No Stranger To Our Pain!

A little story reminds us pain is a perennial human problem. A man went to a fortune teller. She looked into her fortune-ball and told him you will have lots of pain in your life for the next 8 years.” The man asked hopefully, “Then what?” She said, “Then you’ll get used to it.” Sooner or later pain comes to every life – but we never get used to it. Country artist Keith Whitley captured the painful truth about pain in his 1989 song, “I’m No Stranger To the Rain.” The song describes various kinds of suffering and the foggy, hopeless feeling chronic pain can cause. Whitley, a brilliant young country artist, was telling the truth about himself in that song. He struggled with alcoholism from a young age and died of alcoholic poisoning in May 1989, at 33 years old.                                 

 Let’s shift from a country music singer to Christ the Savior. To put a little twist on the title of Whitley’s song, Jesus was no stranger to our pain. Centuries before Christ came to earth, the prophet Isaiah wrote, “He was despised and rejected by men; A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” Isaiah 53:3a). Jesus was no stranger to life’s pain. His pain began with birth in a stable (Luke 2:7) and built to an excruciating climax 33 years later on a cross. Matt.27:35, says tersely, “They crucified Him,” but death by crucifixion was a death of unimaginable pain. On the cross, as physical, mental, emotional and spiritual pain saturated His body and soul, Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani; That is, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matt.27:46). No theological attempt to explain that heartbroken cry fully suffices. The sight of God in the flesh suffering, on a cross of all things, confronts us with depths of spiritual mystery we simply cannot fully plumb.

 Still, there is a truth here that can help us when we, like Jesus, hurt until we question whether or not God is still with us and still cares for us. The pain Jesus suffers on the cross provides the most powerful proof available God has not forsaken us or stopped caring! He has on the job experience at intense and sustained suffering! Philip Yancey writes, “No other religion – not Judaism, not Hinduism, not Buddhism or Islam – offers the unique contribution of an all-powerful God who willingly takes on the          limitations and suffering of His creation. As Dorothy Sayers wrote, ‘For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is – limited and suffering and subject to death – He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His own creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair ... He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain  and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile’ ” (Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?, p 225). All this adds a new layer on the theological question, if God is all powerful and all good, why do good people suffer? We may never totally understand why — but if the question is will God Himself suffer, the answer thunders down the ages from the cross — yes, in the worst kind of way. If God had to      suffer to save us, who could imagine we, too, would never have to do some suffering? Just asking.

 For Christ suffered for sins once ... that He might bring us to God”  – 1 Peter 3:18 

Dan Gulley, Smithville, TN