The Purpose of Suffering

IntroductionThe longer we live, the more we realize how unfixable certain problems are and how broken this world really is. Infertility can’t be fixed by empathy, compassion, and kind words. All the counseling in the world can’t erase the effects of your parents divorce, a terminal illness, or an unplanned pregnancy. The miracle of medicine can’t fix your child born with down syndrome, spina bifida, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophe, or a host of other problems.All of this falls under the category of suffering. And when we suffer deeply, we all ask the same question. Why? Why do I suffer? Whose fault is this? Or is there even fault to assign? Is this just random, senseless, suffering? Why am I suffering? In our text, God answers this question in a way that is disturbing, unexpected but ultimately extremely helpful.SetupNo sentence is wasted in John’s gospel. Last week we finished chapter 8 where we have this repeated reference to Jesus as the light of the world. Chapter 9 expands this theme. What happens when the divine light cuts through the darkness and shines? Here’s what we discover. Some who have never seen, turn toward the light and are made to see. Others, who think they see, turn away, blinded by the light. What we see is two opposite responses to the light. The passage begins with inquiring about the problem of blindness.The disciples are walking along and observing a man born blind. Try to empathize. This man has never seen his parents’ faces. He’s never seen a flower. Never seen a sunset or sunrise.That detail helps us imagine the scenario. For as long as they could remember, going to the temple, was synonymous with passing the man born blind. Beggars always beg in high traffic areas. In Boise here, where the connector dumps into downtown Boise, almost without fail there’s a guy asking for help right where the traffic backs up. The temple was one of these high traffic pinch point.And so they see this guy that they’ve seen ten thousand times and they just ask a question which to my ears anyway seems very insensitive. The guy is blind not deaf.Now in our 21st century mind, we know there’s a biological answer to this question. Why is he born blind? Science can take a crack at this. Childhood blindness can be caused by a variety of things, genetic mutations, having the measels at an early age, premature birth, infections, injuries, or vitamin A malnutritions.If we took this guy to a clinic today, whatever the cause, we could certainly diagnose the biological cause of blindness. But the disciples are interested not in biology but in theology. There is a theological assumption built into the question. Questions are not neutral, are they? Questions contain biases, presuppositions, assumptions. What is the assumption built into the premise of this question? Here it is: sin causes suffering.Now is that a true premise? Yes. Sin does cause suffering. We know that when sin entered into the world, suffering entered with it. The sin of Adam caused the suffering of Adam. The pre-fallen world did not contain suffering. Heaven will not contain suffering. Suffering is only found in a world filled with sin. So it is correct to say that sin causes suffering. That is a correct premise built into their question.But there is an incorrect premise in their question as well. They think they can link specific ailments to specific sins. They are subconsciously operating out of the framework of Christian Karma. Good people get good treatment. Bad people get bad treatment.So this man must be suffering because of sin. This was the conclusion of Job’s friends. “Job, bad things are happening to you, therefore you must be bad.” Now it’s surprising how irrational we can be. In case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of heinously wicked people who are quite healthy. They ignore this and instead reason, “If suffering is a result of sin, then whose sin was it? Was it the parents who sinned or was it this man who sinned?” Who sinned?If it was the parents who sinned, well, then they are being punished by having to suffer all the disappointments associated with disability. And those who have children with special needs understand this. Parents of disabled children have to deal with incredible loss. It’s very likely that my child will never leave the home. It’s very likely that my child will never get married which means we will never have grandchildren. The normal work required to raise a child is quadrupled when you have a special needs child. And you have to deal with helping the child deal with all these feelings and emotions associated with not being like every other child.All the normal hopes and dreams of parents have to be adjusted. This is not the way it was supposed to be? Why? Why? Why? And so the disciples reason, “Maybe God is punishing these parents because of sin in their life.” That’s one possibility.But then again, it could be the child. It’s not like life is easy for a disabled child. And those who are disabled can identify with this. They have to watch all their friends do things they can’t. They have to create an identity in which disability is a part of who they are without it defining them. That’s pretty hard to do. They have to live and be happy for other people’s ability and freedom while being content with their limitations.So maybe it’s God punishing this child for something he did, even in the womb? Who knows? What the disciples are doing is what every human has been doing since the beginning of time. Why is there such a thing as suffering? Why is the world broken? It’s the problem of evil. Do you realize there are only five answers.The Five RoutesWhen