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Each new morn New widows howl, new orphans cry, New sorrows strike heaven on the face.
When we hear of a tragedy, there is a deep-seated psychological defense mechanism that goes to work. We think to ourselves that such things happen to other people, to poor people, or to people who do not take precautions.
Ann Patchett wrote: We are always looking to make some sort of sense out of murder in order to keep it safely at bay: I do not fit the description; I do not live in that town; I would never have gone to that place, known that person. But what happens when there is no description, no place, nobody? Where do we go to find our peace of mind?
The loss of loved ones, debilitating and fatal illnesses, personal betrayals, financial reversals, and moral failures—all of these will eventually come upon you if you live out a normal life span. No one is immune.
No amount of money, power, and planning can prevent bereavement, dire illness, relationship betrayal, financial disaster, or a host of other troubles from entering your life. Human life is fatally fragile and subject to forces beyond our power to manage. Life is tragic.
The book of Psalms provides a prayer for every possible situation in life, and so it is striking how filled it is with cries of pain and with blunt questions to God about the seeming randomness and injustice of suffering.
Things put into the furnace properly can be shaped, refined, purified, and even beautified. This is a remarkable view of suffering, that if faced and endured with faith, it can in the end only make us better, stronger, and more filled with greatness and joy. Suffering, then, actually can use evil against itself. It can thwart the destructive purposes of evil and bring light and life out of darkness and death.
Part of the genius of the Bible as a resource for sufferers is its rich, multidimensional approach. It recognizes a great diversity of forms, reasons for, and right responses to suffering.
In Jesus Christ we see that God actually experiences the pain of the fire as we do. He truly is God with us, in love and understanding, in our anguish.
Life for our ancestors was filled with far more suffering than ours is. And yet we have innumerable diaries, journals, and historical documents that reveal how they took that hardship and grief in far better stride than do we. One scholar of ancient northern European history observed how unnerving it is for modern readers to see how much more unafraid people fifteen hundred years ago were in the face of loss, violence, suffering, and death.
Many societies believe that if you honor the moral order and God or the gods, your life will go well.
As Dr. Paul Brand argues in the last chapter of his book The Gift of Pain, it is because the meaning of life in the United States is the pursuit of pleasure and personal freedom that suffering is so traumatic for Americans.
The DSM-III sought to develop more uniformity of psychiatric diagnoses. When interviewed twenty-five years later by the BBC, Spitzer admitted that, in hindsight, he believed they had wrongly labeled many normal human experiences of grief, sorrow, and anxiety as mental disorders.
In Christ we have received forgiveness, love, and adoption into the family of God. These goods are undeserved, and that frees us from the temptation to feel proud of our suffering. But also it is the present enjoyment of those inestimable goods that makes suffering bearable.
Christianity teaches that, contra fatalism, suffering is overwhelming; contra Buddhism, suffering is real; contra karma, suffering is often unfair; but contra secularism, suffering is meaningful. There is a purpose to it, and if faced rightly, it can drive us like a nail deep into the love of God and into more stability and spiritual power than you can imagine.
The Greeks had taught that the very purpose of philosophy was to help us face suffering and death. On this basis, writers such as Cyprian, Ambrose, and later Augustine made the case that Christians suffered and died better—and this was empirical, visible evidence that Christianity was “the supreme philosophy.”
Christians taught that Jesus came in a physical body and will redeem and resurrect our physical bodies. In contrast to Greek teaching, this implied that this material life is good and worth enjoying fully. We are not to loathe or detach ourselves from the pleasures and comforts of ordinary life and relationships.
Christianity offers a restoration of life. We get our bodies back—indeed, we get the bodies we never had but wished we had, and one beyond our greatest imaginings. We get our lives back—indeed, we get the life we longed for but never had. It’s all because the Christian hope is not just an ethereal disembodied existence but one in which the soul and the body are finally perfectly integrated, one in which we dance, sing, hug, work, and play. The Christian doctrine of the resurrection is, then, a reversal of death’s seeming irreversibility.
