Читать книгу The Jagged Journey - Barry Lee Callen - Страница 8
ОглавлениеThe Bible Gives Us Both Mixed Messages and Sure Anchors
God is completely sovereign, infinite in wisdom, and perfect in love. There is a dilemma related to this biblical teaching, however. It has been put this way: “God in his love always wills what is best for us. In his wisdom he always knows what is best, and in his sovereignty he has the power to bring it about.”12 But will God bring the best about, at least in the short-term? Apparently not.
We can say that all sin brings suffering, but we cannot turn the words inside out and say that all suffering comes from sin, even though this latter judgment dies a hard death.13 Both viewpoints appear in the Bible among its mixed messages. Fortunately, the Bible also presents several sure anchors of truth.
The journey of God’s people in this world has never been easy. After the tragic episode in the garden of Eden, pain, doubt, and toil have marked human life. Even so, the Bible insists that there is a path of faith that we can walk successfully and joyfully. It rises above the fear of delusion and doesn’t collapse under the weight of despair, although it doesn’t escape suffering. The path of the Christian sufferer is jagged as it tracks along the jolting terrain of life in this world.
This unfortunate circumstance of suffering is not optional. Even so, with God’s guidance and resources available, it’s a path that can be traveled successfully, yes, even joyfully. The journey is helped by a series of biblical signposts that keep us on track. Beware, however, that the road is not always clear. The messages sometimes appear mixed within the Bible itself. We do, however, find in the sacred pages a few anchors of truth that can stabilize our faith when the storms of life come.
The Biblical Pathway
Suffering is a subject that preoccupies many of the biblical writers. It comes up constantly in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, there may be more about suffering in church life than anything else. The books of 2 Corinthians, 1 Peter, and Revelation are dominated by the subject. The cross of Jesus, the high point of suffering and divine revelation, looks all the way back to the fall in Genesis and forward to the day when finally there will be no more tears.
We who believe in Jesus must resist the temptation to deny the jaggedness of the journey. American advertising bombards us with drugs, creams, injections, and cosmetic surgeries to alleviate our discomforts, improve our looks, and delay and finally mask death itself. We must resist embracing faith in ways that promise exemption from suffering—God supposedly guaranteeing health and prosperity to faithful people.
The true way of Jesus is through and not around suffering. Following and representing the man of sorrows in this troubled world can’t happen by being successful and comfortable in worldly terms. We must not desire acceptance and applause and seek to avoid conflict with the principalities and powers opposing God’s will and ways. That would be the irony of disciples directly denying their Master. So what is the biblical way of living faithfully?
One expression of this pot-holed but still possible pathway of suffering faith is found in 2 Corinthians 12:8–10. It forms the structure of this book (see the Table of Contents). It’s the 8-9-10 path that travels from stability to despairing to rejoicing. It follows the pattern of the treacherous trail from gentle green grass to the valley of death and on to the home fold where the Shepherd cares for all things (Ps 23).
This 8-9-10 path is embedded in the whole book of Psalms. It jerks back and forth while always heading in the desired upward direction. One celebrated Bible scholar has called it the O-D-R path of faith, organizing the many psalms into three groups, Orientation, Disorientation, and Reorientation.14
The O-D-R path of the Psalms goes like this. First, things are as they should be, orientation. Then things go wrong, disorientation. But even when confusion and suffering are at their most intense, there arrives the grace and guidance of God to set our bleeding feet on higher ground than we had known before. We grow through the experience of being disoriented. We are graciously reoriented. Again, the path of the faith journey leads from comfortable stability to near despairing and on to fresh rejoicing.15
We don’t find in the Bible a flurry of divine executive orders guaranteeing that God’s will is always done precisely as planned.
O-D-R is another way of looking at Paul’s experience seen in 2 Corinthians 12:8–10. Our response to the suffering that comes along the jagged path of faith first tends (1) to either deny the pain or at least hope that somehow it will go away soon. Then it goes on (2) to a realization of the sufficiency of God in all circumstances, even the worst ones. Finally, it leads (3) to the amazing truth that even in our human weakness we can be increasingly strong. In fact, the weakness itself can become an instrument of growth and ministry.
