                        OUT OF CONTEXT? 
                       by Charles Shelton

    John 3:16 -- "For God so loved the world that he gave his only
begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish,
but have everlasting life." 

    Over the years of my life I'm close to 37 now, which I HATE to
realize, I have had quite a few friends and relatives die, some
after much pain and suffering.  In times of suffering and death,
especially when seemingly good, innocent people are involved, some
of us may wonder (I know I often have) how God's love can be seen
in the situation.  "If God is love, why did he allow my child to 
die?"  "If God loves me, why must I suffer this constant pain?" 
Some also wonder about God's love when they think of the starving
multitudes in Third World nations.  Why does he allow such
suffering?  How can he claim to love someone and then sit by and
watch them excruciating life-long pain, especially when he has the
ability to stop that pain?

    To be honest, I am myself puzzled concerning the reasons behind
much of the apparent evil and suffering that I see or hear of in
this world.  And some of the proposed solutions to the puzzle that
I have heard sound pretty shallow, and I imagine especially so to
the one faced with an actual situation of suffering.

    But I think that sometimes what aggravates the problem, making
it seem even worse than it already is, might be called an attempt
to "read" God's love out of context.  Living in a culture that's
completely wrapped up in the concerns of this life, legitimate as
those concerns are, we can easily lose the "eternal perspective." 
We tend to see things only within the context of this life, 
forgetting that God's love in Christ is an eternal love,  something
that will find its greatest fulfillment on the other side of this
life, in the "life to come."

    The Apostle Paul is aware of the eternal perspective when, in
I Corinthians 15, he speaks of the importance of faith in Christ's
resurrection.  In verse 18 he says that if there is no
resurrection, then those who are dead in Christ have perished,
which is the tragic view of death and suffering from the
perspective of this life alone.  He continues, "If it's only in
this life that we have hope in Christ, then we are the most
miserable of all men."  If this life is our only evidence of God's
love, then we ARE in pretty bad shape.  "But now Christ has risen
from the dead, and he's only the first, for ... in Christ all shall 
be made alive" (vv. 20,22).  Thus, we are helped to refrain from
drawing hasty conclusions out of context, for when all of this
world's words have been spoken, we know that God has yet another
word.  On that word we wait, trusting that it will put everything
into context.  The atoning death of Christ on the cross ("For God
so loved the world that...") has given us this larger context.


    Surely, the eternal perspective should not be used as a cop-out
from our responsibility to be concerned with removing or reducing
suffering whenever and wherever we can, and of making the world a
better place for all to live in.  But it can help us to understand,
when this life is unavoidably difficult, that suffering is never
the last word for those who live in the context of God's love.