Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

by Timothy J. Keller

Religions create communities around shared worship, annual observances and festivals, and with calls for deep relationship grounded in sacred texts. They create rites of passage for births, coming-of-age, marriages, and deaths that not only tie members of the community to one another but also to believers in past centuries, and thus the past itself. Secularism cannot produce any of these things and has therefore not forged the kind of tight communities that can comfort and console people during times of grief.

Community among persons is forged only when there is something more important than one’s own interests to which all share a higher allegiance.

Harvard professor Michael Sandel in Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? shows that there are at least three different, conflicting theories of justice vying for dominance in our society. Each theory depends on divergent beliefs about human nature and the meaning of human life, all of which rest on belief about the nature of things that can’t be proven.

This intuition—that we are not just a concatenation of matter and chemicals but also a soul—is, according to Shweder, one of the most widespread convictions of human beings in the world today and through the ages.

Victor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who survived three years in the Nazi death camps, observed how some of his fellow prisoners were able to endure the horror and pass through it while others could not. The difference came down to what Frankl called meaning. The problem is that contemporary people think life is all about finding happiness. We decide what conditions will make us happy and then we work to bring those conditions about. 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.

A celebrated book by Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree, examines the shock and response of parents who discover that the child born to them is not like them—but instead is deaf, a dwarf, has Down’s syndrome, is autistic, or is chronically ill or disabled in some way.

The very day after they learned that their first child was blind and retarded, Sara said to David, “I don’t know why I am saying this, but I feel very strongly that we need to have Jamie baptized.” This impulse came as a surprise to them because neither had gone to church in years. And they still resisted much of religious doctrine, but, Sara explained, “I think I was acknowledging that Jamie had a soul.” This was a crucial move for the parents to make. To love and care for their son, they had to know he was truly human. But if he consisted only of a body, that was a hard case to make. He lacked most of the capacities that we think of as making us human. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum lists the kinds of “capabilities” that in the secular view define someone who is human and therefore has rights. She includes: the use of imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation (“having the social bases of self-respect”), play, and control over one’s environment.

As Susan Jacoby and others suggest, the main response of the secular person to evil and suffering is not to find some meaning in it, nor to prepare to triumph over it in some future life, but to make the world better, to slowly but surely eliminate suffering right here. But the reason for all the emphasis on the here and now of this world is that secularism has no other happiness to offer. If you can’t find it here, there really is no hope for you.

In the secular worldview, all happiness and meaning must be found in this lifetime and world.

But perhaps suffering’s main challenge to secular cultures is that it reveals the thinness of the World Story they give their adherents. As we have observed, every culture must give its people a story, an overarching narrative, about what human life is all about.

Alexis de Tocqueville said, even in the 1830s, that one of the “novel features” of America was its individualism. The American, he wrote, “exists only in himself and for himself alone.”

But our interests in this book are narrower. Many express alarm over what “expanded self”—a self that says “I [have] to create my own happiness, to build my strength, to be the engine of my momentum”146—means for social cohesion. However, we are concerned about what it means for suffering.

Suffering is the result of our turn away from God, and therefore it was the way through which God himself in Jesus Christ came and rescued us for himself. And now it is how we suffer that comprises one of the main ways we become great and Christ-like, holy and happy, and a crucial way we show the world the love and glory of our Savior.

The “problem of evil” is well known. If you believe in a God who is all-powerful and sovereign over the world and at the same time is also perfectly good and just, then the existence of evil and suffering poses a problem. The classic statement of it was given by David Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. “Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”152 This has also been called the argument against God from evil, or just the argument from evil.

British philosopher John Mackie, in his oft reprinted article “Evil and Omnipotence,” wrote: “It can be shown, not merely that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another.”154 But things began to change with the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s book God, Freedom, and Evil in 1974, along with his more technical and rigorously argued book The Nature of Necessity the same year.155 In these works, Plantinga argues that “the existence of evil is not logically incompatible (even in the broadly logical sense) with the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good God.”

