God's Problem (8 page)

Jeremiah was quite explicit: the holy city, Jerusalem, would be destroyed in the coming onslaught. “I will make Jerusalem a heap of ruins, a lair of jackals; and I will make the towns of Judah a desolation without inhabitant” (9:11).
²⁵
The resultant suffering for the inhabitants of the land would not be pleasant: “They shall die of deadly diseases. They shall not be lamented nor shall they be buried; they shall become like dung on the surface of the ground. They shall perish by the sword and by famine, and their dead bodies shall become food for the birds of the air and for the wild animals of the earth” (16:4). The siege of Jerusalem by the foreign armies would lead to unspeakable horrors, as starvation mounted in the city and people resorted to the worst forms of cannibalism simply to survive: “I will make this city a horror, a thing to be hissed at; everyone who passes by it will be horrified and will hiss because of all its disasters. And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and all shall eat the flesh of their neighbors in the siege, and in the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life afflict them” (19:8–9).

Like his prophetic predecessors, Jeremiah held out hope as well. If the people would simply return to God, their suffering could be averted: “Therefore thus says the L
ORD
: If you turn back, I will take you back and you shall stand before me…. And I will make you to this people a fortified wall of bronze; they will fight against you, but they shall not prevail over you, for I am with you to save you and deliver you, says the L
ORD
. I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked, and redeem you from the grasp of the ruthless” (15:19–21).

The logic of this hope is clear. Suffering comes from God. If his people will simply return to him, the suffering will end. But if they refuse, it will intensify until there is a final destruction. Suffering in this view is not simply an unfortunate set of circumstances driven by political, economic, social, or military realities. It is what comes to those who disobey God; it comes as a punishment for sin.

An Initial Assessment

What are we to make of the prophetic view of suffering? It is not simply the view of several lone voices in remote portions of Scripture, but rather the view attested on page after page by all the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, major prophets and minor prophets alike. Moreover, as we will see in the next chapter, the influence of this view extended well beyond the writings of the prophets. It is precisely this view that guides the chronologies of what happened in the nation of Israel in historical books such as Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. It is a view found in many of the Psalms. It is comparable in many ways to the view found in wisdom literature such as the book of Proverbs. This is a view that permeates the Bible, especially the Hebrew Scriptures. Why do people suffer? In part, it is because God makes them suffer. It is not that he merely causes a little discomfort now and then to remind people that they need to pay more attention to him. He brings famine, drought, pestilence, war, and destruction. Why do God’s people starve? Why do they incur dreadful and fatal diseases? Why are young men maimed and killed in battle? Why are entire cities laid under siege, enslaved, destroyed? Why are pregnant women ripped open and children dashed against rocks? To some extent, at least, it is God who does it. He is punishing his people when they have gone astray.

I should stress that the prophets themselves never state this as a universal principle, as a way of explaining
every
instance of suffering. The prophets, that is, were speaking
only
to their contemporaries about their specific sufferings. Even so, there is no escaping the gruesome realities of this view. God sometimes visits judgment on his own people—especially since they are his own people—because they have abandoned him and his ways.

What can we say about such a view? On the positive side, this view takes God and his interactions with the world seriously. The laws that his people broke, after all, were laws meant to preserve
the welfare of society. They were laws designed to ensure that the poor were not oppressed, that the needy were not overlooked, that the weak were not exploited. These were laws as well that dictated that God be worshiped and served—God alone, not other gods of other peoples. The prophets taught that adherence to God’s will would bring divine favor whereas disobedience would lead to hardship—and surely obedience would be better for everyone involved, especially the poor, needy, and weak. The prophets, in short, were concerned about issues of real life—poverty, homelessness, injustice, oppression, the uneven distribution of wealth, the apathetic attitudes of those who have it good toward those who are poor, helpless, and outcast. On all of these points I resonate deeply with the prophets and their concerns.

At the same time, there are obvious problems with their point of view, especially if it is generalized into some kind of universal principle, as some people have tried to do over the ages. Do we really want to say that God brings starvation as a punishment for sin? Is God at fault for the famines in Ethiopia? Does God create military conflict? Is he to blame for what happened in Bosnia? Does God bring disease and epidemics? Was he the one who caused the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed thirty million people worldwide? Is he killing seven thousand people a day with malaria? Has he created the AIDS crisis?

I don’t think so. Even if one wants to limit the prophetic view to the “chosen people,” the people of Israel, what are we to say? That the political and military problems in the Middle East are God’s way of trying to get Israel to return to him? That he is willing to sacrifice the lives of women and children in suicide bombings to get his point across? Even if we limit ourselves to
ancient
Israel, do we really want to say that innocent people starved to death (starvation does not hit just the guilty, after all) as a divine punishment for the sins of the nation? That the brutal oppression of the Assyrians and then the Babylonians was really God’s doing, that he urged the sol
diers on as they ripped open pregnant women and dashed little children against the rocks?

