Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

by Timothy J. Keller

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.

How could a good God, a just God, a loving God, allow such misery, depravity, pain, and anguish?

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.”10 Believers understand many doctrinal truths in the mind, but those truths seldom make the journey down into the heart except through disappointment, failure, and loss. As a man who seemed about to lose both his career and his family once said to me, “I always knew, in principle, that ‘Jesus is all you need’ to get through. But you don’t really know Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.”