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.

As C. S. Lewis famously put it, “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.”

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (v. 18).

Things put into the furnace properly can be shaped, refined, purified, and even beautified. This is a remarkable view of suffering, that if faced and endured with faith, it can in the end only make us better, stronger, and more filled with greatness and joy. Suffering, then, actually can use evil against itself. It can thwart the destructive purposes of evil and bring light and life out of darkness and death.

Suffering can refine us rather than destroy us because God himself walks with us in the fire. But how do we actually walk with God in such times? How do we orient ourselves toward him so that suffering changes us for the better rather than for the worse?

Nothing is more important than to learn how to maintain a life of purpose in the midst of painful adversity.

As Dr. Paul Brand argues in the last chapter of his book The Gift of Pain, 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. All other cultures make the highest purpose of life something besides individual happiness and comfort. It might be moral virtue, or enlightenment, or honor, or faithfulness to the truth. Life’s ultimate meaning might be being an honorable person, or being someone whom your children and community look up to, or about furthering a great cause or movement, or of seeking heaven or enlightenment. In all these cultural narratives, suffering is an important way to come to a good end to the story. All of these “life meanings” can be achieved not only in spite of suffering but through it. In all these worldviews, then, suffering and evil do not have to triumph. If patiently, wisely, and heroically faced, suffering can actually accelerate the journey to our desired destination. It can be an important chapter in our life story and crucial stage in achieving what we most want in life. But in the strictly secular view, suffering cannot be a good chapter in your life story—only an interruption of it. It can’t take you home; it can only keep you from the things you most want in life. In short, in the secular view, suffering always wins.

As the saying goes, if you are an expert in hammers, every problem looks like a nail.

Christianity teaches that, contra fatalism, suffering is overwhelming; contra Buddhism, suffering is real; contra karma, suffering is often unfair; but contra secularism, suffering is meaningful. There is a purpose to it, and if faced rightly, it can drive us like a nail deep into the love of God and into more stability and spiritual power than you can imagine.

For the man of antiquity . . . the external world was happy and joyous, but the world’s core was deeply sad and dark. Behind the cheerful surface of the world of so-called merry antiquity there loomed “chance” and “fate.” For the Christian, the external world is dark and full of suffering, but its core is nothing other than pure bliss and delight.

Christianity sees things differently. 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.

Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.

The Lord has shown us over and over again how He never intended for us to go through this alone. He gave us Himself, and He gave us the Body of Christ. The morning after Wyatt died, two of our friends showed up without calling to look after our other two children. Our Redeemer Church community mobilized an army of prayer warriors and help warriors. Meals were sent, our families flown in from Nicaragua, Arkansas, Texas, and Arizona, people gave up their apartments for our families, rented an apartment down the block, delivered meals to our nanny in Brooklyn, planned and executed the memorial service, printed bulletins, etc. Every single last detail was taken care of, in typical Type-A New Yorker style, with precision and excellence, and all without our knowledge or consent. And so we were allowed to descend to the very depths of our grief, experience it in all its agony, and emerge on the other side. When we emerged, our community had been transformed in unity through suffering, and we were pregnant. “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Freedman was one of many who found it startling that in an increasingly secular society, where now some twenty percent of the population told pollsters they had “no religious preference,” our society turned so visibly to God and faith to communally face the tragedy. Freedman said that it all “has left behind one prickly question: where were the humanists? At a time when the percentage of Americans without religious affiliation is growing rapidly, why did the ‘nones,’ as they are colloquially known, seem so absent?” (These are Freedman’s terms for secular people who do not believe in a personal deity or the supernatural.)

There are lots of other signs that the families in Solomon’s book regularly resorted to “counter-discourses” to survive and even thrive in what would seem to be intolerable situations. The father of a son who is a dwarf is a devout Christian, and came to love his son by professing, “I believe there’s a God. I believe God doesn’t make junk.”135 Another parent of an autistic child points to her church as the biggest comfort she has. Jamie’s sister, Liza, once took two weeks off work to read him The Chronicles of Narnia, a set of children’s books by C. S. Lewis that is heavy with Christian symbolism. Even Solomon, not a religious person, said his own child was “richly and permanently human to me, possessed of a soul, and no alteration could change that.”

For reasons past our finding out, even Christ did not bring salvation and grace to us apart from infinite suffering on the cross. As he loved us enough to face the suffering with patience and courage, so we must learn to trust in him enough to do the same. And as his weakness and suffering, thus faced, led to resurrection power, so can ours.

once human beings turned from God, there were only two alternatives, either immediate destruction or a path that led to redemption through great loss, grief, and pain, not only for human beings but for God himself. There is even a hint here that the future glory will be somehow even greater for all the suffering. Nevertheless, for the present, we live in the shadows.

we should trust God because he is God and not our personal assistant or life coach. We should trust him because it is his due, he is worthy of it, not because it will get us something. If we love and obey God for his own sake, not ours, it begins to turn us into something strong and great and wise. If we don’t seek to find ourselves but to find God, we will eventually find both God and ourselves. “Aim at heaven and you get earth ‘thrown in’—aim [only] at earth and you get neither.”

