Where is God when we are hurting? He is right there because He suffered more than we can ever imagine....
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"The record of Jesus' life on earth should forever answer the question, 'How does God feel about our pain?' In reply, God did not give us words or theories on the problem of pain.
He gave us himself.
A philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.
The Execution
Love's as hard as nails
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross and his.
(C. S. Lewis, "Love's as Warm as Tears")
There is one central symbol by which we remember Jesus. Today that image is coated with gold and worn around the necks of athletes and beautiful women, an example of how we can gloss over the crude reality of history. The cross was, of course, a mode of execution. it would be no more bizarre if we made jewelry in the shape of tiny electric chairs, gas chambers, and hypodermic needles, the preferred modern modes of execution.
The cross, the most universal image in the Christian religion, offers proof that God cares about our suffering and pain. He died of it. That symbol stands unique among all the religions of the world. Many of them have gods, but only one has a God who cared enough to become a man and to die.
The scene, with the beatings and the sharp spikes and the slow torment of suffocation, has been recounted so often that we, who shrink from a news story on the death of a race horse or of baby seals, flinch not at all at its retelling. Unlike the quick, sterile executions we know today, this one stretched on for hours in front of a jeering crowd.
The promises Jesus made must have seemed especially empty to the people of his day. This man a king? A mock king if ever there was one, with his brier crown. Someone had thrown a fine purple robe over him, but blood from Pilate's beatings clotted the cloth.
More unlikely - this man God? Even for his disciples, who had pursued him three years, it was too much to believe. They hung back in the crowd, afraid to be identified with the mock king. Their dreams of a powerful ruler who could banish all suffering turned into nightmares.
Jesus' death is the cornerstone of the Christan faith, the most important fact of his coming. The Gospels bulge with its details. He laid out a trail of hints and bald predictions throughout his ministry, predictions that were only understood after the thing had been done. What possible contribution to the problem of pain could come from a religion based on an event like the cross, where God himself succumbed to pain?
The apostle Paul called the cross a "stumbling block" to belief, and history has proved him out. Jewish rabbis question how a God who could not bear to see Abraham's son slain would allow his own Son to die. The Koran teaches that God, much too gentle to allow Jesus to go to the cross, substituted an evildoer in his place. Even today [the early 80's when this book was originally written], US television personality Phil Donahue explains his chief objection to Christianity: "How could an all-knowing, all-loving God allow His Son to be murdered on a cross in order to redeem my sins? If God the Father is so 'all-loving,' why didn't He come down and go to Calvary?"
All of these objectors have missed the main point of the gospel, that in some mysterious way it was God himself who came to earth and died. God was not "up there" watching the tragic events conspire "down here."
God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. In Luther's phrase, the cross showed "God struggling with God." If Jesus was a mere man, his death would prove God's cruelty; the fact that he was God's Son proves instead that God fully identifies with suffering humanity. On the cross, God himself absorbed the awful pain of this world.
To some, the image of a pale body glimmering on a dark night whispers of defeat. What good is a God who does not control his Son's suffering? But another sound can be heard: the shout of a God crying out to human beings, "I LOVE YOU."
Love was compressed for all history in that lonely figure on the cross, who said that he could call down angels at any moment on a rescue mission, but chose not to - because of us.
At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ~ John 3:16
If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all - how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? ~ Romans8:31-32"
~ Phillip Yancey "Where is God When it Hurts?" pages 229-232
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