Where is God when We Suffer

Maybe one of the biggest questions or most frequent is

Where is God when we suffer?

If God is good, and if God is powerful, then how in the world can people suffer?

When we suffer we lose all sense of the self and our surroundings. Suffering feels like it’s own kind of god. And what we need to have restored is the reminder that while God allows suffering, He is still larger than it. He can work in it and through it. And the process changes us entirely.

The problem is we ask that question in suffering and never ask, what is outside of suffering? What exists beyond it?

If you are experiencing suffering and are struggling this morning, you have a hard time seeing anything but. All is suffering. But in order to heal, in order to ge through, you need someone outside of suffering, you need someone who can speak through it.

And God can do that. But that doesn’t mean that finding Him is always easy,

Suffering Moves Us Into Constant Changing landscapes

The first thing we have to understand is that finding God in suffering is not easy. We believe He is good, that His mercies endure forever. We believe He is the light of the world, the salvation for our souls. We believe in the incarnation of Jesus, we trust His work on the Cross. We even know His mercies are new every morning.

But sometimes those things can’t get us out of bed.

We can know things to be true but in suffering we end up looking around at our landscape and realizing nothing is familiar any more. We look out at the horizon and don’t recognize a thing. We have no landmarks, any ability to know what is right or true.

Maybe your suffering has had to deal with the loss of a loved one. Losing your landmarks is the process of loss. And re-learning how to navigate your life around that loss of landmarks is the process of grief. Maybe you’ve lost an expectation or a dream. And that landmark is gone. Or maybe you look into the future and can’t recognize anything, everything is a fog.

Locating familiarity in suffering is difficult.

I used to do a bit of white water rafting. And one thing you have to be careful of, is the rapids themselves. You are trained how to handle yourself in the raft, you to face the rapids. You are taught how to hold on and how to fall out.

We were facing the most rapid of the day, a class 4, and found out why it was so difficult. We entered the rapid itself (pic 1), and then you can see were completely submerged into the rapid (pic 2, 3, 4) and then you come out of the rapid and the question becomes where are you and who is still hanging on (pic 5). Behind me was a woman named Sue who went through the rapids but didn’t come out of them on the raft. (pic 6, 7, 8). And then my favorite picture, (pic 9). Where is Sue? She was downstream carried along by the rapids whether she wanted to or not. (pic 10-11).

This is what suffering can be like. You suddenly find yourself punched out of the raft and you are into unfamiliar water. You are swirling around and are trying to make sense of what is happening.

By the time you realize it you are 200 feet down the river.

Suffering keeps you on the move like being tossed about in a rapid.

This is why it can be hard to find God in suffering. It turns out that we can find that immovable object in Christ in suffering, but first we have to continue to see why it can be so hard to locate God

It might be one thing to try and make sense of a river after being tossed from a raft, it is quite another to be able to find God.

Job expresses this frustration.

Job 23:8–9 ESV

“Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him; on the left hand when he is working, I do not behold him; he turns to the right hand, but I do not see him.

Job is trying, in his suffering, to find God. But cannot see Him. This is the problem in suffering. Last week we looked at suffering as something that is uncontrollable in our lives. And that uncontrollability is maybe the most frustrating part of suffering.

Because we realize in that uncontrollability that We can’t wish people back, we can’t change what happened. We can’t change the chemistry in our brains or the pain in our bodies.

And so these things that are uncontrollable change the landscape around us. They change how we think, what we believe, they change our sense of the day, our rhythms, routines.

Suddenly, one day we look out and everything we use to recognize is gone. Forget finding God, we can’t even figure out where we are! We are formed and changed. We are carried along in the riptide of suffering.

Whether you want to or not, suffering moves you. It is an ultimate confession of the uncontrollability of the world.

And so it makes sense that when you look around you don’t see God. You have been thrust down the rapids of suffering and are in a different location.

We sound like the psalmist at this point, praying prayers like this

Psalm 22:1–2 ESV

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.

This sounds like Job, and sometimes it sounds like us. This uncontrollability is agonizing. Last week we talked about suffering feeling like being swallowed and that the way through is seeing the God who suffered as well. This week we see suffering like a raging rapid, uncontrollable, that pulls us away

We end looking at unfamiliar landscapes. And this confession is the start of wisdom. “God I no longer see you because I don’t even recognize where I am.” This is the realization that we can’t locate anything if we don’t even know where we are.

Our understanding in suffering is that we have moved. And there is no going back. We have to find home wherever it is we are right now. We have to set up camp. And to do so first relies on the understanding that

Even If We Are Moving, it Turns Out, God is Not

We ask Where is God when we suffer?

Still exactly where He said He would be.

That doesn’t mean we can always see Him, but we know that He is where He said He would be.

Suffering moves us. That’s the problem. And we need to orient back to God.

Suffering moved Job. He was rushing around trying to find God

Job 30:20 ESV

I cry to you for help and you do not answer me; I stand, and you only look at me.

But at the end of Job God does answer. God does finally respond. And it is important that we see what is going on.

Remember that Job for the whole book is asking what he did wrong and is asserting that he didn’t do anything. That is true, we know that from chapter 1. Job’s suffering is not because of what he did. so he wants to know why.

