Where is God when it Hurts – Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants

Isn’t pain “God’s great goof?” Many Christians, says Philip Yancey, would answer yes if they were pressed on the question. Afterall, why would God create us to experience so much unpleasantness?

The goal of this second chapter of Philip Yancey’s book, Where is God when it Hurts? isn’t to give an answer to why pain exists in all it’s forms and types. Rather, he wants to lay a realistic and grounded “perspective on pain.” Pain is, in a fallen world where we are in such risk of destruction and death, a gift.

This doesn’t mean that pain is inherently good. It does mean that pain as a sensation has a purpose. Like warning lights in our car’s dashboard, pain signals to us that something is wrong. Of course, these sensations can “rage out of control,” or die out altogether. The purpose for which pain exists can go very wrong – but the basic design of the nervous system is good. Pain is an essential gift for surviving in a fallen world.

Pain “reveals a marvelous design that serves our bodies well. Pain is as essential to a normal life, it could be argued, as eyesight or even good circulation.” It’s a fact of our biology. It is good to start here, at this basic level. Realizing the “gift of pain” in general can get rid of that nasty presupposition that God did His best, but failed to create a painless world – or worse, that He created the sensation of pain for the purpose of torturing His creation. The usefulness of pain, and the miracle of the nervous system, won’t allow us to keep that presupposition.

We must go further. The greatest response to this presupposition about God is not grounded in our biology. It’s grounded in the biology of Jesus. God incarnate, who took on the form of a servant, who became truly human, in order to suffer and die in our place. The God who created pain isn’t a sadistic madman in the sky. He’s a suffering Saviour, who desires to end our sufferings once and for all by taking our suffering and punishment on Himself.

In relationship with this God, pain takes on a whole new context. God suffers with us and for us. Not distantly, but intimately. He knows, and He cares.

Yes, we still have so many questions. Starting here, though, we begin with the best of friends He knows the worst of all pains, and considers you in your sufferings more significant than His in His own suffering on the cross.

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Philippians 2:3-8

Series page:

Philip Yancey’s Where Is God When It Hurts?