The problem with this view is not only that it is scandalous and outrageous, but also that it creates both false security and false guilt. If punishment comes because of sin, and I’m not suffering one bit, thank you very much, does that make me righteous? More righteous than my next door neighbor who lost his job, or whose child was killed in an accident, or whose wife was brutally raped and murdered? On the other hand, if I am undergoing intense suffering, is it really because God is punishing me? Am I really to blame when my child is born with a defect? when the economy takes a nosedive and I can no longer afford to put food on the table? when I get cancer?

Surely there must be other explanations for the pain and misery in the world. And as it turns out, there are other explanations—lots of them—even within the Bible itself. Before examining these, however, we should see how the prophetic view of suffering affected writers who were not prophets but whose books also eventually came to be seen as part of Scripture.

More Sin and More Wrath: The Dominance of the Classical View of Suffering

 

As horrible and bloodcurdling as the Holocaust was, it was obviously not the only terrible consequence of the Second World War. War affects entire nations, and, of course, the people who live in them, both civilians and soldiers. It is relatively easy to come up with statistics for the major international conflicts of the twentieth century. With respect to casualties, for example, the First World War is usually thought to have caused fifteen million deaths. Many of these deaths were grim and tortuous; trench warfare was an ugly affair. In terms of sheer numbers, the Second World War was far more significant: something like fifty to sixty million deaths, all told. That was 2–3 percent of the entire population of earth at the time. This is not counting, obviously, the severely wounded—soldiers with legs blown off by landmines or wounded with shrapnel they continued to carry in their bodies for the rest of their lives, and so on. What needs to be remembered whenever the raw numbers of those who die or suffer are tossed about is that each of these numbers represents an individual, a man, woman, or child who had physical needs and desires, loves and hates, beliefs and hopes. For more than fifty million individuals in the Second World War, these
hopes were savagely disappointed. And even survivors were scarred for life.

One of the peculiar features of personal suffering is that it may not be worn on the face or evident from the externals of one’s later life. That’s not always true, of course: soldiers fortunate to have survived a war experience—whether a world war, Korea, Vietnam, or any other of the dozens of conflicts of the past century—were often unfortunate for the rest of their lives, permanently wounded or disfigured or so mentally and emotionally shaken that they could never lead a normal life again. Anyone who is inclined to glorify the exploits of war should delve deeply into Wilfred Owen’s poems or Dalton Trumbo’s 1971 film
Johnny Got His Gun,
one of the most terrifying movies ever made.

Others, though, managed to survive a war, return to civilian life, and go on to lead a happy and prosperous existence—so much so that simply by looking at them, you would never know the deep anguish and suffering they had been through. There are millions of experiences like that, of course; here I’ll mention just one, the one I know best—the experience of my own father in the Second World War.

By the time I reached the age of consciousness (I was a bit slow: say, age 13), my dad had the life of someone living out the American dream. We had a nice four-bedroom colonial house on a large lot, two cars, and a boat; we belonged to the country club and enjoyed an active social life. Dad was a highly successful businessman, working in sales for a corrugated box company in Lawrence, Kansas. He was happily married to a woman he considered his best friend, and they had three kids, one of whom, I might say, was particularly striking for looks and intelligence….

Where is the suffering in a life like this? Well, there were of course the typical forms of disappointment, frustration, unrealized hopes, and the rest. And eventually cancer. But well before that, my dad had gone through more than his share of suffering in the world, particularly in the war. In March of 1943, as an eighteen-
year-old, he was taken into the army. After a round of training in different branches of the service (a complicated story in itself), he eventually was sent over as a private first class to fight in Germany as part of the 104th Infantry Division (the “Timberwolves”). The ensuing battles marked him for life.

His first day “on the job” he started out as an ammunition bearer, and by the end of the day was the first gunner on a machine gun. The two guys ahead of him had been killed, and he was the most qualified to take over. And so it went. The biggest trauma happened at a battle at the Roer River in Germany, on February 23, 1945. This was after the German surge at the Battle of the Bulge had been repulsed and the Allies were moving into German territory. The 104th was moving toward the Rhine under heavy fire but first had to cross the small Roer River, which was well protected on the other side by German troops armed to the teeth. The plans for the crossing had been laid, and the time was set, only to be frustrated by a counteraction by the Germans: knowing what was to come, they burst the earthen dam at the head of the river, sending down avalanches of water, making an immediate crossing impossible. The Americans had to wait. Finally on February 22 the orders were given: they would head out at 1:00
A.M
. the next morning.

My dad’s recollections of the next twenty-four hours need to be pieced together from sundry sources: letters that he wrote after the fact and stories that he (reluctantly) told later. He crossed the river in a boat, paddling with a dozen or so others, with German infantry on the other side firing at them, bullets flying everywhere. The fellow in front of my dad was blown away. Those who made it to the other side needed to hunker down in foxholes while more troops crossed. The foxhole my dad found himself in was filled with water from the flooding of the river. And there they had to stay, my dad and two others, unable to move out with crossfire all around. They had to stay, in fact, for nearly an entire day, legs and feet in freezing water, in the dead of winter.

