Part VI: Theodicy — Divine Emotion and the Problem of Evil

Chapter 30

Toward a Biblical Theodicy

The God Who Enters Our Pain

Introduction: From Critique to Construction

In the previous two chapters, we examined the problem of evil from two different angles. In Chapter 28, we explored the fellow-sufferer theodicy — the idea that God is present in our pain, bearing it alongside us. In Chapter 29, we turned a critical eye toward strict impassibility and asked whether a God who cannot be affected by creaturely suffering is capable of offering genuine comfort to those who are broken. We saw that the impassible God, whatever His logical coherence, leaves the suffering without what they need most: a God who cares — not merely in His actions but in His heart.

Now it is time to build. This chapter moves from critique to construction. My goal here is not to offer a complete philosophical theodicy — that would take an entire book of its own. Instead, I want to sketch something more biblical and more personal. I want to walk through the sweeping story of Scripture and show how God responds to human suffering — not as a detached observer, not as an unmoved mover running a cosmic machine, but as a Father who enters our pain, weeps with us, acts on our behalf, and promises to make all things new.

The biblical response to evil is not a philosophical argument. It is a Person. It is the God who heard the cries of Hebrew slaves in Egypt. It is the God who wept through the prophets over His rebellious children. It is the God who came in the flesh and touched lepers, fed the hungry, and wept at the tomb of His friend. It is the God who hung on a Roman cross and absorbed the full weight of human evil into His own body. And it is the God who has promised that one day — one glorious day — He will personally wipe every tear from every eye, and death and suffering will be no more.

This is the God of the Bible. And this God is not impassible.

The God Who Hears: Suffering and Divine Response in the Exodus

The place to begin any biblical theodicy is not with abstract philosophical categories. It is with a cry — the cry of enslaved people groaning under the whip. And it is with the God who heard that cry.

Exodus 3:7–8 records what may be the most important statement about God's emotional engagement with human suffering in the entire Old Testament:

"Then the LORD said, 'I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.'" (ESV)

Pay close attention to the verbs in this passage. There are four of them, and each one tells us something essential about how God relates to suffering people. First, God sees. The Hebrew verb ra'ah (רָאָה) means to observe, to perceive, to take notice. But this is no passive observation. The construction here — "I have surely seen" — uses the infinitive absolute (ra'oh ra'iti), which intensifies the verb. This is emphatic seeing. God is not glancing in the direction of Egypt and then looking away. He is looking intently, fixing His gaze on the affliction of His people.¹

Second, God hears. The Hebrew shama' (שָׁמַע) means not simply that sound waves have reached God's ears, but that He has listened with attention and engagement. Throughout the Old Testament, when God "hears" a cry, it means He is moved to respond. The cry of the enslaved has reached His heart, not merely His mind.²

Third, God knows. The Hebrew yada' (יָדַע) is one of the richest words in the Old Testament. It does not mean merely intellectual awareness. It means intimate, experiential, personal knowledge. It is the same word used of the most intimate relationship between a husband and wife (Genesis 4:1). When God says "I know their sufferings," He is saying something far more profound than "I am aware that they are suffering." He is saying, "I know their suffering from the inside. I have entered into it. I feel it."³

Fourth — and most remarkably — God comes down. The Hebrew yarad (יָרַד) means to descend, to go down. This is the language of movement, of action, of entering into a situation. God does not observe the suffering of His people from a distance. He comes down. He enters the scene. He gets involved. As Terence Fretheim argues, God's "coming down" language in the Exodus narrative reveals a God who is not content to remain above and apart from His people's pain — He descends into it.⁴

Here is the point I want us to see. This is not the language of a detached observer. This is not the language of an impassible God who watches the suffering of His creatures from a state of undisturbed bliss and then, out of His eternal and unchanging will, decides to act. This is the language of a God who is moved — who sees, who hears, who knows intimately, who comes down personally. The Exodus narrative presents a God whose response to suffering is not merely volitional but emotional. He does not simply decide to deliver Israel. He is moved by their cries. Their pain touches Him. And because it touches Him, He acts.

This pattern — seeing, hearing, knowing, and coming down — is not unique to the Exodus. It recurs throughout the Old Testament whenever God's people are in distress. In Judges 2:18, "the LORD was moved to pity" (ESV) by the groaning of His people under their oppressors. The Hebrew verb nacham (נָחַם) here suggests that God's response was not mechanical but emotional — He was genuinely affected by their suffering and moved to deliver them. In Judges 10:16, after Israel's repentance, we are told that God "became impatient over the misery of Israel" — or, as some translations render it, "He could bear Israel's misery no longer." This is the language of a God whose patience with suffering has a limit, not because He is weak, but because His compassion is so intense that He cannot stand to watch His children suffer any longer.⁵

The Exodus pattern teaches us something fundamental about biblical theodicy. The Bible's answer to suffering is not, in the first place, a philosophical explanation. It is a divine action rooted in divine emotion. God responds to evil not because He is running a program but because He is moved by love. This is the foundation of everything that follows.

