Everyone will suffer a broken heart sooner than later in life. We have all experienced the sting of emotional pain and sorrow. Fay Weldon expressed the inevitability of sorrow quite well when she said, “there's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow”. Well maybe Miss Weldon overstated the degree of sorrow, but we can all agree that sorrow will find us sometime in this life.
Sorrow and happiness have to be understood from a Christian perspective. There is no other worldview that can make sense of pain, sorrow and the attainment of happiness in this life; it is only the Christian worldview that offers a satisfying answer.
Philosophers and men of all walks of life have struggled with the question, if God is good why do we have pain and sorrow in this life? Why does God allow men to suffer? We hear from Leo Tolstoy’s character Anna Karenina who once said, “I’m simply unhappy. If anyone is unhappy, I’m.” We can all identify with Tolstoy’s character, Anna, to some degree; for we have all tasted the same pain and sorrow expressed by Anna Karenina.
We can see this sorrow and suffering in the first book of the Bible, the book of Genesis. We have the scene set: Adam and Eve are placed in perfect surroundings. They have all their needs met by the creator Himself. They enjoy each other’s love, warmth, and friendship. They have all the food they will ever need and they don’t even have to run to the supermarket to get it. It’s all right there. They have all of creation right in their back yard and the best thing of all they are in perfect fellowship with the God of creation.
We all know the story. Both husband and wife disobeyed the Creator’s direct command not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and baam, it all starts to unravel. Their relationship with God is estranged. The perfect paradise now becomes thorns and weeds. Adam and Eve are now estranged from each other. For the first time in their lives they experience sorrow. We do see God’s mercy and grace immediately, for God makes atonement for them. He provides a covering for them. Adam and Eve did what all mankind has been doing from day one --- they tried to fix the sin problem, the sorrow problem, on their own. They sought to make a covering for their sin with fig leaves, but God would not have it. Instead of Adam and Eve running to God, they ran from Him and sought their own remedy for their sin.
If we pay attention to our lives, and the lives of others, we find out that at the core of all existence is the desire to be happy. The problem is that man has followed in the same path as Adam and Eve. The truth is that man is not happy at his core and is still trying to find his own remedy for happiness. Just like Adam and Eve, man is not running toward God, but running away from God. This running away from God is the root of all man’s pain and sorrow.
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