Observing the chaotic state of the world today might lead one to conclude that something must have gone wrong with God’s plan for restoration. If the return of the Spirit is supposed to patch things up between God and man and restore the conditions that existed before the Fall, God had better take the plan back to the drawing board; it’s not working. This world we’re living in is hardly the Garden of Eden. The pages of your morning newspaper are crowded with reports of thievery, murder, sickness, hate, greed, cruelty, hunger, death, and other horrors that befell unfortunate victims within the past twenty-four hours. “Convenience store robberies rise 50%;” “Man found slain beside highway;” “Food airlift too little, too late for thousands in Africa;” “Apparent murder suicide leaves family of four dead;” “Freeway accident leaves pedestrian paralyzed;” “Woman assaulted, tortured in apartment;” “Civic leader succumbs to long illness;” “Nine-year-old girl found slain in vacant lot.” All around us the world groans with tragedy and pain.
These grim headlines might seem more understandable to Christians if the tragedies they reported happened only to non-believers. But that is not the case. Sincere Christians trying their best to live under the Spirit’s control suffer the same kinds of debilitating blows as their unchurched neighbors. And even the most dedicated Christians still have sin wreaking havoc in their own lives. In spite of their resolve, they find themselves committing the very sins they try hardest to avoid.
No doubt you have felt the bruising punches of pain and tragedy yourself—perhaps enough to wonder whether you will ever recover. And whether or not you are a Christian, you know that death is lurking in the shadows of the future like a thug in a dark alley, waiting to keep a certain rendezvous that only it knows. Even with the Spirit of God in your life, you do not suddenly find yourself in control of your mind or body. The same old temptations still tug at your senses and the same old weaknesses still sap your resolve. Being a Christian doesn’t seem to make the road any smoother or the grass any greener, and you wonder, “Why not? If God in Adam made him perfect, why doesn’t God in me make me perfect?” Christians must understand the answer to this question, because the very existence of pain and suffering is a hurdle that trips up too many potential believers. And the continued experience of pain in the lives of believers causes many to have second thoughts. Sooner or later, almost everyone asks, “How can a good God allow so much pain and tragedy to run rampant in his world?” Many reason that either he is not good and will not eradicate pain, or he is not all-powerful and cannot eradicate it. Either way they have a god who is not worth believing in, so they turn away and step off the cliff into atheism.
Why Things Are Not Right
The choice between a weak god and a cruel or indifferent god
is not the only alternative available. There are rational explanations for pain
that vindicate both the goodness and the omnipotence of God. The first of these
is that God is still honoring the choice Adam made in
If God had stepped in and taken away the evil results of Adam’s sin, he would have invalidated Adam’s freedom to choose. If having a free choice means anything at all, it must mean the bad can be chosen as well as the good. Had God hovered over Adam with a magic wand poised to correct Adam’s errors every time he made bad choices, Adam’s freedom would have been a sham. He would not have been a true human at all, but a slave to God’s will—a puppet or a robot. Suffering and death are with us because Adam was not a robot; he was free to choose, and he made the wrong choice.
Jesus died, not to undo what Adam freely chose, but to give us a way to remove ourselves from the doom of Adam’s choice. Now we can make the choice to get God’s Spirit back into our lives, thus restoring our relationship to him; but he can’t give us a choice that runs counter to the one Adam already made for the race as a whole. Adam’s pivotal position as progenitor of the human race gave him the power to determine the nature of the world and mankind from his time forward; therefore, his choice stands. The world is infested with evil, and we must live with sin-damaged natures.
As you can see, God faced what seems at first a virtually impossible dilemma. On the one hand, he had to honor the choice of Adam by leaving the results of it lying as they fell. On the other hand, he had to give Adam’s descendants their own freedom of choice in order to validate their humanity. He could not change humanity’s fallen condition without denying Adam’s freedom, but he could not leave us unalterably locked into that fallen condition without denying our freedom.
God’s solution to the dilemma was to offer man a new unfallen nature in addition to the existing fallen nature that man already had. This would not break any rules or go back on any promises because the fallen nature we inherited from Adam would still be intact; Adam’s choice would stand. But by making his Holy Spirit available to live in man, man could choose to have a pre-Fall nature as well. We can choose to have a Spirit-controlled nature as our own just like Adam and Eve before the Fall, but unlike them, we have it in addition to, not instead of our inherited fallen sin natures.
