Hope in the Dark: Believing God Is Good When Life Is Not

by Craig Groeschel

The boy wasn’t the only one healed when Jesus drove out the evil spirit. His father was healed too. Because Jesus drove out the hopelessness that had overtaken him.

instead of finding that the questions distance you from the heart of God, you will discover something else, something much better. Honest questions, sincere doubts, and deep hurts can draw you closer to God than you’ve ever been before.

But faith isn’t about logic. Faith’s not a math problem or a language problem or even a philosophy problem; it’s a matter of the heart.

So as I’m imagining what challenges you might be enduring, you can know that I’m writing from a place of simultaneous pain and hope. Pain in the moment, and hope for the future. But sometimes the pain seems to yell, while hope only whispers. And sometimes it all leads you to doubt whether God sees your pain and responds and cares.

If you are struggling, I’m hoping that you are willing to wrestle. So many people seem to be seeking a bumper sticker God with whom life is clean, easy, and problem free and answers are clever, even punchy. But life is never clean. It’s far from easy. And it’s never problem free. That’s why I believe putting God into an easy-to-explain box is not only unwise but dangerous. To really know God, you have to wrestle through pain, struggle with honest doubts, and even live with unanswered questions. So while I won’t promise you that God is your copilot or that the Bible says it and that settles it, I will promise you this: if you wrestle with him, seek him, cling to him, God will meet you in your pain.

many of the Bible stories and teachings addressed a bunch of the questions I’d silently wondered about for years. It wasn’t as though suddenly I had found a giant flyswatter I could use to bat them all down. It was more like discovering new paths through a familiar forest. I still saw the trees—all of those bad things in the world—but now I also saw a trail leading to the clearing before me. The trees were still all around me, but they no longer stopped me from moving forward.

The truth, however, is that all of us test our beliefs every day. Every time you make a decision about how to respond to someone who is rude to you, your beliefs are front and center.

When your car breaks down on the same day that your spouse overdraws your checking account, you face a dilemma about how you’ll respond—and more important, about what the basis for your response will be. When you’re reading a news app and scan the “word bites” about impending military action against yet another aggressive country, about the latest victim of a serial killer, or about the death toll in a train accident, you’re forced to confront your own beliefs—about human nature, about life, and about God.

The more I’ve lived life and the more I’ve sought to know and understand God, the more I’m certain that doubts are essential to our maturity as believers. If we want a stronger faith, then we might be wise to allow our doubts to stand as we work through them instead of trying to chop them out of the way. Judging from what I see in Scripture, I’m convinced that God honors those seekers who sincerely look for the truth,

Can you relate to David’s pain? He’s exhausted. Worn out. Depressed. And alone. He has cried so many tears, he can’t cry any more. It’s not that he doesn’t believe in God; he absolutely does. He is a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22). David simply can’t understand why the God who has the power to change his circumstances, the one who elevated him from a simple shepherd boy to the king of a nation, won’t do it. The authors of Job, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Jeremiah all express confusion, doubt, and the pain of unbearable suffering endured by faithful believers. Even Jesus questioned his Father’s will in the garden of Gethsemane as he wrestled with accepting what he would have to suffer on the cross. And then, on the cross, he cried out in agony, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). Maybe in some strange way, God allows us to doubt him sometimes. Maybe he knows that’s one of the ways for our faith to grow stronger. One of the best ways.

Think about it. If you understood everything completely and fully, you wouldn’t need faith, would you? But without faith, it’s impossible to please God (Heb. 11:6). Why? Because faith and trust must emerge from love, not from a business relationship, a transaction, or some situation in which we have no choice. Are you willing to ask honest questions? To wrestle? And more important, are you willing to listen for God’s answer?

as much as we think we know, the reality is this: we’re not God, and we don’t know best.

As we grow to trust God, we have to recognize what I consider to be some of the fundamentals of growing in the Christian faith: Awe. Respect. Reverence. Appreciation for God being God. Acceptance of our limitations as human beings. We can’t know everything or see into other people’s hearts. We can’t know all that has come before in the history of the world. And we sure can’t see ahead to how it will all unfold. But God can. Like a master storyteller, he is crafting an epic in which he allows each of us to play a significant role. There are no minor characters or bit players in God’s story. We’re all important. He’ll never abandon us, and he’s working everything for our good. So when we’re suffering, ranting and raving about all the unfairness of life, we would do well also to remember that there’s so much more going on than we can see or understand from our limited perspective. We’re seeing only a tiny sliver of a much bigger story, perhaps only one sentence or one paragraph on just a single page.

“GOD, WHY AREN’T YOU DOING SOMETHING?” MIGHT BE THE question that cuts to the heart of our innermost doubts. Basically, we’re asking God to reconcile what we believe with what we see in front of us. It’s as if the laws of nature that we thought were true—you know, things like gravity—suddenly go away. When we suffer at this level, we seem to see apples falling off trees and floating up into the sky.

