Phillip Yancey

Christians believe that Jesus is, as Colossians tells us, “the exact likeness of the unseen God” (1:15 TLB). If we want to know how God feels about people who are suffering—from poverty, oppression, cancer, or the COVID-19 virus—all we need do is look at Jesus’s compassionate response. God is on their side. As the scholar, Jacques Ellul reminds us, “The suffering of Jesus is in no way good news to him… No, from the biblical point of view, suffering is a horror; it is an act of ‘Satan,’ the ‘devil’s pleasure.’” When Jesus faced a personal ordeal of suffering, he reacted much like any of us would, recoiling from it and asking if there was any other way.