Where Is God When Disaster Strikes?

Recent stories in the news bring to light how unexpectedly, how quickly disaster can strike. I listened with sadness last week as the morning news reported the beating death of a 28-year-old pastor in Texas and worse, the loss of seven children from one family in a house fire in Pennsylvania. Then Friday I watched in horror as the tsunami swept over northern Japan, carrying all away before it. As Phillip Yancey poignantly asked: Where is God when it Hurts? (That book is worth your while by the way).

The Bible is clear about the ultimate source of suffering – (See Genesis 3:17-19; and Romans 8:18, 22-25). Briefly, it teaches that we live in cursed bodies, with cursed psyches (souls) and cursed spirits, on a cursed planet under a cursed system in a cursed time. Men will commit crimes against one another. Accidents will burn houses down. Even the earth will oppose us and challenge us at every turn until we return to dust.

The Bible is clear about all of that. We should therefore adjust our expectations accordingly. We may not like the answer. But the question is not whether we like it. Rather, does it make sense of reality, as we know it? I believe that it does.
But all of that is abstract. Suffering is very personal stuff. I want to spend the rest of this article being personal.

God’s ultimate answer to suffering is the Cross of Christ.

Nine years ago last month I accompanied my friend Phil Ramsey to the spot where his 18-year-old son Joseph had just died in a totally inexplicable car wreck. My heart wrenched as I watched my friend implode in grief. I spent the next three months so angry with God that I could not speak to him except on a professional basis. How could he let that happen?! Two years later I buried one of my best friends, Steve Kotter, victim of a car hitting his bicycle. Two years after that I answered the phone late one night to the wails of a grieving friend. I then buried her twenty-year old son, a drowning victim. Last August I buried my brother, dead of a sudden heart attack. There was no explanation for any of these losses that made any sense to me. I grieved to the bottom of my soul, just as you do in your losses.

What is God’s answer to that? Where is God when that kind of stuff happens to us? Philosophers offer two basic answers: Either there is no all powerful all loving God. Or there is an all powerful God but he just doesn’t care.

But the Bible offers a third alternative. We can hear it in one of the most important, yet overlooked things Jesus ever said, one of the last things he said before he died. Theologians call it “the cry of dereliction,” something Jesus wailed aloud from the cross: “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!?” (Matthew 27:46).

This is God’s answer to our suffering. He is not ‘up there’, distant, aloof, impassive while we suffer. He is ‘down here’ suffering with us. He has taken every single pain, every ounce of tragedy, every shred of injustice, each moment of mindless terror, ‘rolled it into a ball and eaten it, tasted it, fully digested it, eternally.’ (Peter Kreeft, quoted in ‘The Case for Faith’ by Lee Strobel, pg. 63). God is in Christ, suffering with and reconciling the world to him self. (2 Corinthians 5:18-19).

Where is God when we suffer? Suffering with us.

The Cross is the most stunning proof that God cares about our pain. It is the universal image of Christianity. The problem is that we are so familiar with it that we forget how violent, how brutal it was. But the Cross is one of the vilest tormenting and barbaric forms of cruelty and death the world has ever known. Our word ‘excruciating’ comes from the Latin for crucifixion. Yet we wear it around the neck like a trophy. Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion’ met with much criticism because it portrayed the Cross in all its X-Rated gore. “Modern day executions are quick and sterile things. This one stretched on for hours in front of a jeering crowd.” (Yancey, Phillip. ‘Where is God When it Hurts?’ p. 231) In his death Jesus, God in the flesh, fully identified with our suffering. He didn’t have to do that. He chose it. He chose full identification with suffering humanity.

When tragedy strikes the promises of God often seem empty. Words on a page, or even from a friend, can’t fill the breach in our souls. Surely the words of Jesus to his friends must have seemed like empty promises as he hung there and died. They hung back in the crowd and slowly dispersed. It was after all, an empty hope they had clung to.

But that was Friday. Easter Sunday was yet to come. When it did come, the world, suffering, life and death itself was turned on its head. The Cross tells us that God fully identifies with all the suffering of the world. The resurrection tells us that one day he will turn it on its head.

This has had a profound effect on me. It reawakened within me a truth I once knew, a knowledge I once held dear. God, my God, my heavenly father, is not holding me at arm’s length. He is not a careless cosmic thug. He is embracing me. He is beside me holding me up. He is weeping with me. He knows the emptiness of my grief the hollowness of my soul. He knows these things and shares these things with the whole world of suffering. On the cross he absorbed it and through us he absorbs it still.

This knowledge restored my hope in God. It did something else too. It renewed my understanding of the uniqueness of Christianity. If you take the Cross out of the center of Christianity you remove that which makes it peerless among religions. It becomes just another system of morals and principles. But if you embrace the Cross you find a God there who is unlike any other, a God who will go to unimaginable lengths to commune with his creatures. He will commune with us to the death on Friday so that we can conquer death with him on Sunday.