The God Who Weeps: Prophetic Suffering and Divine Anguish

If the Exodus reveals a God who hears and responds, the prophetic literature reveals something even more striking: a God who weeps. The prophets of the Old Testament are not just messengers who deliver God's words. They are, as Abraham Heschel argued so powerfully, participants in the divine pathos — the emotional life of God Himself.⁶

Consider Jeremiah 8:18–9:1. These verses are among the most emotionally intense in all of Scripture:

"My joy is gone; grief is upon me; my heart is sick within me. Behold, the cry of the daughter of my people from the length and breadth of the land: 'Is the LORD not in Zion? Is her King not in her?' . . . 'The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.' For the wound of the daughter of my people is my heart wounded; I mourn, and dismay has taken hold on me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of the daughter of my people not been restored? Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" (ESV)

Scholars have long debated whether these words belong to the prophet Jeremiah or to God Himself. The answer, I believe, is both — and that is precisely the point. As we argued in Chapter 15 (where this passage was treated in depth), the voice of the prophet and the voice of God are intentionally blurred here. Jeremiah is not just reporting God's message; he is channeling God's grief. The prophet's tears are God's tears. The prophet's anguish is a window into the anguish of the divine heart.⁷

This is what Heschel called the "divine pathos" — the idea that God is not a self-contained being of undisturbed perfection but a God who is intimately and emotionally affected by the actions and suffering of His creatures. Heschel argued that the God of the prophets is a God of passion — not passion in the sense of uncontrolled emotion, but passion in the sense of deep, genuine, purposeful feeling. The prophets do not portray a God who observes human sin and suffering with cold detachment. They portray a God whose heart is broken by it.⁸

Or consider the anguish of Hosea 11:8, where God cries out over His rebellious children:

"How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender." (ESV)

We treated this extraordinary passage in detail in Chapter 15, so I will not repeat the full exegetical argument here. But the key point for our purposes is this: the God of Hosea 11 is not a God whose response to evil is an abstract, dispassionate decree. He is a God whose "heart recoils" within Him — the Hebrew verb haphak (הָפַך) literally means "to turn over" or "to overturn," and it describes a gut-level emotional upheaval. God's compassion "grows warm and tender" — the Hebrew nikhmaru (נִכְמְרוּ) describes something kindling or burning with intensity. This is a God who is torn between justice and mercy, not because He lacks resolve, but because His love for His wayward children is so intense that judgment itself causes Him anguish.⁹

And then there is God's pleading with His people to return. In Isaiah 1:18, God says, "Come now, let us reason together." The Hebrew verb yakach (יָכַח) suggests something like a passionate plea, an earnest argument between parties who care about each other. God is not issuing a cold summons. He is inviting His people into a conversation because He genuinely wants them back. He does not want to punish. He wants to forgive. But forgiveness requires a response, and God is pleading for that response with all the passion of a heartbroken parent.

What does all of this mean for theodicy? It means that the God of the prophets is not a God who allows suffering and then sits back in undisturbed contentment. He is a God who grieves over the very evil that He permits. He weeps over the consequences of human sin even as He holds human beings accountable for it. His heart is broken by the destruction His own judgment brings. This is not a weakness. It is a perfection. It is what it means for God to be both perfectly just and perfectly loving at the same time.

The God Who Invites Our Grief: The Lament Tradition in the Psalms

One of the most overlooked features of the Bible's response to suffering is the tradition of lament. Nearly a third of the Psalms are lament psalms — prayers of raw, unfiltered grief, anger, confusion, and even accusation directed at God.¹⁰ And here is what makes the lament tradition so significant for our discussion: God not only tolerates these cries of pain. He inspired them. He put them in His own book.

Think about that for a moment. The same God who is sovereign over all things — who could have filled His hymnal with nothing but songs of praise — chose to include dozens of prayers that say things like "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Psalm 22:1), "How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?" (Psalm 13:1), and "Why do you stand far away, O LORD? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?" (Psalm 10:1). These are not polite, carefully worded prayers. They are screams of pain. And God did not censor them. He canonized them.

Why? Because lament assumes something absolutely crucial about the character of God. Lament assumes a God who listens. It assumes a God who cares. It assumes a God who is affected by the cries of His people and who can be moved to respond. As Andrew Sloane argues in his contribution to Divine Suffering, a fully relational, suffering God can be readily addressed in lament, because lament presupposes that God responds to prayer and acts because of our prayers. A suffering God can be readily found in the practice of lament.¹¹

An impassible God, by contrast, makes lament pointless. If God is utterly unaffected by our cries — if our tears do not touch Him, if our screams do not move Him, if He observes our agony from a state of perfect, undisturbed bliss — then why cry out to Him at all? What is the point of pouring out your heart to a God who is constitutionally incapable of being affected by it? You might as well weep into a void.

