Suffering is seemingly one of the most divisive issues when it comes to matters of faith. It can either compel people towards religiosity or turn people away depending on one’s experience with suffering and how they interpret its presence in their life. Yet, the Christian’s interpretation regarding what the purpose of suffering is, where it comes from, and why it happens is fundamentally linked to what they believe about Jesus and the gospel. In fact, your view of suffering is as telling as your view of God, because what you believe about suffering reveals what you believe about God.
Does the gospel of Jesus even apply to suffering? And if it applies, how might that transform the way we understand suffering, God? We will further unpack this as we go forward.
In the following post, I will not address the whats, hows, or whys as much as I will focus on the Who behind it all, which only then gives us a firm foundation for approaching the whats, hows, and whys all along. Indeed, while Christianity does stand out among all other religious viewpoints in various ways, its portrayal and assessment of suffering is strikingly unique.
Here’s what I mean:
Christianity is different from amongst from all other religions in the world because its basic teaching regarding suffering does not emphasize how to escape/avoid suffering (Buddhism), how to change it (Hinduism), how to live above it (Transcendentalism), how to negate, minimize, or moralize it (false-works-based Christianity, Catholicism), or—the one we probably hear most—how to white-knuckle suffering by making it a mechanism for your own personal growth and benefit (false-therapeutic Christianity).
However, true Christianity is none of these things.
Rather, true Christianity emphasizes and boasts of a Savior who is powerful not because suffering didn’t ever touch him, but because he reached out to touch it, in order to overcome it for us. While every other approach above entails trying to avoid and minimize suffering at all costs, Jesus came to suffer the ultimate cost of sin so that we wouldn’t have to.
A suffering savior versus a savior who does not suffer has dramatic implications:
- A suffering Savior who has suffered in every way can therefore sympathize in every way with us and truly save us (Heb. 4:15). Jesus teaches us how to embrace Him in our suffering—not trying to escape, minimize, moralize, or repurpose suffering—and long for the day when things will be forever set right.
- A suffering savior is in reach, because he came down to earth and reached out to us in our brokenness.
- A ‘savior’ who does not or has not suffered is not really a savior because he has no affiliation with the ones who need saving all along. He’ll be a leader who we can never relate to because he doesn’t share a significant element of commonality or humanity with us. This leader-figure might be able to inspire, but he will never actually be able to help. We will only then depend on the principles and teachings of the leader and not the leader itself, making the figure not a savior after all, but a leader. The saving ultimate depends on our ability to keep his example. But let’s not be deceived: the harder we try, the more we know we can’t rescue ourselves from suffering. But a true savior can rescue us in our suffering because he has suffered for us, is now with us, promises to get us through it, and has already prepared a place for us where suffering will exist no more.
- A suffering Savior is sympathetic. A savior who doesn’t suffer cannot be.
- A suffering Savior is empathetic. Any other savior cannot be.
- A suffering Savior can truly help us because he knows our struggles. Any other savior gives teaching about something that he did not experience, thereby inevitably making these teachings come across as trite, irrelevant, and unrealistic.
A God who has not suffered cannot help us in our suffering, for He wouldn’t truly know it. But a God who has suffered in every way can help us when we suffer in any way because he has truly known and experienced our suffering (Heb. 4:15).
Here are some ways that Jesus experienced suffering like us:
Jesus was forsaken and denied by his own brothers and sisters (Jn. 7:5).
Jesus was betrayed by all of his closest friends (Jn. 20:19).
Jesus experienced starvation and thirst (Mt. 4, 21:18).
Jesus experienced tiredness and weakness (Jn. 4:6).
Jesus felt the emotional pains of his loved ones die (Jn. 11:33-35).
Jesus experienced excruciating physical pain (crucifixion accounts).
Jesus endured psychological trauma in Golgotha (Luke 22:44).
Jesus had no physical beauty or anything attractive about him (Is. 53:2-3).
Jesus was not from a wealthy family or high social class (Mt. 13:55).
Jesus experienced familial, emotional, physical, psychological pain, and then the worst—spiritual pain—by absorbing God’s wrath on the cross for the sins of the world. He welcomed all the worst forms of sufferings into his body, to be torn apart, so that we wouldn’t have to bear spiritual suffering for eternity and so that we can be empowered to endure earthly suffering for just this life.
I’ve heard JD Greear use this quote before that perfectly illustrates the love of God swallow the justice of God so that the grace of God might overflow on us: “Jesus bore the wrecking ball of our condemnation so that we might receive the chisel of His grace”. Because our ultimate suffering was redeemed (sin), we can know that all other forms of suffering are either ultimately redeeming in our relationship with God (sanctification) or will one day be finally resolved by God when we are with Him (glorification).
By knowing that God suffered for us and with us in the person of Jesus, we can be assured of his character to us. Because he suffered in every way, and in addition, suffered more than we will ever know by dying in our place and absorbing the punishment for our sins, we can be assured that he loves us and is with us in our suffering.
Here is where the gospel can be directly applied:
If Jesus “for the joy set before him” willingly chose to suffer your penalty of eternal damnation so that you might be eternally pardoned before God when you were once an enemy of God, simply out of the sheer expression of his grace in love, how much more then can you be assured of his love for you and presence with you in your suffering here on earth—which is infinitely inferior to hell in both intensity and length—now that you are his beloved child?
It is without question, then, that he is for you.
A savior who suffers is good news to us, and when we apply that gospel-rich Who to the circumstance-poor what, we begin to find a plentiful supply of fuel for our sometimes exhausted lives.
A leader who doesn’t suffer is not really a savior; but a leader who suffers really is a savior. Amongst all religions, we can only find that in Jesus.
Jesus is not a powerful Savior because suffering didn’t touch him, but because he reached out to suffer for us, that by doing so, he may touch us with sympathy, promise, and comfort in our suffering.
“A Jesus who never wept could never wipe away my tears” – Spurgeon
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.
(2 Corinthians 1:3-5)