It’s along this jagged path that we learn the difficult reality of suffering and the amazing grace of God at work in its midst. Sometimes the faith walk can be a painful pilgrimage from life at risk to eternal life that transcends its many enemies by a healing power from beyond. The journey has its jaggedness and its joys.
Joining the psalmists, the Apostle Paul is our faithful guide. His testimony of the 8-9-10 trajectory was once offered to the Corinthians as a dependable map of finding the way to spiritual victory in a world of pain. It was Paul’s personal history of ministry and misery and miracle. He had been given insight into “extravagant revelations” (2 Cor 12:7) while being subjected to numerous and painful set backs.
After Paul’s great illumination on the road to Damascus came the beatings, escapes, floggings, shipwrecks, betrayals, and anxieties involved in assisting immature and even wayward churches. There were many long and sleepless nights. But somehow all of it became secondary to the dramatically positive side of Paul’s overall growing experience. He’d been seized by Christ in a spiritual ecstasy, “hijacked into paradise.” There, he reports, he had heard the unspeakable actually spoken.
Paul reports that he dared not brag about such amazing things. Actually, there was little danger of his “walking around high and mighty.” He determines to say nothing more about himself than reporting his humiliations and a particular handicap. What that problem was we aren’t told, and it doesn’t matter. It was an ongoing suffering given “to keep me in constant touch with my limitations” (2 Cor 12:7). This grateful apostle traveled on through all the jaggedness with increasing gratitude and joy.
Suffering certainly will keep one humble. At first Paul begged God to remove the problem, likely malaria or epilepsy. He’d heard back only that God’s grace is sufficient and the strength of God eventually would shine through his weakness and always be adequate for his need. Once he accepted this, Paul actually began to almost appreciate his problem. “It was a case of Christ’s strength moving in on my weakness. Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size” (2 Cor 12:9).
Paul’s 8-9-10 path went from resistance and maybe even denial to the heights of faith, then to near despair and finally, strangely, surprisingly, to ultimate rejoicing. To use the O-D-R imagery, there are seasons of orienting satisfaction, periods of disorienting suffering, and resurrection surprises. The trip is anything but pure vacation, but it’s survivable and even a source of unexpected joy and fresh life. Eventually, amazingly, wonderfully, the path leads to spiritual maturity and to our eternal home. It’s much like tracking the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We learn from his life and teachings, we are shocked by his brutal death, and then we rejoice in the wonderful news of his resurrection. We get oriented, disoriented, and reoriented.
Our days with the Lord alternate among (1) being settled in and stabilized by faith, (2) being shocked, confused, and disoriented by negative events, and finally (3) being newly assured of the adequacy of God’s goodness and grace in any circumstance, even the worst. Is there an easier way? No. Can money or connections avoid pain by purchasing pleasures? Maybe, momentarily. Can the journey of faith, jagged as it is, be completed successfully? Yes!
There’s plenty of biblical help available. The psalms of the ancient Jews probe every possible pitfall and point to the best way through to our final home. They “correspond to seasons of human life and bring those seasons to speech . . . . They affirm that if we try to keep our lives we will lose them, and that when lost for the gospel, we will be given life (Mark 8:35).”16
The Jews, although God’s own people, surely knew well the jagged journey. They were enslaved in Egypt, exiled in Babylon, and embattled and occupied by one alien empire after another. And then the Jew of all Jews, Jesus the gentle Lamb of God, was brutally executed by the Romans although guilty of nothing except bringing loving good news to this world.
On the subject of suffering, then, Jesus and his fellow Jews may be our greatest teachers of all. We have to read carefully their stories, however. The Bible can be seen as sending mixed messages about the source and meaning of suffering and the action or inaction of God in relation to it.
Mixed Messages
I wrote these lines during a two-week journey from Rome to Florida by sea. My wife and I were cruising on the beautiful Royal Princess with a consistent message directed our way—luxury. Another message was never far away. The captain would come on the communication system at noon each day and remind us of the depth of the water below our hull—sometimes approaching 20,000 feet! Twice in the Atlantic Ocean we had to be careful to skirt hurricanes. The ocean floor far beneath is riddled with vessels and lives lost from the ravages of past weather, accidents, and wars.
