By Larry Rosenbaum
Most of us had never heard of the Kurds until a few months ago. But every night we saw pictures of thousands of suffering Kurds and we wanted to help them. No sooner had our relief efforts begun but a terrible cyclone hit Bangladesh, killing up to 300,000 people and leaving ten million people homeless, in desperate need of help. Meanwhile, we hear of millions of people in Ethiopia, the Sudan, and other nations on the verge of starvation.
All of us at times ask an age-old question: why does God allow so much suffering? This is a difficult question, and many books have been written on the subject. I cannot discuss it completely in this article, but I do want to give some thoughts on it, based on God’s Word. In Luke 13, Jesus’ disciples asked him about why God allowed certain Galilean Jews to be killed by Pilate and why eighteen people died when a tower fell on them. “Do you think they were worse sinners than other men from Galilee,” he asked. “Is that why they suffered? Not at all. And don’t you realize that you also will perish unless you leave your evil ways and turn to God.”
In Ecclesiastes 8, we are told “Because God does not punish sinners instantly, people feel it is safe to do wrong.” The Book of Revelation tells of terrible judgments soon to come upon the earth. Chapter nine tells of a judgment that causes so much torment on the human race that people will desire to die, but they won’t be able to. Another judgment causes a third of the human race to be killed (over a billion people!). Yet we learn that people still did not repent of their sins of murder, sorcery, fornication and theft.
As we said last month, even many Christians have a hard time accepting the idea of eternal torment for those who reject Christ. People on the street often tell me that this is unfair. Parents punish their children and society punishes criminals–but eternal torment in hell is an infinitely greater punishment. What they do not see is that our crimes against God are infinitely greater than our crimes against man. Unlike man’s laws, God’s laws are perfect. He has never mistreated me. I owe God an infinite debt–every good thing I have comes from Him (see Matt. 18:23-35). And God’s mercy towards us is infinitely greater than man’s mercy. God has offered us a complete pardon for our sins–past, present and future. If we reject this pardon, we are totally without excuse. Those who will be cast into the lake of fire will be speechless on judgment day. As their sins are played back before them, they will each see that God is fully just, and that they fully deserve eternal punishment.
In Job chapter 2, God said that Job was a blameless and upright man who feared God and avoided evil. Yet, God allowed Satan to afflict Job with a horrible punishment. When Job complained that God was unfair, God rebuked him strongly. Job repented, realizing he was being self-righteous. The truth is that for Job and for the rest of us “He has not punished us as we deserve for all our sins” (Ps. 103:10). Job could have turned against God, blaming Him for allowing the suffering. Instead, he chose to trust in God’s righteousness, and his suffering soon ended and was forgotten.
If a doctor gives me an aspirin to cure my headache, he is having mercy on me. If he cures me of cancer, he is having much greater mercy on me, because he is saving me from a far worse fate. If we have some glimpse of the horror of eternal Hell, we will begin to appreciate the great mercy God has shown toward us.
The apostle Paul said that he was blameless concerning God’s law. Nonetheless, he considered himself the chief of sinners, unworthy to be an apostle, a wretched man. Like the church of Laodicea, we need to see that we also are wretched. The judgments that we see around the world, horrible as they are, are as nothing compared to the ones that are coming soon upon the world. And the judgments of the Book of Revelation are as nothing compared to the torment of Hell.
“Knowing therefore the terror (solemn fear) of the Lord, we persuade men” (2 Corin. 5:11). The reason we do not witness as we should is because we fear men. We do not witness to friends or strangers because we fear they will reject us. What we need is to fear God more than men. Jesus said, “Fear him who has power to cast into hell” (Luke 12:5). When we have this fear, we will overcome every obstacle to witnessing and warn the wicked with great urgency to get their lives right with God.
