our pain, becomes a man. He lives for 33 years. He gets hungry, cold, tired. People talk about him behind his back.

Ultimately his friends betray him, abandon him. He is executed in one of the most painful ways ever invented by human beings. One Biblical tradition says that he descended into hell. Three days later, he is raised again.

God comes in the flesh to take on all our suffering, all our pain, all our sin and brokenness. And he takes it on himself, coming all the way down, and comes all the way back up, to conquer it once and for all.

Suffering and death no longer have the last word on humanity. God does. Jesus does. Suffering doesn't have to define us any longer. Hope can. Hope wins.

We think (and here I'm flat-out stealing from my systematic theology prof) that we know suffering because we experience the pain of it. And from that experience of suffering, we question God's existence and his character.

But actually, quite the opposite is true. We don't know about suffering. Where it comes from, why it exists, how it came to be. We know it stinks, we feel its effects, but we don't know how much we are or aren't allowed to experience in God's providence. We don't know if things could be better or worse. We don't know much about suffering at all, actually.

In the Christian story, we are invited to be agnostic about suffering. And we are invited to be confident in the character and love of God.

The Christian story invites us to boldly yet humbly hold onto the fact that we do know God. We know God and his character because he has made it known in Jesus Christ. God who takes on all our pain, all our shame, all our brokenness and dies for you and for me. That's the character and nature of God. He has made himself known.

And the invitation to all of us is to tie our stories with God's story. We are invited to have all our pain, all our suffering ultimately and finally redeemed--in this life, and/or in the next.