If only life and even the Bible didn’t give us mixed messages! Death and life, perishing and cruising, poverty and luxury, pain and joy, heights of insight and depths of danger. Paul said, “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Cor 4:16). But here’s where the mixed messages start forcing their way in. What if the perishing is happening and the renewing isn’t? What if the psalmist’s fear is coming true, “Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me” (Ps 51:11)?
To have the Spirit is to have God’s eyes within, helping us see beyond the darkness to the dawn that God’s grace might yet make possible. Notice the word might. What if there is no Spirit apparently present? To lose the Spirit is to grow skeptical about faith, empty without hope, spiritually blind, desperate because pain and loss are smothering life itself, leaving an aching blank where the pulsating Spirit once was. The Bible records much despair and also shines with much more hope. Is suffering the occasion for the ending or the deepening of faith? It’s our choice.
We act variously and the Bible speaks variously. The book of Proverbs tends to emphasize the justice of suffering and how suffering often is directly related to wrongdoing. On the other hand, Job and Ecclesiastes insist that much suffering is unjust and irrational. Proverbs maintains that righteousness is rewarded and sin punished (e.g., Prov 1:29–33). But Job’s experience is a frontal assault on such a simplistic assessment of things.
Since the Bible, when taken as a whole, presents the full picture of things, we must be careful not to isolate one biblical passage or even verse from many others on the same subject. For instance, Jeremiah 29:10 by itself leads to believing that God has planned in advance and detail all things that happen in this world. Reading Ezekiel 34 and many passages like it, however, would convince us that God’s interventions in this world are not pre-planned but responses to negative circumstances we have created.
Life in this world is hardly a lovely fairy tale of predictable patterns of experience. Sometimes the just suffer and the unjust prosper. Sometimes God intervenes and sometimes God remains silent and inactive so far as we can tell. So, why not take the advice of Job’s wife—curse God and die? Because the jagged path of faith, even while meandering through valleys of dark shadows, occasionally bursts with sunlight, suggesting a way out, a way upward to the shining heights of eternal joy.
Progress on this path of faith doesn’t come quickly or easily. Patience, discipline, selfless service, and enduring the jagged journey are required. The goal is earned, not given cheaply. Four unwelcome things are interwoven into the very pattern of our human existence. Closing our eyes to them changes nothing except our ability to face them well. They are suffering, evil, injustice, and a keen awareness of how brief are our years.
Two great pieces of music are sharply contrasting and so revealing when experienced together. They represent two basic options for viewing God, suffering, and the life of faith. Tchaikovsky’s great B Minor Symphony is full of marching rhythms that move inexorably toward the end of tragic desolation. The composer described this music’s theme as “the haunting of life by death.” On the other hand, Brahms’ great Requiem, while still having death as a theme, lacks the pessimism. Its somber mood eventually merges into the great climaxes of peace and victory.
Fatalism is always an option, a sad giving in to the awful abyss. Faith also is an option, a daring reach upward that allows the poor pilgrim to find God as guide, resource, and eternal home. These pages choose Brahms, faith, and the reach upward. This doesn’t make suffering and death evaporate, not in this world at least. But it does what we really need. It allows us to survive, even thrive in the midst of whatever. When things are falling apart, we can believe even before seeing positive results. God already is putting the broken pieces together into some new and yet unfinished masterpiece.
God’s Sovereignty and Reasons for Suffering
There’s a big theological divide not easy to navigate. Christians across the centuries have stood on both sides. The Bible doesn’t help us as much as it might. Again, it seems to give mixed messages, or at least allows two contrasting streams of its own interpretation by equally honest and careful readers. It comes down to a definition of God’s sovereignty.
Divine “sovereignty” is a central subject of Christian believing, with two contrasting streams of biblical interpretation. The complicating fact is that, conscious of it or not, we tend to bring to our Bible reading preconceived notions that color what we read and how we understand. We bring our theology to the biblical text and read through our preset theological eyes.
I experienced strong exposure to both streams of interpretation early in life. I studied Bible at Geneva College, a fine institution rooted in the Scottish Presbyterian tradition strongly influenced by the theologian John Calvin. Then I attended Anderson University School of Theology and Asbury Theological Seminary, graduate schools rooted more in the English tradition strongly influenced by John Wesley. These two outstanding Protestant thinkers and reformers had much in common theologically, with at least one significant exception. It centers in Wesley’s resistance to Calvin’s conclusion that God determined in advance that some persons would be saved and others not.
