I Believe in God *Because* There is Death and Suffering

“If there is a God, he would not allow [such and such] to happen.”

That is what many of us are saying, or feel strongly inclined to say. It seems commonplace to interpret the world's tragedies and pains as a sign that we are alone, and that there is no God – or that if there is, he can't be a nice one. Who, we ask again and again, can support the idea of a loving Creator when Creation must starve in such loveless circumstances?

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The truth is, though, that once you finish your angry tirade and are done taking out your frustration on the object of blame, the dying and the suffering in the world will still be going on. Murder and disease will persist. Atheists will continue to help others in opposition to the divine, and Christians will continue to minister in service to the divine. Nothing will have changed.

Only once you have accepted the fact that death and suffering exist are you in a position to make any judgments about them. And when you do, you may see how counterproductive to the human dilemma the denial of a good God is.

When an atheist says God and suffering cannot both exist, they believe they are doing it on behalf of the human race. In truth, they are attacking what is humanity's chief hope – the belief in something beyond the bleak picture we now see.

We want to believe our pain is not in vain, and that one day joy will replace it. We want to believe the loved ones we lost are not lost forever. We want to believe death is not the end. For the person struggling with these issues, God can be the one who is the answer, not the enemy.

Why do the world's sorrows fail to break my faith? Simply put, they bolster my faith.

I believe in God because there is death and suffering;

because without God, death and suffering wouldn't make sense.

Unbelief scolds us and says, “People suffer and die and that's just the way of it. So suck it up and focus on what life you have.” Even if they had tried to sugar-coat it, the despair such a belief would cast on me would take away all my joy and hope.

But I choose not to think that way. I choose to put my faith in the reality of the empty tomb. I choose life in the face of death. I choose to believe in a heaven beyond the hell around us. I choose God.

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Opposing the Ocean

The ocean is scary. It is colossal. It is deep. It is forbidding. Above all, it is powerful. Few things can compare to it in terms of brute strength. It is able to pull down and crush the strongest of ships. What are we in comparison to it? Insects who ride its waves, while treating it with the respect and fear due it, for if we do not we will be swallowed.

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Man pretends to be strong. He is not compared to the forces of nature. He pretends to be wise. For all his smarts however, he cannot reshape and control nature to his liking. He himself is a product of nature, and is subject to its laws. All he can do is play along, and no matter how cleverly he does he must play by the rules, hoping some greater force does not take him by surprise and claim his life.

This is a grim perspective. However, there is another you can take.

If you choose to continually wrestle the ocean, you will fight a losing battle. You will be dragged under and swallowed up, unless by its mercy you are granted your life again. Those who make this choice will meet only frustration, despair, even death.

But you can stop fighting. You can stop trying to turn back the waves of the ocean – and you can ride them instead.

What is a popular metaphor for freedom? A ship on the sea. I stand on the deck as the wind rushes over my face and blows my hair. I listen to the hissing and crashing of the waves below. I feel the swaying of the boat beneath my feet. I look across the rolling waters and to the seemingly endless horizon before me, and the even mightier sky spreading above, across which rolls enormous white islands of clouds, billowing and shaping as they crawl across the planet. I take a deep breath of the salty air, and I say, “These are the moments I live for.”

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I do not wish to fight the ocean. I do not need to. I have found what true freedom is, and I will not cast it aside in trying to prove something that is not true – that I am a god who controls the waves. We all think of ourselves at some point as Poseidon, commanding the currents, altering the course of the deeps as we please. But if we let go, if we accept the fact that we are the ones who ride rather than direct the waves, there are few things more freeing.

Many of us live our lives striving to be something that God did not intend us to be. We are positive we know what we want, convinced that freedom is to be found in the purposes we set for ourselves. But I speak from experience when I say the things in which we look for freedom are often the very things that will chain up and enslave us, stifling growth, mastering and imprisoning us. But once we accept our circumstances, once we accept who we were created to be, only then can we truly live, only then can we truly find freedom.

If you spend your time trying to force onto your foot a glass slipper that was not molded to it, you will only hurt yourself. If you try to fight the ocean, you will fight a losing battle. God is like the ocean. To fight and control him is to choose madness and death. But to ride on his waves is life and peace.

Psalm 18:26, 27

“With the purified you show yourself pure;

and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous.

For you save a humble people,

but the haughty eyes you bring down.”

This does not mean there won't be storms. However, it is an irony that these storms bring us closer to God. During them is when we are most likely to talk to and spend time with him, when during a time of peace we take his love for granted and forget him. It is in our darkest hour, not our brightest, that we cry out to him, that we recognize our need for him. We thank God for times of peace. We also thank God for the times of turbulence, for without these the relationship would quickly die. It is not fun. But it is the very thing that brings us healing and life, curing the numbness we had before been under.

If we want to fight it we will only end up wringing our hands in vexation. Only if we ride it will we find purpose and meaning. So let us not live in denial of the truth, but let us live within it – for if you find the truth, it really will set you free.

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Jesus the Joke?

Do you laugh when you hear the name Jesus? Do you curse? Do you sigh with regret? Or do you sing?

Maybe you are trying to forget him. You hear the name and pull a face. You are disgusted, sick of hearing it, trying to get as far as possible from anything associated with it. You believe he is nothing but a superstition, a product conspiracy formed by some religious elite to subjugate “inferior” persons to their self-serving propaganda.