Even though as Christians we have chosen to live under the control of the Spirit, we are stuck with that rebellious fallen nature we inherited from Adam, and that nature is our major source of grief and misery. Like a cornered animal, it fights our efforts to live and act according to the new nature we have chosen. It kicks and screams and begs and pleads. It enlists the unfair support of our desires and senses and pride. With noble effort and sincere conviction, we may decide once and for all to sweep out the sinful impulses, evil intentions, selfish attitudes, and illicit desires that have nested in our minds so God’s Spirit can come in and take over completely. But the old nature won’t let it happen. A fallen race such as ours is too weakened by sin and too much under its influence to choose to live under the new nature with decisive finality. As we find when we make new year’s resolutions or determine to diet or quit smoking, our well-meaning resolve evaporates all too quickly even without the pressure of exceptional temptation. Our wills are simply too feeble and our minds too dulled even to make the decision that would strengthen our weak wills and clear our dull minds. We have found the well that will quench our thirst, but our buckets are too leaky to draw the water. The rope that will lift us from the pit is easily within our reach, but we haven’t the grip to hold on to it. We have in hand a coupon for free eyeglasses that would cure our nearsightedness, but we can’t see clearly enough to find the optometrist’s office. The remedy for our fallen condition is available, but our fallen condition leaves us too weak to take advantage of it. In spite of our best efforts to tame our wills to ignore the tug of temptation and live totally under the Spirit’s control, our senses rebel and go on grabbing for the gusto.
One Christian, describing the internal battle between the Holy Spirit and his own fallen nature said, “It seems like I have these two dogs fighting continually inside my mind.” When asked which of these dogs generally won the fight, he answered, “Whichever I feed the most.” And so it is. Eventually one dog will grow dominant over the other and control the Christian’s life. The dominant nature will be the one he pets, encourages, feeds, and gives the most attention.
Walking Battlefields
Many new Christians come to Christ without understanding that they are about to become walking battlefields. They are shocked and dismayed at the unexpected resistance to their sincere efforts to follow Jesus—from both without and within themselves. They come to him expecting a functional perfection to descend on them much as the dove descended on Jesus at his baptism. They expect somehow to be lifted out of the morass that entraps fallen humanity into a life of perpetually inflated tires and endless green lights.
Many popular evangelists win their great followings by playing on such expectations. They tell their audiences that the Christian life is one of abundant possessions, abundant money, and abundant good times. But the Bible plainly tells us that the opposite is true: the authentic Christian life is often one of difficulty and persecution. Why? Because Satan is still the lord of the earth, which is another result of Adam’s choice that cannot be changed until the end. Satan’s philosophy dominates the thinking of the majority. As in the beginning when he tempted Eve, he still urges us to elevate our individual selves as supreme and rebel against authority. We hear it all around us: “I gotta be me;” “Everyone must decide what is right for himself;” “Nobody’s gonna tell me what to do!”
Resistance to this programmed mindset of the herd will always mean isolation and hostility. People who advocate freedom to do one’s own thing do not tend to include the freedom to assert that certain things are right and others wrong. Just as eyes accustomed to darkness cannot tolerate light, a world following the lies of Satan cannot tolerate one who holds to absolute truth. The hostility of unbelievers stems from their innate but stifled sense that the Christian’s way is right. They attack Christianity because it judges their behavior and makes them feel guilty. They do what muddy little boys do when a girl in a clean white dress walks by.
Christians often encounter more obstacles than unbelievers because Satan steps up the attack when one commits to Christ. He hammers and shakes and prods new believers in an all-out effort to derail them before they get on track.
Christians need to understand that living with an inherited fallen nature in a fallen world, they cannot expect to live perfect lives. But they can learn to live better lives, step by step, until the new Christ nature comes to be their controlling influence. When we become Christians and invite the Spirit back into our lives, he begins to help us (as much as we let him) make gradually better choices and take continually better steps that lead us toward the perfection Adam and Eve enjoyed before the Fall. The Spirit leads us toward perfection, but in this life we never reach it. That Adamic sin nature holds us back. A few people seem to become very good as they learn to follow the Spirit’s leading, but no fallen human ever reaches the point where he can live a perfect life in this fallen world.
