The Reason for Suffering
Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round! . . .
Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow-dogging sin,
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in.
George Herbert, “Sin”
Peter Berger says that all people and cultures long to “bestow meaning on the experience of suffering and evil.” I have been arguing that no culture or worldview has ever done this with the thoroughness of Christianity. According to Christian theology, suffering is not meaningless—neither in general nor in particular instances. For God has purposed to defeat evil so exhaustively on the cross that all the ravages of evil will someday be undone and we, despite participating in it so deeply, will be saved. God is accomplishing this not in spite of suffering, agony, and loss but through it—it is through the suffering of God that the suffering of humankind will eventually be overcome and undone. While it is impossible not to wonder whether God could have done all this some other way—without allowing all the misery and grief—the cross assures us that, whatever the unfathomable counsels and purposes behind the course of history, they are motivated by love for us and absolute commitment to our joy and glory.
So suffering is at the very heart of the Christian faith. It is not only the way Christ became like and redeemed us, but it is one of the main ways we become like him and experience his redemption. And that means that our suffering, despite its painfulness, is also filled with purpose and usefulness.
On Not Wasting Your Suffering
We live in a time in which this ancient idea of suffering’s “usefulness” is resisted. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains that people who face imminent death but survive often develop post-traumatic stress disorder that may permanently debilitate them. The condition can leave them “anxious and over reactive,” liable to “panic or crumble more easily when faced with later adversity.” Research on stress shows that it is generally bad for people’s health. Stressors include death of a spouse (or, for a non-adult, a parent or sibling), separation and divorce, personal injury or illness, job loss, and financial reversals. Studies show that these can lead to depression, anxiety disorders, and physical illness, particularly heart disease.260
Nevertheless, Haidt maintains that there is empirical support for the ancient view that “people need adversity, setbacks, and perhaps even trauma to reach the highest levels of strength, fulfillment, and personal development.”261 He relates a true story of a friend of his whom he names “Greg.” Greg was a young assistant college professor whose wife left him for another man, taking their two young children with them. Greg faced years of legal expense and fights over the custody of the children. Eventually he won custody but then found himself a single parent with a full-time, poor-paying job. He had almost no hope of finishing the book on which his academic career depended, and he worried about the mental health of his children.262
But several months later, Haidt visited Greg and discovered that many people had rallied around him. He learned how his church helped him with meals and child care and strong emotional and spiritual support. His parents had sold their home in the west and moved nearby to help him raise the children. And then, after relating all of this, Haidt wrote that Greg “said something so powerful I choked up.” He observed how in the middle of many operas there was a crucial aria, a “sad and moving solo” in which the main character turned sorrow into something beautiful. And Greg said:
This is my moment to sing the aria. I don’t want to, I don’t want to have this chance, but it’s here now, and what am I going to do about it? Am I going to rise to the occasion?263
The psychologist listened and knew that “to have framed things in such a way showed that [Greg] was already rising.” Haidt recounts what he calls the “post-traumatic growth” of his friend after that. “With the help of family, friends, and deep religious faith . . . [he] rebuilt his life, finished his book, and two years later found a better job. . . . He now experiences more joy from each day with his children than he did before the crisis.” Greg said that the experience had “radically changed his perspective about what mattered in life.” Career was now not nearly as important to him as it had been, and this freed him to be a much better father. He now found himself “reacting to others with much greater sympathy, love, and forgiveness. He just couldn’t get mad at people for little things anymore.”264
Haidt points out that the three benefits of suffering seen in Greg’s life often appear in others’ lives as well. First, people who endure and get through suffering become more resilient. Once they have learned to cope, they know they can do it again and live life with less anxiety. Romans 5:3–4 sums it up: “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Second, it strengthens relationships, usually bonding the sufferer permanently into a set of deeper friendships or family ties that serve to nurture and strengthen for years.
But the third benefit is perhaps the most significant—suffering “changes priorities and philosophies.”265 Psychologist Robert Emmons has sorted people’s life goals into four basic categories—personal achievement and happiness, relationships and intimacy, religion and spirituality, and “generativity” (contributing something lasting to society). People who invest much or most of their energy into the goals of personal achievement and happiness are the most vulnerable to the adverse circumstances of life.266 Efforts to seek God, deeper relationships, and the good of society sometimes can be directly enhanced by suffering, but our freedom and comfort never are. And so trouble and trials tend to force us out of certain life agendas and into others.