If God allowed a perfect man to suffer terribly (but for an ultimate good), why should we think that something like that could never happen to us? We won’t ever suffer as badly as Jesus did, because none of us will ever be used to accomplish salvation. But something like that could happen on a much smaller scale to us.

Do you want to know who you are, your strengths and weaknesses? Do you want to be a compassionate person who skillfully helps people who are hurting? Do you want to have such a profound trust in God that you are fortified against the disappointments of life? Do you want simply to be wise about how life goes? Those are four crucial things to have—but none of them are readily achievable without suffering. There is no way to know who you really are until you are tested. There is no way to really empathize and sympathize with other suffering people unless you have suffered yourself. There is no way to really learn how to trust in God until you are drowning. But we also learn from this story that God is with us in the fire.

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.”

The hymn writer John Rippon gave this classic expression: When through the deep waters I call thee to go, The rivers of woe shall not thee overflow; For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless, And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress. When through fiery trials thy pathways shall lie, My grace, all sufficient, shall be thy supply; The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design Thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine. The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose, I will not, I will not desert to its foes; That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake, I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.

A walk is day in and day out praying; day in and day out Bible and Psalms reading; day in and day out obeying, talking to Christian friends, and going to corporate worship, committing yourself to and fully participating in the life of a church. It is rhythmic, on and on and on. To walk with God is a metaphor that symbolizes slow and steady progress.

A man who lost three sons at various times in his life wrote about grief in The View from a Hearse: I was sitting, torn by grief. Someone came and talked to me of God’s dealings, of why it happened, of hope beyond the grave. He talked constantly, he said things I knew were true. I was unmoved, except to wish he’d go away. He finally did. Another came and sat beside me. He didn’t talk. He didn’t ask leading questions. He just sat beside me for an hour or more, listened when I said something, answered briefly, prayed simply, left. I was moved. I was comforted. I hated to see him go.

My younger brother, Billy, was a gay man who had AIDS. My parents were Christians who held to the church’s historic teaching that homosexuality is a sin. When Billy took a turn for the worst and was moved into a hospice, my parents, then in their seventies, moved nearly a thousand miles, slept at nights on a pullout couch in a relative’s den, and for seven months stayed beside Billy and cared for him fourteen hours a day. They did not confront him about or even bring up their differences. They fed him sips of juice and spoonfuls of yogurt. They served his most basic needs. Eventually, he himself brought up the issues that had divided the family for many years. He was able to do so because my parents had created a climate of care in which such a frank discussion felt safe to have. We talked them through with truth and tears, and many relational and spiritual issues were resolved.

it is perhaps when we are still in unrelenting darkness that we have the greatest opportunity to defeat the forces of evil. In the darkness we have a choice that is not really there in better times. We can choose to serve God just because he is God. In the darkest moments we feel we are getting absolutely nothing out of God or out of our relationship to him. But what if then—when it does not seem to be paying or benefiting you at all—you continue to obey, pray to, and seek God, as well as continue to do your duties of love to others? If we do that—we are finally learning to love God for himself, and not for his benefits.

Because God is sovereign we are to trust him. But here Paul goes one step further. Because God is sovereign we are to thank him—we are to live thankfully because we know he is like this. We are to thank him beforehand, even as we make our requests. We are to thank him for whatever he sends to us, even if we don’t understand it.

Here we must turn to St. Augustine, the great Christian thinker who lived in the third and fourth centuries. He was profoundly aware of the problem in Greek philosophy. In fact, Paul is referring to it. The great problem is: how can you live a life of contentment? The Greek word for that was autarkeia, and that is the very word Paul uses in verse 11. He says, “I have learned it, I have got the autarkeia.” It meant to be independent of circumstances. It meant to always have this poise, this power, and not to be upset, devastated, melting down over anything.

The only love that won’t disappoint you is one that can’t change, that can’t be lost, that is not based on the ups and downs of life or of how well you live. It is something that not even death can take away from you. God’s love is the only thing like that.

“[God alone] is the place of peace that cannot be disturbed, and he will not hold himself from your love unless you withhold your love from him.”

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. C. S. Lewis, following Augustine, writes: It is probably impossible to love any human being simply “too much.” We may love him too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for the many, that constitutes the inordinacy.389 That is the final way to get the calm, the tranquility, the peace. It is to love him supremely.

On the cross Jesus got what we deserve, including this cosmic, profound pain and restlessness. He got what we deserve, 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, so we can get what he deserves. Jesus lost all of his peace so that you and I could have eternal peace. And looking at what he did and how he did it for you—that will get you through. That is what will make God lovely to you.

When adversity reveals moral failures or sinful character flaws, it means we will have to learn how to repent and seek reconciliation with God and others.

When our suffering is caused by betrayal and injustice, it is crucial to learn forgiveness. We must forgive the wrongdoers from the heart, laying aside vengefulness, if we will ever be able to pursue justice effectively.