Suffering & Love 2

Another struggle for my faith in the realm of suffering, is that God is all-knowing and he created this world. I’ve heard all the preaching and teaching on the fact that when God created the world, it did not have evil in it yet.

Except that, my logic tells me that evil was created then, it just didn’t have that nature or go by that name. The enemy was once a perfect angel, who became jealous of God. And we as humans were also created – we were to make a choice that would cause the beautiful, ageless world around us to become a place of anguish mingled with glory.

I often wonder how long Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden before they were tempted by the fruit. In the Bible, it seems like it was just the next week or so – on to the next chapter – but in reality it could have been years, decades, centuries! Who knows? I don’t. How long did that tree shimmer in the breeze before they gave into temptation? Were they tempted for years? How strong was Adam and Eve’s resolve before the snake came along? Perhaps they’d hardly given the tree a second thought up until then!

Surely God knew that Adam and Eve would one day make that terrible choice? After all, they had an eternity’ worth of time to decide one day to eat from the tree. God knows everything, right?

This question haunted me, pulling me out of the sustaining connection of love and trust that I had built up with the Lord. I had never stopped to think about suffering much before, and now I did, it just didn’t add up.

If God loves us, why would he leave an open door to the terrible inevitable?

I think the answer goes back to what I was saying in my last post, that there is something greater than the existence of suffering.  And for our purposes now, that something is freedom. Freedom to make our own choices. Without it, we would be living a pre-programmed life – one that screams out to our senses that we are trapped and our life doesn’t really matter or have any individuality. How could we ever be authentically loved for who we are if nothing about us was our own choice?

But even more life-changing than this, what brought it all together, was the thought that struck me one day:

If God is all-knowing, then yes he knew giving us free will would cause us to be tempted and the world to fall. BUT he therefore also knew that he himself would step into the consequences of that: die a brutal, human death and experience the agonising separation from his Trinity for the first time since time immemorial.

All to rescue us from the pitfalls of free will. God loves us so very passionately, that he found a way to give us two precious things – the best of both worlds: our freedom to make our own choices and a rescue plan at his expense to deliver us from the worst consequence of making bad choices. And he sent his Spirit to dwell on the earth to comfort us in our present troubles until one day, he will unfold and complete the rest of his glorious plan of true love.

The Lord calls us to be his hands and feet in this world for now, as his children of love, to live to  ease the sufferings of each other – to put love before everything else.

As always, the choices is ours.