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

by R.C. Sproul

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.

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

Our suffering has a purpose-it helps us toward the end of our faith, which is the salvation of our souls.

The first

We must bend over backward to insure the maintenance of human life. If we err, it is better to err in favor of life rather than to cheapen it in any way.

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Peter demanded that Jesus distance Himself from suffering and death. He wanted a Savior unsullied by suffering. He wanted the kingdom to come Satan's way rather than God's way.

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 a prayer of trust. The very essence of faith is trust. We trust that God knows what is best. The spirit of trust includes a willingness to do what the Father wants us to do. Christ embodied that kind of trust in Gethsemane.

Here Paul declared that he rejoiced in his suffering. Surely he did not mean that he enjoyed pain and affliction. Rather, the cause of his joy was found in the meaning of his suffering.

Before sin entered the world, there was no suffering or death.

It is one thing for me to ask God for justice in my dealings with men. It is another thing for me to demand justice in my relationship with God.

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.

We have an intuitive understanding that if God is God, He must be sovereign. It is impossible for God not to be sovereign, and any conception of a god that is less than sovereign is an idol and no god at all.

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.

"Not till we know that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys will we become what Christianity is striving to make us."

For the Christian, there can be joy in the midst of suffering, joy that transcends the pain of the moment. But we don't really understand the grounds for this joy in the house of mirth. We discover it in the house of mourning. 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.

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.

"Why did God allow this to happen?" the only honest answer I could give would be "I don't know." I can't read God's mind. I don't know that it was an act of judgment. On the other hand, I can't think of anything in the Christian worldview that would rule out the possibility that it was an act of judgment.

The bottom-line assumption for anyone who believes in the God of providence is that ultimately there are no tragedies. God has promised that all things that happen-all pain, all suffering, all tragedies-are but for a moment, and that He works in and through these events for the good of those who love Him (Rom. 8:28).

The bottom line is that God's hand is in affliction. His sovereignty is manifest in the dark side of life. This is said so frequently in Scripture that it is amazing that it is so hard for us to get it. I believe that the reason for this is that we shut our minds from thinking about these things. 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.

Those who understand God's sovereignty have joy even in the midst of suffering, a joy reflected on their very faces, for they see that their suffering is not without purpose.

But Satan is not sovereign. Satan does not hold the keys of death.

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.

But God commands us to speak to the dying about their need for a Savior. Ezekiel makes that crystal clear. If we love people, we will warn them of the consequences of dying in their sins.

It is strange that we are so quick to dismiss as "old-fashioned" any mention of a final judgment. It is especially strange that it happens in a time and a culture that is so concerned about justice. We have worked for civil justice, for social justice, and for international justice. Yet we observe what the philosopher Immanuel Kant so acutely observed: justice does not always prevail in this world. The God of the Bible is a God of justice. His own character is just. Therefore, for God not to correct injustices in this world, to let the scales of justice remain forever out of balance, would be for Him to compromise His own integrity. This is precisely what He refuses to do. He promises ultimate justice.