God understands your pain. And what’s more, he invites your questions. He would rather have you yell and scream at him than abandon your relationship with him in icy silence. Feel free to pour out your heart to him, as David did in Psalm 56:8: “Record my misery; list my tears on your scroll—are they not in your record?” God welcomes your anguish and even your anger, but you don’t have to stop there. After you’ve laid bare your hurts and your questions—after you’ve exhausted yourself pounding against his chest—then listen. Open your hurting heart to him, and he will speak. Because even though God is almighty and all-powerful and rules over his kingdom, he also cares deeply about you. He loves you, and he will never abandon you. In fact, it’s usually at your deepest time of need that he meets you, comforts you, and lifts you into a place where healing can finally begin. But only if you’re willing to listen.

“To some, the image of a pale body glimmering on a dark night whispers of defeat. What good is a God who does not control his Son’s suffering? But another sound can be heard: the shout of a God crying out to human beings, ‘I LOVE YOU.’ Love was compressed for all history in that lonely figure on the cross, who said that he could call down angels at any moment on a rescue mission, but chose not to—because of us. At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice. Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God’s scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.”

When people ask why bad things happen to good people, we need to realize that the worst thing happened only once. And Jesus volunteered for it.

What if honestly acknowledging your doubts, as Habakkuk did, is your first step toward building a deeper faith? What if embracing your secret questions opens the door for a maturing knowledge of God’s character?

What if drawing closer to God, developing genuine intimacy with him, requires you to bear something that feels unbearable? To hear him through an ominous utterance, to trust him in the moment of doom, to embrace his strength when you’re weak with a burden? What if it takes real pain to experience deep and abiding hope?

Often the trigger is something unexpected or even unthinkable. Sometimes several smaller but challenging events overlap, and the combined burden becomes a crushing weight that causes a person’s faith to collapse. Didn’t Christ say that his burden was light and his yoke was easy (Matt. 11:30)?

this can become a pivotal moment in your faith journey. This is when you can experience the depth of God’s grace in a way that’s impossible during better moments. His presence is real in your pain. And it might become more real in this valley than it was on the mountaintop, if you can recognize that the way is through, not out. Perhaps that’s why Blackaby sees this crisis as so vital, a requisite part of the Christian faith. If we’re going to become stronger in our faith, more committed to God, more in love with Jesus, then our beliefs will be tested. They must be tested. Blackaby explains, “Will God ever ask you to do something you are not able to do? The answer is yes, all the time!” People may tell you that God won’t give you more than you can bear. While they probably mean well, that’s simply not true. The Bible does say that God won’t let you be tempted beyond what you can handle (1 Cor. 10:13). But he often gives you more than you can handle, so you can learn to depend wholly on him.

When words don’t work, remember that presence does. Love does. An embrace does. That’s the beauty and power of the incarnation. God didn’t shout his love from heaven. He showed us his love on earth as he became one of us in the person of his Son Jesus. When someone is in the valley, rather than trying to explain what’s happening, sometimes we are better off listening. Rather than preaching, we focus on loving. And in those moments of quiet presence, God often reveals himself in ways that go beyond our human ability to understand.

When we aren’t connected to others’ pain, it’s tempting instead to offer them bumper sticker platitudes and pat answers designed to keep our own fragile faith intact.

Our world is broken. Because we live in a world where our free will has opened the door to our spiritual enemy, we will all continue to experience painfully hard, terrible, unexpected events in our lives.

We’re terrified that if we admit how we’re truly feeling, then our faith will crack. But the opposite is true. It’s when we suppress the pain of what we’re experiencing, stuffing it down and denying it, that our faith becomes so hard and brittle that it breaks.

I agree with C. S. Lewis that God’s highest agenda is not our immediate happiness. I believe that God is much more committed to our eternal joy, our spiritual growth, and the condition of our hearts. This means that we need to grow out of spiritual infancy into a richer, ever-maturing belief in a God who is infinitely wiser than we are. We need to learn to trust him even when we can’t feel him, believe in him even when he doesn’t make sense, and follow him even though we’re not sure where he’s leading us.

sometimes just allowing yourself to ask these questions can take you a long way toward reconnecting with God and learning to trust him. It’s hard to love someone—even the Creator of the universe—if you’re holding grudges and hiding your true feelings. Habakkuk clearly loved God, but that didn’t keep him from respectfully challenging God (not testing him; there’s a difference) with a request to help him understand the huge gap between what he believed and what he saw all around him.

Habakkuk wrote, “I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say to me, and what answer I am to give to this complaint” (Hab. 2:1, emphasis mine). I love these images. I will stand at my watch and look to see what God will say to me. As basic and obvious as this may seem, sometimes the reason we’re not getting answers to our questions is that we’re not willing to pause and wait long enough for God to reveal himself to us. Sometimes when we rave and rant, what we really want is simply to vent our emotions, not to engage in a conversation. When we allow our anger, doubt, and fear to control us, our questions can drown out what God wants to say back to us. Other times, we may pose our questions to God, but then, because we’re so preoccupied with the many things that are pulling at us, we don’t pause to listen for his response. As in my one-sided conversation with Amy, we hear but we don’t listen.

when you ask God the tough questions, you have to be prepared to listen to his answers, even if you don’t like them. Hopefully, if you are hurting and you press into God’s presence, he will direct you, guide you, and comfort you. But in Habakkuk’s case, God had other things to do first. And the news would be difficult to hear.

