Where Was God?

When You Suffered Unspeakable Horrors

An insightful webpage that addresses every form of evil, tragedy and suffering

They were beasts, not men, who violated your innocence. They stripped you of your decency. They invaded your body; shaming you, humiliating you. Terror gripped you by the throat. Stark naked, bleeding, pinned like a bug on display they exposed you to the world. Relentlessly they reviled and defiled you. You longed for mercy. No one so much as lifted an eyebrow for you. To them it was a game. They had robbed you not only of every thread of clothing and respectability, but of your very humanity. You were sport, a plaything, a bit of fun before being tossed away. You existed only to be gawked at, jeered at, spat on. With bloodcurdling callousness they continued to desecrate your person with vile, inhuman, despicable acts.

Where was God in the midst of all this horror?

If those savaging you were beasts, you were a gentle, innocent dove. Within you was not a shadow of lust or bitterness or spite. You knew only how to be tender and caring. You let them do their worst, absorbing all the evil and returning kindness for hate. Your only retaliation was to want the best for those who wanted you dead. They sank their vicious fangs into you and ripped you apart.

And where was God?

No one had understood you. You had been betrayed by one who should have shielded you; abandoned by those closest to you; falsely accused by those whose duty it is to protect the innocent. Abusing their God-given authority, those revered as model citizens pronounced themselves righteous and declared you guilty. No one defended your innocence. They all turned away, or pointed the finger, or spat on you.

Just hours ago – yet it seems forever – you sparkled with purity. The transparency of your innocence gleamed like exquisite glass; a work of priceless beauty. Your every move made the sun dance. No grubby hand had ever touched your perfection. Not the tiniest speck of humanity’s grime had ever stained you. Then they arose in fury and vandalized you; crushing you, smashing you, shattering you. You were ruined. Yet in senseless rage they continued their assault, mercilessly pounding all those broken pieces to dust. Your perfection, your value, your beauty were lost forever. Once you were priceless, now trash; once cherished, now fit only to be thrown away.

Yet, as you reeled in torturous agony, you who with one breath could vaporize the planet, gasped, “Father, forgive them.”

But where was God?

Like a never-ending tornado, searing pain raged through every jangled nerve of your mutilated body. Your desirability gone, like a rose ripped apart; your priceless innocence, like crystal shattered beyond repair; your reputation, like the purest mountain stream reduced to putrid sludge, you cried in desperation to your only Hope, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Bleak silence stabbed your heart. Your pain rocketed to inconceivable levels. Abused by those you loved, deserted by those who meant everything to you, but abandoned by God? Treated by your eternal Father as if your hate-crazed torturers were innocent and you were the vilest sinner! The God who hates evil with terrifying fury, did nothing.

With agonizing slowness your torturers began to choke the remaining life from you. You thought of the God who had abandoned you to unspeakable horrors; the God who had turned his back on you; the God who had failed to give the slightest comfort as you suffered alone. Yet still you trusted his love and wisdom. He had deserted you in death and yet you committed yourself to him for all eternity. “Father, into your hands, I commit my spirit.”

They thrust a spear up you – ripping you all the way to your heart. They dragged you away, a hideous corpse. Once so fresh, now you stink. Once pristine; now polluted. Once unique; now extinct. Once so honored; now they turn from you in disgust.

Day after day, the God you had trusted left your body to rot.

Suddenly the Almighty showed his hand. Now the world would see what he had always planned. The impossible happened: you sprang to life! Tears turned to triumph; grief erupted into joy; hideous wounds transmuted into marks of honor. You again sparkled with purity.

Just moments before, you had been like the finest art vandalized beyond recognition. Then the Master Artist, tears in his eyes, lovingly labored on his ruined treasure until each stroke of the vandal became a source of new splendor. The final masterpiece is even more spectacular than ever before – so breathtaking that heaven and earth can only gaze in awe at your loveliness.

