The Problem of Pain

Every one of us is familiar with pain in this life. There is not one who is not affected by its toxic tentacles. The basic question in problem of pain is, why does a good and benevolent God allow pain in this world? Is it because He is good but powerless against evil? Or is it that He is not good but evil? Or is it that He does not care? If God is not omnipotent or not good, then He is not worthy of worship. This in nut shell is the problem of pain.

This question of pain and suffering in the world moved Gautama Buddha to renounce his life as a prince and go in search of an answer to this problem. What he found led to Buddhism, its basic tenet being, desire is the root cause of pain in the world and that in removing this desire one gets liberation. The kshatrya princes of yester years in India meditated on this problem and came up with the principles enunciated in Upanishads, that a good man suffers in this life because of the accumulated sins he had committed in the previous lives; it is basically the bad karma from his previous births that have come to haunt him in this life, an understanding that gave rise to Karma theory and reincarnation or repeated cycle of births and deaths. These are not satisfactory explanations and there is no evidence to show that killing desires or suppressing them will liberate a person from pain or that a cycle of previous lives exist.

How does the Bible, the Scriptures of Christians, deal with this question of pain? What is the explanation provided there? The very first chapter of Genesis, the first book in the Bible deals with the creation of this world and all that is in it, including man. It shows God as all powerful, pure and good, who after each creation affirmed what he created, was good. He made man and woman in His own image, in the image of God – with all His attributes and powers and eternal life. “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.”[1] So how did evil enter in this beautiful world of God?

The serpent, a cunning personification of Satan, Evil, tempted the woman by offering an incentive to disobey God’s one commandment to the ancient pair, not to eat the fruit of the Tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. The incentive was they will be like gods if they ate the fruit. Eve ruminates the thought in her mind, evaluating the proposition, and adduces reasons why she and her husband could eat that forbidden fruit. The tree was good for food, it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree desirable to make one wise. After reasoning thus, weighing the pros and cons she eats the fruit and gave it to her husband. who was there by her side and he also ate it. It was a willful disobedience. Then their eyes were opened and they could know good and the evil. A couple who knew only good and nothing about evil, now knew about evil and thus evil entered the world, pain, suffering and eventually death entered in its wake.

Now, for some of the questions, asked by the skeptics. They ask, it was after all an apple that she ate; was it such a big crime that God should punish the whole human race to suffering and death? It was not just an apple that she ate that caused all these. She and her husband chose to defy God, and His commandment, due to the desire to be like God. That was a red alert and a banner of revolt. They did not want to be under the control of God, but be independent and masters of their own fate. It is very like the rebellion of a teenager, who defies his parents saying, “This is my life; I will do whatever I want with it.” That is a serious threat to parental authority; so also here. God had to deal with it severely, lest it goes out of hand.

Then they ask, for one person’s mistake or sin, why the whole human race should be punished? Well, in modern days everyone is familiar with DNA and how genes pass on the parental characters to their offspring and so on down to the generations. We also know about mutations that occur, which being in changes in the DNA, which are then passed on to their generations. Is it very difficult to imagine that when Adam and Eve chose to disobey God, a mutation or change in their genetic make-up occurred and this got passed on to all human beings, who arose from this first pair? I think that is what must really have happened.

The most interesting question is, God being omniscient, knew full well that the human pair will disobey him and eat the forbidden fruit, then why did He place such a tree in the Garden at all? Well, God did not create us to be robots, but human beings with reasoning capacity and a free will. In so creating the human beings, He ran the risk of them choosing bad over good and wrong over right. It was a risk that He had to take; it was the price He had to pay for creating human beings in His image. Even before laying the foundations of this world He knew this is going to happen and had already made His plans to retrieve human beings from such an evil-ridden world.

Some would like to defend the female of the species by saying, poor Eve was alone when the serpent seduced her. This is not true according to the biblical account. Adam was very much with her. She took the initiative, reasoned out and decided to eat the fruit and gave it to her husband, who also ate it. She was neither vulnerable nor poor nor alone. She was a strong woman, who took a reasoned out decision; unfortunately the decision was a bad decision and back fired on the entire human race.

In this sin-ridden world, good people also suffer because the entire values system in the world has been marred or polluted because of evil and sin. Good or bad, every one born as human being suffer this misfortune.

But God has not left the beautiful and a world full of goodness He created to suffer and perish in evil. He had devised a plan, a plan that started at the very moment when Eve plucked the fruit to eat. He told the woman that her ‘Seed’ will bruise the head of the serpent, the Devil.[2] Paul clarifies that this ‘Seed’ is Christ. God’s plan was that Jesus be born as a human being, but without sin, and be crucified by the evil forces, die and be buried, but rise again on the third day having won a victory over evil. Because of this, he received the power to forgive the sins of human beings, if they ask in sincere repentance, so that they could be reconciled with God.

Many non-believers raise the question is it necessary for God to let His Son Jesus Christ die such a gruesome death on the cross? Was there no other better way of redeeming the people from sin and suffering? Well, evil can be overcome only by goodness. That is the law of the universe created by God. Paul urges the Christians in Rome, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”[3] That is what Jesus did. He overcame the world, not by paying evil for evil, but by paying evil with goodness. His death and apparent defeat to the evil forces on the cross, turned out to be a victory over the evil forces, for God raise him alive from death and he became the Savior to all those who would put their trust in him.

Now that we have seen how the real Fall happened and how this Original Sin is the reason for evil to enter the world and overpower mankind, let’s see how God uses these sufferings to our advantage. When sufferings strike us, we start searching for God. When we are happy and everything is going on well, hardly we even remember God. But in trials and tribulations we get close to God and seek His help to get us out of trouble. Intense pain and suffering pushes us to seek God. C.S. Lewis writes, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain; it is His megaphone to rouse the deaf world.”[4]

Thus the Bible teaches us that God is good and the counterpart of goodness is evil; God has the wisdom to separate good from the evil, and do only good; man lacks that wisdom. God is omnipotent, all powerful, still because He has given man a free will, He has to allow him to commit mistakes and learn. But He provided an antidote to evil in His Son, Jesus Christ, who died for us, submitting to the powers of evil, but overcame them by his goodness and death as a sacrifice to free us from the iron-grip of sin and evil. God is not indifferent; He deeply cares for us, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”[5]

I hope you got a good picture of the truth, truth about sin and suffering, why God allows it, human beings’ role in it, and God’s remedial measure to counter the evil in this world.

God bless you and keep you.

---

[1] Genesis 1:31

[2] Genesis 3:15

[3] Romans 12:21

[4] Lewis, C.S., The Problem of Pain, HarperSan Francisco, 1940, copy 1996, p.91

[5] John 3:16