1 of 1

HE WAS DESPISED and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity. … Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
—Isaiah 53:3-5 (NRSV)

THERE IS GOOD biblical evidence that God not only suffered in Christ, but that God in Christ suffers with his people still. … It is wonderful that we may share in Christ's sufferings; it is more wonderful still that he shares in ours.
—John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ

Download a four-session Bible study course called Perspectives on Suffering.

HAS NOT GOD in Jesus Christ become radically open to the life of the world and become vulnerable to human sin and suffering? In the light of the gospel story, God is not impassible, but passionate, suffering love. If God is love, then receptivity, vulnerability, and suffering are not strange to God's being. God is free to love and thus free to experience the suffering of the world.
—Daniel L. Migliore, The Power of God

UNLESS GOD is on the balance and throws his weight as a counterbalance, we shall sink to the bottom of the scale. If it is not true that God died for us, but only a man died, we are lost. But if God's death and God lie dead in the opposite scale, then his side goes down and we go upward like a light or empty pan. But he could not have sat in the pan unless he became a man like us, so that it could be said: God dead, God's passion, God's blood, God's death.
—Martin Luther, quoted in the Formula of Concord

IT IS A GOOD THING to learn early that God and suffering are not opposites but rather one and the same thing and necessarily so; for me, the idea that God himself suffers is far and away the most convincing piece of Christian doctrine.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

GOD not only participates in our suffering, but also makes our suffering into his own and takes death into his life.
—Jurgen Moltmann, in Theology Today

A THEOLOGY that embraces the idea that God cannot suffer has to answer the question: Can God love? Abraham Heschel rightly said that the essence of Hebraic prophetic faith is that God takes the people of his covenantal love so seriously that he suffers for their actions.
—Dennis Ngien, in Christianity Today

GRANT, O LORD, that in your wounds I may find my safety, in your stripes my cure, in your pain my peace, in your Cross my victory, in your Resurrection my triumph, and a crown of righteousness in the glories of your eternal kingdom.
—Jeremy Taylor, The Westminster Collection of Christian Prayers

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

More Bible Study Helps
Suffering Current Issues Bible Study Course This five-session course will help you and your group answer questions like: What is the nature of suffering? How can we learn and grow through tragedy? Where is God in all this? Read more.	A Community of the Broken A young organization models what it might mean to be the church in a suffering world. by Christopher L. Heuertz Several years ago, I made my first trip to Freetown, Sierra Leone, just as that country's civil war was winding down. One of my first stops was a camp for the war wounded. Read more.

 1 of 1