Radiant with holy glory, renewed to perfection, you rose not just to the innocence and matchless honor that had eternally been yours, but to new and even greater honor. Now you are not only the One through whom we were made, but the One through whom everyone who lets you is restored to the sinless perfection of your purity and to your honor and eternal destiny.

Oh, astounding God!

Truly, you are the Lord of the happy ending; the Master of the surprise twist to the tale, startling the universe by transforming disaster into triumph and grief into endless joy. You are the God of the unexpected; with the flick of a finger flipping meaninglessness into meaning, as effortlessly as flipping a hideous tangle of threads to reveal the most stunning tapestry on the other side. Who could have guessed that what seemed ugly chaos was but a necessary side of a work of breathtaking perfection? Oh, keep me from the stupidity of judging your work before reaching the other side! Just when everyone is sure of the inevitable outcome, you flabbergast us with your genius by bringing victory from nowhere; bliss out of pain; beauty out of filth. In the twinkling of an eye, the defeated win, the oppressed rule, the despised are honored, hopeless losers are hailed as champions.

Truly, you are the God of the impossible.

Like precious gold from rocks mercilessly thrown into intolerable heat, you tenderly draw exquisite good out of the vicious fires of senseless evil. The unveiling of your feats leaves all creation awestruck. One day all will be revealed. Suddenly, everyone who in ignorant fury has raged against you will be speechless. All who have arrogantly shaken their fists will fall on their faces, loathing themselves for their foolish accusations. Every complaining voice will be hushed, then erupt in thunderous praise, rejoicing in the stupendous power, genius and goodness of the magnificent Lord.

In you, infinite love meets infinite knowledge, and infinite intelligence meets infinite goodness. To say that makes you utterly trustworthy is like saying the universe might be big enough for me.

Oh, how much we miss when we can barely see your beauty through eyes clouded with self-pity or self-preoccupation!

You are perfection personified; adorable in every conceivable way. Everything good and beautiful has its source in you. You are beyond everything I could ever wish for. To call you warm and virtuous is to call the ocean a drop of water. You are the standard by which the loftiest human attempts at virtue are measured and found wanting. Alongside you, the most heartwarming human acts of kindness fall to the ground, suddenly seeming shallow and clouded by mixed motives.

To perfect the beautiful surprise you have planned for each of your loved ones, you cleverly conceal critical parts of what to us is a puzzle. Until the final piece clicks into place, few of us will ever guess the mind-boggling extent to which everything you do brims with tender compassion, loving power, and awesome wisdom. Everything is working towards the culmination of the spectacular surprise that only you in your boundless love, power and genius could create. May I trust your loving tenderness and breath-taking goodness right now, before the full unveiling of your plans, so that I will not be ashamed of my mistrust when the perfection of your eternal purposes finally materializes.

If beautiful works of art often look ugly in the early stage of their creation; if a house undergoing major renovations can seem a disaster zone until the work is finished; if in the midst of live-saving surgery, an injured person has more gaping wounds than before the operation, I cannot expect to appreciate the grandeur of what you are doing in my life until your work in me is complete.

Father God, how horrifically you suffered – knowing your Son’s pain as intimately as only the all-knowing Lord could know, and yet still persisting with the plan to rescue me that you and your Innocent had agreed on. You are the ultimate in passionate caring, unstoppable love and selfless compassion. There is no pain you would spare yourself, no extremes you would not go to, so that I could have your very best.

Precious Jesus, the very thought of the horrors you would suffer had sickened you with mind-numbing dread.

Divine holiness would be desecrated by filthiness. You, who had eternally known exquisite intimacy and union with the Father, would be emotionally ripped from the Father’s heart and subjected to all the wrath the Almighty had stored up against all of sinful humanity. The divine, eternal oneness would be smashed. Your whole being recoiled, wanting to flee in panic-stricken terror and revulsion.

How you longed for there to be some other way to meet humanity’s deepest needs!

