The problem with pain

"Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt… And pain is not only immediately recognizable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world…"

-C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Pain is an incredible thing. It's one of the most powerful experiences in our world. It has the ability to cause great distress in the human mind, and at it's core there is a sense of justice not being served, or in even simpler words, that's it just isn't right, or fair. People often either find, or lose their faith in God, over painful events and memories, depending on what they choose to do with it.

People will go to great lengths to avoid pain, which is something I personally relate to a great deal. I spent much of my adult life so far using various things to try and numb painful events from my past.

"We had a plan to build a wall

A great divide that would never fall

To separate us from all the pain

And keep our skeletons locked away

And brick by brick we built it so thick

That it blacked out the sky and all the sunlight

And one by one we all became numb

We were making the bullets to a broken gun"

-Thousand Foot Krutch, Fly on the Wall

This is what is at the core of most addictions. The heartbreaking reality is that the things that mask pain never last. The law of diminishing returns is in full effect in this arena, as the person continues to use something to numb the pain more, the effects go down and they have to use more and more to achieve the desired result. The pain never actually leaves, you can only lock it away for so long before it becomes a festering wound. Out of sight, but not really out of mind.

This is already going to be a long enough post because I am sharing some lengthy material that I find incredibly helpful. I just want to say that this could be an extremely in-depth conversation, so I'm only skimming the surface here. What I want to submit to you is to consider the possibility that perhaps due to many reasons, we have a very skewed view on pain. I would completely agree that pain is not part of God's original plan, but was a consequence of the fall of man and sin entering into the world. I would also say that I do not believe that God causes pain, but rather that he allows it and uses it to achieve his purposes in our lives. I would also argue that God does not like pain anymore than we do. An honest look at Jesus' life and ministry would back this up in my opinion.

One of the most transformational things that I have learned in the last few years, is the realization that God uses our pain and suffering to draw us closer to him, C.S. Lewis said that extremely well in the first quote I shared in this post. The reality is that when everything is great in our lives we often don't believe that we need God and that we can do this all on our own. How then, is he to wake us up out of our delusion? What I would like to leave you with is this last quote from a book I'm reading. Consider the possibility that at the heart of a lot of emotional pain that we experience, are lies that we have internalized at some point about who we are. God often wants to use these painful events to wake us up so that we are in a position where we're willing to seek him and to listen to him, so he can speak truth to those lies and show us who we really are.

"[Transformational Prayer] Principle Four: Since many of the negative emotions we currently feel are reflections of the past, they provide opportunities for the wounds of our lives to be exposed and thus for healing to occur.

It is difficult to address that which has not been identified. God will either allow or orchestrate our surroundings to bring us under duress and testing in order to expose what is our true core belief system (see 1 Pet. 4:12-13). It requires little effort to perform at a high level of "spirituality" when things are going well with us. However, when the fire comes, our impurities are made evident and whatever is on the inside (our true belief system) is made evident. These impurities, falsehoods that we believe, will express themselves through our emotional state and consequential behavior. What we truly believe is made evident through our feelings. As I have already stated, we will feel what we believe. If we choose to follow the smoke trail of our stirred-up emotions back to their original memory source, we may discover the lie-based belief causing the emotional pain. It is here we can find complete freedom from the emotional pain produced by these lies as we receive truth from the Spirit of Christ."

-Dr. Ed Smith, Healing Life's Hurts

Dear Ricky, yes, there is only one God.

Ricky Gervais is a well-known actor and comedian, and I'm definitely a fan of his. He's also pretty outspoken about his atheism and critique of religion. The thing I find the most interesting about this popular argument against God's existence, is that it is self-defeating. This argument attempts to discredit the truth claims of all religions that believe in a god by saying that it is actually the one that holds the truth. All that this argument does is replace other truth claims with another one, but it tries to make itself look better than all the other options by implying it's not doing the very thing it's doing. You can literally turn this argument against itself and say, "There are all these different religions in the world that believe in God, but here you are saying there isn't one. And you think you're right? Right, I'm sure you are. The truth has FINALLY arrived." There is nothing intellectual about just saying "they're wrong and I'm right," it is a position usually loaded with emotionally based views on the world.

At it's heart, the argument here really comes down to one basic question, is God real or not? Of course it is suggesting that no, he isn't, and even subtly implies that religion is ridiculous. Pointing out that there have been many religions from the beginning of time that believed in God but had a different idea about who he is, does not at all act as evidence that God isn't real based on sheer odds alone. Personally I would actually argue the opposite, that if we look at the fact that so many religions believe in God versus belief systems that don't, perhaps they know something even though they can't all be right at the same time on the details. I like how CS Lewis tackles this topic best in his book Mere Christianity when he says:

“If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake.”

I agree with Lewis on this issue. In fact, the Bible has talked about humanity's desire to create and follow false gods since the beginning of time. It is therefore no surprise to find thousands of different gods within the world, I would say it's to be expected. To answer this argument's claim directly, yes in fact the God of Christianity has always asserted to be the one true God in a world of false gods, that is an accurate statement.

The world clearly has an origin, and there had to be a cause of that origin, but was it random, or caused by a God? In my own words, Christianity basically says that an honest look at the world itself shows it to be so obvious that the world could not have been randomly created, so that the person has no choice but to accept there is a creator: 

 

"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." -‭Romans 1:20 NIV‬

I am by no means minimizing the gravity of a question this significant. The question of whether God is real or not is perhaps the most profound question every human being asks themself at some point in their life. What makes it more complicated for each person is that we tend to base our answer to the question on far more than just what the evidence suggests may be true. We tend to bring all of our personal beliefs about our identity, our emotional baggage, and psychology, into the the decision making process when considering the answer to this question. In order to answer this question, one has to consider many other complex issues, especially evil and suffering in the world, which evokes many strong emotions. We all have a choice to make here though, will we allow the evidence to lead us, or the culture of the time we live in, or our emotions? I wonder if we all have ever fully analyzed what is underneath our beliefs on this issue. If we say we don't believe in God, do we really even know why we assert that claim, underneath all of the surface level reasons we usually default to? If our emotional defenses would have us say there is no God so we can avoid accepting some very hard truths about the world, would we be willing to even accept the possibility that he is real if an honest investigation into the claim would point us to that answer? How much does truth matter to us when it's about the most important question in the world?