suffering enters our life there are five possible ways to explain it and each of these explanations have an associated emotional response. And we will race through five explanations of suffering.We are all familiar with this category. When an alcoholic looses his family, looses his liver, maybe looses his leg in an accident, he suffers. Who caused the suffering? He did. Now he beats himself up. I was such an idiot. What did I do that for? I was told a thousand times. How does he feel? Guilty.When a husband sins with his eyes and he experiences the consequence of that in his relationship with his wife. Now there is suffering. He sees her tears. He feels the regret. Who causes that suffering? And what is the emotional response? Guilt? Are my educational deficiencies because I didn’t try hard enough? How can I get back those years? I can’t. Guilt. Is my child’s rebellion because of my bad parenting, my neglect, my anger, my selfishness? How can I get those years back? I can’t. Guilt.What is the cause of my suffering? How do I explain it? If you believe your suffering is self-caused you will experience guilt and you’ll never be able to rid yourself of it. That’s one route and associated response. But there’s a second possible explanation for suffering.Who sinned? Was it that this man sinned or was it his parents who sinned? You see it wasn’t this man’s fault, it was his parents fault. He’s a victim of another person’s sin.One of my friends in high school was sitting watching TV in his family room and a drunk driver came crashing through his window and pinned his leg to the wall and cut off his leg. Now he suffered for the rest of his life because of someone else’s sin. That’s the definition of victim. You did absolutely nothing and you are the one who has to pay for another’s sins. When you are a victim of other people’s sin, how do you feel? Anger.It certainly can be the case that other people are the cause agents in our suffering. Maybe your parents sinned against you and neglected you in some way or took advantage of you or ignored your needs. And you suffer because of that. And you are angry. Maybe your spouse has ignored you. Maybe your children have totally overlooked all the ways in which you’ve sacrificed for them and taken on an entitled attitude. Maybe your boss routinely takes advantage of you. It makes you angry.This can take place on a national/cultural level as well. You want to know why the world is full of hate right now? Because there is a fundamental underlying belief that other people, other races, other political parties are the reason for the suffering I am experiencing. I am a victim of other people’s sin.What is the cause of my suffering? How do I explain it? If you believe your suffering is caused by others you will experience anger and you will never be able to rid yourself of hate. That’s a second route, but there’s a third option.Perhaps there is a spiritual cause to the physical things. Now the Scriptures inform us that at times, this is in fact the case. For example, we are told in the gospels during the last supper that at one point during the feast Jesus turns to Peter and Jesus informs him, “Satan demanded to sift you like wheat.” Now I want you to think how you would feel if Jesus turned to you and said these words. Put your name in the blank.That what? That you will be protected from his schemes? That his attempts will be thwarted? That his fiery darts would be extinguished? Nope.That’s pretty much the worst news ever. I have prayed that your faith many not fail. You will fail. You will suffer. You will turn away. He will dominate. You will be crushed, suffer, weep, and mourn. But your faith won’t ultimately fail.Satan has asked to sift you like wheat and I granted him permission. Lord, why would you do that? What is the cause of that suffering? Satan.Or consider Job. Job comes to God and says, “The only reason Job loves you is because he doesn’t suffer. You’ve put a hedge around him. Does Job love you for nothing?” And God says, “Stretch out your hand and cause him to suffer.”How would I feel if I overheard God say, “Satan, stretch out your hand and cause Jason to suffer?” Fear. To know that Satan himself is working to destroy my joy and cause me to suffer. Yikes.How would you like to be a modern day Job? Your house burns to the ground and your children are inside. Your business is incinerated in a lawsuit and you file bankruptcy. You get some sort of invasive lung cancer. You can’t stop coughing. And your spouse turns to you and says, “Curse God and die you loser.”To know that this was the hand of devil. Where will he stop? What is next? Why is he tormenting me? Fear.This is why tribal cultures, cultures that are highly superstitious are constantly filled with fear. Because the playing ground isn’t even. Satan lurks around with perfect vision ready to spring a trap on unsuspecting victims.What is the cause of my suffering? How do I explain it? If you believe your suffering is caused by the powers of darkness you will experience fear and you will never be able to rid yourself of that fear. That’s a third route. But there’s a fourth.So maybe you say to yourself, “The kind of suffering I’m experiencing is certainly real, significant and even severe, but it wasn’t anyone’s fault. I mean random events happen with tragic results. Every year people die of avalanches, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes. Who’s to blame? Genetic mutations are just a thing. Who’s to blame? Cancer happens. Freak accidents happen. Who’s to blame?”I read an article in the the Guardian by a Jewish Rabbi named Jonathan Romain that begins like this, “Let’s be very clear: there is no divine purpose