Eventually they decided they couldn’t stay: feet frozen and no prospect of help. They made a run for it, with my dad in the lead. Unfortunately, the only way out was through a minefield. His two buddies were blown to bits behind him. He managed to get back to his line but was unable to go any farther. A medic was called in, gave him a quick examination, and determined that his feet were in serious shape. They took him out on a stretcher to the rear of the line; eventually he was evacuated and flown to Salisbury, England.

Doctors there told him it was a miracle he had been able to stand, let alone run, given the state of his feet. They thought they would need to amputate. Luckily, circulation was sufficiently restored and he survived with two feet intact, but damaged for life. Until his dying day he had problems with circulation and could not keep his feet warm.

The end of the story is that an uncle of his learned that he was at Salisbury and managed to visit him in the army hospital there. At first his uncle didn’t recognize him. The sheer terror of my dad’s experience had made his hair turn completely white. He was twenty years old at the time.

I tell this story not because it’s unusual but because it is altogether typical. Fifty million other people were not nearly so lucky: they were flat-out killed. Many millions more were horribly disfigured or dismembered, with wounds to show for the rest of their lives. Millions of others had experiences comparable to those of my dad. Every one of them suffered horribly. My dad’s experience was uniquely his, but in other ways it was typical. At the same time, it was not universal.

Back home in Kansas, where he grew up, there were other twenty-year-olds who on the day of the battle had little more to fret about than getting a D on a chemistry exam or being unable to land a date for the fraternity dance or being jilted by their latest girlfriend. I don’t want to underestimate the excruciating pain of unrequited love: most of us have experienced it and it can tear a person apart from the inside out. But it is hard to compare with the physi
cal torment and sheer terror of being under enemy fire with colleagues being blown to bits on your right and left.

At the same time, in contrast to the boys back home, there were other twenty-year-olds not far from the front lines who were being slowly and inexorably tortured and murdered in the experiments of crazed Nazi doctors—subjected to freezing experiments, incendiary bomb experiments, amputations and attempted transplants of arms and legs, and so on. Suffering is not only senseless, it is also random, capricious, and unevenly distributed.

How do we explain the suffering of war—or suffering of any kind?

The Prophetic View Revisited

As we have seen, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible had a ready explanation for why people had to suffer the excruciating agonies of war. For them—at least with regard to Israel and the nations surrounding Israel at the time—war came as a judgment from God for the sins of the people. I should emphasize that the actual suffering in war in antiquity was no less hair-raising than it is in modern times. Hand-to-hand combat with swords, spears, and knives is just as terrifying as sitting in foxholes with bullets whizzing by and destroying your buddies. For the prophets, God sometimes brings war to teach his people a lesson and force them to repent. I suppose that if there are no atheists in foxholes, then on the individual basis the strategy works.

It would be a mistake, however, to see this perspective on suffering as a view of only a few random authors in the Hebrew Bible. In fact, it is the point of view of the majority of authors who produced the biblical texts. In terms of literary genre, on the opposite end of the spectrum from the prophets were the writers of Hebrew “wisdom.” Whereas the prophets spoke “the word of God” to a specific crisis situation, indicating what God wanted his people to do when faced with some concrete problem, the speakers of wisdom
delivered wise advice that was to be applicable in a wide range of situations. These authors were concerned with universal truths that could help guide one into a happy and prosperous life. They learned the truths they conveyed not by a special revelation from God but by way of human experience that extended over many generations. There are several books of “wisdom” in the Hebrew Bible—including the books of Job and Ecclesiastes, which we will be considering later—but none of them is more typical of the genre than the book of Proverbs, a collection of wise sayings that, if followed, will purportedly lead to a good and happy life.
¹

Consisting almost entirely of pithy sayings of the wise that need to be reflected on and digested, the book of Proverbs is arranged for the most part (there are a few exceptions) in no discernible pattern. It is the kind of book you can just dip into and not worry about the literary context or the narrative flow because, for the most part, there is none. What is striking is that even though Proverbs is very different from the writings of the prophets, it shares with them the basic view that a life lived righteously before God will be rewarded but that suffering comes to the wicked and disobedient. This is not so much because God punishes sinners as it is that the world has been established in a certain way by God, so that right living leads to happiness but wicked behavior leads to suffering. This is a constant refrain throughout the book. Consider the following examples:

This is the classical view of the prophets writ large in Wisdom. Why do people go hungry, experience bodily harm and personal misfortune, come under God’s curse, get into trouble, and die? Because they are wicked: they do not obey God. How does one avoid suffering? How does one guarantee the blessing of God, a full stomach, prosperity in life, deliverance from trouble and harm? By obeying God.

Would that it were true. But historical reality is never so neat. All one needs to do is look around to see that the wicked often thrive and the righteous often suffer, sometimes in horrifying and repulsive ways. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see that even the
historical
writers of the Hebrew Bible—precisely the people you would think could see that the classical view of suffering is riddled with problems, when examined historically—even these writers are for the most part convinced that suffering comes from God as a
punishment for sin. This can be seen in some of the best-known historical episodes of the Bible—for example, in the stories from the very first book, Genesis—and even more clearly from the large and extended historical narratives that take up the story of Israel from the conquest of the promised land (the book of Joshua) to the fall of the southern kingdom to the Babylonians (2 Kings).