Both of these Protestant leaders agreed that “nothing in heaven or earth is understood properly except in light of the divine Parent who brought it into being, who is its ground and goal, who is sovereign, fully able, fully faithful, full of justice and mercy.”17 Calvin’s logic concluded that God’s sovereignty must mean that God is always in full control of all things, including our daily affairs and future destinies. Wesley found this an unacceptable outcome of biblical logic, a picturing of God as other than seen in the coming of Jesus, the one who said that God deeply desires that all be saved.
The core question is this. Does divine sovereignty, with unlimited capacities, imply that God retains and exercises full control of all earthly events? Are we “predestined”?
Wesley and Calvin agreed on two things, but not a third. They agreed that fallen humanity is incapable of doing anything to merit salvation, and thus all salvation is by God’s grace alone. They disagreed, however, on one key point. Wesley insisted that God wants all to be saved and has provided the “prevenient” grace that enables all to choose salvation. Each person is enabled to respond and therefore responsible for the choice made. Any who do not choose salvation face damnation by their own choice and not by God’s advance decree.18
The provision of such free choice, Wesley insisted, does not undercut divine sovereignty but defines it, dramatizing the preeminence of God’s love (see below the section “Love Trumps Power”). Such a preeminence of love is critical for how people should understand the source of their sufferings and their opportunity for salvation in spite of them.
I have pictured this Calvin-Wesley divide as the clash of flowers. Calvin’s TULIP includes the “L” of “limited atonement.” Wesley’s contrasting ROSE sees the biblically revealed God as Relational, Open, Suffering, and Everywhere Active. His flower model is more relational, experiential, and loving in tone and manner, and it highlights the central role of suffering—ours, the world’s, and even God’s. Yes, even the sovereign God suffers.
I was privileged to author the biography of prominent Canadian theologian Clark H. Pinnock, who traveled the jagged journey of first championing Calvin’s view of divine sovereignty and later being a prominent exponent of Wesley’s view.19 On this key subject, I am a Wesleyan along with Pinnock and many others. That influences my biblical understanding and these present pages.
God willingly, out of the love that is God’s very nature, chooses to relate interactively and redemptively with this fallen creation. God is open to freely made human decisions and suffers along with the creation when the wrong decisions are made. God risks this awkward process by choice because the preeminent perfection of God’s sovereignty is love. God, being sovereign, is capable of acting only in ways consistent with his own nature and intentions. God’s nature is love and the loving intention is that all be saved.
We fallen people are struggling in this failing world. We are on jagged journeys. We are enabled by God’s grace to choose for or against God, including choices that bring suffering to ourselves and others, and even our own damnation. God enables and allows, loves and suffers when poor choices are made.
Where did the fallenness come from? Is God still in control? If so, does being in control mean that God is in charge of and even responsible for all events, even the most evil ones? The Bible is clear about God’s existence, but it’s interpreters have been less agreed on what it teaches about how God chooses to relate to the world’s fallenness. Several best-selling books highlight two contrasting options.
Love Trumps Power
Here’s the first option for understanding how the Bible says God deals with the results of human fallenness, and thus who is responsible for our present suffering. Jerry Bridges keys his thinking off of Isaiah 38:17 where King Hezekiah decides, “surely it was for my benefit that I suffered such anguish.” God’s presence and sovereignty are said to be always present and active and in full control of all events in human history, even when they are turning sharply downward. Presumably, all that happens is for the eventual benefit of God’s chosen people, even when events look quite otherwise. All was planned in advance. God has absolute independence and absolute control over the actions of all creatures.20
Bridges also points to Lamentations 3:37, “Who can speak and have it happen if the Lord has not decreed it?” and to Isaiah 45:7, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things.” This is a power position. God has all the power and uses it to accomplish the divine will in this world. All is pre-planned and fully controlled.
