The universal equalizer of all humans is suffering. Regardless of pay, ubiquity, or status, each individual in each culture will encounter agony and misfortune. What’s the point of suffering?
Our souls ponder: Does suffering occur because God cannot prevent it? He will not prevent it? Doesn’t He need to stop it? Does our bad behavior cause suffering? Is it inevitable to suffer? What does God believe that I should do while I’m languishing?
A few common misbeliefs are that God is either feeble or underhanded, lacking resources to stop our pain. According to some religions, we experience suffering because we receive what we deserve, either in this life or the past. Some believe that God is either punishing us or allowing us to receive what we expect. Legalistic Christians will generally say that enduring happens in light of the fact that we sin; on the off chance that we acted better, we would experience less.
The Gospel’s Answer for Anguish
While it very well may be hard to understand how a decent, loving, all-powerful God could permit insidious suffering, the Cross of Jesus Christ is a definitive response to the world’s sufffering.
In two ways, the Cross of Christ gives us a New Perspective on suffering:
First, we learn from Jesus Christ’s Cross that sin brought our suffering. Christ could never have expected to come to Earth if God’s unique design for purity, holiness, and obedience had stayed the course. At the dawn of mankind, God made a spot called “Eden”— a paradise with unhindered access to God. The world was free of suffering and pain.
However, when the first humans sinned against God, they were driven out of this paradise and removed from God. From then on, sin became ingrained in man’s nature and the world. We wouldn’t have needed Jesus if this hadn’t happened. The very reality that He came confirms that God considered our transgression to merit worldly and everlasting misery. The only way out of this hopeless situation was for God Himself to step in and give His Son on our behalf.
Second, the Cross of Jesus Christ demonstrates to us that God has a plan for relieving our pain. Through Jesus’ death on the cross and subsequent resurrection from the dead, God overcame evil and prevented eternal separation from Him. God realized we would suffer, and He cherished us enough to set up an answer to our problem of sin and pain by providing Christ.
