The Western world is groaning in pain and despair as it bears witness to the barbarian destruction of life in Ukraine from thousands of explosives sent from the safety of bombers and missiles through an uncontested sky, raining terror down upon the entire population, all for Ukraine’s inexcusable wish to remain a free, self-governing people. Yet as we groan, we must acknowledge that human history is replete with such behavior. God seems nowhere to be found, having long ago given up an alliance with one side or the other in collective violence. Instead, God sent God’s Son as a sacrifice to violence to show the futility of such behavior, a magnificent gesture of mercy which to date has proven less than effective. So I wonder, is God groaning too? Is God suffering with us?
Long, long ago Paul observed in his letter to the Romans, “we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Ro. 8: 22 KJV). We groan because we want to graduate from the decay of death to the glory of children of God. Karl Barth, in his classic commentary on Romans, observed that we will always groan and travail in pain because our knowledge is not the knowledge of God. And God is in heaven while we are earth bound. “Therefore, it is precisely our not-knowing what God knows that is our temporal knowledge about God…”1 Likewise, the church would have us know that God is in control of all things, omnipotent. God has a plan, and somehow, far beyond our capacity to comprehend, all that occurs is part of God’s plan. We as Christians are to pray in the name of Jesus Messiah for God to exercise God’s power on behalf of the innocent and to relieve our suffering. We can’t really know anything else.
But maybe the will of God is not that humankind learns to live by the teachings of God’s Son. God certainly knows that humankind exists in a largely godless world. Maybe God’s abiding hope is that more and more of us learn to share God’s suffering by acting fully in the world as servants of God’s will; that we ease God’s suffering by the good we can do in the face of evil (see Ro. 12: 14-21). Essentially, humans’ inhumanity to humans provides the framework in which God’s servants can ease human suffering and the suffering of God.
Scripture tells us that God’s plan is to send Jesus Messiah back to earth at the end of times (Mt. 24:1-41). In the First Century CBE and in every century since, people have believed that the return of the Messiah was imminent, likely in response to the continual display of awful human behavior. Yet God abides in God’s suffering, perhaps because of the many, many servants who are easing this suffering by acting in the secular world consistent with the will of God. It is up to us to pray and do.
- Barth, Karl, The Epistle to the Romans, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1968, 310
2 replies on “Groaning With God”
Thank you Jim for your regular encouragement to keep finding and following Jesus. To groan, to pray, to do, to love, to abide. I seem to lose Jesus regularly, but thankful that He seems to keep finding me through people like you.
Blessings.
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