But there was none. So in a spine-chilling act of sheer willpower you mustered your every speck of determination, forcing yourself to endure unthinkable agonies. You chose this because you knew that forever you would look back on your torment and exult in the knowledge that your every millisecond of agony was worth it. You knew your God would waste not a single tear but would achieve from your ordeal infinite good in so many lives. You thrilled in the certainty that your agony would end up filling your undeserving, undesirable, self-centered loved ones with immeasurable joy for all eternity.

Mighty Lord – more innocent than a baby, more powerful than a billion nuclear bombs, more aware of every consequence than the combined intellects of every being in the universe – in every way your sacrificial love is without equal. Others have suffered injustice and been overpowered, but you volunteered and refused to escape. Others did not know what they were getting into; you knew precisely what would happen. Others have been robbed of great riches, but you deliberately came down from heaven to lose more than anyone has ever lost. You delighted your haters by acting weak and vulnerable, when with a flicker of an eyelid you could have reduced them to ash. You fulfilled their joy by letting them vomit their hate over you. You let them expel on you their sadistic lust to inflict pain; filling them with glee as you let them trample you under their feet, grinding you into the dust of death.

Humanity is blighted with people who sacrifice their lives to kill and maim – even in the name of peace.

You sacrificed your life to heal and restore, risking everything to forgive those who hate you. You willingly suffered what you did not deserve so that we might not suffer what we deserve. Such is your exorbitant love that you chose physical torture, because it hurt you even more, just to see me, your loved one, doomed to the eternal consequences of my own sin.

With you, I’m completely out of my depth.

I'm a microbe overwhelmed by the Niagara of your love. As a newborn is unable to appreciate its mother’s love, so your love for me soars far beyond my comprehension. How can I adequately thank you? How can I return to you the enormity of your love? What can I give you that isn’t already yours? My love for you is no virtue. To be head-over-heels in love with you is nothing but the inevitable response to glimpsing your beauty, goodness, wisdom, love and all your other qualities that take my breath away. The most I’ve done is let you inspire me to wrench my eyes off worldly distractions long enough to begin to know you.

No one ever suffers alone. You feel the pain of every individual that has ever lived.

Even an ordinary, hardhearted, self-centered human recognizes that it affects a person profoundly to know that a loved one is hurting. A mother can be more distraught by her darling’s suffering than the child itself. The more aware we are of someone’s suffering, and the more we love that person, the more their pain hurts us. Your feelings for us, however, soar far beyond that of humanity’s most sensitive person. No human can approach the mind-boggling magnitude of your love for us, nor the intensity of your awareness of our every distress and most hidden hurt. You are inconceivable tenderness and acute awareness exploded to infinity. The result is a sensitivity way beyond my powers of imagination. You can’t help but take it personally when anyone even mildly hurts someone.

Your heart breaks even at sins that initially seem to hurt no one.

If any sin were the harmless fun we imagine it to be, it would not be sin at all, and you would approve of it. It is the very nature of sin that it ends up hurting people. Our dilemma is that we are so eager to sin that we claim almost anything short of a chain saw massacre ‘doesn’t hurt anyone.’ Sin is so terrifyingly deceptive and subtle that it sometimes takes centuries before finally manifesting itself as perhaps genetic abnormalities or environmental disasters. We are so eager to sin that we forget that the guidance you give us is always the product of your super-intelligence and selfless love for us. Follow the chain reaction for long enough, and any deviation we take from your guidance will eventually produce such a tragedy that you reel in grief over how much people will end up hurt. Even if the offender hurt only himself, that would be enough to break your heart.

Both by the infinite depth of your feelings for suffering humanity and by what you endured on the cross, all suffering falls on you. And as if the intensity of this agony were not already beyond human comprehension, the unthinkable happens – your pain doubles as people who mean everything to you have the hide to blame you for the suffering induced by anti-God acts that hurt not just them but you. As the Source of everything good, you should forever be adored by hearts overwhelmed with gratitude. You give and give and give. Yet you, who hate human suffering with a terrifying passion, end up the focus of the venom and anger of misguided people who blame the one Person who alone is truly innocent. An animal might bite the hand that feeds it, a child might lash out at its mother’s concern for its safety, someone attempting suicide might fight off his rescuer, but nothing comes close to the appalling way you are treated. No one is nearly so deserving of love, thanks and honor as you are, but is anyone more hated or resented or rejected? The One most worthy of adoration, receives the most abuse!

