At the age of 15, Katie Broadfoot was groomed by her ‘boyfriend’. He became her pimp, and forced her to sell sex on the streets. When she finally escaped his clutches, she was picked up by another pimp. She suffered violence and abuse both from the pimps and the ‘punters’; she was regularly arrested by the police (who would not arrest the pimps). By age 17, she had 39 convictions for soliciting and loitering. She eventually escaped at age 26, after hearing about the violent death of her cousin, who was also in forced prostitution, and had been murdered by a ‘punter’.
It can be easy to look the other way and pretend that stories like Katie’s do not exist (or are not our problem to think about), but the Bible never shies away from the grim reality of life. It describes human nature both at its best and its horrific worst; it tells stories of real people who experienced intense suffering of pretty much every description; that includes graphic tales of women who survived sexual violence, and some who did not.
In Judges, we read a story about a woman who was raped by the men at Gibeah; they continued to assault her until dawn the following day. The story continues: “When her master got up in the morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way, there lay his concubine, fallen in the doorway of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, “Get up; let’s go.” But there was no answer.” (Judges 19:27-28).
When we read about horrendous stories like Katie’s, or the rape at Gibeah we might want to ask, why did God let this happen? Why doesn’t he intervene more quickly?
Those questions are not new; Jewish and Christian believers have been asking them for thousands of years. There are no easy answers; I suspect that is partly the point. A philosopher can ponder the problem of evil, but a theory will never be the same as a reality. There are some questions which only God can answer, in his time, and in his way.
Christians so often mean so well; we throw around promises like Romans 8:28 as if they provided a remedy for all ills. We say that God knows what He’s doing - and no doubt, He does - but that doesn’t magic away someone’s pain. We believe in an interventionist God, and yet we also believe in a God who chooses not to intervene sometimes.
We often feel we want the answer ‘why’, when what we really need is the answer ‘where’. When we are in the dark night of the soul, perhaps what we truly need is not an explanation, but someone to draw alongside us, to cradle us in their arms and tell us that we’re not alone.
The God who sees
“Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.”
Abram agreed to what Sarai said. So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.” (Genesis 16:1-4)
The theologian Elaine Storkey tells a story about a student of hers who was conducting a research project on the lives of marginalised women in Ethiopia. The group had not had much exposure to Christianity, so she asked someone to read some Bible stories which prominently feature women to them, to see whether they could identify with the woman in the stories. They almost unanimously said they identified with the character Hagar.
God had promised Abram that he would become a father of many nations, but when his wife Sarai had not borne Abram any children, and both were past the age for bearing children, she told him to sleep with her servant-girl Hagar instead. It would be a slight anachronism to talk in terms of consent in this context, but in such a world, Hagar would essentially have had no choice in the matter. But when Hagar became pregnant (again, a matter on which she would have no choice), Sarai came to mistreat her, to the point where Hagar ran away (Genesis 16:6).
Hagar might have wondered where God was in the midst of what she was going through. But an Angel of the Lord found her, and promised that her descendants would increase so much that they would be impossible to count. We read in Genesis 16:11:
“The angel of the Lord also said to her: ‘You are now pregnant and you will give birth to a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery.’”
The name Ishmael means, ‘God hears’. God had heard Hagar’s cry. Even when it felt like she was alone, there was still one who knew what she was going through. I find Hagar’s response to the Angel deeply moving: “She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the One who sees me.’”
Jesus tells us that not a hair will drop from our head without our heavenly Father knowing about it, just as not one sparrow drops to the ground without God seeing. We read in Psalm 56:8: “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.”
Sexual exploitation often happens behind closed doors; in the shadows, where the perpetrators believe they will be undetected. The victims (normally women) are often isolated, feeling like they are alone and there is no one who can help; some might even feel that there is no one who even cares.
But God hears. And God sees.
The God who acts
“But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted; you consider their grief and take it in hand. The victims commit themselves to you; you are the helper of the fatherless...You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed, so that mere earthly mortals will never again strike terror.” (Psalm 10:14, 17-18)
It is one thing to say that God sees us in our pain; it is quite another to say that he will do something about it. A God who hears people’s cries and simply lets life unfold would be no comfort at all.
In the story of Hagar, when Hagar was later sent away by Abraham into the desert, after they had used all their water, she “went off and sat down about a bowshot away, for she thought, ‘I cannot watch the boy die’. And as she sat there, she began to sob.” But God heard their cries, opened her eyes, and showed her a well filled with water, and promised that he would turn her son Ishamel into a great nation. He did not abandon her or her son: instead, we read, “God was with the boy as he grew up” (Genesis 21:20).