Sloane makes a further point that is profoundly important for biblical theodicy. He argues that a suffering God allows evil and suffering to be real suffering and actual evil — not puzzling experiences of complex goods in clever disguise. Classical theism, he observes, is sometimes associated with inadequate moral responses to evil — attempts to say that what we call "evils" are actually somehow hard-to-see goods. But if God genuinely grieves over evil, then evil is truly evil. It is not a hidden blessing. It is not a secret good dressed up in pain. Some suffering is pointless. Some suffering is horrific. And a God who genuinely weeps over it — rather than fitting it neatly into an eternal, undisturbed plan — takes that evil more seriously, not less.¹²

This does not mean that God cannot bring good out of evil. Romans 8:28 assures us that God works all things together for the good of those who love Him. But as Sloane helpfully clarifies, the working of good out of suffering does not make the suffering itself good. It does not mean the suffering was intended by God for that purpose. Rather, God responds to tragic circumstances by opening up the possibility that His gracious purposes might be furthered even through them. The suffering is not "freighted in the events by God's determination in advance, but subsequently invested in it by God's redemptive action."¹³

This is a crucial distinction. The impassibilist theodicy tends to say: "God planned this suffering for a greater good, and He is not disturbed by it." The passibilist theodicy says: "This suffering is genuinely terrible, and God grieves over it — but He is powerful enough and loving enough to bring redemption out of the wreckage." Both approaches acknowledge God's sovereignty. But only the second one takes evil seriously as evil while also taking God's emotional engagement seriously as genuine.

The God Who Heals: Jesus and the Ministry of Compassion

If the Old Testament reveals a God who hears, weeps, and invites lament, the Gospels reveal something even more astounding. In Jesus Christ, the God who "came down" in the Exodus quite literally came down — all the way down. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). The God who heard the cries of the enslaved from heaven now heard the cries of the sick, the blind, the lame, and the grieving as a man standing in their midst.

As we explored in detail in Chapter 20, Jesus' ministry was a sustained act of divine compassion embodied. The Gospels are saturated with the language of emotional engagement. When Jesus saw the crowds, He "had compassion" on them — the Greek splanchnizomai (σπλαγχνίζομαι), a word that describes a gut-level, visceral response of pity and tenderness (Matthew 9:36). When He encountered a leper, He was "moved with pity" and reached out His hand to touch the untouchable (Mark 1:41). When He saw the widow of Nain weeping over her dead son, He "had compassion on her" and raised the boy to life (Luke 7:13).¹⁴

As David Lamb observes, the Greek word splanchnizomai literally refers to being moved in one's inner parts — the bowels, the gut. In the ancient world, deep emotions like compassion and mercy were felt in one's inner organs, not merely in the head. When the Gospels describe Jesus as having splanchnizomai, they are describing a physical, embodied emotional response. This is not a cool, detached decision to help. It is a gut-wrenching compassion that drives Jesus to action.¹⁵

But the most remarkable moment in Jesus' ministry of compassion, for our purposes, is the raising of Lazarus in John 11. When Jesus arrived at the tomb and saw Mary weeping, "he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled" (John 11:33 ESV). The Greek verb here is embrimaomai (ἐμβριμάομαι), a word that in other contexts means to snort with anger, like a horse. It suggests a powerful, almost uncontrollable surge of emotion. Then, in what is the shortest and perhaps the most profound verse in the Bible, "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). The Greek verb dakryō (δακρύω) means to shed tears — not loud wailing, but quiet, deep, personal weeping.¹⁶

Now here is what makes this so significant for theodicy. Jesus knew He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He knew the grief was temporary. He knew the story had a happy ending. And He wept anyway. Why? Because the pain was real now. Because Mary's grief was real now. Because death itself — even temporary death — is an abomination, an enemy, something that should not be. Jesus' tears at the tomb of Lazarus are not the tears of helpless ignorance. They are the tears of a God who knows the full horror of death and hates it with every fiber of His being.

This has profound implications for theodicy. It means that God does not look at our suffering and see only the final outcome. He does not say, "Why are you crying? I already know it will work out in the end." He enters into the present moment of pain, even when He knows what the future holds. As we argued in Chapter 25, knowing that something will happen and experiencing it when it happens are two different things. A parent can know their child's surgery will be successful and still weep when the surgeon takes the child through the operating room doors. Jesus knew Lazarus would live again — and He wept at the tomb. God's foreknowledge does not cancel His emotional engagement. It coexists with it.¹⁷

The Cross: The Ultimate Answer to Theodicy

If Jesus' ministry reveals a God who enters into human suffering through acts of compassion, the cross reveals a God who enters into the deepest human suffering through an act of self-sacrifice. As we argued at length in Chapter 26, the cross is the definitive revelation of God's character. And what it reveals is this: God is the kind of God who would rather suffer Himself than leave His creatures in their suffering.

I will not reproduce the full Christological and theological argument from Chapter 26 here. But the central insight is worth restating for our purposes. At the cross, God the Son did not merely permit human suffering. He absorbed it into Himself. He took on the full weight of human evil — betrayal, injustice, torture, abandonment, death — and bore it in His own body. The cross is not God watching suffering from a distance. It is God entering the furnace.