I don’t wish to grieve you by speaking unkindly of your loved ones – all of humanity – but it is time we faced the reality of the pain you silently bear. We are well aware that you alone have infinite knowledge and that we have nothing like your mental capacity to grapple with the facts. We recognize that we are not perfect, which means that, relative to you, we are riddled with selfishness, corrupted by evil and blinded by hypocrisy. And yet we have treacherously tried to shift the blame by accusing the one person in our lives who is pure, perfect and selfless!

You gave us the power of speech and we use it to curse you!

Everything we have ever enjoyed comes from you, and we have the hide to turn you into a dartboard, spearing your heart with insults and false accusations. Your holiness is indescribable. You are terrifyingly perfect, overwhelmingly superior, incomparably just, impeccably good, irreproachably and unapproachably moral, extravagantly compassionate. You are justice personified. You are the Source of morality; the Exalted One; the most generous Person in the universe. We are mean-spirited, defiled and in every way inferior to you. And we dare to judge our Judge! And you dare to keep offering forgiveness.

I am shattered to realize that our reason for raging against you is that you choose to rule the universe by love, rather than by tyrannical force. We resist your holy ways, gleefully exploiting for our own selfishness the freedom of choice you have privileged us with. We insist you must allow us to be selfish – sin against others – but how dare you let others sin against us! Like spoilt brats, we would blow our stack if you prevented us from indulging in our favorite sins, and yet we blast you if you treat certain other people the same way by not stopping them from engaging in their preferred sins. We don’t want you interfering in our lives, but we fill with hypocritical rage at you for not interfering in other people’s lives and stopping them when their selfishness inconveniences us. How our shameful double standards break your heart!

If you ruled with an iron fist, we would lose all choice, and all chance of gaining honor by making right decisions, but the world would be flawless. Everything would work with the sterile, mechanical precision of a divinely operated machine. Nothing would bring you shame or pain. Instead, you have entrusted us with the ability to love, and for that we need the power of choice – something that by its very nature can be used for immense good or abused for horrific evil.

You choose to be driven by love.

That, it seems to me, must be the riskiest, most painful, but most rewarding of all options. To deeply love someone means you could have everything else in the universe, and yet without that person’s love you would still be heartbroken. To love is to make oneself so vulnerable that even having unlimited power could not help.

There are obviously things that not even omnipotence can do.

It cannot, for example, produce a five-sided triangle, because to be a triangle it must have exactly three sides. Neither could omnipotence force a person to love someone, because to be genuine, love must be utterly unforced. There are innumerable possibilities open to omnipotence to try to induce love in a person. You could choose from an enormous range of deceits, threats, bribes, drugs, brainwashing, illusions or genetic programming. Each possibility, however, would not only be of questionable morality but anything it manufactured within a person would be a sham, not love. Someone of infinite power and ability could easily delude a person into imagining he is in love, or could compel someone to act as if he were in love, but the result would be fake. Even with unlimited power, there is little anyone could do to spark genuine love in a person, other than be loving and wait for a response.

We would be appalled if a man kidnapped a woman and raped and enslaved her because he claims he loves her, wants her as his wife and is convinced he can make her happy. It would be an immoral abuse of power, regardless of whether he used physical force or threats – in which case she would be conscious of the violation of her rights – or if he used drugs or hypnotism so that she is unaware that what is happening is against her will. We don’t have to be divine to understand that real love respects the desires of the beloved, no matter how much it clashes with the lover’s personal yearnings, and no matter how certain he is that the person would benefit from lifelong intimacy with him.

