Does God care?

by Philip Yancey

"A youth pastor in Colorado, had just learned his wife and baby daughter were dying of AIDS. The mother had received a contaminated blood transfusion just before her delivery date. "How can I talk to my youth group about a loving God?" he asked me. "How can I tell them God cares?"

That same week I also heard from a blind man calling on a public phone. Several months before, he had invited a recovering drug addict into his home as an act of mercy. He had just learned the recovering addict was molesting his wife-under his own roof. "It's like God is punishing me for trying to serve him," he said. Blind, he began to imagine all that had been going on. Had the addict forced his wife, or did she cooperate willingly? Just then he ran out of quarters, and the phone went dead. Silence.

I have learned not even to attempt an answer to the "Why?" questions. Why did the youth pastor's wife happen to get the one tainted bottle of blood? Why does a tornado hit one town in Oklahoma and skip over another? Why did that one woman's child get hit by a skateboard on Boston Common? I do not know, and, frankly, after much study I have concluded the Bible does not give us the answer. In his speech to Job, when God had a golden opportunity to enlighten us on causation issues, God avoided the topic entirely.

One question, however, no longer plagues me as it once did. The question Does God care? lurks behind Chet Raymo's poignant story about the silent universe. It also lurks behind much of the Old Testament. Job reluctantly concluded that, no, God could not care about him or about other suffering people. "How faint the whisper we hear of him," sighed Job. The psalmists cried out for some sign that God heard their prayers, some evidence that he had not forsaken them.

I know of only one way to answer the question Does God care? and for me it has proved decisive: Jesus is the answer. Jesus never attempted a philosophical answer to the problem of pain, yet he did give an existential answer. Although I cannot learn from him why a particular bad thing occurs, I can learn how God feels about it. Jesus gives God a face, and that face is streaked with tears.

Whenever I read straight through the Bible, a huge difference between the Old and New Testaments comes to light. In the Old Testament I can find many expressions of doubt and disappointment. Whole books Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Job-center on the theme. As I have said, almost half of the psalms have a dark, brooding tone about them. In striking contrast, the New Testament Epistles contain little of this type of anguish. The problem of pain has surely not gone away: James 1, Romans 5 and 8, the entire book of 1 Peter, and much of Revelation deal with the subject in detail. Nevertheless, nowhere do I find the piercing question, Does God care? I see nothing resembling the accusation of Psalm 77: "Has God forgotten to be merciful?"

The reason for the change, I believe, is that Jesus answered that question for the witnesses who wrote the Epistles. In Jesus, God presents a face. Anyone who wonders how God feels about the suffering on this groaning planet need only look at that face. James, Peter, and John had followed Jesus long enough for his facial expressions to be permanently etched on their minds. By watching Jesus respond to a hemorrhaging woman, a grieving centurion, a widow's dead son, an epileptic boy, an old blind man, they learned how God felt about suffering. By no means did Jesus solve the "problem of pain" he healed only a few in one small corner of the globe-but he did provide an answer to the question, Does God care?…

Finally, Hebrews tells us (5:7), Jesus "offered up loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death." But of course he was not saved from death in Gethsemane and at Calvary we get the incredible scene that Martin Luther has described as "God struggling with God." Is it too much to suggest that Jesus himself asked the questions that haunt me, that haunt most of us at one time or another. Do I matter? Does God care? What else can be the meaning of his quotation from Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

When Jesus Christ faced pain, he responded much as anyone else does. He did not pray in the garden, "Oh, Lord, I am so grateful that you have chosen me to suffer on your behalf-I rejoice in the privilege!" No, he experienced sorrow, fear, abandonment, and something approaching desperation: " ... if it is possible, may this cup he taken from me." Ever attentive to bodily detail, Luke adds, "And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground."

We may not get the answer to the problem of pain that we want from Jesus. We get instead the mysterious confirmation that God suffers with us. We are not alone. Jesus bodily reconstructs trust in God. Because of Jesus, I can trust that God truly understands my condition. I can trust that I matter to God, and that God cares, regardless of how things look at the time. When I begin to doubt, I turn again to the face of Jesus, and there I see the compassionate love of a God well acquainted with grief."*

*Yancey, Philip. The Bible Jesus Read. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1999, p. 208-211.