Where was God?

There is a question older than the book of Job, and the twentieth century pressed it past anything its asking had borne before. In the trenches, in the camps, in the cities turned to ash, suffering came on a scale that made every easy answer obscene. Where was God. The honest believer does not rush to fill that silence, and Scripture does not rush either. The sons of Korah do not explain the horror; they fling it at heaven — wake up, why do you sleep, Lord; arise, do not reject us forever. The Bible hands the sufferer no tidy account that would tie the abyss up neatly and let God off the hook. What it offers instead is stranger and harder and, in the end, deeper. The whole creation, Paul writes, groans and travails in pain together until now, and we groan inside it, waiting for a redemption we cannot yet see. And at the center of the faith stands a cross. The God of the Bible does not stand at a safe distance and account for the dark. In Christ He came down into it, was tortured and killed inside it, and cried out from within it. He does not explain the abyss. He entered it.

Faith does not survive the century of atrocity by finding the missing reason. There is no reason that would honor the dead, and the search for one has wounded more grieving people than it ever helped. The temptation is to hand the sufferer a system — a hidden purpose, a greater good, a ledger that balances in the end — and every such system, spoken over an open grave, is a kind of violence. The God of Scripture does something else. He answers the abyss not with an argument but with a presence, and the presence is a crucified one. The cross does not tell you why the dark fell. It tells you the dark fell on Him too, that there is no forsakenness you can name into which He has not descended first. And the groaning creation is not abandoned to its groan. It travails, which is the labor of birth, not the rattle of death. So faith here is not the possession of an explanation. It is the refusal to let go of a God who suffered, and the stubborn hope that the groaning is toward something.