Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

by Timothy J. Keller

staving off our own death is one of our favorite national pastimes.

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.

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our

you don’t really know Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.”

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 poses a responsibility and presents an opportunity. You must not waste your sorrows.

Without meaning, we die.

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.

Contemporary culture, however, does not see suffering as an opportunity or test—and certainly never as a punishment. Because sufferers are victims of the impersonal universe, sufferers are referred to experts—whether medical, psychological, social, or civil—whose job is the alleviation of the pain by the removal of as many stressors as possible.

Through various scientific techniques, the job of the experts was to lessen the pain. The life story was not addressed.

Sufferers are counseled to avoid negative thoughts and to buffer themselves with time off, exercise, and supportive relationships. All the focus is on controlling your responses.

our modern culture does not believe in unseen spiritual forces. Suffering always has a material cause and therefore it can in theory be “fixed.”

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.

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.

The Christian approach to pain and evil, with both greater room for sorrow and greater basis for hope, was a major factor in its appeal.

The Greek philosophers and especially the Stoics had tried “valiantly to relieve us of the fears linked to death, but at the cost of obliterating our individual identity.”

Christianity offered something radically more satisfying.

In short, while God’s ways are often just as opaque to us as a parent’s are to an infant, still we trust that our heavenly Father is caring for us and present with us to guide and protect in all the circumstances of life.

religions that teach heavenly bliss for the eternal soul can offer only a consolation for the life we lost, but Christianity offers a restoration of life.

Early Christian pastors did not believe there was a “one size fits all” way to comfort or equip a person to handle adversity.

It is the most liberating idea possible and it ultimately enables you to face all suffering, knowing that because of the cross, God is absolutely for you and that because of the resurrection, everything will be all right in the end.

“It is God’s nature,” wrote Luther, “to make something out of nothing; hence one who is not yet nothing, out of him God cannot make anything,”

He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.

This Messiah came to die in order to put an end to death itself. Only through weakness and suffering could sin be atoned—it was the only way to end evil without ending us.

to the observers at the foot of the cross, we—who have the teaching of the Bible and have grasped the message of the Bible—know that the way up is down. The way to power, freedom, and joy is through suffering, loss, and sorrow.

“Christians cannot suffer with Christ”—that is, they cannot imitate his patience and love under pressure—“before they have embraced the full benefits of Christ’s suffering for them” in their place.

In older times, there was a much greater humility about our ability to understand the universe.

In earlier times, when suffering occurred, just because we couldn’t think within our own mind of good reasons for it didn’t mean there couldn’t be any. We were humbler about our ability to understand the world.

If you believe that the world was made for our benefit by God, then horrendous suffering and evil will shake your understanding of life.

In ancient times, Christianity was widely recognized as having superior resources for facing evil, suffering, and death.

In modern times—though it is not as publicly discussed—it continues to have assets for sufferers arguably far more powerful than anything secular culture can offer.

The first relevant Christian belief is in a personal, wise, infinite, and therefore inscrutable God who controls the affairs of the world—and that is far more comforting than the belief that our lives are in the hands of fickle fate or random chance.

The second crucial tenet is that, in Jesus Christ, God came to earth and suffered with and for us sacrificially—and that is far more comforting than the idea that God is remote and uninvolved.

The third doctrine is that through faith in Christ’s work on the cross, we can have assurance of our salvation—that is far more comforti...

suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you.

The fourth great doctrine is that of the bodily resurrection from the dead for all who believe. This completes the spectrum of our joys and consolations.

The resurrection goes beyond the promise of an ethereal, disembodied afterlife. We get our bodies back, in a state of beauty and power that we cannot today imagine.

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.

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.

If you don’t believe in God at all, you don’t struggle with the question of why life is so unjust. It just is—deal with it.