in suffering whatsoever.” He then goes on to say that it’s warped theology to equate suffering and purpose.On the one hand this sounds like a great solution to the problem of evil. This is called openness theology where we don’t write into our doctrinal statements that God is in control of all things. There are some things he is not in control of. So there’s a bit of an openness to the outcome since he’s not in absolute control of all things. How does that make you feel? On the one hand that feels like we’ve liberated God from the accusation that he’s somehow responsible for evil. But there’s a nasty, nasty side effect where the cure is worse than the disease: if Jesus isn’t in control of outcomes, how can I really trust the promises of God? If God is not in control of all things, how can he promise anything?Now of course, if you were an atheist, it would not be possible to assign a purpose to tragedy. If God does not exist, there can be no meaning or purpose - by definition. Purpose is always a function of design and a designer. If there is not a designer, there can be no purpose. So tragedy is just nonsense. Terrible deforming accidents are no different than success and flourishing.If you take away a cause for suffering, you know what emotion surfaces? Futility. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. What’s the point if there is no such thing as a point? If my son dies in a car accident or gets married, what’s the point? There is not point. Futility. Vanity. Pointlessness. If you believe your suffering isn’t caused by anyone you will experience despair, you will never be able to rid yourself of Despair.So there you can come up with explanations of suffering but all of them lead to really bad places. If I’m the cause of my suffering I will be perpetually guilty. If others are the cause of my suffering I will be perpetually angry. If Satan is the cause of my suffering I will be perpetually fearful. If nobody is the cause of my suffering I will be perpetually despairing.How would you like to live the rest of your life? Guilty, angry, fearful, or despairing.The Better WayThere’s a better way. The disciples in this passage see a man born blind. They immediately identify the suffering, the injustice, the hardship, the misery, the broken order, the affliction, the gloom, the sadness, the sadness, the grief, the anguish, the hopelessness, the sorrow.Jesus why is this so? What’s the theological answer to suffering? Why do we suffer? Jesus, was it this man who sinned or his parents who sinned that this man was born blind? How do I explain it?Now we are getting into deep territory here. We are entering into profound mystery here and I won’t pretend to be able to solve theological equations reserved for deity.But we should state plainly what Jesus states plainly. Why was this man born blind. What is the clear answer? What is the purpose of this man’s blindness?The purpose of this man’s blindness, according to the text, is that the WORKS of GOD might be displayed in him. Wow.What do we mean here? How can this be? We know that God is perfect. In God there is no darkness. God is not the author of sin or suffering. True. So our language has to be so careful.For a moment, let’s just stay in the exact territory of the text. What this text is clearly saying is that there is a cause beyond the cause. There is a divine purpose that transcends, controls, and rules the causes we can detect. Yes, we can identify secondary causes, but there is a primary cause.If we knew this blind man, we would very likely be able to point to causes for his blindness. Let’s just imagine for a moment based on what we can ascertain. This man was clearly poor since he was begging and he likely came from a very poor family, since his family wasn’t taking care of him. Maybe this man’s blindness came from a vitamin A deficiency. But, why didn’t this man get his vitamins? Maybe he was a minority or grew up in social class that had no opportunity for education. Now we have a social cause. Because he was in a bad social class, he was unable to get work. And without work there is no money. And without money there is no food. Now we have an economic cause. And when you are at the bottom of the heap are treated unjustly, when people look at you in your condition and conclude that God is punishing you with blindness because of sin, your self-image is destroyed and you become angry and a not very likeable person. You want to know what the most common cause of congenital blindness was in the first century? Venereal diseases. When the mother had gonorrhea she would pass this on to the child and they would be born blind. Whose fault is that?Who knows what this man’s story is? But his story, whatever it is, is like our stories.And it’s like our stories in this way: our suffering has identifiable causes. All of these categories are real. I cause suffering for myself daily. Other people in this world cause suffering for me daily. And while not as clear, Satan himself causes suffering. There are ‘natural’ disasters that cause tremendous suffering. Yes, but.But what? But there is a cause above the cause. When we look at physical disability, we can go, oh, that’s a chromosome problem. That’s a genetic mutation problem. Yes, but there’s a cause above the cause. Remember Moses? Moses can’t speak very well. He probably had a speech impediment. Maybe he had cleft pallet. And what did God say to Moses when he pointed to his deformed mouth?Do you hear that? How can you argue that God is not sovereign over these details?FCBC, let me assure you, there is a cause above the cause. Your suffering is so that the works of God might be displayed in you. Believe this. Believe