And the Father was not unmoved by this. As we argued in Chapters 26 and 27, the Father experienced genuine anguish at the cross. This is not patripassianism — the heresy that the Father was crucified. The Father was not on the cross. But the Father watched His beloved Son die in agony, and every parent who has ever lost a child knows what that grief feels like. The Father did not observe the crucifixion from a state of undisturbed bliss. He grieved. He ached. He suffered in His own way — distinct from the Son's suffering, but real and deep and genuine.¹⁸

Why does the cross matter for theodicy? Because it changes the question. The problem of evil, in its classical form, asks: "If God is all-powerful and all-good, why does He allow suffering?" This is a legitimate question, and we should not dismiss it. But the cross adds a dimension that the philosophical formulation misses. The cross says: "God does not merely allow suffering. He has endured it Himself. He has entered into the worst that evil can do and come out the other side." When the sufferer asks, "Where is God in my pain?" the Christian answer is: "On the cross."¹⁹

Jürgen Moltmann captured this insight powerfully in The Crucified God. Moltmann argued that the cross is an event within the life of the Trinity itself. The Father suffers the death of the Son. The Son suffers abandonment by the Father. And the Spirit proceeds from this shared suffering as the power of reconciliation and new life. For Moltmann, the cross reveals that suffering is not alien to God — it is something God has taken into His own being and transformed from within.²⁰

I believe Moltmann is right on the core insight, even though I part ways with him at certain points (as I noted in Chapter 26). Moltmann sometimes tends to make suffering constitutive of God's eternal nature — as if God needs suffering to be who He is. I reject that view. God's inner Trinitarian life is one of perfect love, joy, and fellowship, and it does not depend on creaturely suffering for its fullness. Furthermore, Moltmann sometimes blurs the distinction between the Father's suffering and the Son's suffering in ways that approach patripassianism. But the core insight stands: at the cross, God entered into the deepest human darkness and bore it in His own being. This is not the action of an impassible deity. It is the action of a passible, loving, suffering God.²¹

The cross also reveals something that was always true about God's character. The cross did not make God passible. It revealed that He always was. God has always been the kind of God who would enter into the suffering of His creatures and bear their pain. The incarnation and crucifixion are the ultimate expression of a love that existed from all eternity within the Trinity — a love that, once creation and fall entered the picture, would inevitably take the form of suffering solidarity. As we discussed in Chapter 26, Walter Kasper's formulation is helpful here: suffering does not befall God; rather, He freely allows it to touch Him. God's suffering is not imposed from outside — it is a free, sovereign, loving choice.²²

Lister's Critique and the Author's Response

At this point, I want to engage fairly and carefully with an important critique from within the evangelical camp. Rob Lister, in God Is Impassible and Impassioned, argues that many passibilist theodicies actually undermine the very hope they seek to offer. His argument deserves serious attention because it comes from a scholar who shares much of the same theological framework I hold — and yet arrives at a somewhat different conclusion on this particular point.

Lister's argument runs like this: if we ground our theodicy primarily in God's suffering solidarity — in the claim that "God feels your pain" — then what we gain in existential comfort, we may lose in actual hope. A God who merely suffers alongside us, without the power and sovereignty to overcome evil, is ultimately a tragic figure, not a saving one. The purpose of the cross, Lister insists, was not merely to say "I feel your pain" on a cosmic scale. It was to overcome the power and penalty of sin. The cross is about victory, not just solidarity.²³

Lister is right about this, and I want to affirm his concern clearly. A theodicy of mere solidarity — one that says "God hurts with you" but cannot say "God will end your suffering" — is ultimately inadequate. The sufferer does not need only a fellow-sufferer. She needs a Deliverer. She needs a God who is powerful enough to wipe away her tears and make all things new. If God is nothing more than a fellow-sufferer who is helplessly weeping alongside us, then we are, in the apostle Paul's words, "of all people most to be pitied" (1 Corinthians 15:19).²⁴

But here is where I think Lister draws the wrong conclusion. He suggests that the passibilist theodicy inherently tends toward a God of impotent suffering — a God who feels our pain but cannot fix it. I disagree. The position I am defending in this book is not that God is a helpless fellow-sufferer. It is that God is a sovereign fellow-sufferer. He enters our pain and He overcomes it. He weeps with us and He will wipe away our tears. He suffers alongside us and He has the power to bring all suffering to an end.

In other words, I am arguing for both solidarity and sovereignty. The passibilist theodicy is not complete without both. The cross is both a demonstration of God's suffering love and a decisive victory over sin, death, and evil. The resurrection proves that God's entry into suffering is not the end of the story — it is the turning point. God does not merely join us in our pain; He transforms it. He takes the worst that evil can do — the murder of the innocent Son of God — and turns it into the means of the world's salvation.²⁵

This is what I mean by a biblical theodicy that holds together the two things that strict impassibility and some forms of passibilism pull apart. The strict impassibilist has sovereignty without solidarity: God will overcome evil, but He is not emotionally engaged in our suffering along the way. Some passibilists have solidarity without sovereignty: God feels our pain, but His ability to overcome evil is questionable. The biblical portrait gives us both: a God who is sovereign enough to guarantee the final defeat of evil and compassionate enough to enter into every moment of suffering between now and then.

