“Remember the battle!” Job 41:8

INTRODUCTION

Why does God allow suffering? What does it all mean? The only way we may answer such questions is by coming to know the One who created us and by understanding something of His purpose in doing so. But a knowledge of God and His purpose in creation is only possible because God has spoken, so we must hear what He has said to us.

“God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high having become as much better than angels as He has inherited a more excellent name than they.” Hebrews 1:1-4

God’s word to mankind was limited until the Incarnation. Not until the Word became flesh, in Son, was the fullness of God’s nature and purpose revealed. The Son not only reveals God but also makes purification for our sins, and He has been exalted to a state, and given a name, far above the angels. Because all that exists was made through the Son, that which exists finds its meaning of existence in the Son. These truths, when understood, can help us to understand the necessity of suffering.

WHERE DOES EVIL COME FROM?

Once an ungodly person took great pleasure in telling me that the Bible says that God created evil. He was blaming God for the evil that he saw within himself. He quoted a verse in the book of Isaiah to support His accusation against God. “I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create calamity; I, the Lord, do all these things.” Isaiah 45:7 Everything God creates is good. Evil is Godlessness. The passage in Isaiah means that God takes responsibility for all that takes place in His Creation, as nothing can happen in His Creation that He has not allowed. Evil can claim no life of its own. It has no independent origin. If God had not created life, evil could not exist.

Obviously, when God created life, He also gave freedom to be. The great “I Am” has allowed us to say “I am.” Our individuality is a great wonder. We cannot explain it or understand it. I am and you are is a fact of existence. Evil is being not good, being un-Godly. Created life receives its sustenance from God its Creator. When created life separates itself from its Creator, the result is death. Evil is a state of being God-less. Evil is anti-life.

The Apostle James explains, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God;’ for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. Every good thing bestowed and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation, or shifting shadow.” James 1:13-17

Evil existed before the creation of man. When and how evil entered God’s creation, we are not told. The word of God does tell us about Satan, that very powerful fallen angel. God’s words to the king of Tyre, in Ezekiel’s prophecy, address the source of wickedness, and give us insight into Satan’s fall. “You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created, until unrighteousness was found in you.” Ezekiel 28:15

The face of evil is first seen by man in the serpent found in the Garden of Eden, the most cunning of all the wild creatures. At that time, the serpent was of a form quite different from what we now know as a snake. The words of the serpent to Eve express the spirit of Satan, “You will be like God.” Genesis 3:5 Pride is the essence of sin, putting self before all else.

Why did God allow sin to enter the Garden of Eden? Why did He not at least keep one corner of His creation sinless, particularly Adam who was designed in His image?

God did not create Adam to be a “bubble man.” Adam was created so that God’s creation would never need a bubble. How easy it would have been for God to have kept Adam and Eve in the innocence of their infancy. Instead, He gave them freedom to become, and this process involves a Great Battle between good and evil.

DISTANT DRUMS

The rumble of battle is first heard in God’s words to the serpent. “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel.” Genesis 3:15

God’s words to the woman declare the struggle and pain that would be associated with bringing forth the promised Seed into the world. The battle cry is first heard in the scream of childbirth.

These facts of our existence are not just the result of arbitrary declarations of God. They express eternal realities and truths. The physical world reflects the spiritual world. The battle between good and evil is a spiritual battle. The great Battle of creation is focused on the holy Seed of God coming into the world, the bringing forth of of Life, Eternal Life.

Revelation, chapter 12, gives a summary of what was prophesied in Genesis. There is the woman, crying out in labor and pain, giving birth to the male child. There is the dragon, who represents Satan, seeking the destruction of the child. But the child is caught up to God and to His throne. There is a heavenly war of angels, the Archangel Michael and his holy angels fighting Satan and his fallen angels. The dragon, Satan, is thrown down to earth, taking one third of the angels with him, and he persecutes the woman who gave birth to the male child. The dragon, in rage with the woman, makes war with the rest of her offspring who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus. Thus is the picture of the War behind all wars.

The seed of the woman was carried and preserved by the nation of Israel. Finally, a little over 2,000 years ago, a holy human being, the Son of God was born into this world and he was caught up to God and to His throne. Ever since Pentecost, up to this very day, Christians and Jews have been persecuted by the evil one.

The hatred for the Jewish people and the nation of Israel is the expression of the rage of Satan against the holy One of Israel. It is irrational and insane. The rage of Satan knows no reason.

THE ACCUSATION

Satan is called “the accuser of the brethren.” Revelation 12:10 He accuses mankind before Almighty God! What is his case against us?

