Surprised by Suffering: The Role of Pain and Death in The Christian Life

by R.C. Sproul

THINGS TO COME

Suffering is one of the most significant challenges to any believer's faith.

We all have a tendency, however, to suppose that we can carry far less than we actually can.

The promise of God is not that He will never give us more weight than we want to carry. The promise of God is that He will never put more on us than we can bear.

What is difficult to bear without Christ is made far more bearable with Christ. What is a heavy burden to carry alone becomes a far lighter burden to carry with His help.

To suffer without the comfort of God is no virtue. To lean upon His comfort is no vice, contrary to Marx.

"Therefore let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to Him in doing good, as to a faithful Creator" (1 Peter 4:19). Here, Peter erases all doubt about the question of whether it is ever the will of God that we should suffer. He speaks of those who suffer "according to the will of God." This text means that suffering itself is part of the sovereign will of God.

It is when we view our suffering as meaningless-without purpose-that we are tempted to despair.

We must accept the fact that God sometimes says no. Sometimes He calls us to suffer and die even if we want to claim the contrary.

The prayer of faith is not a demand that we place on God. It is not a presumption of a granted request. The authentic prayer of faith is one that models Jesus' prayer. It is always uttered in a spirit of subordination. In all our prayers, we must let God be God. No one tells the Father what to do, not even the Son. Prayers are always to be requests made in humility and submission to the Father's will.

Because of Christ, our suffering is not useless. It is part of the total plan of God, who has chosen to redeem the world through the pathway of suffering.

The sculptor who fashioned the image of job that I saw in the garden of that church caught Job in the fruitful moment-the nadir of his agony. At the base of the sculpture, chiseled in the stone, were these words: "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him" (Job 13:15). When I saw these words at the base of the statue, I stood and wept in silence. No more heroic words were ever uttered by mortal man than these words of testimony from the lips of job.

Ultimately the only answer God gave to job was a revelation of Himself. It was as if God said to him, "Job, I am your answer." Job was not asked to trust a plan but a person, a personal God who is sovereign, wise, and good. It was as if God said to Job: "Learn who I am. When you know me, you know enough to handle anything."

When Job declared, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him," he was revealing to us that though his knowledge of God was limited, it was still profound. He knew enough about the character of God to know that God was (and always would be) trustworthy. To be trustworthy simply means to be worthy of trust.

The day of one's birth is a good day for the believer, but the day of death is the greatest day that a Christian can ever experience in this world because that is the day he goes home, the day he walks across the threshold, the day he enters the Father's house.

If the day of our death is the greatest day in the life of the believer why is it that so many of us dread it. Is it because we know next to nothing of heaven. If we knew what awaited us then we would long to be with the Saviour rather than fearing the loss of this world and it's treasures.

Times of mirth do very little for the good of our souls.

It is in weeping that we learn to contemplate the goodness of God. It is in mourning that we discover the peace of God that passes understanding.

Solomon challenges us to not simply observe God's work but to think deeply about it. We can observe His handiwork everywhere we look, but we need to do more than simply look at it-we need to consider it, to evaluate it, to seek its meaning, to arrive at some kind of understanding.

We have to learn how to think theologically.

The idea of a "senseless tragedy" represents a worldview that is completely incompatible with Christian thought, because it assumes that something happens without a purpose or a meaning. But if God is God and if God is a God of providence and if God is sovereign, then nothing ever happens that is senseless in the final analysis.

The question that troubles us in reference to the September 11 attacks is, "Why did this happen?" Believers ask the question slightly differently: "Why did God allow this to happen?" Christians phrase the question this way because they do not allow for meaningless events, because at the heart of the Christian worldview is the assurance that everything in history has a purpose in the mind of almighty God. God is not chaotic or random. For everything there is a purpose-including those events we define as tragedies.

Why do we go to the house of mirth in the first place? For many of us, a party is not simply an opportunity to have a good time but a chance to get away from thinking, to get away from considering our "life situation." We look for an escape, an avenue of pleasure that will somehow dull the fears and the aches that we carry about. But the wise person looks for the finger of God in the house of mirth as well as in the house of mourning, in all things that take place.

Jesus holds the keys to death, and Satan cannot snatch those keys out of His hand.

Because of Christ, death is not final. It is a passage from one world to the next.

David's confidence was rooted in the absolute certainty of the presence of God. He understood that with a divine vocation comes divine assistance and the absolute promise of the divine presence. God will not send us where He refuses to go Himself.

What Ezekiel declared in the Old Testament, Jesus reaffirmed in the New Testament: "Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for if you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins" (John 8:24). We sometimes think that the worst thing that can befall a person is to die. That is not the message of Jesus. According to Christ, the worst possible thing that can befall us is to die in our sins. This is the biblical message that is so widely ignored in our day. We like to believe that everyone who dies automatically goes to heaven. We assume that the only ticket required for entrance into the kingdom of God is death. The warning required by Ezekiel is ignored because we do not believe it is necessary.