For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. | Romans 8:22–25
In my Easter sermon, I said that as Christians, we should cling to an irrational hope. I am not usually a person who encourages people to abandon rationale, but there comes a time when you reach the end of your own ability to make sense of the world. At that point, you have to choose either hope or despair.
If you are going to honestly put together the aspects that make up reality, you will eventually have to confront the problem of evil. The existence of pain and suffering does not just go away if you don’t look at it. It is part of this world and something that must be included in any cohesive worldview. The fact that people do suffer and that bad things do happen requires a reason. I don’t mean a purpose for suffering, but a description of where it comes from and who is responsible for it.
Once you have that, you can begin to imagine a ‘cure.’ Some will say that evil comes from individual bad people; the solution becomes removing them from society. Some will say that evil is a result of chaos; the solution becomes order. Some will say that evil is the result of wrong ideas; the solution becomes educating people in a moral way. What happens for a lot of people is that they grab on to one of these descriptions and attempt to produce the remedy. Over time, it proves to be extremely weak in the face of real brokenness. While none of these solutions are bad things, they have no real ability to ‘overcome’ the problem of evil. It leaves many in despair, feeling like the individual bad people, the chaos of the world, and the ignorance of humanity is too big to ever be dealt with. It creates what Romans 8 refers to as a ‘groanings’ – a deep desire to experience relief from the suffering of this world.
This is one of the realities that I have found in the lives of philosophers. They spend their time pondering how human beings function: how we think, act, and interact with one another. Eventually in this, they have to deal with the fact that all of their ideals get mucked up in the actual lived experience. There is something wrong with the world that does not match up to a purely rational way of imagining it. Many of them ride their worldviews to their logical conclusions and find themselves in deep despair. This is not just because they are prone to depression, but because they have found that the problem is greater than any solution that they can muster. To glimpse the depth of sin’s destruction reveals that all of our human ‘cures’ are inept. When you realize that the problem is greater than any solution that you can come up with, you need something greater than what you can rationally produce.
This is where the resurrection and the irrational hope of the gospel comes in. God doesn’t just save us through some simple plan that we can fully grasp and replicate. He miraculously takes people who are dead and makes them alive. He does this through a process where He is killed, and then comes back to life. While the mechanics of it remain entirely irrational to us, the story is easy enough to understand: God has the unhindered ability to take what is absolutely evil and make it good.
We don’t need to understand it, we just need to accept it. In accepting it, every part of our life is opened up to this same hopefulness. We can believe that God has an ultimate purpose for suffering because He has shown us that He can take the murder of Jesus and turn it into the salvation of the world. Our investment in the irrational is not unfounded, because it has already been proven. While we don’t know what God will do to blow our minds in the future, we know He will.