Haidt puts this in another way. Everyone operates out of a life story that integrates the events of life into a “coherent and vitalizing” narrative. People who have never suffered are likely to have naïve stories about life’s meaning. He gives the example of a woman who thought of herself as a brilliant but unfulfilled artist who had been forced by her parents into a mundane job. Her life story led to unrealistic views of her own abilities and to a great deal of self-pity and resentment toward life in general. It also contributed to her failure to find any qualified spouse candidate, who (she felt) had to be extremely creative and perfectly compatible with her. Haidt concluded that adversity offered her a prospect. “She is a mess of mismatched motives and stories, and it may be that only through adversity will she be able to make the radical changes she would need to achieve coherence.”267 He went on to write: “Trauma . . . shatters belief systems and robs people of their sense of meaning. In doing so, it forces people to put the pieces back together, and often they do so by [turning to] God or some other higher principle as a unifying principle.”268
Haidt makes a crucial disclaimer when he says, “I don’t want to celebrate suffering, prescribe it for everyone, or minimize the moral imperative to reduce it where we can. I don’t want to ignore the pain that ripples out from each diagnosis of cancer.”269 He is indeed right, and as we have seen, the Bible agrees with his view. God is grieved at our grief. The Bible is filled with cries of lament and shouts of “Why?” that God does not denounce. And yet—God is so committed to defeating evil that he is ready to help us use it for good even in our individual lives right now. Haidt, James Davies, and other psychologists are arguing that there is a common sense as well as empirical basis for the idea that suffering produces endurance, character, and hope.
The Bible of course assumes this and tells us much more about the various meanings and benefits of suffering, and the various purposes it can accomplish in our lives. What are those purposes?
According to all branches of Christian theology, the ultimate purpose of life is to glorify God. That means that the first—but perhaps hardest to grasp—purpose for our suffering is the glory of God. The words suffering and glory are linked in a surprising number of biblical passages.
Paul says repeatedly that our sufferings prepare for us an eternal glory (Rom 8:17–18; 2 Cor 4:17). Peter adds that our sufferings enhance our eventual joy at our future glory (1 Pet 4:13). Then, in Ephesians 3:13, Paul tells his readers that his imprisonment and sufferings are for their glory. Finally, in 1 Peter 1:6–7, the apostle explains why his readers are “suffering grief in all kinds of trials.” “These have come,” he writes, “so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” Our sufferings, if handled properly, bring the Lord glory.
Many of the most popular churches today teach that God will make you happy, healthy, and prosperous, that he is there for your personal benefit. If we tacitly accept that view of things, we may find it offensive to hear someone say that tragedies and evil can honor and glorify God. And indeed, to simply say such a thing to someone who is watching their mother or child die from cancer would be confusing and cruel.
C. S. Lewis, in his book Reflections of the Psalms, confesses that for many years after becoming a Christian he was confused and embarrassed by God’s calls to us to glorify and praise him, to tell him about his greatness and rejoice in his excellencies. Lewis pointed out that, among humans, such a desire for praise was seen as completely despicable. “We all despise the man who demands continued assurance of his own virtue, intelligence, or delightfulness.”270
However, Lewis began to think about how praise and glorying worked in other ways. He noticed that when we say that a work of art is admirable, we don’t mean that it “deserves” praise in the way that a good student deserves a high mark. Rather, we mean the artwork demands admiration because it is the only “adequate or appropriate response to it” and that if we do not give it that praise, “we shall be stupid, insensible, and great losers, we shall have missed something.” And of course, he concluded then that “God would be, by his very nature, the ‘supremely beautiful and all-satisfying Object.’”271
From there, Lewis reasons that God commands us to glorify him because it is only by doing this that we will ever find the rest, satisfaction, and joy in him that we were made for. He directs us to do this not only because it is simply right but also because we need it. The psalmist tells us that it is “fitting . . . to praise him” (Ps 33:1; 147:1). It fits to glorify God—it not only fits reality, because God is infinitely and supremely praiseworthy, but it fits us as nothing else does. All the beauty we have looked for in art or faces or places—and all the love we have looked for in the arms of other people—is only fully present in God himself. And so in every action by which we treat him as glorious as he is, whether through prayer, singing, trusting, obeying, or hoping, we are at once giving God his due and fulfilling our own design.