The Good News of the Suffering God: Pastoral Power

Having laid the biblical and theological foundations, I want to turn now to the practical, pastoral dimension. What difference does it make, in the real world of real suffering, to believe in a God who genuinely enters our pain?

Andrew Sloane, in his essay "The Good News of the Suffering God" in Divine Suffering, argues that for those who suffer — especially the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized — the message that God genuinely hurts with them is profoundly healing. It means they are not alone. It means their pain is not invisible to God. It means God is not on the side of the oppressors but on the side of the suffering.²⁶

Consider the experience of trauma. Recent work in trauma studies and the book of Ezekiel has shown how Ezekiel's portrayal of a God who sovereignly superintends the judgment of Jerusalem — and yet suffers with those who experience that judgment — enables trauma survivors to place their otherwise overwhelming experience in the context of a morally coherent narrative. As Sloane observes, this does not require the glib and unhelpful notion that all suffering has some positive purpose. There is genuinely pointless suffering — suffering that destroys rather than builds, that shatters souls rather than refining them. But even pointless suffering can be placed within the larger narrative of a good God who created a good world that is now broken, who groans with His broken creation, and who has promised to restore all things.²⁷

Think about what this means in concrete pastoral situations. Imagine a woman sitting in a hospital room, having just received a devastating diagnosis. Her world has collapsed. Everything she took for granted — her health, her plans, her future — has been ripped away in a single sentence from a doctor. What does she need to hear?

The strict impassibilist can say: "God has a plan. Your suffering serves a greater purpose. God is sovereign, and His will is perfect." And these things may be true. But in that moment, in the raw agony of fresh grief, they can feel like cold comfort — even cruel. They can make the sufferer feel that her pain does not matter to God, that God is sitting above it all in perfect contentment, untouched and unmoved by the news that has shattered her world.

The passibilist can say all of those same things — and add something more. She can say: "God is with you right now. He knows what you're going through, and it breaks His heart. Your pain is real, and God feels it. You are not alone. He is weeping with you. And He is powerful enough to carry you through this, and one day He will wipe every tear from your eyes." This message includes everything the impassibilist message includes — sovereignty, purpose, hope. But it adds the one thing the impassibilist message cannot offer: genuine emotional solidarity. God is not just acting for you. He is hurting with you.

Ingrid Faro, in her moving contribution to Divine Suffering, shares her own story of devastating loss. After nine years of her husband's increasing pain and disability, culminating in his death, she was left destitute — adding financial ruin to grief. Her teenage son concluded that God was angry at them and had abandoned them. During that season, the only passage she could read was Psalm 22:1 — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Yet she found comfort there, because she realized that this cry of anguish did not only come from the psalmist. It came from God Himself — from the Son of God on the cross, who spoke those very words from the depths of His own suffering. She writes that knowing the God of the universe sees us, comes alongside us, and gives us new purpose was the lifeline that kept her faith alive.²⁸

This is the pastoral power of divine passibility. It does not offer cheap comfort. It does not pretend that suffering is an illusion or that every tragedy has a silver lining. It takes evil seriously as evil and pain seriously as pain. But it places all of that evil and pain within the context of a relationship with a God who is not distant, not detached, not unmoved — but present, compassionate, grieving, and actively working to bring redemption out of the wreckage.

The Suffering God and the Persecuted Church

The pastoral significance of divine passibility becomes even more vivid when we consider the global reality of Christian persecution. For millions of believers around the world, the question of whether God suffers with them is not an academic debate. It is a question of survival.

Graham Cole, in his essay "The God Who Wept a Human Tear in Global Perspective" in Divine Suffering, draws attention to the ongoing reality of Christian suffering around the world — war, violence, persecution, and the daily reality of millions of God's faithful people who face loss of property, fractured family relationships, social exclusion, hostility, torture, and even death for their faith.²⁹

For Christians facing persecution in China, Nigeria, Iran, and North Korea, the doctrine of a God who suffers with them is not a theological luxury. It is a lifeline. An impassible God may decree their rescue or their martyrdom according to His sovereign plan, but He does not feel the lash on their backs. A suffering God does not merely decree — He enters into the experience. He is present in the torture chamber. He is present in the refugee camp. He is present in the unmarked grave. His heart is broken by every blow, every tear, every cry of His persecuted children.

The New Testament explicitly connects Christian suffering with participation in the sufferings of Christ. Paul writes in Colossians 1:24, "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church." And in Philippians 3:10, he speaks of "the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death." As the Schmutzer volume makes clear, if we allow suffering love to be one of the divine perfections manifest in God the Son, then the suffering of the persecuted church is not just fellowship with Jesus the human pioneer of faith — it is fellowship with Jesus the Lord, God the Son who loved us and gave Himself for us.³⁰

This has transformative power. The persecuted believer who clings to a suffering God is not alone. The God who asks her to endure has first endured Himself. The Lamb who was slain (Revelation 5:6) now stands beside the throne — scarred, but victorious. He does not ask His followers to go where He has never been. He leads the way through suffering, and He promises that on the other side is glory.

