“Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun.  And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them!  On the side of their oppressors was power, and there was no one to comfort them.”
Ecclesiastes 4:1

The emergence of the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens over the past few years, and the publicity they have received for their very vocal attacks on religion has led me to do a lot of thinking.  There’s much that could be said about them, and perhaps I will speak more extensively some other time.  But through all their talk about religion being the bane of our existence and the cause of much of our suffering, I keep coming back to one common denominator that these men see very clearly, as do a lot of people in the world: God or not, there is one thing all mankind can attest the existence of, and that is suffering.  Suffering and pain are the great equalizer, something no right-minded person can deny when he or she looks at the world.  Suffering is real, and we must accept that.  Tsunamis ravage huge tracts of land in Asia.  Earthquakes destroy homes and lives.  Countless numbers starve to death.  Many perish for lack of fresh drinking water.  Diseases run rampant.  Children are kidnapped.  Men rape women.  Young girls are sold into prostitution.  These everyday realities beg the great question: Where is God?

Some are so confounded by this question that they conclude that God must not exist.  They look at what they can see, suffering, and establish that as the universal reality that it is.  And when they hold that up to a God they can’t see and who is supposedly loving, the scales undoubtedly fall in favor of suffering, leading them to deny God.  After all, if all the evidence seemed to point in one direction and not in the other, wouldn’t you follow the evidence?  You’d be a fool not to.  For any person to reasonably believe in God while still acknowledging the reality of suffering, he or she must be able to see God and have ample reason for believing that he is good.  But if God is invisible as Christians claim (1 Timothy 1:17), how can we possibly see him?  How can we know that God is there and that he is good?  The Bible answers these two questions with one answer, and the apostle John tells us this in two places in two distinct ways.

In John 1:18, John writes “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”  The “only God” who has made him known refers to Jesus.  John says that in Jesus was “life, and the life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness has not overcome it.”  When Philip asks him to “show us the Father, and it is enough for us”, Jesus responds “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:8-9)  Jesus claimed to be the visible manifestation of God.  John Stott wisely comments on this:

“‘That’s wonderful,’ people say, ‘but it was 2,000 years ago.  Is there no way by which the invisible God makes himself visible today?”

Jesus came to redeem a people for himself who would have life abundantly.  But what good does that do for us now in today’s age?  Seeing God in the midst of a hurting world is the hope of countless multitudes of people, and the lack of such sight is what leads many to reject him.  But if Jesus left, how are we supposed to see God?

The answer is a humbling one.  John, in his first epistle, will once again use the phrase “No one has ever seen God.”  But instead of following that up with “Jesus made him known,” he says “if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” (1 John 4:12)  Again, John Stott states:  “It is precisely the same introductory statement.  But instead of continuing with reference to the Son of God, it continues: ‘If we love one another, God dwells in us.’”  He goes on to remark that God, who had once made himself visible through Jesus Christ, now reveals himself in Christians who truly love one another.  Christ has commissioned his followers to love one another, and in so doing to be the proof of a loving God.  Where Christ was light (John 1:4-5), he places that responsibility on his disciples (Matthew 5:14-16).  In verse 16, Jesus says “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”  In other words, people will give glory to God when they SEE our good works.  In seeing our love, they will see God.  Peter instructs Christians later by saying “Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.” (1 Peter 2:12)  The same principle is in play here.  God calls people to believe based on making himself visible to them, and he makes himself visible to them through his children loving them.

I recently heard Gary Haugen, founder of the International Justice Mission, say that the world is yearning to know the goodness of God.  I believe even Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are yearning to know that goodness, even if they don’t realize it.  Both men see the injustice and suffering in the world and are angry about it.  It is biblical to be angry at suffering, because God hates it.  Over and over in Scripture, God makes known in no uncertain terms that what he requires of us is to love justice.  He doesn’t want our sacrifices if he doesn’t have our hearts.  He cares about the homeless and oppressed, the widow and those who hunger.  And when they are neglected and violated we should join Dawkins and Hitchens in their outrage, but we should be quick to show them that the cause of our outrage is rooted in our belief in God.  If we are to be strictly logical, rational, and reasonable (skeptic buzz words), void of any emotional interest in the matter, if you look at suffering and conclude there is no God, you’re still left with a suffering world, and you’ve effectively removed any rational basis for seeing it as a problem.  It becomes a neutral fact of life.  I believe the New Atheists can be better referred to as Pissed-Off Agnostics.  They see suffering and get adamantly angry about it.  They want it to cease, and so they will try to eliminate whatever they feel is causing it to happen which, in our day, is seen to be religion.  God calls Christians to fight for the exact same goal, but they see the cause as something far deeper than religion.  “But wait,” it might be objected, “Christians of all people have spread suffering and dismay into this world!  They bomb abortion clinics.  They scream that God hates fags.  They preach morality and my pastor growing up was caught sleeping with his secretary.  They’re hypocrites.  They’ve fought in the Crusades.  The burned witches.  How can you possibly say that they are the proof of God’s reality and love?”  Because I don’t believe they were/are Christians.  The Bible itself is extremely severe against people who claim to love God but don’t live it out.  Jesus explicitly said that not all those who call on him as “Lord” will enter the kingdom of God.  They are hypocrites and they will receive their just reward.  Jesus said that the world will know his disciples by their love (John 13:35).  This love is the visible manifestation of God’s existence and his goodness.