The book of Job gives some insight into Satan’s accusation. One of Job’s friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, gives this interesting account. “Now a word was brought to me stealthily, and my ear received a whisper of it. Amid disquieting thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, dread came upon me, and trembling, and made all my bones shake. Then a spirit passed by my face; the hair of my flesh bristled up. It stood still, but I could not discern its appearance; a form was before my eyes; there was silence, then I heard a voice: ‘Can mankind be just before God? Can a man be pure before his Maker? He puts no trust even in His servants; and against His angels He charges error. How much more those who dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust.’ ” Job 4:17-19

Satan challenges God’s regard for mankind. The dialogue between God and Satan in the opening chapters of Job present the battle positions, God defending a man, and Satan degrading him, seeking his destruction.

THE NATURE OF THE BATTLE

What a strange answer God gives Job in response to all of Job’s complaints and questions. God talks to Job about two wild beasts, Behemoth and Leviathan. Of Leviathan, He says to Job, “Who can strip off his outer armor? Who can come within his double mail? Who can open the doors of his face? Around his teeth there is terror. His strong scales are his pride, Shut up as with a tight seal….Out of his nostrils smoke goes forth….a flame goes forth from his mouth….The folds of his flesh are joined together, firm on him and immovable. His heart is as hard as a stone….The sword that reaches him cannot avail….He spreads out like a threshing sledge on the mire…. Nothing on earth is like him, one made without fear. He looks on everything that is high. He is king over all the sons of pride.” Job 41:13-34

It was pride that laid Satan low. It is pride that makes us selfish, cruel, hateful and murderous, making self our idol. “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High,” says the evil one. Isaiah 14:14

God challenges Job, “Look on everyone who is proud, and humble him; and tread down the wicked where they stand. Hide them in the dust together; bind them in a hidden place. Then I will also confess to you, that your own right hand can save you.” Job 40;12-14 

God is trying to show Job the enormity of the Battle. “Lay your hand on him; remember the battle; you will not do it again!” Job 41:8

What is God’s battle strategy? He could easily use force and annihilate what He has created. But God is a giver of life, and He hasn’t created life just to destroy it. God is working from within His creation, and working specifically through mankind.

When David of Israel faced Goliath, he said, “The Battle is the Lord’s.” I Samuel 17:47 Yet it was David who was fighting the Lord’s enemy. God is working in and through a man. God is in the midst of the Battle. What honor God has given man, that He should find mankind worthy of doing His work! David knew that the Lord alone has the victory; but God realizes the victory through mankind.

VICTORY BY THE CROSS

How does God defeat evil? Evil is defeated through sacrifice, the antithesis of pride. The essence of God’s nature is self-sacrificing Love. “Who, though He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, (or held onto), but emptied Himself by taking on the form of a slave, (or servant of God), becoming “a little lower than the angels,” and by sharing in human nature. He humbled Himself, by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Philippians 2:6-8

This is God’s way of defeating evil, through the obedience of a Man. The antithesis of rebellion is obedience. “For as by one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” Romans 5:19

Instead of the spirit that says, “You shall be like God,” He emptied Himself, not holding onto His divine form, He “became like men and was born a human being.” (Amplified Bible) And as a true man, with all of our limitations, without sin, he lived a life of perfect obedience to the will of the Father.

But “He learned obedience through the things that He suffered.” Hebrews 5:8 His obedience was not an easy gliding above our human condition, like the magic of a superman, but a very real exercise of faith in the face of the degradation, darkness, and horror of human sin. Thus He suffered the effects of our sin and bore the burden of it. He was “a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Isaiah 53:3

“In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety,” (or Godly fear). Hebrews 5:7

The Amplified Bible expresses piety as  “reverence toward God….in that He shrank from the horrors of separation from the bright presence of the Father.” This reverent and devoted spirit of Jesus characterized His whole life. His prayers in the wilderness after His baptism, the many times He went up into the mountains to pray, did He not agonize with tears on those occasions, calling on Him who was able to save him from our death?

Luke 6 gives the account of His healing of a man’s withered hand in a synagogue on the Sabbath. How He felt the condemnation of those who accused Him of breaking the Sabbath. He said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good, or to do harm, to save a life or to destroy it?” But they were “filled with rage, and discussed together what they might do to Jesus.” Then Jesus “went off to the mountain to pray, and He spent the whole night in prayer to God.” It was the next day that He chose His twelve disciples, those to whom He confessed toward the end of His ministry, “You are those who have stood by me in my trials.” Luke 22:28

The death that He cried out to His Father to be delivered from was not physical death, but the death of being separated from the Life, Beauty, and Holiness of God. He grasped and held onto the perfection of God’s nature which He was realizing in flesh! Jesus was fighting for our True Life.

Jesus bore our sin not just on the cross but throughout His whole life. The one reference, in the Gospels, to Isaiah 53’s prophecy of the suffering servant is given by Matthew. It was the day that Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law. That evening, many were brought to Him who were demon-possessed and ill, and He healed them all. Matthew records it as the fulfillment of the prophecy, “He Himself took our infirmities and carried away our diseases.” Matthew 8:14-17

Jesus bore our sins up to and on the Cross. On the Cross, He literally bore our sin in His body. Not until His arrest in Gethsemane was our sin allowed to touch Him. Then came the slapping, spitting, the whip, and the nails. His agony in Gethsemane was caused not by the prospect of physical torture and physical death, but by the darkness and horror of the sin of humanity of which physical death speaks.

