Does God Hurt?

A friend of mind called me late Saturday night and informed me that he and his wife had just lost their newborn child. Landon survived only one day. This precious little boy was born with a heart that simply couldn’t sustain his life. As we cried out to God together, and my friend reflected on the previous twenty-four hours, he went back and forth between unbridled sorrow and an odd calmness. I encouraged him to grieve. And let him know that his sobs were not a sign of a lack of trust in God.

In fact, I wanted him to know that God hurts with us.

For several millennia, theologians have bought into this unbiblical notion that God is up in heaven in an eternally fixed pose. “I too was raised in a theology,” Dallas Willard contends, “that presents God as a great unblinking cosmic stare.” By contrast, Open Theists offer a God who is sometimes “worried about the future” (Sanders) and “vulnerable” (Boyd).

Both of the above approaches are wrong.

Yes, God is sovereign, but that doesn’t mean he only pretends to hurt with us. And yes, God is loving, but that doesn’t mean that he relinquishes his power and sovereignty.

The (partial) answer to this mystery (which will never be fully resolved by our limited minds) lies in the utter otherness of God. God is not like us! “You thought I was just like you,” God says in Psalm 50:21, “I will reprove you and state the case before your eyes.” God’s compassion never fails (ours is fleeting); his love is everlasting (ours is fickle); his wrath is righteous (ours is overwhelmingly egotistical); his desires are always pure (ours are mostly selfish).

Even though God does experience emotion, God’s affections are ultimately active rather than passive. When we suffer, we are responding to unforeseen events over which we have very little, if any, control. When God suffers, he responds to an event which he knew would happen and which he could have prevented had he so desired.

It might be stated this way: in his infinite wisdom and grace, God chose to create a world that he knew would grieve him. And when God is said to be disappointed or saddened, these are real emotions that accompany his evaluation of what happens in history. God is not cold and unresponsive. However, neither is he a victim of some unexpected negative treatment by his creatures.

Here’s what I want my friend to know: I love you—and so does God. I hurt with you—and so does God. And in his sovereignty, God has something in store for you that is good and not bad, loving and not unkind. In fact, through this terrible tragedy, God will show you his mercy and goodness. As the writer of Lamentations says, “Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love” (3:32).