The Value of Suffering and Pain and Its Correspondence to God

1275 Words6 Pages
In the world today, there is appalling devastation, pain and suffering endured by millions of innocent people. Most view them as unfair trials; they ask, ‘If there is a God, why does He allow it?’ Although pain and suffering are viewed as unnecessary and unfair trials executed by God on sometimes innocent people, they’re a necessary way in becoming more Christ-like because it is a way for sin to be explicated and for God to be revealed to the lost. From the biblical point of view, there is no intrinsic value in this suffering. Akin to the evil in the world, suffering is a perversion of what should be, which was caused by the disruption of the relationship between mankind and its Creator; it has no value in and of itself. That’s not to say that there can’t be any value whatsoever in pain and suffering. C.S. Lewis writes, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (The Problem of Pain 93). Human suffering is a sign that there’s something wrong with the world. The experience of suffering should prompt the human search for God. Some, of course, reject the existence of God altogether. This solves the problem of suffering by removing it completely, but makes for several other problems. First, there’s no one to blame for the suffering. Second, one has no one to turn to for real strength and comfort, except oneself or other individuals with limited resources. The third problem is one that C.S. Lewis mentions: how does one explain things like love, goodness, justice, and reason? Lewis states, “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A person does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line… Consequentially atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we

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