Pain and Suffering

Notes on Hillsdale College Online Course on C. S. Lewis part 5

Lecturer Michael Ward

By Rev. Lonnie C. Crowe

How can pain exist in a world created by a supposedly good and all-powerful God?

Pain is a tool in God's hand.  Pain insists on being attended to.  God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.  It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

We need this because we are under the illusion that all is well.  That we are the captains of our own souls. 

God loves us so much that He is willing to challenge us and our halfhearted understanding of what love is in a relationship with Him.  God loves man, not in some disinterested, indifferent, concern for our welfare, but in the truth that we are the objects of His love.  You asked for a loving God; you have one, the consuming fire Himself, the love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work, as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.

The process of our realization is often a painful one.

George McDonald:  "The son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His."

3 Lessons:

Pain shows bad men where they are wrong.

Pain reveals our need for God.

Pain demonstrates when people choose the good for its own sake.

We must understand the agony of the Cross; the agony of being forsaken, before we can fully embrace joy of the Resurrection.  The miracle of the Resurrection is that is shows that God's forsakenness can be redeemable, can be reinterpreted.

Fortitude and patience come in when reason and argument exhaust themselves.

We cannot carry the burdens and pain of another.  Jesus can and did. When we realize this, we can share in the Cross and then the Resurrection.  We must go down to go up.