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August 8 - September 21, 2018
Human life is fatally fragile and subject to forces beyond our power to manage. Life is tragic. We all know this intuitively, and those who face the challenge of suffering and pain learn all too well that it is impossible to do so using only our own resources. We all need support if we are not to succumb to despair.
Suffering “plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.”
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.”
you don’t really know Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.”
at the heart of why people disbelieve and believe in God, of why people decline and grow in character, of how God becomes less real and more real to us—is suffering. And when we looked to the Bible to understand this deep pattern, we came to see that the great theme of the Bible itself is how God brings fullness of joy not just despite but through suffering, just as Jesus saved us not in spite of but because of what he endured on the cross.
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.
when facing unavoidable and irreducible suffering, secular people must smuggle in resources from other views of life, having recourse to ideas of karma, or Buddhism, or Greek Stoicism, or Christianity, even though their beliefs about the nature of the universe do not line up with those resources.
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.
“For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For . . . [modernity] the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique.
“in Christianity there is none of the ancient arrogance . . . none of the self-praise of the sufferer who measures the degree of his suffering against his own power to which others bear witness.” Instead of stoic endurance of high doom, “the cry of the suffering creature resounds everywhere in Christianity freely and harshly,” including from the cross itself.45 Christians are permitted—even encouraged—to express their grief with cries and questions.
Christians believe, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote famously, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”49
“The Christian doctrine of suffering asks for more than a patient tolerance of suffering. . . . The pain and suffering of life fix our spiritual vision on the central, spiritual goods of . . . the redemption of Christ.”
While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy.
Some suffering is given in order to chastise and correct a person for wrongful patterns of life (as in the case of Jonah imperiled by the storm), some suffering is given “not to correct past wrongs but to prevent future ones” (as in the case of Joseph sold into slavery), and some suffering has no purpose other than to lead a person to love God more ardently for himself alone and so discover the ultimate peace and freedom. The suffering of Job, in Gregory’s view, belonged to this last category.95 A personal God is a purposeful God, and in the Bible, it is possible to recognize different ways
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It was often assumed that one was required to look outside of the self—to nature and to God—to learn the right way to live. Modern people, however, have a “buffered self,” a self that is bounded and self-contained. Because there is no transcendent, supernatural order outside of me, it is I who determine what I am and who I will be.110 I do not need to look at anything outside myself in order to know how to live. Today the self is “master of the meanings of things for it”; indeed, now “we stake our claim as legislators of meaning.”
people have questioned the ways and justice of God in human affairs since the book of Job and earlier. But virtually no one on record had previously argued that evil made the existence of God impossible. The assertion that evil disproves God’s existence was something that could arise only if immanent frame assumptions about God were already in place.
suffering and evil disprove God’s existence only if you have a particular view of God that is already a departure from the more traditional, orthodox view. The skeptical conclusion is largely inherent in the premises. You could argue that, within the immanent frame, the game is rigged against the God of the Bible when we come to evil and suffering.
suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you.
The idea of heaven can be a consolation for suffering, a compensation for the life we have lost. But resurrection is not just consolation—it is restoration. We get it all back—the love, the loved ones, the goods, the beauties of this life—but in new, unimaginable degrees of glory and joy and strength. It is a reversal of the seeming irreversibility
natural evil offends those who believe in a God who exists for us, and confounds those who don’t believe we are all sinners needing salvation by sheer grace.
the “theodicy problem” is largely the product not of a strong belief in God and sin, but of a weaker form of belief. It is as we get larger in our own eyes, less dependent on God’s grace and revelation, and surer that we understand how the universe works and how history should go that the problem of evil becomes so intolerable.
In the last days of her physical illness, she became increasingly delirious, but remarkably, what she was quoting was Scripture. It was so embedded in her heart, that when disease had ravaged her mind, and reduced her to incoherent ramblings, what was left was the Word of God. As we buried her, my prayer was that the Lord would place His Word so deep in my heart, so that when my mind was in extremis, I would only be able to speak His words back to Him.
God gives us what we would have asked for if we knew everything that He knows.
It makes little sense to point to a state in which we are stripped of all love and everything that gives meaning in life—and tell people that they need not fear it. The secular consolation that “the dead do not suffer” seems thin in comparison to the Christian consolation of the resurrection.
To live for happiness means that you are trying to get something out of life. But when suffering comes along, it takes the conditions for happiness away, and so suffering destroys all your reason to keep living. But to “live for meaning” means not that you try to get something out of life but rather that life expects something from us. In other words, you have meaning only when there is something in life more important than your own personal freedom and happiness, something for which you are glad to sacrifice your happiness.
“Drug use,” he writes, “is a tacit admission of a forbidden truth [in Western culture.]” What is that truth? It is that “for most people happiness is beyond reach.” Human life is unavoidably hard and unhappy for the vast majority of people and always will be. In the secular worldview, all happiness and meaning must be found in this lifetime and world. To live with any hope, then, secular people must believe that we can eliminate most sources of unhappiness for the majority of people. But that is impossible. The causes of suffering are infinitely complex and impossible to eliminate.
Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death, likewise expresses his disgust with what he calls “scientific manipulators” who don’t take the misery and horror of human life seriously enough. They give the impression that “we can change the world” with this or that technology, or that we can manage pain and suffering, we can “legislate the grotesque out of it, inaugurate a ‘proper’ human condition.” This is why he feels that “in this sense, all science is ‘bourgeois,’ an affair of bureaucrats.”
one of the main teachings of the Bible is that almost no one grows into greatness or finds God without suffering, without pain coming into our lives like smelling salts to wake us up to all sorts of facts about life and our own hearts to which we were blind.
If a case comes before a judge involving a company in which the judge has an investment, she would recuse herself from the case because her objectivity could be suspect. We modern people are in the same situation. God is already questionable since our highest value is the freedom and autonomy of the individual self, and the existence of a being like God is the ultimate barrier to that. We are quick to complain about evil and suffering in the world because it aligns with our cultural biases. But we can’t recuse ourselves from hearing this case as the judge can.
If our lives do not go as we have planned, it is natural to question the wisdom of God, but our indignation is greatly magnified by an unexamined premise that God, if he exists, exists to make us happy, as we define happiness. Also, it is hard to imagine the development of virtues such as courage, humility, self-control, and faithfulness if every good deed was immediately rewarded and every bad deed immediately punished. No one would do things simply because they were right and loving to do. We merely would react instinctively to avoid pain and get pleasure.
Here we see the Achilles heel of the “logical” argument against God—the case that evil means God cannot exist. We also can understand why it has fallen on such hard times. If you have a God infinite and powerful enough for you to be angry at for allowing evil, then you must at the same time have a God infinite enough to have sufficient reasons for allowing that evil.
“only an omniscient mind could grasp the complexities of directing a world of free creatures toward . . . previsioned [good] goals. . . . Certainly many evils seem pointless and unnecessary to us—but we are simply not in a position to judge.”
The implicit but strong cultural assumption of young adults is that God owes all but the most villainous people a comfortable life. This premise, however, inevitably leads to bitter disillusionment. Life is nasty, hard, brutish, and always feels too short. The presumption of spiritual entitlement dooms its bearers to a life of confusion when things in life inevitably go wrong.
If there really is an infinitely glorious God, why should the universe revolve around us rather than around him?
Why, in light of our behavior as a human race, does God allow so much happiness? The teaching of creation and fall removes the self-pity that afflicts people with the deistic view of life. It strengthens the soul, preparing it to be unsurprised when life is hard.
when on earth, people say “no future bliss can make up” for a particular instance of suffering, “not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”204 This is an effort to convey the same idea that J. R. R. Tolkien does when he envisions a time in which “everything sad is going to come untrue.”
“What the Muslim denounces as blasphemy the Christian holds precious: God has wounds.”
Martin Luther taught that human nature is in curvatus in se, curved in on itself. We are so instinctively and profoundly self-centered that we don’t believe we are. And this curved-in-ness is a source of a vast amount of the suffering and evil we experience, from the violence and genocides in the headlines down to the reason your marriage is so painful.
Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad points out the uniqueness of the Hebrew Scriptures.218 There we read that creation was the result of one all-powerful God without a rival, who made the world not in the way a warrior wins a battle but more as an artist crafts something of wonder and beauty. As an artist, he creates for the sheer joy of it (Prov 8:27–31). And therefore the world has a pattern to it, a fabric. A fabric is a complex underlying designed order or structure.
Biblical wisdom, according to von Rad, is to “become competent with regard to the realities of life.”
Faithfulness, integrity, unselfish service, and love are not only right but wise, because they fit the fabric of reality.
It is . . . a faith that . . . has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead.
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).
It seems to me quite disastrous that the idea should have got about that Christianity is an other-worldly, unreal, idealistic kind of religion that suggests that if we are good we shall be happy. . . . On the contrary, it is fiercely and even harshly realistic, insisting that . . . there are certain eternal achievements that make even happiness look like trash.
Perhaps the best way to understand this is to put it in the following way. Dan McCartney writes: “Christ learned humanhood from his suffering (Heb 5:8). [And therefore] we learn Christhood from our suffering.”242 Just as Jesus assumed human likeness through suffering (Heb 2:18; 4:14–15), so we can grow into Christ’s likeness through it, if we face it in faith and patience. “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor
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“This . . . sin of sins, the murder of the Son . . . provides the opportunity for love to be carried to its very peak, for there is no greater love than to give one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:13).” Evil is defeated because God uses it to bring about its very opposite—courage, faithfulness, selfless sacrifice, forgiveness.
while Christianity never claims to be able to offer a full explanation of all God’s reasons behind every instance of evil and suffering—it does have a final answer to it. That answer will be given at the end of history and all who hear it and see its fulfillment will find it completely satisfying, infinitely sufficient.
there was a crucial aria, a “sad and moving solo” in which the main character turned sorrow into something beautiful. And Greg said: This is my moment to sing the aria. I don’t want to, I don’t want to have this chance, but it’s here now, and what am I going to do about it? Am I going to rise to the occasion?263
First, people who endure and get through suffering become more resilient. Once they have learned to cope, they know they can do it again and live life with less anxiety. Romans 5:3–4 sums it up: “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Second, it strengthens relationships, usually bonding the sufferer permanently into a set of deeper friendships or family ties that serve to nurture and strengthen for years. But the third benefit is perhaps the most significant—suffering “changes priorities and philosophies.”
