If you count my college dorm, I’m living in my sixth house. To some people this might not seem like many houses while to others, that number is a crazy amount of houses to live in. Either way, my family has moved around quite a bit. I can remember a time when it was especially hard to do so. When we moved from Buffalo, New York to Wilmington, North Carolina, my family felt its fair share of pain. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’m starting to see now how much we can learn from pain.
Does God feel pain? That’s a question many people ask, and it’s really hard to know for sure. To try to answer that, I first think about how man is said to be made “in God’s image”, which must imply that God feels pain, since humanity definitely feels pain. This could be wrong, since there are a few different definitions for what “image” means, so let’s look at the crucifixion for an answer instead. After Jesus died on the cross, there are many accounts of crazy nature-related events happening such as the rocks crying out, the sky darkening, the ground shaking and some ancient prophets came back to life and were seen by many people.
If we think about it, we can almost imagine it’s like God was literally shaking the forces of nature in anguish because a part of him stopped living. Besides that, we can look at Jesus himself – who was God - who suffered tremendously on the cross. The band Attalus talks about how pain connects God and humanity in their beautiful song “The Problem Of Pain”:
“The world was falling fast; I cast myself headlong
To save your rebel souls; to prove my love is strong
The problem of pain is a problem I too went through
I shouldered your hell and emptied myself for you”
So God feels pain. We’ve seen evidence of it in the Bible and we have this song to try to capture what it’s like. God probably feels pain a little differently than we do but it seems like it’s there. So what now? What does this mean? If God is an all-powerful being, it seems like he wouldn’t want or need to feel pain. At the very least, I think God would make it so he doesn’t feel any pain. However, we see in the Bible that God chooses to feel pain through the fact that he dove headfirst into the world and let us kill a part of him. This means that God suffers with us. Pain is like a bridge that connects humanity and God – it doesn’t separate the two, contrary to popular belief.
Of all the important lessons Jesus taught, one of the most important is that God is not distant. When we’re broken after a tough week, lying down, not able to sleep and just thinking about life, God feels us. When relationships we thought would always stay solid end up cracking and falling apart, God hurts with us. When we go through physical pain ranging from a paper cut to the worst kind of torture imaginable, God is right there with us.
Since God is with us through every kind of pain and hurt and suffering, we can be comfortable knowing that God’s got a close eye on whatever hurts us. Remember that whenever we suffer, it doesn’t push us away from God, it instead brings us closer to him.
