Keeping His own Rules (How Does faith Help?)

pp 228-237 excerpted from "Where Is God When It hurts?" by Philip Yancey





Old Testament characters like Job and Jeremiah sometimes wondered aloud if God had "plugged his ears" to their cries of pain. Jesus put an abrupt and decisive end to such speculation. Not only had God not plugged his ears, he suddenly took on ears....literal eardrum--ossicle--cochlea human ears. On the cracked and dusty plains of Palestine, God's Son heard firsthand the molecular vibrations of human groans; from the sick and needy, and from others who groaned more from guilt than from pain.



Clear your mind and reflect for a moment on Jesus life. He was the only person in history able to plan his own birth. Yet he humbled himself, trading in a perfect heavenly body for a frail body of blod and sinew and cartilege and nerve cells. The Bible says that there is no temptation known to man that Jesus did not experience. He was lonley, tired, hungry, personally assaulted by Satan, beseiged by leeching admirers, persecuted by powerful enemies.



As for physical appearance, there's only one description of Jesus in the Bible...."He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering" (Isaiah 53:2-3)



When Jesus first began his ministry the people hooted "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" An ancient ethnic joke; Jesus, the hick, the the country bumpkin from Nazareth. In keeping with that reputation, he seemed to gravitate toward other rejects; lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors, paralytics, notorious sinners.



Jesus neighbors once ran him out of town and tried to kill him His own family questioned his sanity. The leaders of the day proudly reported that not one authority or religious leader believed in him. His countrymen traded his life for that of a terrorist.

No other religion,.... not Judaism, not Hinduism, not Buddhism or Islam..... offers this unique contribution of an all-powerful God who willingly takes on the limitations and suffering of his creation. As Dorothy Sayers wrote,

"For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is-----limited and suffering and subject to sorrow and death----He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with His creation, he has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not already exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money, to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile"

The fact that Jesus came to earth where he suffered and died does not remove pain from our lives. But it does show that God does not sit idly by and watch us suffer in isolation. He became one of us. Thus, in Jesus God gives us an up-close and personal look at His response to human suffering. All our questions about God and suffering should be filtered through what we know about Jesus.

And when Jesus himself faced suffering, he reacted much like any of us would. He recoiled from it, asking three times if there was any other way.There was no other way, and then Jusus experienced, perhaps for the first time, that most human sense of abandonment. "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" In the gospel accounts of Jesus last night on earth I detect a fierce struggle with fear, helplessness, and hope-----the same frontiers all of us confront in our suffering.

The record of Jesus life on earth should forever answer the question, How does God feel about our pain? In reply God did not give us words or theories on the problem of pain. He gave us Hiself. A philosophy may explain difficult things, but it has no power to change them. The Gospel, the story of Jesus life, promises change.