Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

by Timothy J. Keller

“Trauma . . . shatters belief systems and robs people of their sense of meaning. In doing so, it forces people to put the pieces back together, and often they do so by [turning to] God or some other higher principle as a unifying principle.”

So to see God as glorious is not only to admit his incomprehensibility and beyondness, and make him the thing that matters the most, but it is also to work your heart so it finds him the most pleasurable and beautiful thing you know.

“God, if He was merely my accomplice, had betrayed me. If, on the other hand, He was God, He had freed me.”

She went on to explain to us that the graven image, the idol of the title, was a God who always acted the way we thought he should. Or more to the point—he was a God who supported our plans, how we thought the world and history should go. That is a God of our own creation, a counterfeit god. Such a god is really just a projection of our own wisdom, of our own self. In that way of operating, God is our “accomplice,” someone to whom we relate as long as he is doing what we want. If he does something else, we want to “fire” him, or “unfriend him,” as we would any personal assistant or acquaintance who was insubordinate or incompetent.

So one of the purposes of suffering is to glorify God by simply treating him as the infinite, sovereign, all-wise, and yet incarnate and suffering God that he is. This glorifies God to God—the most fitting thing that can be done. And if we do what fits God and our souls, we will find, as Elisabeth Elliot argues, a rest not based on circumstances.

At the heart of their faith was a man dying for his enemies, and if you are a member of a community that speaks and sings about it—rehearses and celebrates it—constantly, then the practice of forgiving even the murderers of one’s children will not seem impossible.

“Most of us have [therefore] been formed by a culture that nourishes revenge and mocks grace,” the authors conclude, and they are right.

And that is why peace and love in the face of evil and suffering—whether shown by the Amish in Lancaster, or Stephen in Jerusalem, or Jesus himself on the cross—is one of the greatest testimonies possible to the world of the reality of God, to his glory and his grace.

But if Christianity is true—this is already happening. Don’t you see that you are already on camera? There is an unimaginable but real spiritual world out there. You are already on the air. Everything you do is done in front of billions of beings. And God sees it, too. As Joni wrote about her friend Denise, “Angels and demons stood amazed as they watched her uncomplaining and patient spirit rising as a sweet smelling savor to God.”295 No suffering is for nothing.

Happiness is a by-product of wanting something more than happiness—to be rightly related to God and our neighbor. If you seek God as the nonnegotiable good of your life, you will get happiness thrown in. If, however, you aim mainly at personal happiness, you will get neither.

Seeing and embracing God as he truly is makes us wise, for it gets us in touch with reality.

It is only if we make God’s glory primary in suffering that it will achieve our own. And yet sorrows and difficulties can do just that. We are called not to waste our sorrows but to grow through them into grace and glory.

When we are devastated by a career reversal, there is real loss and grief. But we may also come to see that the magnitude of our suffering is due to the excessive weight we put on our job status or other achievements for our own self-worth. The reversal can be a unique opportunity to invest more of our hope and meaning in God and family and others. This effectively fortifies us against being too cast down by future reversals. It also brings us new sources of joy we were not tapping before.

The implication is that these sufferers in turn become comforters to others—and on and on it goes. The church becomes a community of profound consolation, a place where you get enormous support for suffering and where people find themselves growing, through their troubles, into the persons God wants them to become.

It is looking to Jesus that enables you to function in God’s gymnasium. It takes away self-pity, as we consider what he endured for us without complaining. If he endured infinite suffering and loss for us, we should be able to endure finite grief and loss, knowing that God is working behind the hateful evil to bring out some good in our lives. If we keep our eyes “fixed” on Jesus, we will come through the pain and experience with the deeper peace that can be the result.

Because of God’s infinite majesty and wisdom, we expect to not understand all his ways. It wouldn’t make sense that everything he does would make sense. How could an infinite, beginningless being always manage our lives in a way that makes sense to us?

When troubles come, you will need God’s help to find the particular insights, consoling thoughts, and wisdom you will need to get you through.

It is one thing to believe in God but it is quite another thing to trust God. It is one thing to have an intellectual explanation for why God allows suffering; it is another thing to actually find a path through suffering so that, instead of becoming more bitter, cynical, despondent, and broken, you become more wise, grounded, humble, strong, and even content.

Why do we so often avoid a person in affliction?324 It may be as simple as the feeling of incompetence—we don’t know what to say or do. It may also be the sheer fear of being drawn into and drowning in the sufferer’s pain. Others stay away because, like Job’s friends, we need to believe that the afflicted person somehow brought this on or wasn’t wise enough to avoid it. That way we can assure ourselves that it could never happen to us. The afflicted person challenges us to admit what we would rather deny—that such severe difficulty can come upon anyone, anytime.

There is a way of using theology and theological arguments that wounds rather than heals. This is not the fault of theology and theological arguments; it is the fault of the “miserable comforter” who fastens on an inappropriate fragment of truth, or whose timing is off, or whose attitude is condescending, or whose application is insensitive, or whose true theology is couched in such culture-laden clichés that they grate rather than comfort.

Perhaps the most typical and unhelpful “help” he received was a set of nodding statements that “we know all things are for the best and we have to trust God.” John Feinberg was a professor of systematic theology in a graduate school. He already believed that. He had written whole treatises on that. But the more he heard this from people, the more guilt he felt. He wasn’t being allowed to lament or wail or cry out like David in the Psalms or Job. He was being implicitly told that if he was not already experiencing peace in his heart, knowing the wisdom and goodness of God, he was a spiritually immature man.

