What does the Bible say about the foundations of our trust in God? Part II

Having looked at some of the big ideas swirling in our university culture, and considered the wider lens through which we are asking our questions, we can return to our passage in Acts for a closer look at the question of evil and suffering proposed at the end of my second article. Why does God allow it? Does the Bible have an answer?

The profound struggle of faith

As we’ve seen, our current way of looking at the world means that we often ask the why questions in an urgent quest to understand ourselves, here, now, instantly; to put things into perspective and to get a grip on a world that feels impossibly out of our reach and control. On top of this, we expect the answers to be neat and quantifiable.

The Bible, however, does not give us a neat and instant answer. Intensely frustrating as this might feel at times, it is not a weakness, but a strength: for it points us to who God reveals himself to be. Let’s take another look at Acts 17, verses 24-25: ‘Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone – an image made by human design and skill. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.’

These verses affirm that God is more than a soulless object, imaginary or otherwise. He is a living being who gave us life from his infinite love, wisdom and creativity. Yet though he made us; though he made the physical world; though interacts with it and us… he is also bigger than it all, and much bigger than we can entirely comprehend. This is the core of the tussle of faith: the relationship between limited human beings and a limitless God; we who cannot see the whys and wherefores of life on this broken planet, and the God who we’re supposed to trust with them. The Bible shows us that - though the world is uncertain from our perspective - it is in the loving, trustworthy hands of a God who is certain about it.

Why does it have to be a struggle?

This trust goes against the grain for us on two fronts. Firstly, it challenges the part of us that retains God’s image. We are loving, relational creatures; deeply attached to, involved and invested in a world that is broken. We love the world. We love the people in it. And we long for it to be as it should be: totally lovable. We don’t want to surrender it to a God who means that we have to acknowledge that it is broken.

And yet our freedom to know it and to love it has been broken, because it has lost its right bounds in relationship with God. We have tried to extend our dominion too far. And so, on a second front, trust goes against the grain for creatures like us, who want to abuse our freedom and put ourselves at the centre of reality. We don’t want relationship with God: we want control. We rightly see the pain and brokenness of the world and ache with it, rage against it. Yet we often wrongly blame God for it, rather than acknowledging the part that our abuse of freedom plays in it.

Hope and restoration

This complex mixture of love and pain, selflessness and selfishness, can make this God feel distant, unimaginably huge and unknowable. Thankfully, this is where the bridge comes in (see Acts 17:31). Not only does God make sense of the complexity of our experience, give us a place in the infinite cosmos and liberate us to love one another, but he also gives us personal and eternal redemption out of our mess and confusion; bridging the gap between finite human beings and the infinite God. This isn’t a twenty year plan, a government policy or a self-help book. It was - and is - the life of his only son, his very self. Jesus Christ, given for us, in history, in the concrete physical world; that we might be given the incomparably amazing gift of forgiveness and redemption from our mess… and be brought back into the loving relationship with God that we were made for.

Empathy

And all the while, importantly, this Jesus is real about pain. John describes how, when Jesus came to the tomb of his friend Lazarus, he wept (John 11:35). Even though he knew that there was hope - that he was about to raise his friend from the dead - he still acknowledged the pain of loss. Our profoundest suffering should not drive us away from God, then, but allow us to understand him better. In Jesus, we get a glimpse of the face of a God who’s cheeks are streaked with tears; deeply disturbed by the brokenness of the world… so devastated by the reality of our lovelessness that he would give himself over to pain and death in order to save us from it. God not only gives us context for our suffering, but shares it.

Any answers? (Round 2)

Through Jesus’ sacrifice, then, God gives us hope and communion in the midst of pain. In the light of this, we can look forward to a time when everything will be made right: when there will be no more tears and no more brokenness. And though this life is in the very real shadow of death (Psalm 23), God promises to walk with us through the valley until we can be with him, in the perfect communion of a restored creation.Paul puts it perfectly in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18:

16Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. 18So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

As well as resources on the general theme of trusting God in these strange times, we've also got a few recommendations for digging in to the book of Acts! Don't forget to check out the rest of this series too.