Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

by Timothy J. Keller

The facts make clear that [this sung faith] did serve to deepen the capacity of endurance and the absorption of suffering. . . . It taught a people how to ride high in life, to look squarely in the face those facts that argue most dramatically against all hope and to use those facts as raw material out of which they fashioned a hope that the environment, with all its cruelty could not crush. . . . This . . . enabled them to reject annihilation and to affirm a terrible right to live.393 Thurman argued that the slaves believed the Christian faith and therefore knew about the new heavens and new earth, and about Judgment Day. They knew that eventually all their desires would be fulfilled and that no perpetrator of injustice was going to get away with anything—that all wrongdoing would be put down. And that was a hope that no amount of oppression could extinguish. Why? Because their hope was not in the present but in the future. Some argued that it would have been better for the slaves to put their hope in some kind of concrete political action—but hopes in our own achievements can be dashed so that hopelessness engulfs us. But hope in the New Jerusalem can never be snuffed out because it is a certainty—it is based in God’s action, not ours.