“So why did God do this to your mum?” my dad asked.
We were at the Prince of Wales Hospital, sitting on the fourth floor outside the neurological department, sharing a meal of rice and store-bought barbequed pork (such are the meals of a family whose mother is absent), watching Coogee beach and its surrounding suburbs come alive before us, like a pair of caged birds staring at the sky.
I knew why. Or at least I thought I did. I thought I’d learnt the purpose of suffering at youth group through the book of Job: to bring us closer to God. But within those white walls that sapped all the colours of life, this knowledge was of no comfort. When I saw the maze of tubes penetrating and emerging from my mother’s body, opening holes where holes are not meant to be, this knowledge was of no comfort. When I saw my mother losing her memory, this knowledge was of no comfort.
“Have you read the book of Job before, Dad?”
I paused, wondering if he would find comfort where I did not.
“God gives an answer we do not expect.”
An answer that is not really an answer, but I realise now, a tunnel through which we see an even greater mystery, in a sense. And one that is of greater comfort than an answer to the mystery of suffering.
The Mystery of Suffering
Job was a righteous and blameless man. But after Satan questions the sincerity of Job’s obedience—he only obeys because of material blessings from the LORD—God allows Satan to afflict him. Satan destroys his possessions, kills his servants, his children, and even after that, because Job does not sin or charge God with wrong, Satan strikes Job’s body with loathsome sores. And as Job sits there on the pile of ashes of his dead family and home, scraping himself with pottery, his wife tells him,
“Curse God and die.”
But Job replies,
“Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” (Job 2:10)
This amazing response silences the obvious question: How—no, why—would a good God allow such a good man to suffer? This is the mystery of suffering.
God’s Answer?
When the LORD finally responds, he does not give Job an answer to the mystery of suffering. Instead, God seemingly breaks every modern counselling rule. In Job chapters 38 to 41, the LORD rebukes Job. He reminds him of his limited understanding.
Can you set limits for the earth, the sea and the stars? Can you find your way to the depths of hell? Can you guide the stars in orderly constellation? Can you count and congregate the clouds to unleash the waters of heaven? Can you give understanding to the rooster, and withhold understanding from the ostrich? Can you form nature in all its necessary harshness yet orderly beauty? Can you bring the proud low and judge the wicked where they stand? Can you command Leviathan, the king over all the sons of pride? Can you give to God that he should repay you?
Of course I can’t, God. I know that. Or do I? But regardless, of what comfort are these words?
The Mystery of Grace
The LORD doesn’t answer the mystery of suffering, in part because what Job really needs, what we all need, is not an answer. The mystery of suffering is only a shadow of a greater mystery, of a sort—a greater wonder. And what we need are new eyes to see this mystery, with eyes that are only opened in the whirlwind of suffering (Job 37:14). We need to be shown where the rare and precious jewels of wisdom lie hidden (Job 28:21).
At the end of the book, Job’s eyes are opened to see that God alone can do all things and no purpose of his can be thwarted—not even by the devil himself. But where Job could only see a glimpse of God’s ultimate purpose in suffering, we see now that God has destroyed “the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (Heb 2:14). And not only destroyed, God has put a leash upon the devil; for even the pain and groaning that the devil wrought is used for our sanctification, for our ultimate glorification (Rom 8:28–30). Evil and suffering have not only been conquered, they have been made into servants, for our good. Yet of what comfort is this knowledge?
Job’s friends, miserable comforters that they are, refuse to wrestle with the mystery of suffering. They try to explain it away with their tit-for-tat theology, that only the wicked suffer and the innocent always prosper, convinced by the end of the argument that Job must have done wrong to justify his suffering (Job 22:5–11).
But their denial of the mystery of suffering leaves no room for wonder, for mystery, for the possibility that the LORD would allow the righteous to suffer. They cannot fathom that a good God would cut off the upright (Job 4:7), or reject a blameless man (Job 8:20). They have no concept, no category of innocent suffering. Much less would they have been able to conceive of the possibility that the most innocent man of all, the incarnate Son of God, might suffer. And yet he did. For us: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21).
Where is the comfort? It is in the grandeur, the wonder that the mystery of suffering points us to: the mystery of grace. Jesus himself.
Why would God limit himself as a man? Why would perfection tarnish itself with the punishment of sin? Why would a just God forgive? Why would God give everything for me who has given him nothing? Why? We say it’s because he loves us (Jn 3:16), but do we really understand such a love? It doesn’t make sense! This is the greater mystery: the wonder of his grace that we will spend eternity praising and discovering (Eph 2:7). And we begin that process of discovery in our suffering.
Wrestle with the mystery of suffering, and it will wrestle you into the comforting arms of the greater mystery of grace. Shall we receive grace, and not the means to see it?