it.This is a cause for hope. A lot of people choke on what Jesus says here. They just can’t take it. They gag on this doctrine. How could a good God allow a man to suffer in blindness his entire life? I want nothing to do with that. But listen, if your suffering becomes the stage upon which the brilliant work of God in you is played out, is that not worth it? Do you suppose that this man, after he was healed was bitter at Jesus? Do you think he was angry, “Why didn’t you heal me sooner?” This man’s years of suffering give him eternal categories of joy permanently inaccessible to the average person. Great suffering means great opportunity for the works of God to be displayed in you.What Work of God?Now what works? That’s the question. What work of God will he display in your suffering? We don’t know. We have to be okay with that.We end today not knowing what Jesus’ purposes are for this man. Perhaps this man will remain blind for the rest of his life and glorify God in that suffering. This was Joni Erickson Tada’s story. Glorify God in my disability. The works of God were displayed in her.This was also Paul’s story. Paul had a thorn in the flesh. We don’t know what the thorn was but it represented suffering. Have you ever had a deep thorn that you just couldn’t get out? And every day it remained lodged into your flesh, the more it irritated you. It just festers and it’s so hard to do a single thing without it reminding you that it’s there. He suffered.As he suffered he begged the Lord three times for him to remove it. And three times God said to Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in weakness.” How can that be that this is a good thing? What possible purpose might God have in my suffering that he doesn’t take away?Well the first thing to say is that you don’t know the end of the story. He may still choose to take it away. This man might have prayed every day of his life for the last 30 years for God to heal him. That’s a lot of unanswered prayer. I’m guessing his prayers for healing fell pretty flat. But then in an unexpected moment of hopelessness and disappointment, God healed him.And second, the Works of God can’t be great unless the suffering is great. Hard things are moments when more of him is revealed. What makes this miracle so amazing? It’s that this man has been blind his entire life. It makes the miracle absolutely irrefutable. What if the purpose of your life’s suffering is to make God’s glory irrefutable? Are you okay with that? You better be if your goal in life is to find purpose, joy, and meaning. There cannot be a more joyful, more purposeful or meaningful existence than making God’s glory irrefutable.John 9 is all about light. We are not left in the dark about the meaning of darkness. It’s not meaninglessness. He doesn’t leave us alone to try and find meaning in suffering. Suffering exists in God’s children so that the works of God might be performed in us and through us.CommunionNow as we transition into communion I want to take a moment and reflect that we are not to take communion in an unworthy manner.And speaking of cause and effects, Paul says some of you are sick and some of you have even died BECAUSE of this. Now, if we keep reading in this text we are going to all of the sudden get horribly confused.In this text Paul seems to undo everything we’ve tried to teach today. He is linking physical sickness and even death with taking communion in an unworthy manner. Is he reintroucing Christian Karma. Who sinned that this man is sick? Did he take communion in an an unworthy manner?Here’s the key, key difference. It all has to do with purpose. The disciples believed that the suffering of blindness was God’s way of punishing the sinner. God said, no the suffering is God’s way of glorifying the savior.The suffering associated with taking communion in an unworthy manner is not punishment but discipline. A father disciplines. A slave master punishes. A father says, “That’s dangerous what you are doing. Keep away. Don’t touch that outlet. Don’t run into the street.”Here’s what we are being asked to believe. Do you believe that God is greater than your suffering? You see a Christian has an answer that is emotionally satisfying: A Christian says, “If there is suffering in my life and I caused it, I can take comfort in the fact that even my own sin there is a cause above the cause. That God is working even my own sin out for good. The suffering I am experiencing is not because God is punishing me (even if I caused it) because all my punishment fell into Jesus. All of it. God would never take two payments for one debt. God is not going to punish Jesus for my sin and then punish me. If there is suffering in my life because of others or because of Satan, I can take it because there is a cause above the cause. God is working it out toward his own good. If there is suffering in my life because others caused it, he will redeem that and glorify himself because of it and reward me in it.”And if the suffering doesn’t have a personal cause, it’s just a seemingly random tragedy or mutation or accident, there is a cause above the cause. Believe this!You want to know how to make a mockery of the table this morning and take communion in an unworthy manner? By saying, “Yes Jesus, I know that you suffered severely. I know that you were able to take the greatest suffering in the world, the death of the Son of God and redeem it for the most glorious purposes in the world.” Yes, I know that’s true, but I don’t believe that you are able to take my suffering and redeem it. That’s making a mockery of what we are about to celebrate. Don’t take communion in an unworthy manner my friends.Joni Erickson Tada said,