Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

by Timothy J. Keller

Luther regarded Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, my God—why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46) as “the greatest words in all of Scripture.”104 Luther knew personally about what he called Anfectungen, a word that means the “assaults” that the world, the flesh, and the devil make on human beings through the evils and suffering of life. For Luther “Anfectung is . . . a state of hopelessness and helplessness having strong affinities with the concept of Angst [or dread].”105 But in these words of dereliction from the cross, Luther saw a deep paradox. Christ suffered Godforsakenness in his human nature; he knew Anfectungen in infinite degrees, beyond anything any other human being will ever experience. Here, then, is what the New Testament letter to the Hebrews means when it exhorts us to approach Jesus for mercy and grace “in our time of need” because he is able “to sympathize with our weaknesses . . . having been in every respect tested as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:14–15 NRSV). Indeed, Luther saw that “in Christ, the God-forsaken sinner has a Savior who has taken on himself the full depths of human estrangement from God—and overcome it.”106