The distinction between a theodicy and a defense was made by Plantinga in God, Freedom, and Evil. The word theodicy was coined by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, meaning literally a justification of God’s ways to human beings.

The soul-making theodicy helpfully forces us to examine our assumptions. Is the highest good that we become comfortable and trouble-free or that we become spiritually and morally great?

So the unfairness and difficulty of life in the world is a means by which we grow into something more than behaviorally conditioned animals. However, the soul-making theodicy suffers from some glaring weaknesses. First, pain and evil do not appear in any way to be distributed according to soul-making need. Many people with bad souls get very little of the adversity they apparently need, and many with great souls get an amount that seems to go far beyond what is necessary for spiritual growth. Also, this theodicy does not speak to or account for the suffering of little children or infants who die in pain, or even for the suffering of animals.

The second and perhaps most prominent of these explanations is the free will theodicy. This has a long and ancient history going back to St. Augustine.

Is it really true that God could not create free agents capable of love without making them also capable of evil? The view that he could not has been called the libertarian understanding of free will. It says that God cannot lead us to do the right thing without violating our free will, and so evil is inevitable for free agents.

In the past few decades, therefore, most Christian thinkers and philosophers have turned away from the very project of seeking full theodicies. Instead, they have increasingly (and to my mind, rightly) recommended that believers not try to formulate theodicies but rather simply mount a defense. A defense shies away from trying to tell a full story that reveals God’s purposes in decreeing or allowing evil. A defense simply seeks to prove that the argument against God from evil fails, that the skeptics have failed to make their case. A defense shows that the existence of evil does not mean God can’t or is unlikely to exist. In making a theodicy, the burden of proof is upon the believer in God. He or she must provide an account so convincing that the listener says to the believer, “Now I see why all the suffering is worth it.” But in a defense, the burden of proof is upon the skeptic.

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.

If there is an infinite God and we are finite, there would be no way for us to lay odds on such things.

As Blaise Pascal wrote, “At first a thing pleases or shocks me without my knowing the reason, and yet it shocks me for that reason which I only discover afterwards. . . . The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”

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.

I propose that there are three powerful themes of Christian teaching that can serve us in this way when it comes to the pain and suffering of life. Each one not only helps enrich our understanding of suffering but directly affects our attitudes, giving us a new frame of heart capable of facing adversity. The first set of Christian teachings that frame the heart in this way are the doctrines of creation and fall.

The Fall of humankind means that the original design of the world is broken.

When we stand back to consider the premise—that God owes us a good life—it is clearly unwarranted. If there really is an infinitely glorious God, why should the universe revolve around us rather than around him?

The second Christian doctrine that speaks so well to our hearts is that of the final judgment and the renewal of the world.

The final doctrines that serve as resources for our hearts are the doctrines of the incarnation and the atonement.

The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our own nature.

Christian teaching for centuries has been this: Jesus died on the cross in our place, taking the punishment our sins deserve, so that someday he can return to earth to end evil without destroying us all.

His death and resurrection created a people in the world who now have a unique and powerful ability to diminish the evil in their own hearts as well as a mandate to oppose and endure without flagging the evil they find in their communities and society. And it was all because the Son of God entered into human suffering to turn evil on its head and eventually end evil, sin, suffering, and death itself for good.

The Bible says that Jesus is the light of the world. If you know you are in his love, and that nothing can snatch you out of his hand, and that he is taking you to God’s house and God’s future—then he can be a light for you in dark places when all other lights go out. His love for you now—and this infallible hope for the future—are indeed a light in the darkness, by which we can find our way.

But 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.”219 Since the world was made by a good and righteous God, the fabric of the world has a moral order to it. That order is not based on power but on righteousness. Power and self-interest may appear successful in the short run, but they do not ultimately “work” in a world created by a good and just God. Therefore cruel, selfish power is not only sinful, but stupid. It brings about loneliness, emptiness, and destruction. Faithfulness, integrity, unselfish service, and love are not only right but wise, because they fit the fabric of reality. Except. While Proverbs points to the fact that, in general, hard work leads to prosperity, and laziness leads to want—it doesn’t always work that way. Job and Ecclesiastes supplement Proverbs’ understanding of the world. Our world has been created by God and therefore has a foundational moral order to it. And yet something is wrong with that order now. It is partly, t...