Mixed in with our faith in God are all sorts of competing commitments to comfort, power, pride, pleasure, and self. Our faith is largely abstract and intellectual and not very heartfelt. We may believe cognitively that we are sinners saved by God’s grace, but our hearts actually function on the premise that we are doing well because we are more decent or open-minded or hardworking or loving or sophisticated than others. We have many blemishes in our character. We are too fragile under criticism or

too harsh in giving it. We are bad listeners, or ungenerous to people we think foolish, or too impulsive, or too timid and cowardly, or too controlling, or unreliable. But we are largely blind to these things, even though they darken our own lives and harm other people. Then suffering comes along. Timidity and cowardice, selfishness and self-pity, tendencies toward bitterness and dishonesty—all of these “impurities” of soul are revealed and drawn out by trials and suffering just as a furnace draws the impurities out of unrefined metal ore. Finally we can see who we really are. Like fire working on gold, suffering can destroy some things within us and can purify and strengthen other things.

There is an almost paradoxical balance of confidence and humility in this response. Their statement combines elements that we would consider antithetical to one another. On the one hand, they express a strong belief that God not only is able to rescue them but actually will rescue them (v. 17). But then we are puzzled by their next sentence, beginning “But if not.” If they are confident in God, why would they even admit the possibility of not being delivered?

The answer is that their confidence was actually in God, not in their limited understanding of what they thought he would do. They had inner assurance that God would rescue them. However, they were not so arrogant as to be sure they were “reading God right.”

As a pastor, I have heard countless people say, “I trusted God, and I prayed so hard for X, but he never gave it to me. He let me down!” But to be more precise, their deepest faith and hope was actually set on an agenda they had devised for their lives, and God was just a means they were deploying to get to that end. At best, they were trusting in God-plus-my-plan-for-my-life. But these three men trusted in God period.

When we remember that Jesus had been living in unimaginable glory and bliss for all eternity, we realize that his entire life was, for him, like walking in a furnace.

But if you say to yourself when you get thrown into the furnace, “This is my furnace. I am not being

punished for my sins, because Jesus was thrown into that ultimate fire for me. And so if he went through that greatest fire steadfastly for me, I can go through this smaller furnace steadfastly for him. And I also know it means that if I trust in him, this furnace will only make me better.”

Rittgers says that the Lutherans, in their concern that Christians not doubt the love of Christ, minimized the legitimacy of lament. He argues that the early Reformers created a culture in which the expression of doubts or complaints was frowned upon. Christians were taught not to weep or cry but to show God their faith through unflinching, joyful acceptance of his will.

Never fear to go to God, since we have such a mediator with him, that is not only our friend, but our brother and husband. Let this keep us when we feel ourself bruised. Think. . . . “if Christ be so merciful as to not break me, I will not break myself by despair. . . .”346

This is a difficult concept for modern Western people, since we think of our feelings as almost holy, sovereign things. We either feel happy or we don’t, and, we think, we can’t force our feelings. And that is right; we must not deny or try to create feelings. But we must remember that in the Bible, the “heart” is not identical to emotions. The heart is understood as the place of your deepest commitments, trusts, and hopes. From those commitments flow our emotions, thoughts, and actions. To “rejoice” in God means to dwell on and remind ourselves of who God is, who we are, and what he has done for us. Sometimes our emotions respond and follow when we do this, and sometimes they do not. But therefore we must not define rejoicing as something that precludes feelings of grief, or doubt, weakness, and pain. Rejoicing in suffering happens within sorrow.

Because when you are not all absorbed in yourself, you can feel the sadness of the world. And therefore, what you actually have is that the joy of the Lord happens inside the sorrow. It doesn’t come after the sorrow. It doesn’t come after the uncontrollable weeping. The weeping drives you into the joy, it enhances the joy, and then the joy enables you to actually feel your grief without its sinking you. In other words, you are finally emotionally healthy.

everything is needful that he sends; nothing can be needful that he withholds. . . .

Above all, keep close to the throne of grace. If we seem to get no good by attempting to draw near him, we may be sure we shall get none by keeping away from him.362

the problem of horrendous suffering is both a great philosophical and a great personal problem. To treat it as only one or the other is inadequate.

God comes both as a gracious, personal God and as an infinite, overwhelming force—at the very same time. He is both at once.

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.

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.

God allows evil just enough space so it will defeat itself. The story of Job is a smaller version of what God is doing in your life and in the history of the world. 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.

This is the way of wisdom—to willingly, not begrudgingly, admit that God alone is God.

if we are not getting much out of going to God in prayer, we will certainly get nothing out of staying away.

Jesus is the ultimate Job, the only truly innocent sufferer. Jesus “was willing to live the life of Job to its ultimate conclusion. He was willing to die while considered by friend and foe alike to be a fool, a blasphemer, even a criminal—powerless to save himself.”

As an innocent sufferer, Job is the companion of God.”381 In other words, when you suffer without relief, when you feel absolutely alone you can know that, because he bore your sin, he will be with you. You can know you are walking the same path Jesus walked, so you are not alone—and that path is only taking you to him.

our Western secular culture is perhaps the first society that operates without any answers to the big questions. If there is no God, we are here essentially by accident, and when we die, we are only remembered for a while. Eventually, in this view, the sun will die and all that has ever been done by human beings will come to nothing. If that is the nature of things, then it is no wonder that secular books for people under stress never ask them to think about questions such as “What are we here for?”384 Instead, they advise you to not think so hard about everything but to relax and to find experiences that give you pleasure.

Christian peace comes not from thinking less but from thinking more, and more intensely, about the big issues of

For Christians: Their “bad things” will work out for good (Rom 8:28). Their “good things”—adoption into God’s family, justification in his sight, union with him—cannot be taken away (Rom 8:1). Their best things—life in heaven, new heavens and the new earth, resurrection—are yet to come (Rev 22:1ff).

Your problem is not so much that you love your career or family too much, but that you love God too little in proportion to them.

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get