I had not realized that if God loves this world,
God suffers; I had thoughtlessly supposed that God loved without suffering. I knew that
divine love was the key. But I had not realized that the love that is the key is
suffering love. –NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF
We will discuss this week a characteristic of God that everyone either believes
or hopes He possesses. Faith in a God of love is, indeed, our greatest comfort.
If true, it is the warmest reassurance to the human soul. If not, we are
virtually without hope. Yet even among those who believe, God’s love is also
the source of the deepest of questions. If God is love, why do we hurt? If He
loves us forever, why doesn’t He act like it now? If He is the source of all
love, why do we so often sense His elusiveness instead of His embrace?
The first item on my agenda today is to join a host of others in
proclaiming my belief in a loving God. The New Testament epistle of First John
asserts that “God is love.”1 The near-unanimous testimony of
believers throughout history is the same. And our common sense provides objective confirmation. We know full well that human love
must have a loving God as its source, for the simple reason that any effect
must arise from a cause consistent with it. Nature, so impersonal and devoid of
love, cannot be that source. God is love’s fountainhead, the well from which
all love comes. And His love, just like His power and knowledge, must be
boundless, exceeding the cumulative love of humans since the beginning of time.
Nowhere is this better expressed than in this stanza of an old gospel song:
And were the skies
of parchment made,
Were every stalk on
earth a quill
And every man a
scribe by trade –
To write the love
of God above
Would drain the
oceans dry,
Nor could the
scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched
from side to side.2
My second agenda item is to interject a dimension of God’s love that
is often overlooked: the suffering side of His love. If you think about it a
while, you will come to realize that love and suffering are mutually inclusive.
You can’t have one without the other. To love is to suffer; to suffer is to
love. “Death, psychological distress, pain, and injustice,” says Bruce Vaughn,
“provide the occasion for suffering,
but not the cause. For none of these would cause us suffering were it not for
the fact that we love. If we did not
love, both ourselves and others, we would not suffer.”3 He goes on
to quote Miguel de Unamuno: “Love and suffering mutually engender one another.”4
If you have trouble grasping this concept, then consider the love of a
mother toward her child. Even before the baby’s birth, maternal love springs
forth within her. On the one hand, this love imparts to her a sense of great
satisfaction. On the other hand, it demands of her a life of gritty sacrifice.
It is a yearning love that longs and strives for the child’s good. When that
good does not materialize (for instance, when the child becomes ill or
rebellious), the mother suffers pain and hurt. To avoid that suffering would be
to abandon love itself.
God’s love, the wellspring of that mother’s love, is just the same but
to an even greater extent. He loves us infinitely, so He must infinitely desire
what is best for us. And when, because of sin and suffering, that best does not
materialize, He must infinitely experience the painful, suffering side of love
that hurts along with the beloved.
The prophet Hosea, likewise using the analogy of parental affection,
expresses how God suffers in love:
When Israel was a
child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called Israel, the more they went from me... Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in
my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with
cords of compassion, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke
on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them… My people are bent on turning
away from me... How can I give you up, Ephraim! How can I hand you over, Israel!... My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.5
Here we see the classic Old Testament portrait of a God of love
grieved by our sin. He suffers with us. In the New Testament we find a picture
even more poignant. There God in Jesus Christ groans under the weight of our
sin. He suffers for us.
Let me bookend today’s reading with another quote from Yale professor
Nicholas Wolterstorff. His son’s tragic death at the age of twenty-five led him
to write a book entitled Lament for a
Son. Referring to the aftermath of this horrible experience, he writes:
My son is gone. The
ache of loss sinks down and down, deep beyond telling. How deep do souls go?
...I never knew sorrow could be like this... It’s hard to keep one's footing... I cannot fit these pieces
together. I am at a loss. My wound is an unanswered question...
Who is this God
looming over me? Majesty? I see no majesty. Grace? Can this be grace? I see nothing at
all; dark clouds hide the face of God. Slowly the clouds lift. What I saw then was tears, a weeping God, suffering over my
suffering...
I do not know what
to make of this; it is to me a mystery. But I find I can live with that... Life
eternal doesn’t depend on getting all the questions answered; God is often as much behind the
questions as behind the answers...
[T]he cry of those
who suffer injustice is the cry of God... And sometimes when the cry is
intense, there emerges a radiance which seldom appears: a glow of courage, of
love, of insight, of
selflessness, of faith. In that radiance we see best what humanity was meant to be. So I shall struggle to live the reality of
Christ’s rising and death’s dying. In my living, my son’s dying will not be the last word.6
Please do not mistake me. I am not presenting to you today a
teary-eyed, overly sentimental God who would cry at the cinema nor a divine
worry-wart akin to some doting grandparent. Nor am I trying to humanize God,
giving you the picture of a weaker, less powerful Being whose hands are tied to
the point that all He can do is weep. Such a portrait is the furthest thing
from my mind. An emotionless, non-suffering God would be preferable. Here
again, my objective is to raise your view of God. You and I are loving beings.
We may not always experience or practice it, but we know what it means to truly
love. We know that therein is abundant privilege and joy admixed with the
deepest sacrifice and suffering. We understand that true love longs for the
best in the beloved and selflessly works toward that end. It rejoices when that
end is achieved and grieves, in the fullest sense of the word, when it is not.
We are aware that true love, in the words of the apostle Paul, “bears all
things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Or, as he
sums it up, “Love never fails.”7 And if that is what we know about
human love, then we know just as surely that its source—the infinite love of
God—must be vastly greater in every dimension. The joy of God as He loves must
be beyond measure; likewise, His sorrow.
That is the portrait of God I am painting on the canvas of your soul
today—a God more powerful, knowledgeable, sovereign, righteous, and loving than you could ever imagine. To
those of you today who do not believe in a God of such love, I offer to you my
deepest sympathy and prayer. To those of you who do believe but for some reason
do not sense His love, I declare to you the grandest consolation. Even now you
are in God’s embrace. How strong and secure are those arms! Yet how softly the
suffering Father holds you!
In closing, I offer a reminder
that the final chapter in our existence has not been written. God is not yet
through with us. He still in divine love is working to accomplish for us what
is best. He is determined that His purpose for us will not be thwarted. He
vows, in the midst of His own suffering, that our suffering will not be the
last word.
Weekly Quotation
Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Grace
That Shaped My Life,” in Kelly Monroe, Finding
God at Harvard (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 157.
1First John 4:8,16
2Frederick M.
Lehman, “The Love of God,” quoted in Kenneth W. Osbeck, Amazing Grace (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2002), 46.
3Bruce Vaughn, “Does
Suffering Build Character?” [n.p.], March 22, 1997, p. 3.
4Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E.
Crawford Flitch (New York: Dover Publications, 1954).
5Hosea 11:1-4, 7-8
(RSV).
6Nicholas
Wolterstorff, “The Grace That Shaped my Life,” in Kelly Monroe, Finding God at Harvard, (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 1996), 156-58.
7First Corinthians
13:7-8
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