God spends four chapters responding, but never answers why. God doesn’t answer Jobs question, what He does do is help Job to locate Him.

Why doesn’t God answer Job’s question directly?

See when we suffer, when we are facing uncontrollability, we actually don’t spend as much time trying to figure out why, what we do is try to figure out where we are. We want to know where we are now. What does our new landscape look like. We work to locate God, we work to locate ourselves. And what God’s answer in Job does is locate God and Job. It does the very thing that human searching actually wants.

We aren’t going to read the entire 4 chapters but I encourage you to do so this week.

Now God answers from a storm and begins to question Job.

Job 38:4–7 ESV

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

God does not answer Job directly but asks him, “where were you?” Now it’s rhetorical but God asks Job’s question back. Where were you? God has not moved, He created order and holds it together.

It is easy to assume that somehow God has moved but we have remained in place. Suffering shows us how easily we move. We need to remember and confess that and then recognize that God finds us, not the other way around.

Job 38:8–11 ESV

“Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?

God has been sustaining order since Creation. God has been administering justice since the beginning. And he asks Job, when have you commanded the morning? God is graciously repositioning Job to where he can recognize himself and a place where he can recognize God.

God gives Job an address. He tells him that even in suffering God is at work. That even if Job doesn’t know or can’t see it, there is a universe at work and God is at the center. That even if Job’s life can’t make sense, there is still much more that does.

We Trust Christ to Reorient us In Suffering, to Redeem us Through It

The rapids and tsunami of suffering is very real and very much moves us. But at some point we have to relocate ourselves. At some point we have to look for the landmarks again. And God is more than willing to show them to us.

God will ultimately reorient us to Him. Let God reorient you.

And He will work in the middle of your suffering, giving you an address, showing you where you need to be and who He is in that.

Simone Weil writes, “the extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.”.

God can take that movement, random and chaotic as it is, and lead and guide us into something else. Suffering is never the end God assures us of it.

so what does God supernaturally do to reorient us to Him?

God’s supernatural use in suffering is to first give us a focal point.

In all of God’s speech, he does not address the particularity of Job’s suffering. He does not answer why. He does not give the reason. And that is because if you are spinning around in suffering, if you are treading water as suffering takes you down the river, what you don’t need are the reasons why, that doesn’t get you out of the water.

What does get you out of the water is someone on the bank, outside the chaos, who can throw you a life preserver.

God is reestablishing Job’s horizon by telling Him that God still upholds the world and that Job can orient His life toward God. God is looking through Job’s suffering and showing Him where to look.

What God is doing is establishing the focal point in Job’s life.He is giving Job something to look at to be able to find Him when His life is out of control.

We often face suffering in our lives and we forget how to live, we just resign to the pain. But God is showing Job that even in the suffering there is a place to look, place to focus.

God is doing something incredible here. In game theory this is called giving a focal point. A focal point is the means of people understanding the rules of the game when there are no rules available. It feels like, in suffering, there are never rules available.

The example is given, imagine you and a friend are planning on meeting up in NYC. You agree on the date, but never agree on the location. For some reason you both don’t have your cell phones. How do you find each other? You have to determine what would be most obvious to both of you.

They researched this and found that most people would choose Grand Central Station.

What time would you choose? Most people chose noon.

When we don’t feel like we know the rules, flying down those rapids, God gives us a focal point.

Hebrews 12:2 ESV

looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

And then God teaches us how to continually find that focal point

God teaches us in suffering. God uses all the places that we would never want to look at and redeems it. God’s speech in Job reminds us that all is at God’s disposal and all comes under God’s authority. So he uses all the “why did this happen” and He uses the “what is wrong with me” in order for us to grow.

We look at our own suffering and just see something that we would rather throw away. Something that we would just rather toss in the trash. But is seems connected to us in the same way. We can’t shake the suffering, so then we begin to think, are we the trash?

Or We look at others suffering and see something we would rather ignore. And so people in suffering don’t get the time of day because we don’t know what to do with their suffering.

God looks at suffering and lovingly sees something He can redeem. God is strong enough and caring enough to not just sift through our lives and pick out the good parts. He takes it all.

Romans 5:3–5 ESV

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

We know He takes it all because of the cross. There is no part or bit of suffering that is unused.

And we know all our suffering can be used because of the resurrection.

God has not moved, suffering moves us. And God gives and regives His address to us when we need to be re-created. He outwaits our pain, our sadness. He outlasts our shouting and crying. He does not move. He does not change. Your sorrow and your darkest night does not move God.

He will reorient you back toward Himself. And when that happens we root down, not into our suffering, not into our pain, but through it to Christ Himself. We place all of our weight and all of our sadness onto Him. He can carry us, He can hold it.

Unload and offload the rapids of grief and loss onto God’s address in Christ. He will grow you in it if you stay focused on Him.

What does that mean?

Keep showing up before the Lord. Open the Scriptures, get into a reading plan or discovery Bible study

Keep showing up in community. Keep coming sunday morning, and run to church on the days you don’t feel like coming. Join a faith community, join a foundations class.

Root into Christ as He reorients you.