The God of Glory
So much of Christian faith and practice hinges on the concept of the glory of God. But what is that?
The theology books struggle when they try to define it. I believe it is because the glory of God is actually the combined magnitude of all God’s attributes and qualities put together. The glory of God means what can be called his infinite beyondness. He is not a “tame” God, a God at hand. He is not someone you can always figure out, or expect to figure out. This is a God beyond our comprehension, and it is one of the aspects of the biblical God that modern people dislike the most. We are always saying, “I can’t believe in a God who would do this” or “I can’t believe in a God who would judge people.” One of the things that may mean is that we don’t want a glorious God, one beyond our comprehension.
The glory of God also means his supreme importance. The Hebrew word for “glory” is kabod, which means “weight”—literally God’s weightiness. Fortunately, we have an English word that has the same lexical range and that functions in the same way—it is the word matter. Matter means “as opposed to the immaterial, something solid, something substantial,” but it can also mean “importance.” And therefore, when the Bible says that God is glorious, it means he should matter, and does matter, more than anything else or anyone else. And if anything matters to you more than God, you are not acknowledging his glory. You are giving glory to something else.
When J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was published in the 1950s, a woman named Rhona Beare wrote Tolkien and asked him about the chapter in which the Ring of Power is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom. When the ring is melted, the Dark Lord’s entire power collapses and melts away with it. She found it inexplicable that this unassailable, overwhelming power would be wiped out by the erasure of such a little object. Tolkien replied that at the heart of the plot was the Dark Lord’s effort to magnify and maximize his power by placing so much of it in the ring. He wrote: “The Ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical treatments of the placing of one’s life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself.”272
Tolkien means something like this: It is one thing to love somebody and get a lot of joy out of the relationship. But if that person breaks up with you and you want to kill yourself, it means you have given that person too much glory, too much weight in your life. You may have said in your heart, “If that person loves me, then I know I am somebody.” But if that person then takes the relationship away, you collapse and melt down because you have ascribed more glory and honor to him or her than to God. If anything matters more to you than God you are placing yourself and your heart into something external. Only if you make God matter the most—which means only if you glorify him and give him the glory—will you have a safe life.
There is one more thing to say about God’s glory—it is his absolute splendor and beauty. The word for “glory” in the Old Testament means importance, the word for “glory” in the New Testament (the Greek word doxa) means “praise and wonder; luminosity, brilliance, or beauty.” Jonathan Edwards once said: “God is glorified not only by His glory’s being seen, but by its being rejoiced in.”273 It is not enough to say, “I guess he is God, so I have got to knuckle under.” You have to see his beauty. Glorifying God does not mean obeying him only because you have to. It means to obey him because you want to—because you are attracted to him, because you delight in him. This is what C. S. Lewis grasped and explained so well in his chapter on praising. We need beauty. We go to lengths to put ourselves in front of beautiful places, or surround ourselves with beautiful music, or hang out with beautiful people. But these will leave us empty if we don’t learn to see all of these things as mere tributaries and God himself as the fountain, the headwaters of it all.
So to see God as glorious is not only to admit his incomprehensibility and beyondness, and make him the thing that matters the most, but it is also to work your heart so it finds him the most pleasurable and beautiful thing you know.
No Graven Image
How, then, can we glorify God in our suffering—and how can suffering help us glorify God?
In 1966, Elisabeth Elliot, who had been a missionary to the Aucas (Waorani) of the South American Amazon rain forest, wrote a novel entitled No Graven Image.274 It is the story of a young unmarried woman named Margaret Sparhawk who had dedicated her life to translating the Bible for remote tribes whose languages had not yet been written down. She took up Bible translation work among the Quechua people of the mountains of Ecuador. Key to her work was the discovery of a man, Pedro, who knew the unwritten dialect that Margaret needed to learn in order to translate the Bible into that particular language. He began to teach her the language, and her painstaking work of systematically recording and documenting it moved forward.
