Intro:
HAS GOD EVER SUFFERED?
§
Jews want to know where God was during the Holocaust;
§
Christians want to know where He was in the massacre of the Armenians;
§
The Kosovars want to know where He was during their bloody civil war.
§
In fact, there is not a person who has not asked that question in the
face of tragedy:
§
Where is God in the suffering of cancer or the untimely death of a
spouse?
§
We also want to know whether He has ever personally suffered—has He
entered into the anguish of mankind?
Many
people believe that the God of Christianity is indifferent to the sufferings of
the inhabitants of this planet. A God who sees human suffering and fails to
intervene is hardly worthy of worship.
So
can we say with integrity that God cares and therefore people matter?
§
Only at the cross do we see the love of God without ambiguity. Here is
God’s farthest reach, His most ambitious rescue effort. God personally came
to our side of the chasm, willing to suffer for us and with us.
§
At the cross His love burst upon the world with unmistakable clarity.
Here at last we have found solid reasons to believe that there was a genuine
connection between God and man. Here is mercy; here is justice. And here is a
God who suffers with us. At the cross, cynicism ends.
§
Scripture tells us that at Calvary, “God was
reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Cor. 5:19). In those
nine words we have the essence of the gospel, the assurance that God has drawn
near, and the answer to the skeptic’s questions.
§
God has built a bridge to us and paid the entire cost of its
construction. And He walks arm in arm with us over the chasm, entering into our
own suffering. Here we see a God who has Himself faced the cruel blows of what
is popularly called fate, though they are blows He predetermined He would bear.
Here we meet a God who will astound us and captivate our hearts.
§
To better understand the suffering of God, we need to take a journey
that begins at a familiar stream but ends in the deep river of God’s
loving-kindness and personalized grace. If we stare at the cross intently, we
shall find a God who not only judges but a God who also grieves, a God who not
only smites, but also heals—a God who has suffered.
§
Three common words—self-substitution, submission, and
suffering— will guide us to some uncommon blessings.
1.
THE SELF-SUBSTITUTION OF GOD
A.
The idea of substitution is as old as Eden, where God killed animals so
that Adam and Eve would have a covering for their nakedness.
1.
Those animals shed their blood for our first parents in order to picture
the coming of a better sacrifice in the distant future. From then on the phrase in
the place of was the essence of Old Testament theology.
2.
When an angel prevented Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, “in a thicket
he saw a ram caught by its horns” (Gen. 22:13). Providentially, Abraham took
the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the place of
his son. The very word sacrifice implies substitution.
3.
When the Israelites were about to leave Egypt, they sprinkled on their
doorposts the blood of a lamb so the angel of death would bypass them. Thus the
lamb died in the place of the firstborn in every Israelite
home. But these lambs were only symbolic; they were unable to permanently shield
the Israelites from judgment or take away the sins of the nation.
4.
The substitute sacrificed has to have a value sufficient to bear the
penalty. When God surveyed the universe, He found no sacrifice that would meet
the qualifications to redeem humanity. No animal or man qualified. If the
barrier of sin that exists between God and us were to be removed, God would have
to provide the substitute Himself. Thankfully He did just that.
5.
The prophet Isaiah, writing as though he were sitting at the foot of the
cross, described Christ’s mission:
4Surely
he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him
stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. 5But he was wounded for our
transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace
was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. 6All we like sheep
have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath
laid on him the iniquity of us all.
(Isa. 53:4—6)
6.
God, in Christ, chose to bear the penalty that He Himself demanded. God
became both our judge and our substitute. He both sentenced us to eternal
condemnation and paid that price on our behalf.
7.
Recently I read that a mother threw herself over her two-year-old son to
absorb the impact. of a car that was out of control. She was killed, but her
child lived. She became the substitute, preserving the physical life of the one
she dearly loved. She literally died in the place of her son.
8.
In the same way, God rescued us from the more terrifying fate of eternal
moral and spiritual lostness. And He put Himself in harm’s way to absorb the
blow.
9.
We now move from the familiar to the less familiar. Now we must probe the
mystery of the Father-Son relationship and the role of the suffering God.
2. THE SUBMISSION OF
GOD
A.
In the same chapter quoted earlier, Isaiah portrayed Christ as a willing
victim. “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a
sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.”
(Isa. 53:7).
1.
The prophet likened Jesus to a lamb, not because He was weak, but because
He was submissive. He could have called angels to deliver Him, but He
voluntarily died for us.