We need to be careful here not to overstate what God will do; the Bible makes it clear that he has delegated some of his authority here on earth to humans, as in the Creation Mandate: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). God has designed our world in such a way that He does not - and will not - always intervene whenever things go wrong: that is part of what it means for us to have genuine responsibility for our society. Our governments are called to promote good and to restrain evil, and as individuals, we are to work for justice, mercy and righteousness;
But there are times when He does; God is on the side of the poor and the downtrodden, not the powerful and the corrupt. He is the God who “has brought down the mighty from their seat, but has exalted the humble and meek. He has filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich empty away.” (Luke 1:52-53). Psalm 10 describes Him as “the helper of the fatherless”, and talks about him “defending the fatherless and the oppressed.” He is on the side of the victim in the brothel, not on the side of the perpetrators.
We believe in a God who is sovereign, and who uses human beings to accomplish his purposes, whether they know it or not. Sometimes He might intervene directly; on other occasions he might work through us.
And even if he does not act now, we know that one day in the future, he will. There will be a day on which wrongs will be put right, on which evil will be judged and on which those who weep will be comforted. There will come a day on which God will say: ‘No more’.
The Bible has very strong words to say about the reality of judgement for those who have done evil, including those who have committed sexual sins or abused other image-bearers: they will not escape justice in the future for what they have done, even if they are able to evade it in the present. Let every perpetrator of abuse beware: you can hide away your sins, con human courts, flee from governments, but nothing escapes the eye of the God who judges all things.
And even if it seems impossible to imagine in the here and now, the Bible holds out a promise of hope for those who are suffering, grounded in the reality of Jesus’ resurrection. In Revelation 21, we read about how God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying, or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” There will be no more abuse, no more trauma, and the agony and tears that now feel so inescapable, will one day be washed away like raindrops in a mighty river.
In his ‘Chronicles of Narnia’, C.S. Lewis paints a picture of what it is like when the King returns. The land of Narnia has been frozen under the bitter cold of winter by the evil White Witch, but there is a prophecy that one day, the great lion Aslan will come back and put the world to rights: “Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight. At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more. When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death. And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.”
God sometimes intervenes now, and sometimes he doesn’t. But one day, he will say: no more. No more evil. No more abuse. No more pain. Instead, peace, comfort, and restoration, however far away that might seem now.
The God who suffers
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.” (Psalm 22:1-2)
Believers in God have often felt abandoned, neglected or forsaken. To read the Psalms is to be confronted by the raw reality of human experience. They express a confidence in God’s future, but they implore him to bring it forward into the present. The theologian Tom Wright explains: “The Psalms call us to pray and sing at the intersections of the times--of our time and God's time, of the then, and the now, and the not yet.”
For the woman who has been trafficked, and is being sexually abused, words like Psalm 22 may express familiar sentiments: “My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.” God will one day act, but He isn’t doing so now. God may care about me, but He’s not delivering me from my pain.
But the remarkable reality of the Christian story is not simply that God is on the side of the powerless, but that he actually identifies with them. For the words of Psalm 22 are words which God himself - in the person of Jesus - once prayed, from an old rugged cross on Golgotha’s Hill. Christians do not believe in a God who lives on high, removed and detached from the pain of human experience; they believe in a God who got his hands dirty, who came down into all the muck and brokenness of a hurting and damaged world.
The pastor and theologian John Stott once wrote: “I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness.”
Jesus knew what it was to feel alone, abandoned by friends and family. He knew what it was to be mocked by his captors, as the crowds, the Jewish authorities, and even those being crucified next to him hurled abuse at him. Jesus knew what it was to be treated with shame and scorn, what it meant to be beaten and whipped and exposed. And he knew what it meant to feel abandoned by God: the sky turned black, as a sign of God’s judgement. He did not wash his hands of human evil; he let evil do its worst.
Where is Jesus in the brothel? You can see him in every woman, man or child who is broken and bears the scars of physical abuse. You can see him in each one who has been told they are worthless, that they have no dignity and no value but thirty pieces of silver. You can see him in each and every one whose body has been handed over for the corrupt and powerful to make sport of. In every victim, abandoned, abused and alone.
Their sorrow became his sorrow; their story became his story.
Where is Jesus? He is there, identifying with each and every victim, still bearing the scars from the day He himself was the sacrificial lamb.