Here’s what this looks like: remember a couple years back when that major tsunami hit South Asia and devastated it?  Skeptics look at that and ask where God is.  You know where he was in that situation?  He was in the massive relief effort that was sent to the region.  We reveal our own presuppositions when we assume that what goes bad is God’s fault and that whatever good comes out of it is our own doing.  The relief effort was not man cleaning up God’s mess.  It was God responding to the brokenness of this world which is due to man’s sinfulness by graciously sending help to that region.  Thousands of young girls in Asia are captured and sold into brothels to entertain older men.  This is an outrage!  So WHERE IS GOD?  He’s in Gary Haugen, a Christian who started the Christian-based International Justice Mission which goes into these countries and liberates these young women from bondage.  Is God in the storms of life?  Or is he in the body of people who go in and rescue others from them?  I can ask the question conversely: Is the problem in poverty and world hunger?  Or is the problem in the people who do nothing?  Before we renounce God because there’s so much suffering in the world, we must honestly look deep within ourselves and ask whether or not we have the right to complain.  What is tellingly common about the vast majority of people in the world who deny God because of suffering is where they live: the West.  Peter Kreeft says:

“We live in a relative bubble of comfort, and we look at pain as an observer, as a philosophical puzzle or theological problem.  That’s the wrong way to look at pain.  The thing to do with pain is to enter it, be one with [the one suffering], and then you learn something from it.  In fact, it’s significant that most objections to the existence of God from the problem of suffering come from outside observers who are quite comfortable, whereas those who actually suffer are, as often as not, made into stronger believers by their suffering.”

God is made known when his children love, when they share the burden of those who are suffering.  God makes himself known in this way.  Paul tells believers that “God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.” (1 Corinthians 3:17)  So where is God?  Christian, where are YOU?

I saw a really simple and concise summation of all of this while flipping through a magazine a few months ago.  I came across a one-page ad for the Salvation Army in which a person was walking down a road flanked on both sides by homes left desolate by a storm.  The caption read: “We combat natural disasters with acts of God.”  I absolutely loved it.  God is not in the storm.  He is in the relief.  That is the problem of good.  How can an evil or non-existent God possibly allow so much good?

Of course all this still leaves us with one fact that I haven’t even attempted to refute: suffering exists and abounds.  That’s a reality.  That’s the one thing all of us will agree on even if our life has been relatively easy.  We all experience the brokeness of this world.  And as a Christian, I can’t fully explain why suffering even exists in the first place.  We’re not told.  But we are told that God is on a mission to eradicate it, and that one day it will finally be over.  He came to demonstrate this through his Son Jesus Christ, so that whoever would follow him would dwell with him when God creates a new earth that is free of death and full of life, where there will be no pain or injustice.

Christian, you are the proof of God’s existence and love.  How are you doing with that with that responsibility?  Is your life a checkmate against the claims of those who believe that belief in God is what is wrong with this world?  People will become skeptical, angry, and cold toward things that burn them.  A woman who has continually had her heart broken by men is going to be extremely skeptical and weary of giving another man her heart, if she ever does.  Similarly, so many people who don’t believe in God are skeptical of him not because they don’t want to believe, but because they have been burned so often by those who claim to follow him.  Prove the New Atheists wrong by the way you live.  Shine Jesus, the light of men, in this broken and dark world.  Always remember: there is no God to be seen for those who are not loved by his people.

“The world cannot argue with a Church that lives in the pain of society’s poor.  The integrity of this form of Christianity silences the harshest of critics, because they know genuine love and compassion when they see it.  And the truth is, they want it.”
Tony Campolo and Gordon Aeschliman

“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
Revelation 21:4