The Practice of Lament as Theodicy

We have already touched on the lament tradition in the Psalms, but I want to return to it now and develop its significance as a practice — not just a literary genre. Lament is not merely something that ancient Israelites did. It is something that Christians are called to do today. And it is, I believe, one of the most important and most neglected practices in the contemporary church.

As Sloane argues, the tradition of classical theism has often struggled to know what to do with lament. Calvin's Psalms commentary is a case in point. For Calvin, much of the lament in the Psalms was little more than evidence of inadequate faith — even from such Old Testament greats as David. If Calvin's picture of God is right — a God who has decreed all things from eternity and who is utterly unaffected by creaturely events — then lament can only be a sign of failure, a refusal to accept God's sovereign will with the passive submission it demands.³¹

But if God is genuinely affected by human suffering — if He listens with His heart and not just His omniscience — then lament takes on a completely different character. It is not a failure of faith. It is an expression of faith. It is the bold, honest, trusting cry of a child who knows that her Father cares enough to hear her pain. Lament presupposes that God responds to prayer and acts because of our prayers. It presupposes that our cries are not lost in the void but are received by a God who is moved by them.³²

Furthermore, lament addresses one of the deepest problems generated by suffering: the apparent absence and silence of God. When we suffer, God often feels far away. The heavens seem like brass. Our prayers seem to bounce off the ceiling. Where is God? Why is He silent? The practice of lament gives us a way to voice that anguish — to cry out to God about God's own apparent absence — without abandoning faith. And the remarkable thing is that lament, when practiced faithfully, often leads to renewed encounter with the very God who seemed absent. As Walter Brueggemann has argued, God accepts the groans of His children, takes them into His own person, and speaks them back to His hurting people.³³

There is something deeply significant in this. The God who suffers with us also weeps through us. The Holy Spirit, as Paul tells us in Romans 8:26, "intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." When we lament, we are not lamenting alone. The Spirit of God is lamenting with us — groaning with the groaning creation, carrying our inexpressible pain into the heart of the Father. This is Trinitarian suffering in action: the Son who endured the cross, the Spirit who groans within us, and the Father who receives those groans and responds with compassion. Lament, far from being a sign of weak faith, is one of the most deeply theological and deeply relational acts a Christian can perform.³⁴

The Suffering God and the Meaning of Suffering

One of the most sensitive pastoral questions surrounding theodicy is the question of meaning. Does suffering have meaning? And if so, what kind of meaning?

There are dangerous errors on both sides of this question. On one side, there is the error of saying that all suffering has a clear, identifiable purpose — that God specifically ordained each instance of suffering for a particular reason that we can discover if we look hard enough. This view can be cruel. It tells the grieving mother that her child's death was "God's plan," which can make God sound like a monster. It tells the abuse victim that her suffering was "for a purpose," which can be used to justify and perpetuate evil.

On the other side, there is the error of saying that suffering has no meaning whatsoever — that it is random, chaotic, and ultimately absurd. This view can be despairing. If suffering is truly meaningless, then the universe is indifferent to our pain, and we are left to face the darkness alone.

A biblical theodicy rooted in divine passibility charts a course between these two errors. It says: not all suffering has been specifically planned by God for a particular purpose. Some suffering is genuinely pointless in the sense that it was not part of God's original intention for the world. The world is broken. Evil is real. And some of the pain we experience is simply the result of living in a fallen world under the shadow of sin and death.

But — and this is the crucial "but" — God is able to invest suffering with meaning after the fact, through His redemptive action. God is not the author of all suffering, but He is the Redeemer of all suffering. He takes what evil intends for destruction and, through His sovereign love, brings something new and good out of it. This is the message of Romans 8:28 — "And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose."³⁵

Notice: Paul does not say that all things are good. He does not say that God caused all things. He says that God works all things together for good. God takes the raw material of our suffering — including pointless, unjust, horrific suffering — and weaves it into a larger story of redemption. He does not do this by pretending the suffering was good all along. He does it by being powerful enough and loving enough to bring good out of evil.

And here is where divine passibility makes all the difference. An impassible God who works all things together for good does so from a position of emotional detachment. He runs the machine, pulling levers and arranging outcomes, but He is not personally affected by the suffering He is weaving into His plan. A passible God who works all things together for good does so from a position of emotional engagement. He grieves the suffering even as He redeems it. He does not pretend it was not terrible. He weeps over it — and then He transforms it.

This is how the Scriptures themselves present God's redemptive work. God does not orchestrate evil with detached efficiency. He overcomes evil with passionate love. The cross is the proof. The worst evil in the history of the universe — the murder of the Son of God — was transformed by God's power into the greatest good the universe has ever known: the salvation of the world. But God did not accomplish this transformation by remaining emotionally uninvolved. He accomplished it by pouring out His own lifeblood. He entered the evil. He bore the evil. He defeated the evil. And it cost Him everything.

