INTRO: I want to speak to us this morning on the enigma of suffering. To man, suffering is an enigma. It is a puzzle. To many, the question as to why people have to suffer is totally unanswerable. Many ask, if there is a God, or if God is good, why is life filled with trouble? Why is there suffering? Why are there so many problems in life? Why are there catastrophes? How can a good God allow such things as tsunamis or earth quakes, or droughts, or flooding? And if we don't have tsunamis or earthquakes, still we all experience adversity. Our suffering may be mental, as in depression; or it may be physical, still it is suffering. Why suffering? Maybe we ask such questions as why did my baby die? Why was my husband killed in that accident? Why, why, why? Is there an answer to such questions? Or does heaven have an answer?
Here a while ago, and I am no stranger to this, but I fell into a time when it seemed the sun would never shine again. I was so down. I felt like I had pain. I didn’t want to go to work. I didn’t even want to get out of bed. It seemed I just had to drag myself through life. In such times it seems you do well if you just hang on. You just hope you can go to sleep at night and be without that pain for a while, and maybe wake up in the morning and things will somehow have changed. May I ask you, do any of you ever feel like that? But that is yet only a very small difficulty. We may experience the death of a loved one, or some tragedy or other such things, and then comes a dark moment in our lives and we say, "Why Lord?" Eliphaz the Temanite, one of Job’s miserable comforters, certainly was right about one thing when he said in Job 5:7, |