One day, Margaret is feeling grateful as she travels to see Pedro. She remembers the Bible verse “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage.” And she prays to God, “I’ve been waiting, Lord. Waiting and waiting. . . . You know I waited a long time to be a missionary to mountain Indians. . . . You seemed to say translation and medical work. So you gave me Pedro. . . . Just being here today is an answer to prayer.”275 She thinks of all it has taken to bring her to where she is that day—the support of friends, financial help from many people in the United States, years of training, years of building relationships, and of course the provision of the one man who knew both Spanish and the dialect she needed. God now seemed to be bringing things together. Margaret imagines the possibility of bringing the Bible to a million people in remote regions of the mountains.
Finally, she arrives at Pedro’s home and discovers that he has an infected, painful wound in his leg. As part of her duties Margaret provided ordinary medical care and therefore she had with her a syringe and some penicillin. Pedro asks her for an injection and she decides to give it. But within seconds, Pedro begins to experience anaphylaxis, a severe, whole-body allergic reaction to the penicillin. The entire family gathers around in tears as he lies convulsing.
“Can’t you see he’s dying?” his wife, Rosa, cries to her. “You killed him.”
Margaret is astonished at what is happening and prays, “Lord God, Father of us all, if You’ve never heard me pray before, hear me now. . . . Save him, Lord, save him.”276 But Pedro worsens and begins to retch, bent over in tormented spasms. Rosa puts both of her hands on the top of her head and begins the death wail of women in her community. But Margaret continues to pray in her mind, “O Lord, what will become of Rosa? . . . What will become of Your work? You started all this, Lord. It wasn’t I. You led me here. You answered prayers and gave me Pedro—he is the only one. . . . O Lord, remember that. There is no one else.”277
But Pedro dies, and indeed it means her work is over. All the years of labor are wiped away. “As for the translation of the Bible, of course, I cannot go ahead without an informant. God knew about that when Pedro died. I do not write prayer letters [to my supporters] anymore, for I have nothing to say about my work. It seemed, on the night of Pedro’s death, as though Finis were written below all I had done.”278
The book ends with a profoundly confused young missionary. There is no last-minute reversal, and no “silver lining.” She stands at Pedro’s grave and thinks, “And God? What of Him? ‘I am with thee,’ He had said. With me in this? He had allowed Pedro to die, or—and I could not then nor can I today deny the possibility—He had perhaps caused me to destroy him. And does He now, I asked myself there at the graveside, ask me to worship Him?”279
The answer was yes—as my wife, Kathy, and I learned a few years later when we listened to Elisabeth Elliot’s lectures in the theological seminary where we were graduate students. She pointed to the last page, where, she said, was the key line.
“God, if He was merely my accomplice, had betrayed me. If, on the other hand, He was God, He had freed me.”280
She went on to explain to us that the graven image, the idol of the title, was a God who always acted the way we thought he should. Or more to the point—he was a God who supported our plans, how we thought the world and history should go. That is a God of our own creation, a counterfeit god. Such a god is really just a projection of our own wisdom, of our own self. In that way of operating, God is our “accomplice,” someone to whom we relate as long as he is doing what we want. If he does something else, we want to “fire” him, or “unfriend him,” as we would any personal assistant or acquaintance who was insubordinate or incompetent.
But at the very end, Margaret realizes that the demise of her plans had shattered her false god, and now she was free for the first time to worship the True One. When serving the god-of-my-plans, she had been extraordinarily anxious. She had never been sure that God was going to come through for her and “get it right.” She was always trying to figure out how to bring God to do what she had planned. But she had not really been treating him as God—as the all-wise, all-good, all-powerful one. Now she had been liberated to put her hope not in her agendas and plans but in God himself. If she could make this change, it would bring a rest and security she had never had. In short, suffering had pointed her to a glorious God, and it had taught her to treat him as such. And when she did so, it freed her from the desperate, doomed, exhausting effort to seek to control all the circumstances of her life and of those she loved.
Elliot’s novel was extraordinarily bold, and it offended traditional religious as well as secular sensibilities. In spite of the fact that we expect young children to trust adults that they cannot understand, most modern people are horrified to be asked to trust a God they cannot understand. But the novel was just as outrageous to many in the evangelical Christian world. Many readers wrote Elliot and protested vehemently that God would never allow such a thing to happen to a woman who had so prayerfully dedicated her life to his cause. A leading evangelical pastor told her with much satisfaction that he had personally kept the book off the Christian “book of the year” list.