The God Who Comforts: Paraclete Theology and the Ministry of Presence

The New Testament does not leave us with the cross alone. It also gives us the Holy Spirit — the Comforter, the Paraclete. The Greek word paraklētos (παράκλητος), which Jesus uses to describe the Spirit in John 14–16, means "one called alongside" — an advocate, a helper, a companion who stands with you in your hour of need.³⁶

Paul develops this theme beautifully in 2 Corinthians 1:3–7:

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too." (ESV)

Notice the language here. God is called "the Father of mercies" — a title that identifies Him with the compassionate God of the Old Testament who is defined by His raham, His "womb-love." He is called the "God of all comfort" — paraklēsis (παράκλησις), the same root as paraklētos. God is the one who comes alongside us in our suffering. He does not shout encouragement from the sidelines. He enters the arena and stands beside us.³⁷

And then Paul adds a remarkable further dimension: the comfort we receive from God overflows through us to others. Those who have been comforted by God become agents of God's comfort to the suffering around them. The church is called to be a community of comforters — a community of people who have experienced God's presence in their own suffering and who therefore know how to be present with others in theirs.

Ingrid Faro captures this vision powerfully in her contribution to Divine Suffering. She argues that the church is called to be a "paraclete" community — a community of people who come alongside the broken, just as the Spirit comes alongside us. Every human being has some brokenness. We are not called to come alongside people to point out their poverty but to help them recognize their value. God so loves each person that He sent Himself — sent His Son — and now sends us, the healed and comforted, to heal and comfort others.³⁸

This is not a secondary implication of divine passibility. It is a central one. If God genuinely suffers with His creatures, then the church — as the body of Christ — is called to do the same. We are called to weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15), to bear one another's burdens (Galatians 6:2), to come alongside the afflicted and the broken and offer not just correct theology but genuine human presence and compassion. An impassible God can still command this of His people, of course. But a passible God models it. He does not merely command compassion — He embodies it. And we are called to imitate Him (Ephesians 5:1).

The Eschatological Hope: God Will Wipe Away Every Tear

We arrive now at the climax of our biblical theodicy — the eschatological hope. For the ultimate answer to suffering is not found in the past (though the cross is decisive) or in the present (though God's presence is comforting). It is found in the future — in the promise that one day, God will bring all suffering to an end.

Revelation 21:3–4 is one of the most breathtaking passages in all of Scripture:

"And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.'" (ESV)

I want to walk through this passage slowly, because every phrase is loaded with emotional and theological significance.

First: "The dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them." The Greek verb skēnoō (σκηνόω) echoes John 1:14, where we are told that the Word "became flesh and dwelt [literally, 'tabernacled'] among us." The eschaton — the final future — is a return and fulfillment of what began in the incarnation. God comes to be with His people. Not to observe them from above. Not to manage them from a distance. But to live with them, face to face, in unmediated personal fellowship. This is the language of intimacy, of presence, of relationship. An impassible God can decree such presence. But a passible God desires it — and that desire has been burning in God's heart since the moment Adam and Eve hid from Him in the garden.

Second: "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes." Stop and picture this. The eternal, almighty, sovereign Creator of galaxies and atoms — bending down to the face of a weeping child and gently, tenderly wiping the tears from her eyes. This is not the action of a dispassionate administrator closing a file. This is the action of a Father who has wept those tears Himself. He knows what those tears feel like. He has shared them. And now, at last, He will end them — not with a decree from a distant throne, but with the intimate, personal, physical gesture of a loving parent comforting a child.³⁹

Third: "Death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore." The four enemies are named — death, mourning, crying, pain — and each one is abolished. These are not merely inconveniences that a well-organized universe should minimize. They are abominations. They are the consequences of sin and the fall. They are the things that have broken God's heart throughout the ages. And now, at last, they are destroyed. Not explained. Not justified. Not rationalized. Destroyed.

Fourth: "The former things have passed away." The old order — the order characterized by suffering, evil, injustice, and death — is gone. A new creation has dawned. And in this new creation, there is no more gap between God and His people, no more barrier of sin, no more sting of death. Only the unmediated presence of the God who has loved, grieved, wept, and suffered alongside His creatures from the very beginning — now finally, at last, rejoicing with them in unending joy.

This eschatological vision is the capstone of biblical theodicy. It does not answer every philosophical question about why God permits evil. But it answers the most important pastoral question: Does the story end well? Is there hope? Will suffering have the last word? And the answer, thundering from the throne of God, is: No. No, suffering will not have the last word. Love will. Joy will. God will. And the God who speaks that final word is not a God who observed our suffering from a safe distance. He is a God who entered it, bore it, wept through it, and finally — gloriously, decisively, eternally — ended it.

Comparing the Two Messages

I want to close the main body of this chapter by doing something simple but, I hope, powerful. I want to place the impassibilist and passibilist messages side by side and let the reader judge which one sounds more like the God of the Bible — and more like good news.

The impassibilist message to the sufferer says: "God's plan is perfect. Your suffering serves a greater purpose. God is sovereign, and nothing happens outside of His will. He is not disturbed by your pain, because He sees the whole picture and knows that it all works out in the end. Trust in His plan."

