Where is God in suffering?

We envision God as the source of life, light, and goodness as is claimed in the Bible, and when we encounter death, darkness, and despair, our logical conclusion is that God has turned his back on us. This only adds to our misery.

Yet when we go back to scripture, we see time after time God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit moved and bowed in the face of suffering. I do not understand how this works, but this is a pattern in scripture.

God the Father
Nobody reads Ezekiel; it's a weird book tucked in an obscure part of the Old Testament, but it gives the most amazing description of the heart of God.

In chapter 16, God explains his relationship to his special people, the Israelites, with a story about an abandoned newborn he found in a field and saves. She grows up but is still fragile and in need of care and he cleans her, marries her, takes care of her, lavishing her with jewelry, clothes, and fine dining. She becomes famous across the world for her beauty.

But she begins to trust in this beauty, and the love story begins to unravel. She starts sleeping around eventually not taking money for it, but giving money for it. She takes the riches she had been given and uses them to make idols. Then, she sacrifices her children to them. What wickedness, ugliness, and profanity!

Far from abandoning her in her sin, God takes it in the chin like a rejected father and cuckold husband. Then he allows her to reap what she has sown. And there is verse after verse of his howling pain and anger, descriptions of the results of sin. Israel suffers the consequences of her betrayal, and God the Father suffers right there with her.

God the Son
In Jesus, the infinite God squeezed himself into human flesh and lived among us. That's what we celebrate at Christmas.

God physically enters our world and experiences it from first to last breath--experiences sunburns and mosquito bites, making new friends, losing old friends, family members dying, new births, weddings, physical exhaustion, hunger, and longing. Jesus lived in a minority group in a mighty empire, was born as a refugee on the run from a tyrant, was a brilliant adolescent apprenticed to become a blue collar carpenter. But more remarkably, this Friday we remember his ultimate suffering on the cross, a cruel, publically humiliating way to die slowly.

In the life of Jesus, we can be sure that not only does the great God the Father feel the fallout of sin in mysterious, supernatural ways, but God the Son fully understands our human sufferings.

Isaiah prophesied this about Jesus' sufferings (chapter 53):
...He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain
    and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.

In life, Jesus experienced what we humans experience. In death, out of love, he took on the compounded, sin-upon-sin of all people and it "pierced" him, it "crushed" him. Far from abandoning us to the suffering caused by sin, Jesus in his crucifixion faced the ultimate suffering, the collective wages of sin.

God the Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit, promised to us our comforter and guide also knows pain and grief.

In this next passage, we see the love of Jesus in action, our sin, and a grieved Holy Spirit:

...In all their troubles,
    he was troubled, too.
He didn’t send someone else to help them.
    He did it himself, in person.
Out of his own love and pity
    he redeemed them.
He rescued them and carried them along
    for a long, long time.
But they turned on him;
    they grieved his Holy Spirit.
Isaiah 63 (The Message)

While the Holy Spirit may be generally grieved by sin, we are told he is personally grieved as he accompanies us in our suffering:
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.
Romans 8:26

This interceding is a emotional pleading that the Spirit does with us as we pray in our weakness, in our need, in our desperation.

So what?
We expect God to be far from suffering in general, from our suffering in particular. But scripture does not read that way. Instead, we have a God intimately acquainted with suffering in all ways. Whatever we may feel in our pain, God is not indifferent to our suffering, and we are not alone. His back is not turned, his face is upon us and he weeps with us.