In this post I want to try and tackle (not answer) something that all believers, in fact all people, wrestle with when it comes to God and His involvement in our day to day lives. The reason I’m likely not to provide a satisfactory answer is because many smarter than me have tried and come up short for reasons that I will explain.

However, whilst I may not be able to satisfy your curiosities in this area theologically, I have found that spiritually this isn’t an area that I spend much time worrying about any more. I’m not perfect of course but I feel it’s something I have journeyed over a long period of time. I will unpack some of how I have done this later on.

Let me set the scene and explain why I am writing about this today. I am reading the book of Acts and have reached chapter 8, a pivotal moment in the growing Jesus movement. The believers have received the Holy Spirit, they are seeing incredible signs and wonders, and thousands have been added to their numbers. It’s causing a real stir in the city ultimately they are being punished for what is happening – many Jews and religious leaders don’t like this ‘new way’ that is growing. Stephen, a Jesus follower who was chosen to be one of the new leaders, has just been executed for his preaching and demonstration of the Kingdom and as we open chapter 8 we see things ‘seem’ to be getting worse for the believers.

..On that day a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him. But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison. Acts 8:1b-3

So why did I write ‘seem’ in inverted commas? Surely it doesn’t ‘seem’ bad, it just IS bad right?

Yes……but no.

The next verse starts to open up something interesting for this new movement which is very exciting.

Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went. Acts 8:4

We hear about a man called Philip doing and seeing amazing things in Samaria, the whole city received joy. We hear the beginnings of the gospel spreading to Africa through this same man and of course we then hear about Saul becoming Paul and spreading the gospel with Silas, Barnabas, Timothy and many others throughout the known world.

What seemed like a horrible time for the church has actually turned into a catalytic movement that has grown the church.

So here in lies our wrestle. Moments like this raise many questions for us because they are all connected in our minds. Think of this timeline;

• What happened at Pentecost kicks off the amazing signs and wonders, just as Jesus said would happen.
• The amazing signs and wonders cause people to repent and follow Jesus.
• Because of this attention is drawn towards the apostles and others following Jesus.
• Peter and John are thrown in prison and speak boldly to the religious leaders.
• Stephen is appointed as a leader also because of the crowds that have gathered and begins to minister with great power
• Stephen then gets in trouble with the authorities and is ultimately killed for what he is doing.
• The incident with Stephen kicks off intense persecution for all the believers
• That persecution scatters the believers from Jerusalem and into many places where the gospel is preached and the numbers grow again.
• This causes the gospel to spread (as we read later in Acts) into the gentile world where it continues to grow and accelerate.
• Ultimately because of that (jumping many centuries on) I am here as a follower of Jesus writing this blog today.

So, given the fact that the gospel spreading over the known world is what Jesus wanted, and given that more followers of Jesus is a very good thing the questions we ask start to get……. well difficult.

I don’t know about you but I start to ask questions like;

It’s good that Stephen was killed right? Maybe God wanted that persecution to happen so that the believers would spread out? Would they have scattered if they hadn’t been persecuted in Jerusalem? But does God want His people to experience pain? Does God cause pain? Would Stephens friends think that his death was a ‘good’ thing?

Does this make sense? Really what we are doing here is trying to understand whether something bad can ultimately end up being good, and if it ends up good was the other thing really bad in the first place. And more importantly, where is God in all of this?

It’s here that we enter a theological tangle. These are questions and views that have been argued back and forth for centuries.

Whilst I’m not a well versed theologian, let me summarise ‘some’ of the thinking around this. Bear in mind many people will hold one or a few of these views all at the same time.

