Brown's Daily Word 3-2-09

Good morning,
Praise the Lord this the Month of March. Praise the Lord for the season of Lent, where we join Jesus our Lord on His journey to Jerusalem. In Mark 8, the Lord makes His first prediction of His coming passion, death, and resurrection. He declares that the Son of Man must suffer. Here we read about the must-ness of the suffering that Jesus took upon Himself. He is the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with our grief. Jesus came into the world of sin and suffering, and He made our suffering redemptive. We have the Good News of redemptive suffering because of Jesus, who conquered sin, suffering, and death.
Hinduism has a clear and comprehensive answer to the question of Suffering. All events are sincerely regarded as a result of karma. For example, a Hindu family that has lost a baby sincerely believes that they are reaping the consequence of actions either of this life or a previous one as a result of karma. Similarly, if you pass a beggar on the street, you shouldn't feel compassion but you should see someone who is reaping the consequence of his or her karma. Suffering, then, is not seen as an inversion of the Creator’s purpose, but a divine kind of balance. Buddhism, on the other hand, arose directly from this question of Suffering. Buddhism originally was a quest for how to solve the problem of suffering, and the answer was rigorous meditation. From that meditation comes the realization that suffering is an illusion and that it arises from desire. For example, when a child’s father dies, the pain is not loss for the father, but it is a result of the child’s desire for a father’s affection. The suffering of a beggar is not about poverty, but the beggar’s desire for a better life. If a child can remove their desire for the father’s life, the suffering will be reduced. Therefore, to extinguish suffering, one must completely remove desire. The whole of Buddhism is concerned with this problem. The Muslim world view states that suffering is not bad or evil – all events are thought of as determined by the will of God, the finger of Allah, the cause of all causes. Every time a baby dies, a car crashes, someone is murdered, it is the result of the finger of Allah. It is a fatalistic approach. They teach that God moves all things, but is himself moved by nothing. If you were to ask why does Allah do that, the answer comes directly back that he is Unknowable and Unquestionable. It is a blasphemy to even ask that question. In Islam, you resign yourself to the will of Allah. The word Islam, in Arabic, means Submission to the will of Allah; the act of questioning God is clearly a refusal to submit your will. For the great religion of the Western world, atheism, suffering is a result of the sheer natural forces of the world. There is no purpose. There is no grand unfolding of history. All that happens is just natural! Atheism views the world totally in the absence of God. Richard Dawkins is perhaps the best known proponent of atheism. “In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect. There is no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music." Try using that to comfort a family who has just lost a child. A Hindu cannot bother to care about suffering, a Buddhist deals with pain by convincing themselves that pain is a phantom, denying it’s there, a Muslim must not and cannot know why God is doing what he is doing. The atheist is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. What is the Christian perspective? How do Christians deal with the fact that they follow an all loving, all powerful God, yet live in a world full of such horrible pain? The Bible does not avoid dealing with suffering. In fact, it acknowledges the link between sin and suffering, but not in a karmic sort of way (where if I commit a specific sin, God will send a specific punishment). It is important to note that the connection between sin and suffering is at a general level. We cannot draw a specific link between a person's suffering and someone’s sin. In fact, we even get a snapshot of just such a conversation in the gospel of John. As the disciples were walking along, they came across a man who had been blind from birth. “Who sinned”, they asked, “this man, or his parents?” "Neither," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.”
The words of Jesus tell us that someone who dies in a car crash is not any more sinful than anyone else. Their tragic death is a symptom of a sinful, fallen world. The Bible, in Romans 8, tells us that the whole world groans, waiting to be freed from the bondage to sin and death and suffering. If you are in the world, you are under its bondage to decay. Every time we feel pain, we are reminded that this world is not as it should be. Death is not right, pain is not right. The world groans…..the world hates suffering, people rightfully hate suffering. God also hates suffering.
Because God hates suffering, Christians have a magnificent obsession with Jesus’ death. Jesus took the judgement for all of our sins on the Cross. It was the judgement that we so thoroughly deserved. He took our sins in His death, but the resurrection is vital. Jesus did not stay dead. The resurrection means that Jesus is himself the first fruit of non-suffering. He is the first part of the redeemed and perfected creation, the tip of the iceberg of life after death! The point being made here is that what has happened to Jesus will happen to all those united with him and it will happen to the whole world, a transformed world as we read from Revelation 21. It is guaranteed because it has already started. It started in Jesus. In the face of suffering, we are confident that God so loved the world, that he gave his Only Son, yet we are also confident that there will come a day when there will be no more crying, pain, or injustice. God will make all things new once again. Yet, what does this mean for us while we wait, while we survive, while we hang on in a world full of hurt? Does the death of Christ offer a quick fix to the pain we feel? No, there is no quick fix to grief, nor does God want Christians to pretend that everything is fine and there is no sadness in this world. He does not want us to pretend that being a Christian means only having a life full of prosperity, blessing, and eternal happiness. There are blessings and there is happiness, but there is a time for grief. The evil of suffering is very real, and very painful. Does the death of Christ answer the question of "why me God"? There are still no easy answers but we can be sure that Suffering drives you to the love of a God who has Himself suffered!
In Jesus the Suffering Servant,
Brown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP4JSVMBdZg