2.
Who put Christ on the cross? The Jews did, the Gentiles did, we did; and
God did.
3.
The Father initiated salvation because of His loving-kindness; the Father
is a redeeming God. The Father and the Son took the initiative together.
4.
The will of the Father and the will of the Son coincided in the perfect
self-sacrifice of love. We must never view the Son and the Father as being in
opposition to each other.
5.
It is true that Jesus cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have
you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). But if the Father turned away from the Son at
the cross, it is because they agreed that it must be so, given the plan of
redemption that they had chosen.
B.
If Father and Son were unified in their decision to create the world,
they were similarly unified in the greater act of redemption.
1.
Although the Incarnation invites us to distinguish the persons of the
Godhead, it does not allow us to see them in conflict.
2.
As we read earlier, “God was reconciling the
world to himself in Christ” (2 Cor. 5:19,). This does not mean that
God is our servant; it means simply that given the ends He wanted to accomplish,
He chose to accommodate Himself to our great need of redemption. He submitted
Himself to our need.
3.
Now we move further downstream, wading in the deep waters of
contemplation, trying to understand our suffering God.
4.
Our challenge will be to stay within the confines of God’s revelation,
and yet without fear say, God suffered on our behalf.
3. THE SUFFERING OF GOD
A.
We now come to the event that is best described as the hinge of history,
the one happening that stretches the limits of our understanding. We will
contemplate the cross. But before we do so, we must wrestle with the question of
whether God can actually suffer.
1.
Can God suffer? Did God suffer? Does God suffer?
2.
In the early centuries of the church, believers spent much discussion
on the impassibility of God, that is, the doctrine that He is incapable of
feeling pain.
3.
He has, some said, no emotions that are affected by what happens on
earth; not that He is removed from us or indifferent, but He is simply
unaffected by our trauma. It was widely taught that God stays above the fray,
granting us His grace but not suffering with us in our pain.
4.
The Westminster Confession of Faith asserts that God is “without
body, parts, or passions, immutable.”6 Even some
contemporary theologians argue that only the human nature of Christ suffered
on the cross, not the divine. The love of Christ, they contend, was the love of
God, the power of Christ was the power of God, but the suffering of Christ did
not belong to the Godhead. God could not suffer in the Incarnation as the
God-man. It was His humanity alone that heaved with emotion the night before His
crucifixion.
B.
There were two reasons for this view.
1.
First, because God is immutable: “For
I am the LORD, I change not; ...” (Mal. 3:6). Emotional ups and
downs would be inconsistent with His perfection.
2.
Second, God is self-existent and has within Himself all of the
resources He needs for his own pleasure and enjoyment; He does not have to look
outside of Himself for pleasures or pain. He cannot be a victim of evil; He
cannot be subject to the same fluctuations as we. Therefore the divine nature
did not suffer even when Christ died.
3.
Is this biblical?
a.
No, God chose to suffer. He has chosen to be rejected by some
and accepted by others;
b.
He chose to have His beloved Son suffer in our behalf. As far as we
know, God could have willed otherwise; Yet He chose this plan with its
injustice and pain. We are invited to believe that looked at from eternity, this
plan is best.
4.
As humans, we suffer involuntarily.
a.
The circumstances of life, with their mixture of joys and sorrows,
are largely out of our hands.
b.
But everything is in God’s hands, everything.
c.
He suffers because He willed it to be so; no man can make God suffer.
d.
We must forever do away with any notion of a weak God who is a victim
of the chaos that has resulted from His original creation.
5.
Furthermore, it pleased God to suffer. He was not forced into
a situation in which He could not find pleasure, for God does whatever He
pleases (Pss. 115:3; 135:6).
Yet it pleased the LORD to
bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering
for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of
the LORD shall prosper in his hand.
6.
The Bible describes God as having
deep emotions.
a.
He commanded Hosea, you will recall, to marry a woman who would
become a prostitute. Hosea’s personal feeling of betrayal and loss
represented the betrayal and loss God experienced over wayward Israel. You might
think that one of the advantages of being God is to never feel disappointment;
after all, He has infinite power and nothing can stand in His way. But He can
feel grief too. There is no heartbreak like that of unrequited love, and the
Almighty planned that He would experience it.
b.
In another passage God asks, “Can a
woman forget her nursing child, and have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget, but I will not forget you” (Isa. 49:15,).
The prophet depicts God’s passionate love and burning wrath. God wants to whip
the rebellious child and hug him simultaneously.
c.
