God and Suffering

A Christian understanding of God’s relationship to suffering is not that God is simply a compassionate spectator looking down on the strange and bitter world that God holds in being. As a Christian, I believe that God is participating in the suffering of the world, that God is truly a fellow sufferer. The Christian God is the crucified God. 
--Sir John Polkinghorne, quoted in Socrates in the City: Conversations on "Life, God and Other Small Topics." Edited by Eric Metaxas.

On suffering

There is nothing more important for a person to learn—and no lesson suffering is more suited to teach him—than his own nothingness. Suffering does not make us stronger, but neither does it sap our strength until we are ready to find convenient consolation in God. Rather, suffering reveals that we have been weak all along, that our strength is an illusion and our sense of permanence and invulnerability has always been a façade. Suffering shows us that we are powerless to secure what we are most eager to possess, that everything the world has given can be swept away in the blink of an eye.

—Timothy Dalrymple, in Hope for Hitchens?: Finding the Way in the Land of Malady at Patheos.

For you

   Dear friends, let us look into the ocean through which Christ waded for us. He was without any comforts of God on the cross. No feeling that God loved him, no feeling that God pitied him, no feeling that God supported him. 

    God was his sun before, now that sun had become all darkness. Not a smile from His Father, not a kind look, not a kind word. 

   Nobody ever loved God and got this from God and yet loved anyway. Nobody ever loved people and got this from people and yet followed through. He went to hell for people. He was without a God as if he had no God. All that God had been to him was taken from him now. He had the feeling on the cross of being condemned. 

   He must have heard the judge say, ‘Depart from me, Ye cursed. You who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.’ That’s what he heard. 

   He felt that God said the same to him. Ahh, this is the hell which Christ suffered. Dear friends, I feel like a little child, casting a stone into some deep ravine in the mountainside, listening to hear it fall but listening in vain. It’s too deep. The longest line cannot fathom it. The ocean of Christ’s sufferings is unfathomable. He was forsaken and in the place of sinners. 

   If you grasp Christ as your surety and mediator, you will never be forsaken. From the broken bread and the poured out wine, do you not hear the cry arise, ‘My God, my God why hast Thou forsaken me!’ 

   And do you not hear the answer, ‘For you!’ For you.

—Robert Murray M'Cheyne, Scottish Presbyterian minister (1813-1843)

What is the purpose of this misery?

"What is the meaning of it, Watson?" says Holmes solemnly. "What is the object of this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what purpose? That is humanity's great problem to which reason so far has no answer." Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box.

What refuge then when a man feels himself powerless in the grip of some unseen and inevitable power, and knows not whether it be chance, or necessity, or a devouring fiend?  There is but one escape, one chink  through which we may see light, one rock on which our feet may find standing-place, even in the abyss.  And that is the belief, intuitive, inspired, due neither to reasoning nor to study, that God is there also; the belief that these seemingly fantastic and incoherent miseries have in His mind a spiritual coherence and purpose, though we see it not.

—Charles Kingsley, in Two Years Ago Volume I