Thus is the Battle. What God told righteous Job that he could not do, Jesus did! Regarding Job, God told Satan, “Spare his life!” But when it came to Jesus, Satan was given no restrictions.

The death that Jesus died was like no other death. The Father allowed Him to plumb the depths of evil. The darkness that Jesus experienced on the cross was caused by our sin, not by any separation between the Father and Son. “For He has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither has He hidden His face from him, but when he cried to Him, He heard.” Psalm 22:24

Jesus’ cry from the Cross was a cry of faith in God and in Himself. It was the cry of of true man, true in all respects, the fulfillment of what God designed man to be, and the fulfillment of a life that expressed all the fullness of God. “In him all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form.” Colossians 2:9 Note the present tense. There is a Man at the right hand of the Father for all eternity!

God heard that cry as did the whole Universe. Jesus’ cry of faith from the Cross is what upholds all things. Hebrews 1:3 Everything came into being through Him; and as Creator of all things, all creation reverberated with the indestructibility of His holiness. “All things are held together in Him.” Colossians 1:17 The curse of death was made powerless in Him by the power of His indestructible Life! Hebrews 7:16

As He was dying, Jesus said, “It is finished,” having finished the work of defeating evil forever. He not only rose from out of the dead, but as He told Martha right before He raised her brother Lazarus from the dead, “I Am the Resurrection and the Life.” He was so before He ever died. His resurrection was evidence of this wonder.

God, through the Son, was giving the death blow to evil. The Cross was the decisive battle, and the victory belonged to the human race. “For since it was through a man that death came into the world, it is also through a Man that the resurrection of the dead has come. 1 Corinthians 15:21

The Cross was the deciding battle of the conquest of Life over death. The Son of Man resisted sin unto death. Through Man, God realized the victory. “It was God personally present in Christ, reconciling and restoring the world to favor with Himself, not counting up and holding against men their trespasses, but canceling them.” 2 Corinthians 5:19

The worth of Jesus, His absolute human righteousness, expressing God’s nature absolutely, fully satisfies the desire of God and atones for, covers, the sins of the whole world. The perfection of the Life of the Son justifies humanity’s existence. Satan’s accusation against mankind has been silenced forever.

CONCLUSION

God’s identification with the life of man is at the heart of the mystery of suffering. God works within the confines of His great eternal purpose that He is realizing for His creation through the human race. God, in making Himself a part of His creation through mankind, becomes the victim of our sin. In the midst of the Throne of God is a Lamb standing as if slain. Revelation 5:6 The suffering of creation expresses the suffering of its Creator.

There is a unity found in creation proceeding from the Son, through whom all was created. The battle between good and evil permeates the whole creation. Even the “tooth and claw” of animal existence in the wild is a reflection of the struggle.

But the struggle is not meaningless. “For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.” Romans 8:20-22

All suffering participates in the suffering of God. It expresses the inexorable movement of His eternal design and purpose which touches and transfigures all life. Every pang of the smallest creature is felt by God. It is all working toward the bursting forth of the New Creation, the new heaven and new earth in which righteousness dwells. 2 Peter 3:13

When a baby bursts forth from the womb, there is water and blood. When the Roman soldier pierced the side of Jesus, there came forth water and blood. Jesus is “The Beginning Of The Creation Of God.” Revelation 3:14

The pre-incarnate Son, the eternal Word, the eternal expression of the Wisdom of God, was with the Father as the heavens and earth were brought forth. “Then I was beside Him, as a master workman; and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him, rejoicing in the world, His earth, and having my delight in the sons of men.” Proverbs 8:30-31

And being found in human form, he said, “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working.” John 5:17 The Father finds perfect rest in His Son. Jesus knew this and said, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and that I do nothing of Myself; but as My Father taught Me, I speak these things. And He who sent Me is with Me. The Father has not left Me alone, for I always do those things that please Him.” John 8:28-29

God planned, designed, and purposed it to be so, that a Man would express all that He is and would accomplish all of His pleasure. Where is God in our suffering? He is Immanuel, God with us. Isaiah 7:14

CONCLUDING NOTE

If the Battle has been won, then why does war and suffering continue? First, Satan knows no peace. But more important, God is not through with this world. There are many more important events yet to take place; but that is another subject. Above all, God is most interested in the battle going on within the human heart. He invites us to enter into His Rest which is His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Hebrews 3-4 In the midst of the battles that rage without and within, we may know the Peace that He has given to mankind. “Peace I leave with you; my Peace I give to you; not as the world gives, do I give to you.” John 14:27

Rosemary E Hyslop
August 2014 – edited May 2021