Here’s the contrasting option, one I think more biblical when the whole of biblical revelation is considered. When ultimate power is set forth as the primary attribute of God, no answer will be satisfying to the persistent question, why does God not eliminate awful suffering when God can with his power and should with his goodness? The answer is that Bible puts divine power in the context of God’s love relationship with his beloved.
God is said to be love. Love is God’s primary perfection, not power. God’s use of power is disciplined by God’s loving nature. This implies that God tends to withhold acts of divine coercion in favor of the wooing of reaching and redeeming love. God is powerfully present in all events, to be sure, but without the choice of dictating and fully controlling them.
Insists Douglas John Hall in contrast to Jerry Bridges, “There is no sword that can cut away sin without killing the sinner. . . . Freedom is of the very essence of the human creature. . . . Jesus is the Christ.”21 The implication of this final claim is that God works against evil in this world in the way portrayed in the crucifixion of Jesus. Divine wisdom is that of the cross (1 Cor 1—2). Therefore, “the only power that can address suffering humanity is the power of love, and that is a power ‘made perfect in weakness’” (2 Cor 12:9).
Many verses, especially in the Old Testament, can be quoted on the side of Bridges—strict divine control, which seems to imply that God is at fault when evil events are unstopped. But the Christian should follow the Master who said he did not come to destroy but to fulfill his Jewish tradition. In fulfilling it, he often corrected its common teaching traditions, especially by turning law into a love focus. Jesus ended the sacrificing and suffering of animals by placing God on the altar once and for all! The great love of God was willing to suffer. God self-sacrificed on our behalf! That’s the very heart of Christian faith. True and undeserved love redeems our lives and sets us on the jagged journey of loving others.
Admittedly, it’s hard to get away from the focus on divine power. Much Christian theology over the centuries has been formed while the church was existing as a prominent center of power in various worldly empires. It’s been observed that a “prestigious” church, Christianity as the official religion of an empire, can hardly afford to be known as representative of a crucified God! Women theologians have rightly told us recently that for much too long the church has highlighted the power manner of God’s working, reflecting an excessively male reading of the Bible and an unbalanced masculine way of being in the world.
Could it be that, in our day when the church is being reduced to much less prominence in secularized societies, she could rediscover her true self? If so, a power focus would give way to the more biblical love focus. The Bible would stop being read as God coercively marching in triumph over all enemies and conquering all suffering and evil by mighty power, even by pre-planning all events. It would be read as intended, God in Christ reaching in love to make possible the redemption of all the lost, Christ through his Spirit working through suffering in the midst of our suffering to bring good out of evil.
If we read the Bible through the eyes of God’s love, not through a dominance of God’s power and judgment, the TULIP theological metaphor of Calvin yields to the ROSE of Wesley. We then come to better understand why evil manages to happen even in God’s world. We come to see more clearly that those who gain new life in Christ, through the graciousness of the Father’s love, are called to join in the ministry of suffering and self-sacrificing love. When in pain ourselves or seeing a great injustice crippling others, we come to be less inclined to place blame on the victim (“you’re getting what you deserve”) or blame God for allowing it in the first place when the power was available to force justice.
We also should note the celebrated book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Rabbi Kushner deals with suffering in his family and among the many to whom he had ministered over the years. He comes to some radical conclusions, or are they just so different from how people often think that we judge them radical? He certainly champions the love focus of God, which for him leads to some dramatic conclusions.
“Our being human [by God’s design] leaves us free to hurt each other, and God can’t stop us without taking away the freedom that makes us human.” So, God couldn’t stop Hitler from his monstrous evil. “God wants justice and fairness but can’t always arrange for them.” Is God the source of evil happenings? Absolutely not! “God is as outraged as we are.” “The God I believe in does not send us the problem; He gives us the strength to cope with the problem.” The God who “neither causes nor prevents tragedies helps by inspiring people to help.”22 It’s the way love works.
Again, there are two options before us for reading the workings of God. I choose the ROSE-like one, God the compassionate lover over God the judgmental wielder of power. Why? Because in Christ we have received God’s own self-revelation. God works in the way most consistent with the divine nature and intent, and both are seen hanging on the cross of Jesus.
But, even when this understanding is firmly in place, there may be exceptions, unanswered questions, and occasions when the power option prevails. Rabbi Kushner may be essentially right and yet somewhat wrong when insisting that God “can’t” act forcefully against evil. In fact, the Bible records numerous examples of God doing just that. These examples are real if only the exceptions to God’s preferred way of working.
Pivot Points and Truth Anchors
People commonly see what appears to be the Bible’s mixed messages about the causes of suffering and the related action or inaction of God. Some people can’t tolerate anything mixed coming from the Bible and choose one aspect of the whole to be the final and only biblical answer. This reaction is very human, and yet it also is very unfair to the Bible, which sees
The Bible sees the whole of life, reports the whole, and gives sure anchors to allow safe passage through the maze.
the whole picture, reports the whole, and in the midst of it all gives a few sure anchors to allow safe passage through the maze. Here are the orienting, dependable, and clearly biblical anchors of truth.
Anchor #1. Love, Not Coercion.
What about all the grotesque and dehumanizing suffering we see or at least hear of constantly? The answer isn’t easy for believers in a God who is believed to be all good and all-powerful. It lies somewhere on the line connecting “intends” and “allows.” The Sovereign of all is also the Lover of all who surely intends only good for all. Then why does any awful suffering ever exist?
We know this much from the Bible. God is a risking Lover who allows suffering by giving freedom of choice to us humans. This is a love gift that necessarily includes the possibility of its misuse, sin. God never intends sin or suffering. It comes from our choosing not to love in response to God’s love. The divine intention is that humans freely choose a loving relationship with God and each other. Since that obviously has gone sour by human choice, God reacts in love while allowing the negative results of our wrong choices to play out.
The major reaction of God, however, is to choose in Christ to enter into the arena of our suffering in order to share the suffering and work to bring good out of the evil we have created. In this “incarnating” process, God never gives up sovereign control of the creation. Nothing in the creation can ultimately frustrate what God intends. In the meantime, however, we creatures have much to say about how our history goes. It often goes badly, bringing suffering even to the innocent, even to God. That’s how the biblical story goes.
What God allows includes the awful cross of Jesus, with something about that cross needing to be made clear. It’s a dramatic picture of the bleeding heart and reaching love of God the Father. “The Cross was no more the will of God than any other brutal murder. It was the work of wicked men.”23 Christians often have insisted that God planned the death of the Son all along, even that the death was necessary for the forgiveness of our sins—an extension of the tradition of animal sacrifice. On biblical grounds, I argue otherwise.
Our well-being and loving relationship with God have been God’s plan all along. God’s reaching love has infused that plan. Self-giving sacrifice has been at the heart of God’s very identity from the eternities. Our sin forced its activation in Christ on our behalf. In that sense, the cross was “planned,” but only in that sense. The cross was a heavy price for God to pay for our sins. It was the bleeding heart of the divine dripping healing and forgiveness on our broken souls.
Here’s what is shown so dramatically on that cross of Jesus. Love does not coerce. The power of God is to be seen through the lens of God’s love. God allows evil because God’s nature is love. Love instructs, persuades, and disciplines, but coerces only as a last resort. One might say that evil cannot be forcibly stopped without violating the free choice of humans—which would make us marionettes and not potential love partners with God. This necessity of allowing our free choices is not to be seen as a “limitation” of God’s power; it’s merely an acknowledgment of who God really and always is.
Anchor #2. Divine Patience.
Note this brief dialogue I once created between God and the whale over how best to handle the wayward Jonah:
God: “There’s a guy with an assignment from me who hasn’t the stomach for it. He’s being sent to Nineveh and choosing selfishly to head in the wrong direction. I want your help.”
Wally (the whale): “I say, why don’t you smack him in the face and make him pay attention without bothering me? You’re the biggest thing in the whole creation, not me!”
God: “Sorry, Wally, but I’ve decided you’re just the ticket. I’m not the smacking type, at least not at first.”24
What’s the point? God has smacking capacity and is known to use it in extreme circumstances—tough love. Some suffering may come from being forcibly punished by God for sinning. However, God typically chooses to begin with the softer love option, patience over sheer power. God’s heart is love and love’s first option for dealing with our sin is persuasion not coercion. It’s usually patience before power.
