The Suffering Arc Of The Bible

The earliest scriptures attribute suffering to the activity of God alone. God is the cause of all that happens, good or bad. Since God is good, then all suffering, in this view must ultimately be good as well. The simplest way to make sense of this is to attribute suffering to sin. If you do good, good things happen to you. If you do wrong, evil will befall you. This is commonly known among scholars as the Deuternomic or Deuteronomistic principle of interpreting life.

Over time, this view came to be challenged. Scriptures grew up that insisted in the most iconoclastic ways that suffering was often undeserved. Hence the Book of Job, where a man who suffers most terribly is held up as blameless.

You can see this transformation by comparing The Book of Daniel with earlier prophetic texts. The prophets always attributed the suffering of the Jewish nation under Assyrian and Babylonian rule to the activity of God. The Jews had sinned by running after idols, and so God used the great empires of history to punish them for their misdeeds. But Daniel turns this on its head. In that book the great empires are manifestations of demonic forces, known as the beasts. In the Book of Job a man had suffered in spite of his goodness. To Daniel, suffering is often caused by evil's attack on the good. Turning the Deuteronimic principle on its head, Daniel claims people often suffer because they are good. The Bible moves from the view that people suffer because they are evil to the view that they suffer in spite of being good and finally the view that they suffer because they are good.

Jesus pushes this even further. God, in His goodness, suffers supremely. God became Job. In this moment He turns everything upside down. He proves all of the older views wrong. Truly we are completely dependent on his sacrifice for our salvation, indeed our very existence. This is a profound statement about the nature of God. We are incapable of finding any path to salvation on our own. Sinfulness is a part of the human condition, and one we cannot escape from. So God, seeing this, bridges the gap by situating Himself within the very fabric of that sinful condition. All we do wrong is visited upon God. Thereby God gains the moral position He can use to forgive us all.

What a wondrous life this is, what a wondrous truth! I am eternally grateful for the Revelation of God given in Christ Jesus. This is why I'm a Christian, this is why I will always be a champion of the Christian faith. This truth, this insight, this progressive revelation whereby the true nature of God is finally brought to the light. God is the Suffering Servant. Had the Old Testament not given us some view of a cosmic deity, of a genuine monotheism, we would be unable to grasp the grand scope or importance of the revelation in Christ. Had the Old Testament not given us the vision of the Suffering Servant, than we would not be able to grasp the redemptive power of suffering in some circumstances. If we didn't have the Deuteronomic Principle we would miss the important message that in suffering one can still find meaning. But had Christ not incarnated all of this in a single man, we would never have gotten the picture of the overall, nor would we have a physical, historical revelation of the true nature of God.