So Jesus is furious at evil, death, and suffering and, even though he is God, he is not mad at himself. This means that evil is the enemy of God’s good creation, and of God himself. And Jesus’ entire mission was to take evil on and end it. But, as we have seen, evil is so deeply rooted in the human heart that if Christ had come in power to destroy it everywhere he found it, he would have had to destroy us too. Instead of coming as a general at the head of an army, he went in weakness to the cross in order to pay for our sins, so that someday he will return to wipe out evil without having to judge us as well. He will be able to receive us to himself because he bore our judgment himself on Calvary.

We owe God everything, since he created us and sustains our life every moment. It is only reasonable and right that we love him more than anything else and serve him rather than our own interests and impulses. But we do not—we live for ourselves and we sin. Therefore we do not deserve a good world, a world made for our benefit.

According to the Bible, God plans our plans. Proverbs 16:9 says, “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” The author assumes that while we make our plans, they only fit into the larger plans of God.

In Acts 2:23, Peter again tells us Jesus was crucified “according to the definite plan” of God, and yet the hands that put him to death were guilty of injustice and “lawlessness.” In other words, the death of Jesus was destined to happen by God’s will—it was not possible that it would not happen. Yet no one who betrayed and put Jesus to death was forced to do it. They all freely chose what they did and were fully liable and responsible for their decisions. Jesus himself puts these truths together in one sentence: “The Son of Man will go [to his death] as it has been decreed, but woe to that man who betrays him” (Luke 22:22).

In the end, the Christian concept of God’s sovereignty is a marvelous, practical principle. No one can claim to know exactly how both of these truths fit together.229 And yet even in our own ordinary experience, we know something of how to direct people along a path without violating their free will. Good leaders do this in part—why would the infinite God not be able to do it perfectly? 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).

Kidner means that these passages of the Bible must be put alongside those that talk of God’s omnipotence, sovereignty, holiness, absolute self-sufficiency, infinity, and eternal nature. As biblical theologian Alec Motyer puts it: “The living God [is] a self-maintaining, self-sufficient reality that does not need to draw vitality from outside.”235 Put another way, God depends on no one and nothing, but everything depends on him. God does not need our love and worship. He needs nothing to complete himself, as we do. We must not look at these passages that talk of God’s emotions and grief without seeing what the rest of the Bible says; otherwise we might come up with a God as “halting . . . ever-changing, in process of growth” or needing our love.

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 4:16–17).

It is only Jesus’ suffering that makes it possible to end suffering—to judge and renew the world—without having to destroy us.

But evil is neither simply the result of flawed individuals nor merely of a single powerful being like the devil. It stems from both as well as from the effects of a corrupted created order. And ultimately we can’t see all the roots and sources of evil—it is a mystery.

Haidt points out that the three benefits of suffering seen in Greg’s life often appear in others’ lives as well. 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.”

Everyone operates out of a life story that integrates the events of life into a “coherent and vitalizing” narrative. People who have never suffered are likely to have naïve stories about life’s meaning.

According to all branches of Christian theology, the ultimate purpose of life is to glorify God. That means that the first—but perhaps hardest to grasp—purpose for our suffering is the glory of God. The words suffering and glory are linked in a surprising number of biblical passages.

Many of the most popular churches today teach that God will make you happy, healthy, and prosperous, that he is there for your personal benefit. If we tacitly accept that view of things, we may find it offensive to hear someone say that tragedies and evil can honor and glorify God. And indeed, to simply say such a thing to someone who is watching their mother or child die from cancer would be confusing and cruel.

The glory of God means what can be called his infinite beyondness.

The glory of God also means his supreme importance. The Hebrew word for “glory” is kabod, which means “weight”—literally God’s weightiness.