But rather than us spend ten seconds considering that maybe the all-knowing God is doing the right thing, we lash out at you. Nothing wounds like hate-filled curses hurled at a person by someone he loves. No one loves like you love those who rage against you, so no one hurts like you. Perfect One, what they did to you on the cross is no worse than the way they have always hated you. A mere glimpse of the pain we cause you fills my eyes with tears, but in reality my heart is as hard as ice and my insight is but a clouded pinprick. If all earth’s oceans were tears and every grain of sand an eye; if every day since creation were an eon of time in which to mourn, it would not suffice to grieve the appalling treatment you receive from those you love. We abuse your love and your patience by dishing out to you the grossest of all injustices, when our every heartbeat depends on you.

The extent to which you have been misunderstood by those who mean more to you than every galaxy in the universe must surely be the greatest of all tragedies. And yet, because of your staggering love for us, the same people who so deeply hurt you, bring you unsurpassable joy the moment they begin to change their attitude towards you.

I reel at the dangerous predicament of people too blinded by hypocritical rage over their own hurt to see the terrifying implications of the reality that they themselves have hurt people. Can’t they see that their very presence in a perfect world would ruin its perfection? No matter how morally superior they imagine themselves to be, their selfishness – just like mine – would soon begin hurting people. Don’t they know that as the Perfect Judge you must be fearsomely impartial? You love humanity so fervently that even the most minor cause of human suffering infuriates you. The time is hurtling towards this planet when they will get their wish, but they don’t understand that this is the worst thing that could ever happen to them.

You will indeed produce a perfect world by destroying every cause of suffering.

What breaks your heart is that each of your loved ones is, in fact, a cause of suffering. Each of us has lied or cheated or stolen or slandered or been selfish and by so doing we have hurt people – contributed to human suffering. Oh, mighty Judge, stay your hand just a little longer! These poor people are too focused on the sins of others to see their desperate predicament. Their only hope is if, before it is too late, they avail themselves of the spiritual transformation made possible only by you suffering in their place. I beg you, give them a little longer to want to be rid of every trace of selfishness and seek you for the only transformation that would enable them to enter a perfect world in the next life without ruining it.

Each moment you suppress your explosive yearning to remove every cause of human pain, is yet another moment in which people have the chance to yield to you before it is too late to avoid the eternal consequences. If only your loved ones understood that the very reason for them thinking ill of you – your temporary tolerance of evil – is dramatic proof of your loving goodness and mercy! Your present tolerance of sins you hate is the only reason any of us has so far avoided instant banishment to hell. (And if it can be unpleasant living in a world where both good and evil abound, how intolerable it would be in a place where only evil exists.)

The unavoidable reality is that removal of all evil from earth necessitates the eternal removal of every source of suffering that has not sought spiritual transformation through you. If some people can’t see it, I can. I willingly choose to be subjected to earthly suffering if the delay in the eradication of all evil gives billions of people more time to come to their senses before that fateful Day of Reckoning.

I dare not imagine I could endure what you endured when you sacrificed everything for sinful humanity.

Nevertheless, despite my yearning for an evil-free world, I would rather embrace significant suffering than for billions to be without another chance to avoid their fate. The very thing that exposes me to suffering – the presence of imperfect people on this planet – props open the door of salvation for multitudes. In this extremely limited and indirect sense, my exposure to suffering plays a role in people’s eternal salvation. What a staggering thought!

Present pleasures are but the pathetic shadow of the endless delights reserved for everyone who yields to your love. The eternal surprises you have for me will literally be out of this world. That makes them incomparably superior to anything I could hope for down here. Staying on a planet where evil exists makes it inevitable that life will sometimes be nearly intolerable. To use your own words, ‘In the world you will have tribulation’ (John 16:33). Here, unlike most people, I have no special loved ones. Except when I’m worshipping you – and sometimes even then – my mood swings seem to wobble from medium to mild depression, further lowering my ability to enjoy anything down here.

Nevertheless, I still crave the privilege of living behind enemy lines in a dangerous, anti-God world of pain, suffering, death and tragedy. How could I make a vast difference to people’s lives in a world that is already perfect? How could heaven’s perfections approach the exciting opportunities and challenges of living in a hostile world, where I can be used of you to totally reverse people’s eternal destinies? This dark planet is the place for daring exploits. This is where heroes are made. This is where I can win honor for you, my Lord.

