In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire —may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.

1 Peter 1:6-7 (NIV)

Our church has begun a series on suffering and it has gotten me thinking about the tension that lies at the heart of the Christian faith. On one hand, God is profoundly good, a goodness we see in Scripture and experience every day. On the other, we are called to suffer. By “called” I mean that suffering, for a variety of reasons, is expected. But how exactly does God’s profound goodness factor into suffering?

The difficulty many have with God is the presence of suffering in the world. That if there were a God, he certainly would not allow this to happen. But this assumes God is the way we think he should be. It also assumes his goodness is the way we think it is. Sure, if God is all-powerful, then he must be the type of God who allows us to suffer. But whether we conclude he is good or not because of this depends on whether we define his goodness based on his willingness or unwillingness to allow us to suffer. Scripture makes clear God’s goodness is not defined in this way.

Our difficulty with God when it comes to suffering, rather, is our own conception of him. If we have been raised on a strict diet of being told God is good and he does not want us to suffer, we are understandably going to have difficulty when we do. We are going to think something strange is happening to us. We are going to think it should not be happening, and that God is not who he says he is. We are going to be inclined to a crisis of faith.

But there is really no cause for a crisis of faith if we turn to scripture, because in scripture we see from cover to cover a God, though profoundly good, willing to allow suffering. It isn’t as if the Word of God portrays God as a God unwilling to allow any form of suffering, and we now find ourselves coming to terms with a world full of it. The opposite is actually true: the Word of God shows God to be very willing to allow suffering, something that reflects the world we find ourselves in. Our difficulty with suffering then is our own ideas about God that neither agree with scripture or the world around us.

But how can God be both good and allow suffering? Again, the answer is that God’s goodness is not defined by his willingness or unwillingness to allow us to suffer. It is defined by something far more profound. To put it simply, God’s goodness is defined equally by his holiness. And it is God’s holiness that makes God willing to allow suffering. God did not create the world and then, looking down one day, say, “Something is missing. I know: suffering!” No, the Word of God is clear that all the suffering we see today came through sin. So suffering is clearly not something God desires, but it is something he allows on the basis of his holiness.

It is really important we understand this. When we object to God’s goodness on the basis of suffering, we are imagining a God willing to go to any length to prevent it. We are imagining a God willing to restrict our free will in order to prevent the consequence of sin, which is suffering, or a God willing to allow us to exercise our free will without consequence. In short, we are imagining a God who is either controlling or not holy. But God’s way of dealing with sin was to allow humanity to exercise the full range of free will and also experience the full consequence of sin. God was willing to allow sin to come through Adam and death through sin, resulting in the world we now see today.

And God is now in the process of delivering us not only from suffering but its root cause, which is sin, through Jesus Christ and his work on the Cross. Yes, even now, God could snap his finger and deliver us all from it instantly. But for a variety of reasons, he has chosen to deliver us progressively. He has chosen to keep us in the world, though we are no longer of it, experiencing his goodness in a variety of ways as we are transformed by him, being conformed to the image of His Son. And his reasons for doing so – though I have no space to go into it now – are all good.

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