Articles
Coping with Life 12 – Pain
Coping with Life 12 – Pain
By Mike Willis
Most people will spend a portion of their life enduring pain. The pain that comes at the birth of a child is mentioned numerous times in Scripture (Psa. 48:6; Isa. 13:8; 21:3; 26:17-18; 66:7; Mic. 4:10). Sometimes there is perpetual pain from an incurable wound (Jer. 15:18).
Satan uses human pain to persuade people not to believe in God. The argument is simply stated: “If God is perfectly loving and good he must wish to abolish evil; if God is all powerful he must be able to abolish evil. But evil exists. Therefore God cannot be both perfectly good and almighty.” To make this argument, an atheist has to borrow from Christianity the ideas of “good” and “evil.” If there is no God, there is no absolute moral standard to define good and evil. The secularist position is that right and wrong are personal decisions because there are no moral absolutes. That being the case, this objection to faith in God has to be thrown into the trash heap, because it presupposes what they argue does not exist, “good” and “evil.” Their argument is self-defeating.
No one knows the mind of God apart from God revealing Himself to us. In the Bible account of the undeserved suffering of Job, the patriarch made many severe criticisms of the God who allowed him to suffer. God never did explain to Job why he was suffering. What He said to Job is that his finite knowledge did not qualify him to criticize God (see Job 38-41). Despite man’s advancements in science, today’s best philosophers, doctors, and counsellors have no better explanations for human pain than the ancients. They are no better qualified to criticize God than was Job.
The cross of Jesus demonstrates that good (the atonement of human sin) can come out of human suffering. Would any Christian wish that Jesus had not experienced pain when we depend upon His saving blood to have hope of resurrection to eternal life? The cross also shows mankind the character of God—“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:16-17). I am thankful that God sent His Son to save those who believe on Him, even though Jesus’s beating and crucifixion were horribly painful to Him.
When I was young, I could not understand why my parents took me to the doctor’s office and let a hired nurse stick a needle into my arm. I thought that, if they loved me, they would not allow that nurse to do that to me and sometimes I was mad at them for a short time when they arranged for that to happen. Later, I learned why and subsequently decided to take my own children to a doctor for shots to protect them from pandemics and to heal them from diseases they had contracted. One day we will learn why God created a world with pain and how that is not inconsisent with His moral character.