Usually when a person enters that valley, they go to one of two extremes. Many want to return to their last spiritual high, that mountaintop experience in which everything with God seemed great.

Some people slide into the valley and decide to descend even farther.

They wrongly assume that God must not love them if he’s not willing to do what they want him to do to alleviate their suffering.

If, like Habakkuk, we’re willing to lean into the hardship we’re experiencing and wrestle with how God might use it to achieve his purposes, then we can begin to climb out of the valley.

Paul got it. He wrote, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9–10). Paul didn’t just hear God’s response; he listened. And that subtle difference changed the very fabric of who Paul was, just as it changed my friend John.

Habakkuk helps guide us through the valley with three specific actions. First, as we just saw, Habakkuk questioned the apparent injustice of God. Then he decided to stop and listen to God as he learned of God’s intent to destroy his people using the evil Babylonians. Next, he took notes. God told Habakkuk, “Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it” (Hab. 2:2). Finally, and this may be the hardest action of all, Habakkuk realized that he needed to wait on the Lord’s timing. He had to trust that God knew the best time to lead his people back to the mountaintop.

God makes you a promise, it will happen. It’s simply a matter of when.

Apparently, Habakkuk wasn’t crazy about waiting either. Nonetheless, he knew that was the third thing he had to do if he was going to make it out of the valley of despondency. God told him, “The revelation awaits an appointed time; it speaks of the end and will not prove false. Though it linger, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay” (Hab. 2:3).

So when your marriage is falling apart and the people around you and your spouse keep saying things like, “It’s just too hard; you might as well go ahead and get divorced,” you dig deep and remember the vows you made, trusting God by faith that all things are possible with him. When your kids keep making wrong decisions and everyone else says, “Oh man, they’re so messed up; there’s no hope,” you believe by faith that God is working in their lives to bring about good to those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

You listen. You write down what God is showing you. Then, as you wait, you continue to believe by faith. Faith isn’t faith until it’s all you’re holding on to. If you don’t have anything left to grasp, you continue to reach toward God. You press on, one step after another, day by day, even when things are going wrong, to live by faith. You don’t stop. You don’t quit. You don’t go back. You walk by faith.

EVEN THOUGH I’M UPSET, ANGRY, CONFUSED, FRUSTRATED, DISappointed, and impatient, I will remember who God is. The Lord is still in charge. And he is good. He is righteous. He is true. He is faithful. He is all-knowing, all-powerful, and ever present. The world may seem upside down, but the Lord is still there. He is sovereign, and he has a plan—a much bigger plan than I can see right now. I have to respect that he is God and I am not. His timing is not my timing. His ways are higher than I’ll ever understand. He is supreme in all wisdom, and he knows the end from the beginning. I’m just a person, his creation. He has everything under control.

And what if wanting to believe is enough? What if that tiny bit of barely noticeable faith is still pleasing to God?

Do you see that deep, inward, unshakeable faith in a trustworthy God? Theirs wasn’t a faith based on the outcome they desired; it was a faith based only on the character and goodness of God. Essentially, these three teenagers stood boldly and declared, “We believe our God can.” “We believe our God will.” “But even if he doesn’t, we still believe.”

They knew that even if they died a terrible, excruciating death in the flames of the king’s furnace, God was still God. They believed that the Lord was on his throne and that they simply had to do their part and trust him.

Job said, “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him” (Job 13:15). Nothing could strip Job’s faith from him. You might be shocked at how your trial can reveal a depth of faith you never knew you possessed.

Habakkuk urges us to draw on our longterm memories of God rather than being so shortsighted that we choose to keep replaying only our immediate, distressing circumstances.

What do you do when you’re in the valley? You remember what God has done. When he comforted you. When he guided you. When he answered your prayer exactly the way you wanted him to. And when he didn’t do what you wanted, but sometime later you realized it was exactly what you needed. And you dare to believe that what he’s done before, he will do again.

Acceptance is not denial. When you accept what God is doing, you don’t simply stuff your feelings down and let your heart die, even as you’re practicing your smile in the mirror and memorizing Bible verses.

It’s not a denial. It’s faith. Not faith that God will do what Habakkuk wants God to do. But faith in God’s character. Habakkuk goes on to say, “The sovereign hand of God is doing something here. God has spoken, so I’ll accept whatever he is doing, as difficult as that may be for me.”

We have to make choices about what we believe is true, exercise our willpower to act on those beliefs, and yet remain honest about the way things appear to us and how we feel.

Even as his body reacted, he realized that he had a choice about what he was going to believe. He could trust his emotions. He could trust his current view of the situation. Or he could trust that God could somehow bring good out of an inconceivable scenario—the Babylonians invading their land.