However, Elisabeth told us, her own actual life experience had run almost exactly parallel to this novel—and actually had been even worse. In These Strange Ashes, an account of her first years as a Bible-translating missionary in South America, she tells of a man named Macario, who was “God’s answer to prayer . . . the key to the whole of the language work; he was (God knew) the only man on earth who spoke both Spanish and Colorado with equal ease.” But he was senselessly murdered, shot to death. Their translation work “now came to a sudden full stop.”281
Later a flood and then a theft robbed the translators of their card files—in which they had invested years of work.282 And after all this, Elisabeth married Jim Elliot, one of five young missionaries who were trying to reach out to the then isolated and hostile Waorani people of the Amazonian rain forest. One evening they sang a hymn, “We rest on thee, our Shield and our Defender,” and the next day they traveled into the forest, met a party of Waoranis, and were all speared to death, leaving behind many widows and orphans.283 All the Christians who were indignantly telling the author that God would never allow such things to happen to faithful believers simply didn’t know what they were talking about.
In her 1996 epilogue to Through Gates of Splendor, the account of the missionaries’ deaths, she challenged both the secular and traditional religious views of God and suffering as simplistic and naïve. She warned against trying to “find a silver lining” that would justify what happened. She wrote:
We know that time and again in the history of the Christian church, the blood of martyrs has been its seed. We are tempted to assume a simple equation here. Five men died. This will mean x-number of Waorani Christians. Perhaps so. Perhaps not. . . . God is God. I dethrone Him in my heart if I demand that He act in ways that satisfy my idea of justice. It is the same spirit that taunted, “If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the Cross.” There is unbelief, there is even rebellion, in the attitude that says, “God has no right to do this to five men unless . . .”284
The theme that runs through all of Elliot’s work is that to trust God when we do not understand him is to treat him as God and not as another human being. It is to treat him as glorious—infinitely beyond us in his goodness and wisdom. But, as Jesus says, the hour at which God’s glory was most brilliantly revealed was on the cross (John 12:23, 32). There we see that God is so infinitely, uncompromisingly just that Jesus had to die for sin, but also that God is so absolutely loving that Jesus was willing and glad to die. This is consummate wisdom—that God’s love and justice, seemingly at odds, could both be fulfilled at once. And so to trust God’s wisdom in our suffering, even when we don’t understand it, is to remember the glory and meaning of the cross. Elliot reasons like this: “Those hands that keep a million worlds from spinning into oblivion were nailed motionless to a cross—for us. . . . Can you trust him?”285
So one of the purposes of suffering is to glorify God by simply treating him as the infinite, sovereign, all-wise, and yet incarnate and suffering God that he is. This glorifies God to God—the most fitting thing that can be done. And if we do what fits God and our souls, we will find, as Elisabeth Elliot argues, a rest not based on circumstances.
Trusting God in suffering also glorifies him to others. When believers handle suffering rightly, they are not merely glorifying God to God. They are showing the world something of the greatness of God—and perhaps nothing else can reveal him to people in quite the same way. “It is commendable if someone bears up under the pain of unjust suffering out of a conscious commitment to God,” writes Peter (1 Pet 2:19). Patient endurance of suffering, when onlookers know that the sufferers are Christians, can reveal the power of God. Paul puts it even more vividly: “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus [suffering], so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Cor 4:10).
In the early church, the first martyr was Stephen, who was stoned to death for his public preaching of the gospel. The account of his death is told in Acts 6:8–8:1. When he was on trial for his life, we are told he was not fearful but radiant—“his face was like the face of an angel” (Acts 6:15). And as he was dying under the hail of stones, he prayed aloud, “Lord Jesus, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60). The young scholar Saul of Tarsus was present and saw the entire scene (Acts 7:58, 8:1). Later Saul is on his way to imprison Christians and destroy the church in Damascus when he meets the risen Christ. Jesus says, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads” (Acts 26:14). Goads were sharp sticks used to move animals in a right direction, and Jesus is indicating that although Saul was angrily opposed to Christianity, there was something deep inside that was pushing him unwillingly toward acknowledging its truth. Many believe that one of those “goads” was the seemingly inexplicable joy, peace, and lack of bitterness that Stephen showed as he was dying. How could Stephen have been that calm? How could he have been that sure that he was right with God? That able to forgive people even as they were killing him? It didn’t make sense. The way Stephen bore up under suffering was more than just “commendable”—it stuck in Saul’s soul.