1 – God doesn’t cause pain – a popular view held by many. Biblically this thinking originates from the creation story where we see how the world was in perfection before the fall. It’s when sin enters into the heart of mankind that they ‘begin to die’ and a sickness enters the world. Therefore all pain, sickness etc. ultimately has its root in sin (not necessarily the individual sin of the person suffering but corporate sin). People also often talk about Jeremiah’s prophesy of hope and a good future which suggest Gods goal can’t be pain. This view is also backed up by Jesus teaching regarding how God is a good Father who doesn’t give bad gifts to His children. It’s also why healing restores people to health (pushing back sin) and the book of James talks about how God does not tempt us with evil so we shouldn’t say that. It would be simple if we stopped there but……there’s more.

2 – God sends pain – on the opposite end we have people who believe that God sends pain, not because He wants us to suffer, but because in the long term it leads towards what is good, just like we’ve read in the book of Acts. People will point to passages in Exodus where God talks about how He is the one who gives sight or makes people blind, deaf or mute. In Lamentations Solomon writes how calamities come from the mouth of God and Isaiah prophesies about how the Lord brings light and darkness, prosperity and calamity. In this view we are looking long term and understanding that the ultimate goal of salvation comes before individual and/or isolated pain so God has no trouble bringing pain if it leads us further.

3 – God allows pain – these next two views often sit alongside points one and two. In this view people don’t believe that the origin of the pain is from God but it’s clear that God doesn’t always prevent the pain from happening. Biblically we best see this in the book of Job where it is Satan doing the tempting and tormenting but God is the one who sets the limits of that pain. We read in Luke how Jesus was ‘driven’ by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. Paul later talks about a ‘thorn in his flesh’ which he asked God to take away but Gods answer ‘seems’ to suggest that this weakness of Paul was to display Gods strength. This is a painful thought for many because we see throughout the scriptures that God can stop pain and often does, but on the other occasions, where He doesn’t stop pain, we struggle with the reasons. We’ll finish with one more.

4 – God uses or redeems pain – this differs slightly from the previous point in that rather than God ‘allowing’ or ‘not allowing’ pain to happen, He simply uses the pain that is in our lives to help bring us closer to Him. The writer of Hebrews talks about how God’s discipline is good for us in the same way that while a child being told off by their father might not enjoy the experience, it is for the child’s good that they are disciplined. The book talks about how this pain produces righteousness and peace if we allow ourselves to be trained by it. James talks about the pure joy we have when we face trails suggesting that the pain we experience is a root to joy through the Father, a thought backed up by Paul when he talks about the comfort we receive from God in pain which allows us to comfort others.

On top of these, or perhaps under them, are the two camps of free will and predestination. Is everything we face planned out by God or are we the architects of our own decisions? Without doing a deep dive here we see throughout the Bible arguments for both and where we land on this will have an impact on our view of God’s role in pain.

Ok, breathe; there’s a lot to take in here.

One thing we are agreed on is that we cannot avoid pain in our lives. We know it from the scripture when Jesus says clearly that in this world we will have trouble, and we know it experientially because there isn’t a person I have met who hasn’t experienced pain. The other thing that I believe is pretty clear, and it’s probably why we end up in different places on our theology, is that God does meet us in our pain, or perhaps we meet Him in our pain. I personally gave my life to Jesus in the middle of loss and I know countless stories of others where they turned to God when life went belly up. I know of others who have an illness which has brought them closer to God.

These experiences can often lead us to many believing that God was involved in those moments because the ultimate gift of being with Him in eternity out-shadows the temporary pain we have felt on earth. I even know people who have refused prayer for healing because their sickness comes from God and they fear if they lose it they won’t depend on Him the same.

Of course others have turned away from God in the middle of their pain. The loss and agony they feel leaves them doubting that God could exist at all and if He does then He can’t be loving or good but some kind of tyrant who doesn’t care about us. I know many people who walked closely with God until trouble came and they couldn’t face Him in those days.

Pain clearly has an effect on our believing in God.