Philip Yancey puts his finger right on this biblical anchor of truth. The Bible is full of examples of much divine patience going before direct and coercive punishment. “The people of Israel knew why they were being punished; the prophets had warned them in excruciating detail. The Pharaoh of Egypt knew exactly why the ten plagues were unleashed against his land: God had predicted them, told him why, and described what change of heart could forestall them. Biblical examples of suffering-as-punishment, then, tend to fit a pattern. The pain comes after much warning, and no one sits around afterward asking, ‘Why?’ They know very well why they are suffering.”25
Anchor #3. Looking Forward.
We must get beyond any preoccupation with demanding answers to the “why” questions of suffering. We suffering humans typically ask the wrong questions. We want to know why something bad has happened. Where did it come from? Who’s responsible? Am I guilty of something? The Bible, however, consistently moves to another question, the forward-looking “What now?” in favor of the backward-looking “Who caused this?” and “Why me?”
Suffering, whatever its unclear cause in a given instance, has the capacity of producing something of value if that’s where our focus goes. Pain can be newly woven into something freshly beautiful. What is bad can be channeled into something good never possible before. Since that’s precisely what the loving and redeeming God is always about, surely that’s where our attention should be.
We’ll consider in later chapters how suffering can be managed constructively and even used for our training in Christ-likeness—a major goal of all biblical revelation. In the meantime, we should avoid the “why” in favor of the “what.” I may not know why this or that is happening, but with God’s help I can learn what good might come out of it if my focus is in that direction.
Anchor #4. Hope Persists Regardless.
Shaking loose of the disabling “why” questions and looking forward expectantly is possible because God is at work in this world whatever the circumstances. The point of the empty tomb of Jesus is that the worst that can happen in this life never has to be the end of the story. We are emboldened to believe that new possibilities exist because of the grace of God. Even death can die!
The call of Christ is for the faithful to fix their gaze on the positive potential lodged in the negative. Suffering has been overwhelmed by victory, and even can be used as a tool that helps bring victory. Jesus has died and also risen. New can emerge from old.
This is illustrated repeatedly in the Bible. The final editors of the present Bible appear to have had a structural agenda designed for our encouragement. The major units of the biblical material all tend to end on the same note. The worst has happened, but . . . . Here’s a quick run through the whole Bible, pointing out this repeating note at the end of each major unit of material.
1. Torah. Moses dies, but Joshua lives! God’s people will enter their promised land even though Moses will not (Deut 34:4).
2. Prophets. For those who finally honor God, sunrise is coming. The arrogant will be burned up and God’s people will burst with energy and dance with joy! (Mal 4:1–3).
3. Writings. The Exile has been long and awful, but suddenly the new king Cyrus says, “Now it’s time to go home and rebuild. It’s over. You are free!” (2 Chr 36:22–23).
4. Gospels. Do you want to be part of God’s coming future? Be good stewards of today. Feed my sheep! (John 21:17–19). Meanwhile, I go to prepare an eternal place for you. Knowing that, you can go on with your work here.
5. Letters. How can we be sure that we can manage in evil times and that the future is secure? Because the God who promises is full of glory, majesty, strength, and rule before all time, and now, and to the end of all time. Yes! (Jude 1:24–25).
6. End of All Ends. When will relief be real for us who still wait and suffer? Says Jesus, the Alpha and Omega, “I’m on my way! I’ll be there soon! Yes! Come, Master Jesus! The grace of the Master Jesus be with all of you. Oh, Yes!” (Rev. 22:20–21).
It’s a constant note in the Bible. Hope persists regardless of circumstance because the loving God persists, prevails, and promises.
Anchor #5. Head Toward the World’s Suffering.
God is love in eternal being and thus in earthly action. The people of God are to join the divine action by being filled with God’s Spirit and focusing their attention where God’s attention is focused. We are to love as God loves.
Whatever the philosophical debates about the origins of suffering, God’s focus is on doing something about it in the present that we are experiencing. Suffering is central to the fact and meaning of God-with-us in Jesus. It’s also central to the intended reality of our lives of faith. We are to represent Jesus in this evil-laden and suffering world by relieving the suffering of others, even at the cost of our own suffering.