This was perhaps the first example of what later Christian writers such as Ambrose, Cyprian, Ignatius, and Polycarp said over and over. Christians died so well, leaving onlookers wondering where they got their power. “Christians used suffering to argue for the superiority of their creed . . . [because] they suffered better than pagans.”286 Paul never forgot the principle after his conversion. That is why later he could write to believers not to be discouraged by his imprisonment (Eph 3:13) because his suffering was a way to show people his Savior’s character. He said to the Philippians, “I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel. As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ” (Phil 1:12–13).
In October of 2006, a gunman took hostages in a one-room schoolhouse of an Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. After shooting ten victims, five of whom died, ages seven to thirteen, he killed himself. Within hours after the suicide-murders, members of the Amish community visited the killer’s parents and expressed sympathy for their loss and support for the hard days ahead. When the gunman was buried a few days later, his young widow and her three children were amazed to discover that half those attending the funeral were Amish, who showed nothing but support and concern for the murderer’s family. An entire Christian community faced their suffering with the same peace that Stephen did in Acts 7. The forgiveness and love shown by the Amish community toward the shooter and his family was the talk of the entire country. The way they handled their suffering had been a powerful testimony to the truth of their faith and to the grace and glory of their God.
It is worth noting that the testimony of the Amish to Christ was so powerful that many observers felt the need to mute it. A made-for-TV film about the incident created a fictional character, Ida Graber, an Amish mother of one of the murdered children. In the movie, she is so filled with doubts and anger at God, and so unable to forgive the gunman, that she almost leaves her faith. Those who were actually involved with the Amish after the shootings countered that, despite the deep grief and pain, there was simply no one in the community who had their faith shaken or who could not forgive.287 The film showed—without aiming to—that the secular filmmakers who lived within the “immanent frame” couldn’t really comprehend an attitude toward God that enabled people to accept mysterious providence and dispense forgiveness without bitterness toward either God or the shooter.
Four years after the incident, a group of sociologists published a book about it.288 One of their main conclusions was that our secular culture is not likely to produce people who can handle suffering the way the Amish did. Many pundits and commentators across the country tried to claim the Amish’s startling love as “the best in ‘us,’” ignoring the profoundly and distinctively Christian roots of what they did. The Amish Grace scholars called that out as naïve. They argued that the Amish ability to forgive was based on two things. First, it was grounded in deep reflection and meditation on Christ forgiving his tormentors and killers.289 At the heart of their faith was a man dying for his enemies, and if you are a member of a community that speaks and sings about it—rehearses and celebrates it—constantly, then the practice of forgiving even the murderers of one’s children will not seem impossible.
But second, the authors pointed out that at its heart, forgiveness is a form of “self-renunciation”—it means giving up your right to pay back. As sociologists, they knew that the Christian view is that the meaning of life is to give up one’s individual interests for the sake of God and others, it is to give up one’s freedom in order to live according to God’s will and to the benefit of one’s neighbor. But this is directly opposed to how Americans are taught to live.
We live in an individualistic, consumeristic society, a society in which we are taught not self-renunciation but self-assertion—that your freedom, interests, and needs must always come first.290 A culture promoting self-assertion, however, will usually produce revenge as a response to suffering, while a counterculture like the Amish, promoting self-renunciation, will much more likely produce forgiveness as a response. “Most of us have [therefore] been formed by a culture that nourishes revenge and mocks grace,” the authors conclude, and they are right.291
And that is why peace and love in the face of evil and suffering—whether shown by the Amish in Lancaster, or Stephen in Jerusalem, or Jesus himself on the cross—is one of the greatest testimonies possible to the world of the reality of God, to his glory and his grace.
