The Logic of God: Does God Suffer?

There’s an old joke that goes like this:

Question: What is a bigger problem: ignorance or apathy?
Answer: I don’t know and I don’t care.

The “Open View” of God grapples with both issues: “What does it mean that God ‘knows everything’?” and “Does God suffer?” In this post I’ll deal with the issue of God’s suffering.

The traditional view is that God cannot suffer. Suffering implies that whatever makes God suffer is somehow superior to him; God’s experience of reality is conditioned by whatever causes him grief. And so God is defined as being “apathetic” or unfeeling. God is enshrined in bliss and so is unaffected by anything that could cause him suffering.

Aristotle took this view so far as to say that God was actually unaware of the created universe. Some Christian thinkers have taken a similar but less extreme view by saying that while we may have a relationship with God, he does not have one with us because he cannot be affected by anything outside himself.

The Bible, on the other hand, speaks of God’s “passion” — he feels because of his interactions with us. Passages talking about God’s feelings abound. Early on we are told that “It repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart” (Genesis 6:6). God is described as experiencing anger (Deuteronomy 4:20, 1 Kings 11:9, Psalms 7:9, Psalms 80:4). In a remarkable passage, God is described as feeling a warmth in the midst of betrayal that prevents him from expressing his anger:

How can I give you up, O Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, O Israel?
How can I make you like Admah?
How can I treat you like Zeboiim?
My heart recoils within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender.

I will not execute my burning anger;
I will not again destroy Ephraim;
for I am God and not a man,
the Holy One in your midst,
and I will not come in wrath.

(Hosea 11:8-9, ESV)

(Every Christian ought to see himself in the above passage — one whom God loves so much that he will not let go, even when we grieve and disappoint him. This is the nature of God’s love.)

Even more, we see Jesus, the ultimate revelation of God, “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3), who wept and grieved over the world. Yet he said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

And even the Spirit grieves: “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30). And Romans tells us that “The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Romans 8:26).

This is just a small sampling of the places in the Bible that show God’s pathos on our behalf. The Bible shows God as a vulnerable lover who experiences rejection and pain. God is exquisitely sensitive to the human condition. Far from being the “unmoved mover” of classical Greek philosophy, he is, as one writer put it, the “most-moved mover.” He is moved by our plight to the extent, finally, of entering into it himself.

From a purely intellectual perspective, I’ve long thought that the cross is the strongest answer to the so-called “problem of evil.” The problem of evil can be stated as follows: “If God were all-powerful and all-good, would he not prevent evil? And so either God is not all-powerful, or he is not all-good.”

But we see in the Bible a God who enters into the suffering caused by evil. He suffers with us; he joins us in the midst of our suffering. As Hebrews puts it, “For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (Hebrews 2:18)

This finds its high-point in the cross, where God, in the person of his beloved Son, takes on himself the consequences of the evil in the world. What is more, this suffering is reflected to the Father, since John tells us that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). The Father himself truly sacrificed the fellowship of his Son. On the cross the relational oneness (though not the eternal oneness) between the Father and Son was interrupted for the sake of dealing with the sin of the world; this interruption was reflected in Jesus’s cry of abandonment.

The point that God himself suffers on our behalf and for us means that suffering is not incompatible with either his goodness or his power. In fact we can even say that the suffering of God validates our suffering. It was worth while for him to suffer and so suffering is never the last word; for the believer it is even transformed.

The Bible advances a transformed view of suffering. James tells us to “count it all joy” when we encounter (fall among) various trials. James describes the process whereby the suffering we experience makes us “perfect and complete, lacking nothing” (see James 1:2-4).

Paul writes in similar vein when he says,

And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.

(Romans 5:3-5, KJV)

(Note that the King James gets it right in using the word “glory” instead of “rejoice” as the ESV does. The difference is between external proclamation (“glory” or “boast”) and internal feeling (“rejoice”). The expression — glory — implies and surpasses the feeling.)

In other words, we no longer see suffering as the last word; rather it is part of a glorious process that gives us hope as we see that we can indeed endure. And in the midst of that process God confirms its validity by pouring love out through us by his Spirit.

We notice that James tells us to “count it all joy” when we suffer. Now the author of Hebrews talks sense when he says the following:

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

(Hebrews 12:11)

But he also holds out Jesus as an example:

… looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Here again we see the word “joy”. Suffering is not joy, but it produces joy. Paul tells us to glory in our sufferings because of the hope it engenders; James and the author of Hebrews both see it as a means to joy.

And joy really is the last word. God is vulnerable to suffering but he is not endangered by it. He is not threatened by any experience the way we are. His being cannot be eroded by change — even the change of suffering that always seems to threaten to wear us away.

And we notice that God calls us to this very thing. Paul says, “Rejoice in the Lord always.” He repeats this several times, even apologizing to the Philippians for being so repetitive (Philippians 3:1).

We, from our limited perspective, see this as paradoxical. How can we rejoice while suffering? But really it is just a call to be like God. Rejoice because God rejoices and is the source of all joy, even though he suffers with us. We have the hope of his glory through Jesus; we, too, have a “joy set before us.”