Not only do you have a God-sized empathy beyond my comprehension, but you, the Innocent One, suffered on the cross for every anti-God action that has ever inflicted hurt. And there is yet another way in which all suffering finds its culmination in you. Through you, every hurting person can find meaning in their suffering.

How I love you for transforming being victimized into the most meaningful act in the universe! Let me briefly remind myself of just how meaningful and beneficial your earthly suffering was.

For you, defeat led to honor; shame led to being revered as holy; powerlessness led to the loving way to rule the universe. Your repulsive wounds healed into medals of valor. Your suffering became the reason that millions so adore you that they would give their lives for you. Becoming an object of shame catapulted you to being revered by all generations.

You became sin-sick, so that I might be healed of my every spiritual wound.

By letting yourself be treated as filth, you made it legal for me, the soiled one, to be so completely purified that now I am treated by the Holy Lord as spotlessly perfect. You sank to the depths so that I, drowning in a cesspool of my own filth, would be raised above even angels to the status of divine royalty, empowering me to rule the universe with you from the very throne of God.

Your torment split history in two, creating an entirely new spiritual era.

It terminated the Old Testament law and the spiritual distinction between Jew and non-Jew. It released the torrent of the Holy Spirit upon all humanity, sweeping over all subsequent generations, regardless of race, age, gender or social standing. Even more significantly, all divine interaction with humanity – even for all generations prior to your suffering – hinged on the certainty that you would be tortured for their sins. Your trauma gained spiritual, mental and physical benefits for all eternity for multiplied millions of people of all eras and cultures.

Not only has the mix of heaven’s inhabitants and leadership structure been transformed by what you endured, but even sub-human creation will benefit (Romans 8:19-22). And not only the physical realm, but the entire spirit world has been revolutionized by what seemed like just another vicious attack on a hapless victim. By becoming the devil’s plaything, you defeated and sealed the fate of the Evil One and each of his millions of demons.

Whether they supposed their motives to be good or unashamedly bad, millions throughout history have tried using violence to defeat evil or bring happiness. You succeeded where everyone else failed, and you did it not by violence, but by suffering violence. You became the victor by becoming the victim. You achieved the impossible, and you did it not by a sword in the hand but by a sword in the side.

Suffering humiliation and senseless violence empowered you to identify with us and to minister to our otherwise incurable needs. Similarly, through your triumph, what we have suffered at the hands of evil people or powers can become invaluable, both in gaining for us the rightful authority and ability to minister to other hurting people and by achieving for us eternal honor. Just as Father God ensured none of your tears were wasted, so enormous good can be achieved through our tears. All we need do is follow your lead in your attitude to suffering and to those who have inflicted it, and by entrusting our pain to God’s resolution, just as you did.

I wonder if I could be engrossed for all eternity, forever plumbing new depths in all that you achieved when you yielded your innocence to sadists, letting injustice crush the life out of you, as you became our scapegoat. The senseless cruelty that ended your life achieved infinitely more than the combined lifetime efforts of every human who has ever existed. Your ill-treatment by thugs had such immense meaning that through it, all meaningless suffering inflicted by anti-God forces can suddenly brim with meaning.

If you turned torment into triumph, and suffering indignities into the flight path to greatness, so can I. I can do it, because everything you did, you did for me. You died so that I could be born of God – born with divine genes so that all your achievements are now within my reach.

By becoming one of us, you proved that traumas that should destroy us will end up exalting us.

We need only let you empower us to follow your example, especially in: trusting God to bring good from the senseless acts of anti-God behavior that have hurt us forgiving those who deserve annihilation for the godless way they have treated us.

You enable us to achieve this humanly impossible level of trust and forgiveness, not merely by showing us how it is done, but through doing it for us by living inside us. You wait only for us to let you do it for us.