"Why does God let some suffer so much?"

Why does God let some suffer so much?

Someone wrote a post asking why God lets some people suffer so much.

They have a condition. Rare, they say, and horrific. It gets worse every day. There is no treatment they know of, no expectation of healing, and no one around them who understands what it is like. They describe every moment as torture.

And they say this didn't start with the illness. Before the illness, there were years of trauma, and stress, and struggle. So the illness landed on a life that was already hard.

They've heard the things people say. That God will use it to teach them. That it isn't God's fault; it's a fallen world. They repeat both of those in the post, and they aren't satisfied by either one.

Their argument is simple, and they make it carefully. If God is all powerful, and if he sees our stories before we are born, and if he has the power to do anything at all, then why would he choose to let someone suffer like this when they are calling out to him?

They are not claiming to deserve better. They say plainly that they are far from perfect, that they've done wrong and still do. They say maybe none of us are worthy. But they can't square that with watching other people have an easy life alongside them.

They know how it sounds. They say we are all biased about our own pain. They say it anyway, because they believe it's true in their case: what they are enduring is hell on earth.

And they've heard the answer that only the next life matters. Their reply to that is one of the sharper lines in the post. It's easy to say that while you still have joy and some peace in this world.

Then, near the end, the argument stops and something else starts.

They say they are tired. Broken. Watching themselves decay. Most nights they cry, and cry out to God.

We're not going to answer the question. Not because there's no answer—there probably IS one, and it's likely already been said to this person, maybe more than once. An answer isn't what's needed here.

Jesus was told about eighteen people crushed under a tower, and he had an answer available. He didn't give it. He moved past the question. The disciples asked whose sin caused a man's blindness—an answer with a clean cause—and he told them nobody's, then healed the man in front of them. Information was never the missing piece.

So instead of an answer, we're going to ask a different question: what does a person do with God tonight, while none of this has changed?

"I cannot feel his presence… I'm unsure if he's even there, or if he's just not listening."

"How can God leave me here?"

There are two questions in that post, and they are not the same size.

The first one takes up most of the words: Why does God allow suffering, and how is it fair that it falls so unevenly? That question is argued for, defended, anticipated. They've clearly had it out with people before.

The second one is four words long, and it's the last thing they write: "How can God leave me here?"

That one isn't about fairness. It isn't a comparison with anyone else's life. It's about whether the person they have been crying out to, night after night, is there at all—and if he is, what it means that he has said nothing.

Scripture handles those two very differently.

The first one it mostly refuses. When people brought Jesus the news of Galileans killed by Pilate, they brought it as a fairness question—what did those men do. He told them those men were no worse than anyone else, and then he changed the subject entirely. When his own disciples looked at a man born blind and asked whose sin caused it, he said neither this man nor his parents, and went and healed him. He had the answer available. He didn't give it. He didn't treat the question as the thing that mattered.

The second question is different. Scripture doesn't refuse that one. It doesn't answer it, either. What it does is stranger—and more useful. It gives you the words for it.

There is a psalm in the Bible, written by a man named Heman the Ezrahite.

We know almost nothing about him. What we have is his prayer, and the note at the top of it, which says it was set to a tune. That detail is worth holding for a second. This was sung. In public. By the assembly.

Here is what it says.

Yahweh, the God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before you. Let my prayer enter into your presence. Turn your ear to my cry.

For my soul is full of troubles. My life draws near to Sheol. I am counted among those who go down into the pit. I am like a man who has no help, set apart among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom you remember no more. They are cut off from your hand.

You have laid me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths. Your wrath lies heavily on me. You have afflicted me with all your waves.

"You have taken my friends from me. You have made me an abomination to them. I am confined, and I can't escape. My eyes are dim from grief."

I have called on you daily, Yahweh! I have spread out my hands to you.

But to you, Yahweh, I have cried! In the morning, my prayer comes before you. Yahweh, why do you reject my soul? Why do you hide your face from me?!

I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up. While I suffer your terrors, I am distracted.

You have put lover and friend far from me, and my friends into darkness.

That's the end. There is no turn. Most psalms have a but in them somewhere—but you are good, but I will trust. This one doesn't. The last word in the Hebrew is darkness.

Look at what's in it, next to the post.

Crying day and night, and nothing coming back. Affliction that started young and never let up—from my youth up. Being cut off from people, unable to get out. Eyes worn out from grief. A body drawing toward the grave. And the direct accusation that God has hidden his face.

That is the same post. Written three thousand years earlier, and put to music so a congregation could sing it.

There is one difference, and it is the only one.

The post says he isn't listening. Heman says, "Why do you hide your face from me?"

One is said about God. The other is said to him.

That's it. That's the whole gap. Not more faith, not better theology, not a resolution nobody has. Heman had no more answers at the end of that psalm than he had at the start. He never got told why. As far as the text goes, nothing changed for him. What he did was aim it.

And this needs saying, because the temptation is to promise the ending. Heman's psalm doesn't end in relief. Hebrews says of a whole crowd of people that they were commended for their faith and did not receive what was promised. Not delayed. Did not receive. Whatever else is true, it is not the case that praying it produces the outcome. Heman prayed it, and the psalm still ends where it ends.

But it is in the Bible. God put the words of a man who said, "you have hidden your face," into the book he gave his people to pray. He did not correct it. He did not add a paragraph at the bottom fixing it. He kept it.

Which means the thing being felt right now—that he is gone, that he isn't listening, that the darkness is the only thing left—is not something that has to be resolved before God can be spoken to. It is already inside the prayers he gave us.

So here is the one thing that can be done tonight.

Take the sentence you have already been saying, and put Him in it.

Not—he isn't listening. Why won't you listen?!

Not, "he has left me here." Why have YOU left me here?

Same words. Same anger, if it's anger. Same exhaustion. Turned around so it is going somewhere.

And if your own words won't come, Heman's are there, and they are yours to use. "You have laid me in the lowest pit. My eyes are dim from grief. I have called on you daily. Why do you hide your face from me?"

You don't HAVE to mean it calmly. Heman didn't.

The post ends: "How can God leave me here?"

There is no answer to that here. Not one that hasn't already been offered—and found useless.

What there is, is Heman—cut off, worn out, singing it in public, getting nothing back—and the last line he wrote, which God saw fit to keep:

You have put lover and friend far from me, and my friends into darkness.

Said to him.