Question
Gramps,
Recently I have had a string of small trials that keep testing my patience and faith. At times, I have feelings that God might be punishing me for something I have done wrong or something I am not doing, but I am not sure what. Sometimes I think that during my youth, it was ingrained in me to fear God too much, and I catch myself feeling very guilty for the little mistakes I make. At times, my prayers distance me from God because I feel ashamed of my weaknesses and mistakes. Does God punish us?
Richard
Answer
Richard,
Few doctrines raise more questions than the scriptures that say we must “suffer even as [Christ]” if we do not repent (Doctrine & Covenants 19:15-20). On the one hand, God’s omnibenevolence—His perfect, fatherly love—is a bedrock tenet of Christian faith. On the other hand, scriptures declare that “wickedness never was happiness” (Alma 41:10) and describe the pain of the unrepentant in some of the most severe language in sacred scripture. Is such suffering a punishment imposed by a wrathful God, or is something deeper and more purposeful at work?
Early Christian thinkers often painted a picture of a distant, even cruel God, as Terryl and Fiona Givens, in their book The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life observed: “Theologian Peter Abelard agreed, as have countless others, that the very behavior in which God freely indulged, treating His creatures ‘in whatever way God may wish to,’ would be ‘deemed the summit of injustice among men.’” Later, the infamous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” likened God to one holding “you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, [and] abhors you.”
However, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches a different view: God is not capricious or cruel, but a loving Father to whom our joy and suffering matter deeply. The Givenses write, “God is invested in our lives and happiness, because He chooses to be a Father to us. His concern with human sin is with the pain and suffering it produces. Sympathy and sorrow, not anger and vengeance, are the emotions we must look to in order to plumb the nature of the divine response to sin.”
When the scriptures speak of God’s wrath, it is typically an expression of His justice—the needed foundation for faith. If God were not just, if He didn’t reward and punish according to predictable laws, it wouldn’t matter whether we believed in Him or were obedient—we would receive from Him arbitrarily. Thankfully, God is just and reserves His wrath for those who defy Him, and pours His mercy out liberally.
Sin, then, is not simply a broken rule. It is a condition—a spiritual illness that separates us from God’s nature of joy and love. “Sin itself is a condition we assume when we place ourselves in opposition to those moral laws that undergird the structure of existence,” the Givenses explain. “The intensity of His response to sin is commensurate with the intensity of that pain He knows sin will entail, and in which He has already chosen to share. For He is the God who weeps.”
A key doctrine in the restored gospel is that punishment for sin is primarily a natural consequence, not an external imposition. The scriptures and modern prophets teach that God does not desire for us to suffer, but they also warn that if we walk off the edge of a cliff, we must fall, and if we do not turn on the light, we must sit in darkness. Suffering for unrepentant sin is the inevitable result of our choices: Being like God is being on the path of peace and happiness; any deviation leads to suffering. This is a simple consequence. Our Heavenly Father knows this. He also knows we will fall short and sin. This is why He sent Jesus Christ. This is why Christ suffered for our sins.
Punishment, then, is not a vindictive act of God, but a result of moving contrary to the eternal laws that bring joy. The commandments are the beacon lights of greater realities that define the cosmic streams in which we swim—they “lead us to a condition of optimal joyfulness. When we choose otherwise, we are then no more than a swimmer thrashing furiously, confident of our powerful strokes, but swept along nevertheless, a captive of the prevailing tides.
Doctrine & Covenants 19:15-20 clarifies that Jesus Christ suffered for all, “that they might not suffer if they would repent.” If we reject repentance, we “must suffer even as I, which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore.” This suffering is not merely emotional or existential: it is a spiritual agony, a consuming recognition of having placed oneself outside the circle of divine love and harmony—what King Benjamin describes as “an awful view of their own guilt and abominations, which doth cause them to shrink from the presence of the Lord into a state of misery and endless torment.”
This brings us to the heart of the gospel: justice and mercy “cannot be robbed” (Alma 42:25). The demands of justice require that all debts incurred by sin be paid. Yet, the genius of God’s plan is that mercy allows another to pay the debt if they are able—and only Jesus Christ, because of His infinite Atonement, was able and willing to do so.
The suffering of Christ for the sins of the world was not just to satisfy an impersonal justice, but to create a way back—a ladder, a light switch, a path home. The Lord repeatedly invites all to use this atoning power, warning only that if we do not, “then justice has its full claim on us.”
The Church teaches, through both scripture and modern prophets, that no one is condemned simply because they are ignorant of the gospel or because of circumstances outside their control. All who have lived upon the face of the earth will be judged according to their works and the desires of their hearts. In essence, it is our individual choices and desires of our hearts that either redeem or condemn us. Everyone will have the opportunity to accept the gospel, in this life or the next, and to accept the terms of Christ’s offer.
Thus, it is not God who forces suffering for its own sake, but His refusal to nullify the law of agency. God has given all of us agency to act. Unfortunately, some are victims of others’ agency. Even this is accounted for perfectly in His plan: The innocent who suffer will be recompensed for their suffering, such that it will accrue to their good. Little children who are put to death will inherit the glory of the celestial kingdom—a recompense far greater than the suffering that they had to endure.
Does God weep at our sin and pain? The answer is a resounding yes. In the vision of Enoch (Moses 7), the Lord wept as He observed humanity’s suffering and hate: “His soul was grieved for the misery of Israel.” He is not a detached, disinterested deity, but hostage in some way to His limitless love. In the words of the Givenses, “Sympathy and sorrow, not anger and vengeance, are the emotions we must look to in order to plumb the nature of the divine response to sin.”
The divine solution is not to eliminate suffering at the cost of agency, but to redeem it—making it bearable, meaningful, and ultimately temporary within the scope of eternity. By suffering, we gain strength of character if we know how to bear it. We may also learn something of compassion … Thus, we may change our characters to be more Christlike.
We must trust, as mortals, that “all things wherewith you have been afflicted shall work together for your good, and to my name’s glory, saith the Lord” (Doctrine & Covenants 98:3). The Atonement assures that suffering—ours or Christ’s—will not be wasted, and that God, who weeps, is ever working to redeem and restore.
The teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints point to a God who both loves and honors the moral freedom of His children, who suffered Himself in the person of Christ to offer us a way out of pain, and who provides for justice and mercy in perfect harmony. To suffer for our own sins is not a punishment imposed by a capricious God, but a consequence of our own choices in refusing the healing given freely through repentance and Jesus Christ’s Atonement.
This doctrine does not trivialize pain or justify evil; instead, it invites us to trust in the process of spiritual growth, to rely on the Atonement, and to readily seek repentance. It is a clarion call not to fear God’s justice, but to embrace His mercy—a mercy that is as infinite and personal as the love of the God who weeps for us.
Gramps
