Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

by Timothy J. Keller

For years, Lewis rejected the existence of God because he believed the logical argument from evil against God worked. But eventually, he came to realize that evil and suffering were a bigger problem for him as an atheist than as a believer in God. He concluded that the awareness of moral evil in the world was actually an argument for the existence of God, not against it. Lewis describes his awakening to this point in Mere Christianity,192 but he gives a longer exposition in his essay De Futilitate. Lewis explains that “there is, to be sure, one glaringly obvious ground for denying that any moral purpose at all is operative in the universe: namely, the actual course of events in all its wasteful cruelty and apparent indifference, or hostility, to life.”193 So the existence of cruelty and evil in the world was the reason Lewis could not believe there was a good God, a “moral purpose” operating behind the universe.

So this leaves us with a question. What if evil and suffering in the world actually make the existence of God more likely? What if our awareness of absolute evil is a clue that we know unavoidably at some level within ourselves that God actually does exist?

He was arguing that morality was relative—different to every culture and person. In conclusion, he said, “I think morals are totally subjective: therefore God is unnecessary.” Dilley heard herself responding: “But, if morals are totally subjective, then you can’t say Hitler was wrong. You can’t say there’s anything unjust about letting babies starve. And you can’t condemn evil.

When people ask me what drove me out the doors of the church and then what brought me back, my answer to both questions is the same. I left the church in part because I was mad at God about human suffering and injustice. And I came back to church because of that same struggle. I realized that I couldn’t even talk about justice without standing inside of a theistic framework. In a naturalistic worldview, a parentless orphan in the slums of Nairobi can only be explained in terms of survival of the fittest. We’re all just animals slumming it in a godless world, fighting for space and resources. The idea of justice doesn’t really mean anything. To talk about justice, you have to talk about objective morality, and to talk about objective morality, you have to talk about God.200

In summary, the problem of senseless suffering does not go away if you abandon belief in God. If there is no God, why have a sense of outrage and horror when unjust suffering occurs to any group of people? Violence, suffering, and death are completely natural phenomena. On what basis do you say cruelty is wrong?

King and Nietzsche agreed on one point. If there is no God or higher divine law, then violence is perfectly natural. So abandoning belief in God doesn’t help with the problem of suffering at all and, as we will see, it removes many resources for facing it.

Hope comes not in the solution to the problem but in focusing on Christ, who facilitates the change.

When one of my sons was around eight years old, he began to exert his will and resist his parents’ directions. One time I told him to do something and he said, “Dad, I’ll obey you and do this—but only if first you explain to me why I should do it.” I responded something like this: “If you obey me only because it makes sense to you, then that’s not obedience, it’s just agreement. The problem is that you are too young to understand most of the reasons why I want you do to this. Do it because you are eight and I’m thirty-eight—because you are a child and I’m an adult and your father.”

How much more, then, should we trust God even though we do not understand him. It is not just that the differential in wisdom between him and us is infinitely greater than the difference between a child and a parent. It is not just that he is sovereign and all-powerful. We should also trust him because he earned our trust on the cross. So we can trust him even when he hasn’t shown us yet the reason why. He is good for it.

“Andi, you need to force-feed yourself the Scriptures. Through them the Holy Spirit can speak to places in your heart where human words just can’t reach.”

The point was that Feinberg would have to learn to rejoice more in God and his love, but the evil was evil and would always be painful.

He was petrified that he would have to face the death of one or more of his immediate family and that it would be more than he could bear. But, his father said, he was not facing it now, and so he shouldn’t expect to feel strong enough now for something that had not yet happened. “God never promised to give you tomorrow’s grace for today. He only promised today’s grace for today, and that’s all you need” (Matt 6:34). Another penny dropped.

It is one of the many excellences of the book that Job is brought to contentment without ever knowing all the facts of his case. . . . [T]he test would work only if Job did not know what it was for. God thrusts Job into an experience of dereliction to make it possible for Job to enter into a life of naked faith, to learn to love God for himself alone. God does not seem to give this privilege to many people, for they pay a terrible price of suffering for their discoveries. But part of the discovery is to see the suffering itself as one of God’s most precious gifts. To withhold the full story from Job, even after the test was over, keeps him walking by faith, not by sight. He does not say in the end, “Now I see it all.” He never sees it all. He sees God (Job 42:5). Perhaps it is better if God never tells any of us the whole of our life-story.373

But it is because we don’t fully love God just for his own sake that we are subject to such great ups and downs depending on how things go in our lives. We do not find our hearts fully satisfied with God unless other things are also going well, and therefore we are without sufficient roots, blown and beaten by the winds of changing circumstances. But to grow into a true “free lover” of God, who has the depth of joy unknown to the mercenary, conditional religious observer—we must ordinarily go through a stripping. We must feel that to obey God will bring us no benefits at all. It is at that point that seeking, praying to, and obeying God begin to change us.

But God allows Satan only enough space to accomplish the very opposite of what Satan had wanted.

God allows evil just enough space so it will defeat itself.

God has now mapped out a plan for history that includes evil as part of it. This confuses and angers us, but then a book like Job pulls back the veil for just an instant and shows us that God will allow evil only to the degree that it brings about the very opposite of what it intends.