Haunting questions

Death and disease are merely sad terms until they come to your home and knock on your door. They then can become heart-breaking tragedies which give rise to deep questions regarding the human experience: Questions like why God allows disability, disease and death to bring such havoc. Or the age-old quandary of whether God is all-loving but not powerful enough to stop such tragedy. Or could it be that He is all-powerful but perhaps not as good and loving as we have believed Him to be?

Then there is the problem of the seeming silence of God in the face of human suffering. Does He really care? Why does He not speak?

The silence of God haunts us, yes, even angers us. Like Job, we must know why the suffering, why the tragedy.

In the account of Lazarus's death and Jesus' bringing him back to life, there are some provocative insights into the attitude of our Lord regarding disease and death. The story is not only about the grief of Jesus, but also about His anger. Our Lord wept along with those who wept at the tomb of Lazarus. The record says that He was "greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. . . . Jesus began to weep" (John 11:33,35, NRSV). The words "deeply moved" in Greek mean literally "to snort like a horse" and connote that there was indignation and anger in His sorrow.

Why was Jesus angry? He was angry at the abnormality of death, angry at the horrendous consequences of the Fall and angry at the devil. B.B. Warfield comments: "It is death that is the object of His wrath, and behind death him who has the power of death, and whom He has come into the world to destroy. Tears of sympathy may fill His eyes, but . . . His soul is held by rage."

Jesus took decisive action and raised Lazarus from the dead. This act became a portent and symbol of Jesus' ultimate conquest of disease and death. Through His own death and resurrection, our Lord would "destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death" (Hebrews 2:14-15).

Our experience of full and completed redemption, however, lies in the future. All creation groans awaiting that day (Romans 8:22). "The last enemy to be destroyed is death" writes Paul in I Corinthians 15:26. We are living between the time of the inauguration of God's kingdom power and the consummation and full victory of that power in the Second Advent. Then death will be swallowed up in victory (I Corinthians 15:54), but until then we must live in a fallen world in which no one is granted immunity from sickness, disease and death.

Yes, God is all-powerful and He is all-loving. But He is also all-wise, and in His infinite wisdom He uses suffering as the means of sanctifying those He loves (Romans 8:28-29). He uses disability, disease and death to remind us that eternity is our true habitat. We are like deep sea divers, submerged in a world that has been ravaged by evil and rendered unfit by the Fall, a world that is really foreign to the believer. We move about clumsily down here as we go about our daily tasks, all the while relying on the fresh air of the eternal world for survival. We look forward to release from the confinement of our earthly existence, knowing that "the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us" (Romans 8:18).

The questions never end when we ask why. Hope lies in the direction of asking what. What does God hold out to us as consolation and promise? What response will best honour Him?

Then we must practise submission, yieldedness, "Gelassenheit" as the early Anabaptists called it. We cannot make our wishes control what happens to us and to those around us. So we wait in hope, and trust the promise that "this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (II Corinthians 4:17). This promise must become the frame of reference in which we view all our unanswered and haunting questions, our helplessness, our suffering, yes, our impending death.

We can trust the One who knows why. This is enough.

Walter Unger is President of Columbia Bible College, Clearbrook, B.C. and a member of Bakerview MB Church

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