The passibilist message to the sufferer says: "God's plan is perfect, and He is heartbroken by your suffering. Nothing happens outside His will, and your pain grieves Him. He sees the whole picture, and He weeps with you in this moment. He is working to bring redemption out of your suffering, and one day He will personally wipe every tear from your eyes. You are not alone. God is with you. He feels what you feel. And He will not rest until your tears are turned to joy."

Both messages may contain truth. But I believe only the second one captures the full truth of the biblical God. And only the second one sounds like good news.

Notice that the passibilist message does not sacrifice anything that the impassibilist message affirms. It still affirms God's sovereignty, His perfect plan, His omniscience, and His ultimate triumph. It simply adds to those affirmations the truth that the impassibilist cannot say: God is emotionally engaged with your suffering. He hurts with you. Your pain is His pain. And that is not a weakness. It is the greatest possible expression of the greatest possible love.

The Fellow-Sufferer Who Saves: Nicholas Wolterstorff's Testimony

I want to conclude with a testimony — not a philosophical argument, but a personal witness — that captures the heart of everything this chapter has been saying.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, the distinguished philosopher from Yale University, lost his twenty-five-year-old son Eric in a mountain-climbing accident. In the aftermath of that devastating loss, Wolterstorff wrote a slender, aching book called Lament for a Son. It is one of the most honest and most beautiful pieces of theological writing I have ever read.⁴⁰

Wolterstorff found comfort not in philosophical theodicies — not in arguments about the greater good, not in explanations about free will, not in assurances that Eric's death served some hidden purpose. He found comfort in the conviction that God is a fellow-sufferer. He writes of God: "God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers." And then he adds one of the most haunting and beautiful lines in modern theology: "It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live."⁴¹

Read that again. No one could see His sorrow and live. The glory of God, on this reading, is not merely His power or His majesty or His blazing holiness. It is also His grief — a grief so deep, so vast, so overwhelming in its compassion that a mortal human being could not look upon it and survive. The sorrow of God is itself a glory — a terrible, beautiful, unbearable glory that reveals the infinite depth of His love.

Wolterstorff's testimony is not a philosophical argument. But it is, I believe, a window into the heart of God. The God of the Bible is not a God of undisturbed bliss who watches human suffering with serene indifference. He is a God who has lost a Son. He is a God who knows what it feels like to watch the one He loves most die in agony. He is a God who has wept, and grieved, and ached with a depth of sorrow that would destroy us if we could see it fully.

And He is a God who has promised that the tears will end. Not because suffering is an illusion. Not because pain does not matter. But because He is powerful enough to defeat evil and loving enough to stay with us until He does.

This is the God who enters our pain. This is the God who weeps with us, who bears our suffering, and who promises to make all things new. This is the God of biblical theodicy. And I believe — with all my heart — that this is the God who is actually there.

Conclusion: A Person, Not an Argument

We began this chapter by saying that the biblical response to evil is not a philosophical argument but a Person. We have now traced that Person through the sweep of Scripture — from the Exodus to the prophets, from the Psalms to the Gospels, from the cross to the throne room of Revelation. And at every point, the same portrait has emerged: a God who hears, who sees, who knows, who comes down, who weeps, who bleeds, who dies, who rises, who comforts, and who promises to make all things new.

This chapter has not provided a complete theodicy. There are questions about the origin of evil, the permission of suffering, and the hiddenness of God that deserve — and have received — extensive treatment elsewhere. But what I have tried to show is that the biblical approach to theodicy is fundamentally different from the philosophical approach. The philosophical approach seeks to explain why God allows evil. The biblical approach reveals who God is in the midst of evil. And the God it reveals is not impassible.

The God of the Bible is a God who sees the affliction of His people and comes down to deliver them. He is a God who weeps over His rebellious children and pleads with them to return. He is a God who inspired a hymnal in which a third of the songs are cries of raw, unfiltered pain — because He wanted His people to know that He listens with His heart. He is a God who came in the flesh and wept at the tomb of His friend. He is a God who hung on a cross and cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — experiencing from the inside the utter desolation of abandonment and death. And He is a God who has promised that one day He will personally, tenderly, lovingly wipe every tear from every eye.

As we noted in our companion book Beyond the Grave, the God whose love extends beyond death — the God who offers hope even to those who have passed from this world — is the same God whose compassion reaches into every corner of human suffering in this life. His love does not stop at the grave, and it does not stop at the limits of our understanding. It reaches further, deeper, wider, and higher than anything we can imagine (Ephesians 3:18–19).

The question is not whether God has an answer to suffering. The question is whether that answer is cold logic or warm presence. Whether it is a philosophical diagram or a nail-scarred hand. Whether the God behind the answer is unmoved by our tears — or whether He is wiping them away with His own fingers.

I believe the Bible is clear. The God who enters our pain is the God who is actually there. And knowing this does not eliminate the mystery of suffering. But it transforms the mystery from an unanswerable accusation into a trusting lament — a cry that rises not into the void, but into the heart of a God who hears, who cares, who weeps, and who will one day make everything right.

That is the good news of the suffering God. And it is, I believe, the best news in the world.

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