An unmoved mover. A good God—distant, sovereign, ruling from outside time, watching as history unfolds.
A Palestinian child cries out—a piercing, desperate scream—"God, help me. Allah, save me."
Silence.
The fragile life fades away, just another casualty of war, another victim of brutality, another statistic of atrocity.
Heaven seems silent, the all-seeing Almighty seemingly indifferent to the suffering of the innocent. Or perhaps this God cares but is powerless to act.
Can a sovereign truly be sovereign if powerless? Is the Almighty truly almighty?
Where is this God in the rubble, in the midst of devastation?
Where is He as the innocent perish, as evil reigns?
The conclusion seems inescapable: He is absent. He is dead.
And yet, even in the ashes of despair, there remains a potentiality of faith—fragile and barely possible.
Not a simple faith, but one born out of the deepest pain, a faith that may yet survive the horrors of Auschwitz, the barbarity of Hiroshima, and evil of genocide.
It is a faith not in an indifferent, removed deity, but in the God-man, Jesus Christ, who redefines what we mean by God.
This is not the unmoved mover, untouched by suffering, but the God who enters into it.
The God who bleeds with the bleeding, who weeps with the weeping, who identifies with the dying.
Jesus, the God-man, does not just watch human suffering from a distance—He endures it. Hanging on the cross, He cries out in His own agony, quoting the Psalms: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). The very Son of God, the one in whom “all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9), knows the full weight of abandonment, suffering as we do.
In Jesus, God does not remain a distant spectator; He steps into human history, into the darkest places of human experience. The God-man who redefines God shows us a God who suffers, who takes the horror of evil upon Himself.
This is what Jürgen Moltmann called the "crucified God"—a God who enters into suffering, not out of necessity, but out of love.
Moltmann writes, "The cross of the Son divides God from God to the deepest point of God’s existence, a dividedness in which is enclosed all the abandonment, all the godlessness, all the hatred of godliness, all the meaninglessness of human existence."
Here, God is not an indifferent ruler but a suffering, compassionate presence. In the God-man Jesus, we see a God who stands with us in our pain: “In the passion of the Son, the Father Himself suffers the loss of the Son. The grief of the Father is as important as the death of the Son.”
Jesus, in His suffering, redefines God. He shows us a God who is not unmoved but moved, not distant but present, not invulnerable but vulnerable to our suffering.
And this is where faith may still be possible—even in the aftermath of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and genocide. This is not faith in a God who prevents all suffering, but in a God who suffers with us and for us, and who promises that suffering will not have the final word.
The God-man who redefines God is in the business of the reconciliation of all things—this is the promise that runs through the cross and resurrection. The One who endured the worst of evils is also the One who will heal and restore. Despite appearances He is not absent in the rubble; He is at work in the very midst of it, making all things new.
And so, even in the darkest moments, there remains a possibility of hope—a hope that sustains faith. A faith that dares and struggles to believe that the God who suffers is the same God who will redeem, that the One who weeps with us will one day wipe every tear from our eyes (Revelation 21:4). This is faith in the crucified God, who promises that even in the face of evil, the story is not over. He is in the process of reconciling all things, bringing life from death, and hope from despair.
This is the God who redefines suffering, and through suffering, redefines what victory and ressurection look like.
- Swales 2024, a reflection after reading Wood Between the Worlds, Chapter 4 ‘God on the Gallows’
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