Perhaps the name has been used in such circles for this kind of purpose. But you're wrong if you think this is the real thing. If you take another look at the accounts of Jesus' life and testament, removing all preconceived ideas you have, and viewing them as they are, this is not the picture you get.

The picture you get is of a man who lived a life of hardship and danger, but who walked throughout it with godlike fearlessness – a man who went toe-to-toe with the religious elite of his day, and silenced them like their arguments were just air. A man who felt for others, even shed tears at the deaths of total strangers. But if he was iconoclastic to the surrounding culture, it was because of his loyalty to the past, more deeply because of his loyalty to the one he called his father, a love which directed all his actions. He ignored the pleasures and thrills of the world, because he himself was the way to a greater future than any of those shallow distractions could offer – he gave the hope of eternal life in a renewed world beyond this one. If anyone put their faith in him, they would never die completely, which was proven in his resurrection from the dead – something which nothing in this planet can offer, though it tries so hard.

What many refer to as science claims that his resurrection is too bizarre to be real, believing science to be omniscience – when there is still so much mystery in the universe it hasn't yet uncovered. Can you prove God doesn't exist, that he didn't create the universe, and that he didn't raise Jesus from the dead? But if he did raise him from the dead, then all the babbling of these scientists is lost to the wind. This world they have carefully built with their academics, their technology and their urban civilizations would be seen for what it is – a clever invention, but not proof of man's absoluteness or God's nonexistence.

Frankly my heart goes out to all who put their trust in earthly things, who believe all that remains to them is a limited time in a dark and sorrow-filled world to enjoy what pleasures they can get under a scarcity of joy and happiness. Only despair remains to them. But those who put their trust in God have hope for eternity – not just monotonous eternal persistence, but life, the thing which every human soul craves. Those who are powerful in this world will enjoy what they can get. The weak, the losers, the bullied, the diseased – the Scriptures say they will be royalty with Jesus in God's kingdom, having everything, if they follow in his footsteps, forgiving their enemies as he has forgiven them. As he said,

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

What Do We Strive For?

Jesus wants you to be successful. Jesus wants you to be great. Jesus wants you to impact and leave your mark on the world. Jesus wants you to get to the top. Jesus wants you to have fun and enjoy life. Jesus wants to feel good about yourself. Jesus wants you to win. Jesus wants you to beat down the competition. Jesus wants...Jesus wants...

What did Jesus want?

“Feed my sheep.”

Some people invoke the name of Jesus as a means to an end. They say “I am a Christian” and “I believe in God,” then go on to talk about how by their own power and determination they will climb the ladder and win a place in the world's hall of fame on their own merits. They may even begin to feel smug toward those who are less successful, even those called failures, quite closed to the possibility that some people may have to deal with disadvantages that others do not.

Of course they may nod their heads to the impoverished, to the addict, to the physically or socially disadvantaged, even go to great measures to help them to achieve the success they are achieving. But some cannot help falling behind, even giving up for lack of spirit or strength, and when this occurs they are at a loss as to the cure, and may even label them as hopeless, avoiding them as a disease, as a burden that will hold them back from achieving their own happiness.

For the non-religious this is an understandable conclusion. They have no time to lose in pursuing the good things in life, so they can enjoy as much of it as they can before it's all over. They know some day they will die and their bodies will decay, and they themselves will live on in nothing more than a memory – if even that for very long. They see no point in wasting precious time finding a way to cure these broken spirits, writing them off as self-destructive or simply lacking in sufficient optimism.

But whose spirit wouldn't be broken, living in the despair that some day they were going to die, while experiencing defeats and frustrations at every attempt to experience in life the good things they expect from it, and having finally run out of spiritual and emotional fuel? Is there really any point in trying anymore?

Those who see it that way are probably wiser than the former party. They understand what Solomon meant when he described life as vanity of vanities, a striving after the wind, a tragedy where all a man works for in his lifetime is lost to him when he dies, left to someone else to enjoy in his place. They know they cannot buy everlasting happiness or immortality. They know they are doomed.

However, one who is truly a Christian sees it differently.

They know Jesus was raised from the dead, and that one day they will also be resurrected as he was. They know that life is shallow and meaningless if its not centered on that which is eternal and full of wonders. They know that their boasting should not lie in their own power or smarts, but in God who made them in the first place and gave them the capabilities they possess. They express their gratitude not only with their voice, but in actions, such as lifting up the downcast and the downtrodden, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, visiting the imprisoned.

“For as surely as you did it to the least of these, you did it also to me.”

This is what Jesus really wanted, and continues to desire. No more self-righteousness and pride, no more pursuing of achievements that will not last, but instead humility and gratitude, and the storing up of treasures in heaven, where thieves do not break in and steal and where moth and rust do not destroy – an eternal treasure. For we have set our sights on something greater than the world has, the joy and glorification of Jesus who suffered and died for us, and was raised to victory over death and despair.

Let us not be Christian in name, secular in vocation. Let us live our whole lives for the reward of a joy and peace that will never die.




Romans 3:27- "Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith."

1 Corinthians 1:26-31 - "For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became wisdom to us from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, "Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord."