JESUS' ANSWER TO OUR UNSOLVED PROBLEMS

ONE of the great values of the pulpit and the religious Press is to throw light on the problems that con­front thinking men and women as they face life, and, in Milton's phrase, 'To justify the ways of God to men.' It will be obvious to us all, however, that there are some problems which, at present, are insoluble. Man is continually asking questions which have no satisfactory answer. For instance, think of man's relation to nature. He feels in a sense that he is superior to nature, yet natural catastrophies are continually bringing suffering upon men. Man tries to think his way to the cause of these disasters, and gets a certain way. For instance, when an earthquake sweeps thousands of Japanese people into eternity the Christian man is appalled ; but he at once begins to try to think his way through the situation, and feels some relief in remembering that the laws of the world which make the earthquake possible are necessary laws, and that man must learn to accommodate himself to them, and, for instance, not build heavy archi­tectural structures on ground which he knows to be unsafe. But, no sooner has he got some kind of comfort for that, than a great tornado rushes across
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some of the States in America, bringing ruin, desola­tion, calamity, and death, and man's mind seems stunned and baffled. Long ago, if he is a thoughtful man, he has put away the thought that this is God's vengeance, or judgement, or punishment. He sup­poses that the existence of the winds is a necessity, and'yet man seems unable to protect himself against the onslaught of such a storm. It seems beyond his capacity to cope with the situation, and the calamity seems to achieve nothing;' not even to teach him lessons about the natural forces, for who can escape from a cyclone ? Matthew Arnold's lines cause him something approaching distress:

Earthquakes do not scorn
The just man to entomb,
Nor lightnings turn aside
To find his virtues room.

If God is a loving Father, why does He allow these things to happen? Or does He allow them because He cannot help it? It was this kind of unsolved problem that led John Stuart Mill to propound his dilemma: 'Either God is not omnipotent, or He is not good.' And, though such catastrophies as I have indicated are fortunately rare, yet, if they hap­pen but once, the problem is raised; and on a lesser scale that kind of problem is being faced every day. Here is the farmer who has just rejoiced to see some crop pushing its way through the soil, and a frost which he could not possibly have foreseen blights it for ever. Or he sees the corn standing golden in the fields, and rain and wind make thousands
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of acres useless. No one can condemn the Christian farmer for asking the question, 'Why? ' Or take a natural catastrophe of another kind. We are all familiar with the famous picture The Hope­less Dawn, in which a fisherman's wife has thrown herself at her mother's knees in an agony of distress. The pair have watched all night for the return of the beloved, and now it is breaking upon them that the storm has claimed him. There is not one of us who does not feel sympathy for that young wife in the picture, and the more thoughtful of us cannot help asking why the storm did rise at that moment. Could that storm achieve more in the purposes of God than the lives of fishermen? This is the kind of unsolved problem that a thoughtful man continually puts to himself.

Those who have given much thought to the problem of pain will recognize quite frankly that there is a central problem in that mystery which is insoluble as far as reason goes. We may throw light on many of the problems of pain. We can see pain as a warning. We can understand why the innocent suffer, because the world is made on the family basis and not on an individual basis, and, receiving the assets of the family, some of us must bear its liabilities. We can see that a good deal of suffering is brought about through ignorance, folly, and sin, for which God is not directly and com­pletely responsible, since He is always striving to replace ignorance with knowledge, folly with wis­dom, and sin with holiness. We can see that God suffers with us. We can count up all the assets
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which come to us through pain; heroism, sym­pathy, and pity. And yet there are questions that in our lifetime will never be solved. Why did God make a world in which cancer is even a possibility? Why did God make our bodies capable of experiencing such agony? As we see men and women, and even little children, suffer, why could He not achieve His purpose without such dreadful agony? These are amongst the unsolved problems of life.

Every one of us could give examples of them either from his own experience or from his own observation. I think of a missionary friend, a brilliant graduate of a northern University, who went out to India, learned the language, was an immediate success amongst Indian students, could preach and speak in the language, acquired a sound knowledge of that sacred literature which is the background of the Indian student mind. He married a cultured lady, founded a perfect Christian home, and had two little girls. Then one day, bathing in a shallow backwater, which I know well and in which I have bathed a score of times, he was attacked by cramp and taken from the water dead. The question one is bound to ask is, 'What was gained in comparison with what was lost? ' We may say that death is only an incident, that his life goes on ; and there is both truth and comfort in that; but, humanly speaking, all that long, laborious preparation to qualify himself to do that one job seems lost. On a recent Sunday night we sent the flowers from my pulpit to a young mother still in her early twenties,
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with a baby five weeks old. There the mother lay in the throes of galloping consumption, with apparently only a few weeks to live. As I sat on the edge of her bed, with her thin, wasted hand in mine, she said, ' God won't let me die, will he? There is so much to live for now.' But she passed over while these pages were in the Press.
I must not add illustrations like this together, because the effect is depressing to some readers, and we have so many of these illustrations locked up in our own hearts, that one does not wonder that men throw up against the brassy heavens their anguished cry, 'Why? '

Let us turn now to the brighter question, 'What is Jesus' attitude to these unsolved problems ? ' First of all, I think that we may safely say that Jesus, that fearless thinker, would, as it were, lead His men as far as He could through any problem. For instance, as you watch Him tackle the problem of pain, He will not believe that the Tower of Siloam fell on a certain number of men because those men were sinners. He is slow to regard catastrophe as a divine judgement. 'Think ye,' He said, 'that these men were sinners above all them that dweit in Jerusalem ? I tell you, " No." ' And when men asked Him, saying, 'Lord, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? ' Jesus answered, ' Neither did this man sin nor his parents : but that the works of God should be made manifest in him we must work the works of Him that sent Me."
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He would recognize that disaster is not to be thought of as the will of God any more than sin is the will of God, though its possibility is the will of God, as is that of sin. He would recognize, I think, that, like a human father, God would save His children from disaster if such saving did not interfere with the principles on which He was educating His other children, making religion a kind of insurance; or, by holding up the laws of the universe, make it unreliable, unknowable, and more terrifying­since one could never learn its ways‑than it is now.

Jesus' mind, moreover, was made of stem stuff, so that He would not regard the price paid for our education as children in God's family as too high. We think it too high because commonly we make two mistakes.

(1) We think of death as the ultimate calamity, whereas it probably interferes as little with the purposes of God as a man's removal from one town to another. We cannot hope to realize that now, but we shall realize it when, standing in the eternal world, the brevity of this life and the scope of the life after death fall into their proper proportions. It is impossible to believe that the purposes of God through all eternity can be ultimately defeated by, say, a few germs, or a falling brick, or a pit explosion, or a bullet. A man must die some day, and, though our hearts ache at the death of a child and we do well to do all in our power to save life, yet the difference between six and sixty in the perspective of eternity is less than between this minute and the next.
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(2) God would not put us into a world where what we call disaster was even possible unless, by the right reaction to such disaster, we could, in co‑operation with Him, win a permanent good greater in measure than the evil of the dis­aster. When you see the agony of an incurable cancer you must say, 'The measure of that agony is less than the measure of good which, in co‑opera­tion with the sufferer, God will win for him.' This is the only faith which justifies the possibility of pain. It cannot be too often said that the measure of the world's suffering must be the measure of our faith, since both are less than the measure of God's purposes. The Cross is never the last word. There is always Easter morning. And the measure of the glory of the second is greater than the measure of the agony of the first.

Jesus, it seems to me, had one final anchorage for His n~dnd amid all the buffeting waves of doubt. He found a solution in the character of God. It is not, a solution arrived at by the reason, or the problem would not be insoluble. It is a solution of faith, but a faith supported by reason. Instead of Mill's dilemma, I would suggest to you another. Either God is a fiend who has somehow climbed on to the throne of the universe and works malicious, evil, and revolting deeds, or He is a loving Father. If you start out by believing the first, there are hundreds of facts which will fit, but you had better sing a Nunc dimittis -‑'Lord, lettest now Thy servant depart in tears, for mine eyes have seen hell.' If that view of God is true, then all our
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strivings are mockery, and there cannot be any such thing as morality. Or we may believe that God is a Father whose name is Infinite Love, and that we are in a world which is His school for His children‑not a world that is perfect yet, but a world in the making, and not a Father who achieves His ends by irresistible power, but by the power of Love which suffers many a set‑back, which involves His children in suffering, which breaks His own heart, which makes it possible for a sinless Man to die on a cross, but which in the end is the only way of achieving a divine purpose in a divine way.

So you may ask yourself which makes the most sense; and that, after all, is a scientific way of look­ing at things. Where there are two theories, the scientists accept the one which best accounts for the observed phenomena. But there is one factor which powerfully suggests that we are on right lines when we think of God as Father, and that is that Jesus thought so; and, whatever we may believe about His person, almost everybody will agree that no one has ever seen farther into the nature of the being of God than Jesus. Here, then, you have, putting it at its lowest, a great teacher on his own subject. We would not quarrel with Einstein about relativity, or with any acknowledged expert on his own subject. Jesus, whom all agree to be the world's greatest religious teacher, has spoken to us on His own subject, the nature of God. Can we do other than sit at His feet? And He has not only spoken, but put His views to the test, tried them out in His life and death. And that life is
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so radiant, victorious, and glorious, and the influence of that death so compelling, that the unbiased mind finds it harder to think Him wrong than to think Him right. For to suppose Him wrong is to sup­pose an ultimate indecency at the heart of things, and be driven in vain to find some other adequate explanation of the appeal of His words and character.

So, when I see Him nailed to a cross and yet looking up into the face of God and calling God 'Father,' I find myself saying over and over again that there are things I cannot understand, there are things which would seem to contradict the loving nature of God ; but, if Jesus says that God is a Father, and if Jesus can leave His life in the Father's hands and be certain, by faith, that all will work out well in the end, I can leave my life to Him, and I can commit to His capable hands the lives of others, and get them, even in the hour of darkness, to hold on in the dark. The faith of Jesus in God is the lamp which I press to my breast, and its light never goes out.

If I stoop
Into a dark, tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time; I press God's lamp
Close to my breast ; its splendour, soon or late
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day.

For the God who, on Easter morning, vindicated the faith of Jesus will vindicate those who bet their lives, and risk everything for the belief that He is what Jesus said He was, even though they find what Jesus found, that Gethsemane and Calvary lie between.