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Responding to the Practical Problem of Evil, or Isaiah's Third Servant Song - chapter 50

Griffith, struggling with the
vexing problem of theodicity 

One of the biggest attacks against Christianity is the problem of evil, specifically the issue of unjust suffering.  Often this objection is brought up as if they have found a chink in our armor, like the Christian has never thought about the issue.  “Oh yeah, Mr. Defender of the Faith, here’s a curve ball for you – if God is good why do bad things happen?”  The answer is, “How long do you have?”  because the Bible talks about the problem of unjust suffering page after page after page. 

Everyone has these kinds of problems.  You can hear it in the voice of my 18 month old son as he cries – “Why do bad things happen to good people!”  But the severity of unjust suffering extends from things like being forced to take a nap when you don’t want to, to sorrow and pain that most of us could never begin to comprehend. 

Let’s consider the third “Servant Song,” found in Isaiah 50.  (Read the message on the fourth song, Isaiah 53, here).  This chapter answers the problem of unjust suffering, not from an intellectual perspective, but from a practical perspective – what should we do when life seems unfair?

The Context of Isaiah 50

In Isaiah 50, there are two different servants of the Lord who are suffering on the extreme end of the spectrum of suffering.   These two servants illustrate two very different approaches to this sort of problem.  The first servant is Israel in verses 1 to 3 and the second is the Lord Jesus Christ in verses 4 to 9.  Isaiah then concludes the chapter in verses ten and eleven with some applications for us.  Now would be a good to read Isaiah 50, looking for

* two servants,
* two kinds of unjust suffering,
* two approaches to dealing with our problems.

James Tissot, The Flight of the Prisoners

In this post we’ll consider the first servant and his problem.  The first servant is the nation of Israel (and we can also think of Judah).  They went through incredible suffering of siege and captivity (Israel 722 B.C. Judah 586 B.C.).  When you think about the worst way to die, rarely does a person say a siege.  But it should be towards the top of the list.  Their food supply is cut off.  And people do crazy things when they are starving, like eating their own children (see 2 Kings 6:24-30 for a gruesome example).  When taken they are forced into slavery.  These sort of extreme sufferings form the background of verses one to three.