Since we are made in the image of God, it must be that God has
emotions. Certainly if the Holy Spirit is grieved because of our sin, we can say
the same of the Father.
C.
We come now to one event that most clearly reveals the suffering of God
1.
Now from the sixth hour there was
darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour. 46And about the ninth
hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is
to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? 47Some of them
that stood there, when they heard that, said, This man calleth for Elias. 48And
straightway one of them ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar, and
put it on a reed, and gave him to drink. 49The rest said, Let be, let
us see whether Elias will come to save him. Jesus, when he had cried again with
a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. (Matt. 27:45—50)
2.
All of course acknowledge that Christ suffered on the cross. His
grief in Gethsemane, His expressions of sorrow, and His cries in those final
moments testify of His personal agony and pain. What was happening when He
died? He became legally guilty of our sin; the spotless One came in contact with
genocide, rape, adultery, greed, cruelty, and murder. “He
himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Pet.2:24).
3.
The Father who loved the Son temporarily abandoned Him, increasing
the anguish of the Son. The Father neither intervened nor chose to comfort His
Son. The thief crucified next to Christ taunted Him, “Aren’t
you the Christ? Save yourself and us!” (Luke 23:39).
4.
Though Jesus had omnipotence at His disposal, though the angels had
to be restrained to keep from delivering Him from death, Jesus stayed on the
cross by divine appointment. The sacrifice demanded it.
5.
No wonder Isaac Watts wrote:
Well
might the sun in darkness hide and shut his glories in
When
Christ, the mighty Maker, died For man, the creature’s sin.
(Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed?)
6.
But did He suffer only as
man, or also as God? Was the whole Trinity emotionally involved in His
agony? Or was the divine nature passive, the Father accepting the payment that
the Son offered on that dark day in Jerusalem?
7.
It is unthinkable that Christ would cry, “My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and the Father not suffer.
As parents we know that if we watched our son be crucified, he would not be the
only one who would be suffering. Think of the closer relationship that exists
between the members of the Trinity. Indeed, they are one in essence, one in purpose,
and one in desire. If Christ suffered as man, we must boldly affirm that God
suffered.
8.
Yet the Scriptures do stop short of saying, “God died.” The
reason is that immortality belongs to God’s essential being: He “alone
possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light; whom no man has seen
or can see. To Him be honor and eternal dominion! Amen” (1 Tim.
6:16,). So He became a man that He might be able to die.
9.
Perhaps Paul’s admonition to the Ephesian elders is the closest the
Scriptures come to saying that God died. He said, “Take
heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy
Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath
purchased with his own blood. (Acts 20:28).
10.
An embittered skeptic asked, “How could an all-knowing,
all-loving God allow His Son to be murdered on a cross in order to redeem my
sins? Why didn’t He come down and go to Calvary?” The answer is, “In
Christ, He did!”
11.
Charles Wesley did not back away from the bold assertion:
Amazing love! How can it be
That Thou, my God, should’st die for me?
(And Can It Be That I Should Gain?)
12.
Recall the woman whose son was
killed in an accident, who asked her pastor angrily, “Where was your God
when my son was killed?” to which he replied, “He was where He was
when His Son was killed]’
13.
Our perpetual struggle is to reconcile God’s love and the fact of
human suffering. There are those who think that God has turned on them, that He
has abandoned them in their greatest hour of need.
14.
What we want in our despair is an unveiling of the heart of God; we
want to know that He not only has power, but that He also has feelings. We all
have seen the pain on the face of a child when a parent remains aloof from his
suffering. We can be glad that our heavenly Father is not like that; He not only
knows, He feels.
15.
If you want to see how much God is angered by the sin of the world,
look at the cross. Someone has said, “There love and justice meet in one
momentous catharsis of divine emotion?’
16.
There was no human solution to our estrangement; how can God be just
and overlook sin. How can He be love, yet punish? But God is not a man. He finds
a way, one that does not compromise His justice that does not deny His love.
There at the cross we see love and justice passionately colliding and resolving
themselves in mutual satisfaction.
17.
Christianity says that God willingly accepted mistreatment at the
hands of His creatures.
Closing
: A PERSONAL RESPONSE
So has God suffered? Yes my friend and
what’s more because of that suffering he is touched with the feelings of your
infirmities, He is able to succor you. He has hurt and continues to hurt as
looks upon the sad condition of this sinful world.
We can be grateful that our God can identify with the hurts of His
creation.