How To Become Perfect
So what is the point of having the Holy Spirit in our lives at all if his presence does not keep us from sinning? It is sin that separates man from God to begin with, so if his return does not put the brakes on sin, how are things improved? To take the question a step deeper, how can the Holy Spirit even stay in a life that continues to sin? As we showed in chapter five, God does not tolerate sin because sin is incompatible with his nature. He got out of Adam and Eve because they sinned, but now he offers to come back into the lives of Christians even though they have this sin nature that keeps them belching out sin like the exhaust pipe of an oil-burning clunker. Why? Has God given up on the ideal of a perfect universe? Has he decided that absolute goodness is too rigid an ideal, that he needs to back off a bit and be a little more flexible and tolerant? Has he decided that a few minor sins here and there are really not all that serious, and will really not hurt anything? Certainly not! We must stand sinless in his eyes before he can offer us his Holy Spirit. And this brings us back to the center of the dilemma; we are not sinless. We cannot behave perfectly because of our old, inherited sin nature.
The answer to the dilemma is in the fact that Jesus traded places with us when he went to the cross. He took our sins and carried them to the cross to make us sinless, and in return gave us his perfection to claim as our own. God honors this trade. When he looks at a Christian, he sees only the sinless nature which Christ gives him and accepts the sinner as if he were perfect. And on the basis of that trade, the Christian is perfect; he is legally but not functionally perfect. He has the perfection of Christ to hold before the judge even though the old sin nature is snorting and burrowing beneath the surface. God can recognize Christians as perfect because the trade gives them an automatic purifying system that non-Christians don’t have. It is as if Jesus, after his death, laid a sewer line from earth to hell. When a Christian momentarily fails to follow the Spirit and commits a sin, Jesus siphons it off and dumps it through this pipeline into hell, the garbage heap outside the universe. At the same time, he pumps his own perfect nature into the Christian’s life. This continual draining of sin and influx of perfection keeps the Christian perfect in the eyes of God. This undeserved recognition of the Christian as perfect is what the Bible calls grace.
Is God Being Fair with Us?
The idea may enter your head that God is not being altogether fair with us. We are saddled with the results of Adam’s folly through no fault of our own. Adam committed the sin but we must suffer the consequences. His mistake made us what we are—ruined us as perfect, Godlike creatures—and we had no say in the matter. Is that fair? We really have no right to ask the question because this is not our universe; it is God’s. It’s his game, his field, and his ball; we are just the players. He doesn’t owe us a seat on the rules committee. He doesn’t have to listen to our opinions on fairness as if we had a right to equal input on how his universe should be run. He could have discarded us like an artist throwing out a damaged painting, and started over with a blank canvas. Since he has chosen to let us live sin-diminished lives in a world of pain and tragedy, we have no cause for complaint. He made us, and we are his to do with as he will.
However, God is not indifferent to our plight. He is fully aware that we are helpless victims of forces beyond our control—that the decisions of others have given us a fallen nature we did not personally choose. But we must remember that he did give us a solution. He did not just walk away from us like a child from a broken toy and leave us the crippled victims of fate. Instead, he gave us a way to make a choice that is the antidote to Adam’s choice. Adam chose to follow Satan and brought evil into a world of good. Now we can choose to follow Christ and bring good into a world of evil. Choosing Christ does not exempt us from living with the evil we inherited from Adam, but it allows God to recognize us as innocent in spite of it.
Although the world groans with pain and tragedy, God keeps it turning and allows the population to increase because he knows the end is worth the agony. Our few years in the arena with our adversary may leave us broken and scarred, but our very worst pains will be swallowed completely by the eternity of bliss that awaits the Christian.
Reject these answers to the existence of pain, and pain may deflect you into atheism. But you will find no answers for it there. Instead, you will find that pain hurts even worse without God. Christians feel the full impact of pain just as unbelievers do, but it does not permanently devastate them because they can look beyond it and trust God’s promise to bring things right in the end.
