Some thoughts on pain and suffering and how our current teaching series on the humanity of Jesus helps me make sense of it all:

As a thoughtful Christian, I have to be able to make sense of that most difficult of questions: how do you reconcile the reality of suffering and evil with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God? … As the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell famously asked, “what are you going to say as you kneel next to a dying child?”

Bringing logic to bear on that situation is, for most people, simply a case study in using the wrong tool for the job. Instead, comfort comes from understanding that God is familiar with suffering through first-hand experience of the real thing.

Jesus was not just a man, he was God. And he was not just God, he was a man. This is the most mind-boggling mystery of the Christian faith to me. Everything that is true about mankind is true about Jesus. And everything that is true about God is true about Jesus. But in his humanity, he didn’t “cheat” by playing his “God card” whenever things got tough. People suffered and died all around him. He lost people close to him. And eventually, when it was his turn to suffer and die, he didn’t rage against it as though something disruptive to the whole universe were happening.