Gregory taught that while suffering in general is caused by human sin, that does not mean particular forms of suffering are always the result of specific sins. He warned against making too direct a connection between sin and suffering, since that, after all, is one of the main lessons of the book of Job. In Moralia, Gregory shows that Job’s friends insisted that his great suffering had to be punishment for some equally great wickedness. But they failed to see that suffering in the world is of many different kinds and serves “a number of purposes in the divine economy.”
God accepts only the forsaken, cures only the sick, gives sight only to the blind, restores life only to the dead, sanctifies only the sinners, gives wisdom only to the unwise. In short, He has mercy only on those who are wretched.
We must rest in the sufficiency of Christ’s sufferings for us before we can even begin to suffer like him. If we know he loves us unconditionally, despite our flaws, then we know he is present with us and working in our lives in times of pain and sorrow. And we can know that he is not merely close to us, but he is indwelling, and that since we are members of his body, he senses our sufferings as his own
In ancient times, Christianity was widely recognized as having superior resources for facing evil, suffering, and death. In modern times—though it is not as publicly discussed—it continues to have assets for sufferers arguably far more powerful than anything secular culture can offer. Those assets, however, reside in robust, distinctive Christian beliefs.
J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings: “Always after a defeat and respite, [evil] takes another shape and grows again.”150 No matter what we do, human suffering and evil
. of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines. . . . Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. . . . As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It
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The Bible teaches that God is completely in control of what happens in history and yet he exercises that control in such a way that human beings are responsible for their freely chosen actions and the results of those actions.
Look at the sins in the life of the patriarch Jacob, whose life is recounted in the book of Genesis. Jacob deceived his father and robbed his brother; as a result, he had to flee his homeland and experienced great suffering and injustice in a foreign land. Yet there he met the love of his life and had the children through which Jesus was descended. It is clear that his sin did not put him into a “plan B” for his life.
Did he not suffer consequences for his foolish behavior? Yes, he did. But God was infallibly in control, even as Jacob was completely responsible.
The sovereignty of God is mysterious but not contradictory. It means that we have great incentive to use our wisdom and our will to the best effect, knowing God holds us to it and knowing we will suffer consequences from foolishness and wickedness. On the other hand, there is an absolute promise that we cannot ultimately mess up our lives. Even our failures and troubles will be used for God’s glory and our benefit. I don’t know a more comforting assurance than that. “God performs all things for me!” cries the psalmist (Ps 57:2).
At the most practical level, we have the crucial assurance that even wickedness and tragedy, which we know was not part of God’s original design, is nonetheless being woven into a wise plan. So the promise of Romans 8, “that all things work together for good,” is an incomparable comfort to believers.
The more you love someone, the more that person’s grief and pain becomes yours. And so even in the first chapters of Genesis, we see God is suffering because of our suffering, because of the misery of the world. Here we have no abstract deity, no “divine principle,” no “rational structure behind the universe.” This is not merely the “spark of divine life in every living thing.” This is a transcendent but personal God who loves us so much that his heart is filled with pain over us.
“The Ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical treatments of the placing of one’s life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself.”
In The Lord of the Rings the effect of the One, ruling ring was to magnify the ego. So when Samwise puts on the ring, “All things around him were not dark but vague; while he himself was there in a grey hazy world, alone, like a small black solid rock.”325 Suffering can do that too; it can make you and your needs the only solid, real thing, and all other concerns vague, hazy, and unimportant.
J. R. R. Tolkien describes one of his characters in The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee, who has a similar trial of faith and comes through it. But even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength . . . and he felt through all his limbs a thrill, as if he was turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue.
The Lord of the Rings depicts evil as “both-and.” It is both an inner lack and a real power in the universe. Shippey shows that sometimes the Ring in the narrative acts as a psychic magnifier of what is twisted and wrong inside the wearer, but other times it is depicted of having a malevolent power of its own. In my view, this “both-and” fits the Bible’s view of evil as well.