The unbeliever does not have this comfort. To him pain is nothing less than tragic because it is an unavoidable blight on the only life he has. It’s a cloud in his sky that threatens to rain out his game. Since he denies that there is life after death, he must try to build his heaven here and now. He devotes his few years to the piling up of all the pleasures and comforts he can afford. But it doesn’t work, because he can’t shut out the threat of disaster. The shadow of some pain either present or pending dulls the glow of every pleasure. Some wave of misfortune is sure to wash away his sand castle. The good times may come, but he knows they can’t last. Sooner or later they will be ended by a doctor’s diagnosis, an ambulance, a termination notice, a car crash, a tax collector, or a mortician. Like a butterfly dodging hailstones, he may think himself safe for the moment, but as he escapes one gotcha he moves into the path of another. The unbeliever travels a bumpy road with broken guard rails and washed out bridges.
And it leads him to a dead end.
Turning Pain Against Its Source
Many believers think that at least some of their pain and tragedy is inflicted by God. We hear them say things like, “God took our little child from us,” either angrily blaming him for the loss or passively accepting it as his will for them. But God is never the source of pain or trouble. Death is never his will. Death and pain are blights on God’s universe, and he detests them as such. He created the world trouble free and intended it to remain that way. Man invited pain into the world when he sinned. However, since pain is now with us, God has found ways to use it to achieve his purposes.
God often uses pain to drive us toward him. When things are going well we tend to settle into a self-satisfied state and ignore our need for God. Like a driver on a smooth, straight road, we tend to fall asleep at the wheel, which is often fatal. Our diligence to duty gets sluggish and our sensitivity to God’s will gets dulled without obstacles on which to exercise them. In his book The Horse and His Boy, C. S. Lewis tells the story of a youth named Shasta and his friend Aravis. These two young people were on their horses, riding hard to warn the king of an invading army. They thought they were riding as fast as they could, but their present pace would not get them to the king in time. So the great lion Aslan (who is the Christ figure in these stories) suddenly appeared to them as a threatening wild beast. He frightened the horses and raked his claws across the back of Aravis to get them moving faster. It worked. The fright spurred them into a burst of speed that made the difference. Fear and pain accomplished what duty could not.
God also uses pain as metal workers use fire on ore. It burns out all that is worthless and melts down what is pure to be shaped into something beautiful. God allows us to endure pain because he loves us too much to tolerate anything in our lives that is not good and eternal.
God is not the author of pain; it is with us solely because of the activity of Satan. A swarm of Satan’s invisible angels works at us all the time, luring us to follow our own desires into traps of trouble and calamity. When we break away and chase after this bait, God may withdraw some of the angelic secret service protection assigned to guard Christians They stand back and let in just enough of Satan’s forces to inflict the necessary dosage of pain to wake us up and get our eyes back on the road.
When the Christian understands the source and purposes of pain, it loses much of its punch. It ceases to be a blight that ruins his life or destroys his happiness. The darkness doesn’t bother him so much because he knows the sun is just over the horizon and about to rise.
In a sense, the Christian lives in paradise in spite of the bruising blows of adversity. When he becomes a believer, the borders of heaven expand to include him. He is annexed.
Christians on earth form a colony of heaven and have all the rights of citizenship. They are subject to God’s laws and live under his protection; they just don’t yet live on the mainland.
The Bible explains this foretaste of heaven by telling us that the Holy Spirit is an earnest—a sort of down payment or deposit with the promise that the full sum will be paid when the Christian leaves the colony and comes to live on the mainland. We cannot experience the full impact of the Holy Spirit in our lives because of our sin-dulled minds and fallen natures. But the dim perception of his presence and the joy that comes from what control we allow him gives us a sample of the shipment before the full delivery.
Our bodies may wear down from the incessant pounding of the earth’s evil, but our spirits, united with God’s, live above it all in the exhilarating atmosphere of heaven. Life on earth is the foreword; at death the first chapter begins. Life is “on your mark, get set.” At death the starting gun sounds and we go for the gold.
Are the lives of Christians more pain-free than those of non-believers?
If God is good and all-powerful, why doesn’t he eradicate pain?
If God took all pain from the world, what would that mean in terms of man’s freedom?
Does the Holy Spirit in the lives of Christians make them perfect?
Does God see Christians as perfect? Why?
When a Christian sins, does that destroy his or her relationship with God?
Does God cause pain? How does he use pain?