Some pain is intended by the Creator. There is, after all, a pain that makes becoming possible—see chapters ten and eleven. But much of the suffering that now exists surely was not intended by a loving God because it works only toward destruction. It’s just “evil,” “live” spelled backwards. Again, we must put an end to the “why” questions and shift to doing God’s healing work. What did Jesus tell his disciples on that Mount of Transfiguration? I’ll paraphrase. “You can’t stay here forever absorbing this spiritual high, protected from the pain. Go back down to the masses who suffer. Get your hands dirty and feed my sheep!”
The Heart of Biblical Revelation
The resurrection of Jesus made plain that God had been with us and for us as the Son hung and died on the cross. The empty tomb means that the cross is never the end of the story of Jesus or of ourselves and our suffering. We certainly haven’t been given all the explanations about the causes of suffering in particular cases. Mystery remains. What we do know is that darkness already has been overwhelmed by light. Given the resurrection, even the cross glows with glory! That doesn’t answer all of our questions, admittedly, but it does point in the right direction and brings hope to the jaggedness of our faith journey.
This is the heart of biblical revelation and thus of Christian faith. What’s God’s primary response to human suffering? It’s God’s personal identification with it in Christ. The main answer to the problem of pain is the pain of God. We must not shy from the thought of God in pain. You’ll find this quote elsewhere in the book: “God’s problem is not that God is not able to do certain things. God’s problem is that God loves! Love complicates the life of God as it complicates every life.”
This loving complication means that God’s power ultimately reveals itself “in divine solidarity with the sufferer, that is, in the ‘weakness’ of suffering love.”26 God really was with us in the suffering of Jesus. God wasn’t only remotely with us in Jesus’ suffering and death, there by proxy and at a safe distance, only illustratively. God really and fully was there as Emmanuel, “God with us.” We typically speak of the sacrifice of Jesus when actually we should dare to say more. God in Jesus was self-sacrificing as an act of amazing love.
The Cross of Jesus, high point of suffering and divine revelation, looks back to the fall in Genesis and forward to the day when there will be no more tears.
The cosmic significance of the cross is this. God the Father was choosing to meet our suffering with that of his own, addressing the suffering caused by our sin with presence and personal pain. Because of the depth of divine love, God was voluntarily participating in our suffering, the innocent suffering for the guilty, in order that the pain of our guilt could be purged of divine judgment and cleansed of final power over our existence and destiny. The big words are incarnation, voluntarily assuming and suffering in our flesh, and atonement, suffering in our flesh so that we again could be at one with God.
To see this God on the cross is to know this God’s true heart. The cross should cause us to love this God, turning from sin and receiving forgiveness and new life. But it’s always our choice. We can look at amazing love and melt in full repentance. We also can look, hate on, and die an unnecessary death. If we receive and are renewed by divine love, what happens to us? Seeing the suffering love that is God, we are enabled to become agents of that love in a suffering world. We are to become models here and now of what God is always and everywhere. We will never be God, of course, but with God in us and serving through us we can function as apostles of divine love.
Given where Christ now is, at God’s right hand, where are we to be if filled with Christ’s Spirit? We are being drawn toward the suffering of the world, just as God was and is. Suffering love is a reality at God’s very heart and also at the center of our calling as God’s children. Karl Rahner once put it well in an Easter homily:
Christ is already in the midst of all the poor things of this earth, which we cannot leave because it is our mother. . . . He is in all tears and in all death as hidden rejoicing and as the life which triumphs by appearing to die. He is in the beggar to whom we give, as the secret wealth which accrues to the donor. He is in the pitiful defeats of his servants as the victory which is God’s alone. He is in our powerlessness as the power which can allow itself to seem weak because it is unconquerable.27
Beautifully said! Given the loving heart of God now shared at great cost for us, where and how should we be as God’s faithful children? We are to be with those who are suffering just as God has graciously been with us.
Biblical faith reports that who God is and what God has done and is doing is for the sake of this creation. The new creation in the blood of Christ is intended only secondarily to “get people to heaven.” Primarily, it’s intended to make the disciples of Jesus “responsible, grateful, and joyful citizens of earth.”28 God being with and identifying with us brings pain to God; our identifying lovingly in God’s name with this creation and its troubles will bring pain to us. So be it! So says the entire Bible with its signposts and truth anchors.