I want to throw something else into the mix as well. I believe as human beings, certainly in the western world, we are particularly bad, and probably becoming worse, at holding tensions and siting in the grey (something I’ve written about recently). We are polarised in our make up, we like rights and wrongs, we prefer things to be definite and set in stone. We make and break rules, we vote for and against, we don’t love the in between. On top of that is the fact that we have certain parameters and concepts that we are incapable of thinking outside of e.g space and time, and because we are so ‘head’ focused thanks to our post enlightenment state we often reject anything that we cannot comprehend. It’s why the idea of eternity leaves us dumbfounded and the suggestion of God being everywhere at the same time is beyond us.

Why do I throw this in?

Well, I believe when we are faced with these seemingly theological paradoxes like we have just discussed, we simply are asking the wrong questions because our understanding is so limited.

I’ll fully admit that I’m not smart enough to fully decide what the right questions are either……….

Perhaps we have got too tied up in the rights and the wrongs. Perhaps in our righteous attempts to try and comprehend the role of God and pain we have reduced Him in such a way painting Him as a tyrant or someone incapable of ruling. I believe there is something more to all of this that we simply cannot grasp. For example, imagine trying to explain to someone even 50 or 60 years ago what the internet, AI, and other ‘smart’ inventions would be doing in our world. We couldn’t because it would have been outside our comprehension. I believe it’s like that x100000000 when it comes to God’s role in this area.

It’s from these base layers that I have developed my approach to this subject.

I got to the point in my journey with God where I have stopped asking God ‘why’ when a painful thing happens. To be clear, I will ask Him when praying for someone why they are suffering so that I can pray from an informed place, but I mean more in the wider sense. I’ve realised that an answer to the ‘why’ question rarely helps me. When a loved one has gone from my life no ‘why’ would leave me feeling better so I just decided that I didn’t need to know until less God wanted me to. Instead I began to ask questions around how I could move forward, how I could trust Him more, how this pain could be used to reinforce my faith.

I got to this place because I decided my trust for God needed to supersede my desire for a pain free life.

My life is not the pinnacle of the Kingdom of God. God is so much more than me.

Ultimately I had to decide whether I trusted God and believed He was good but, and this is a big but, my answer to these questions couldn’t be formed by looking at my own life, whether it was good or not, but by looking at Him and his nature that is revealed through creation and His word. Was He good or not? Could I trust Him or not?

Too often we make our lives the base reference point for God. If life is good, God is good, if our world is peaceful, God is peaceful, and we do the same in the opposite. I don’t believe this is not the way it should be. Who God is should be our starting point. He is good even if my life is rough. He is peace even if my life is chaos. If we reduce who God is to a sum of all our experiences, difficult though they may be, we reduce Him from the omnipotent, omniscient God that He is to a human formed omen that rises and falls on our desires and experiences.

I don’t understand why some people are well and some are sick. I don’t know why some experience healing and others don’t. I can’t grasp why some are blessed financially and others scrape for all they have. I’ve seen people honour God and struggle externally in their circumstances and I’ve seen people dishonour God who seem to be flying in life. I’ve seen the opposite happen as well. I can’t seem to make sense of any of that and I don’t think I am supposed to. If I could understand how all of these things work then I’d be following a God who is no bigger and smarter than me and none of us want a God like that!!!!

We’re nearly there I promise!

When I first met Jesus I began a process of death. A process where I began to die to all the emotions, thoughts and dreams I felt I deserved. I am simply learning to embrace the mystery of this life and trust the God who formed it. This is a live ongoing process in my life and if you knew me you would know that it hasn’t been linear, some seasons feel easier than others, and it is very definitely not complete.

I know I won’t have answered all your questions nor will I have fully satisfied those of you who are experiencing great pain right now. All I know is that God is good and He loves you, you can trust Him even when life doesn’t look the way you hoped.

I invite you to start this process too. As I’ve already said it may mean you can’t answer all your friends complicated questions about pain but it will allow you to begin to live a life of faith in the midst of storms and that will be more powerful to anyone around you than a well versed answer.