Glorifying God When No One Sees
The martyrdom of Jim Elliot had a visible impact on a generation of young Christian leaders. But what about suffering that virtually no one sees? Can that glorify God? Yes.
Joni Eareckson Tada is a woman who has been in a wheelchair most of her life. When she was seventeen, she had a diving accident and suffered an injury that left her a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the shoulders down. During the first two years after the injury, Joni experienced depression, bitterness, thoughts of suicide, and doubts about her Christian faith. When she was in a rehabilitation hospital in the Baltimore area, she shared a room with three or four other young women who also had some kind of debilitating condition. One of the people in her room was a girl named Denise Walters.292
Denise had been a happy, popular seventeen-year-old high school senior in Baltimore, Maryland. One day when she was bounding up the steps at the high school, she stumbled because her knees felt rather weak. By the end of the day, she could hardly walk. She went home and went to bed. When she woke up to go to dinner, she found she was paralyzed from the waist down. Not long afterward, she was paralyzed from the neck down, and then went blind. Just like that. It was a rare form of rapid-progression multiple sclerosis.
She lay motionless in her bed at Greenoaks Rehabilitation Hospital, unable to move or see, or barely able to talk. It was difficult to have any kind of conversation with her. Her roommates could have brief, fragmentary talks with her, but that was it. It wasn’t long before she had no visitors but her mother. But Denise and her mother were Christians, and every night her mom came in and read the Bible to her and prayed with her dying daughter. Denise knew she was dying, but death was not coming quickly enough to be considered merciful in any way. She lay there in a lonely hospital bed for eight long years.
Then she died.
Joni shares how troubling Denise’s life was to her. As her book explains, she first had to come to grips with her own loss and suffering. She recounts all the questions that pressed down on her every day. “Why did this happen to me? I am a Christian committed to Jesus: Why am I in a wheelchair for the rest of my life? How can God bring any good out of this? Why should I trust a God who allowed this to happen to me?” Nevertheless, slowly but surely, she began to make progress. She had begun to discover some of the reasons why suffering can be meaningful. Many of them had to do with a deeper understanding of God’s glory. She came to see that suffering is a way to testify to others about the glory of God. If others see you being patient under the suffering, it can show them that God is real.
But when Denise died, Joni struggled because here, it seemed, was a person who had loved Christ, and who never complained, but whose suffering seemed to be completely pointless. Nobody saw her. “Nobody ever told her ‘I want the kind of life you have. How do I get it?’ Her suffering seemed to be for nothing.”293
When Joni heard that Denise had finally died, she shared her struggle with some of her friends. One of them opened a Bible and turned first to Luke 15:10, which talks about the angels rejoicing in heaven over a repentant sinner. Then she turned to Ephesians 3:10, where it says that the angels are looking at what happens inside the church. If they had thought of it, they also could have gone to the book of Job. There the suffering of Job is watched by a great council of angels and by the devil as well. And suddenly Joni got it.
The secular worldview says there is only this world. The here-and-now material universe is the only reality. The natural is real, there is no supernatural. The immanent is real, there is no transcendent—no angels and demons, no spirits and souls, no God or devil. If you live within the secular “immanent frame,” as Charles Taylor says, you would be completely cut off from the hope that then came to Joni. “‘I get it!’ I lit up. . . . So her life wasn’t a waste, I reasoned. . . . Someone was watching her in that lonely hospital room—a great many someones.”294
To understand Joni’s insight, do this thought experiment. What if I told you that tomorrow, for one day, there would be a special camera that was going to put everything you said, everything you did, and everything you thought, on television? It would beam it around the world and probably a billion people would see it. Would that make any difference in how you lived tomorrow? I think it would. It would bestow enormous meaning and significance on even the most fleeting thoughts and minor actions. It would be somewhat frightening, of course, because you would need to be on your best behavior. But it would also be thrilling. You might say, “There are a couple of things I have always wanted to tell the world. Now I really can.” It would make an enormous difference. It would make the day incredibly meaningful.
But if Christianity is true—this is already happening. Don’t you see that you are already on camera? There is an unimaginable but real spiritual world out there. You are already on the air. Everything you do is done in front of billions of beings. And God sees it, too. As Joni wrote about her friend Denise, “Angels and demons stood amazed as they watched her uncomplaining and patient spirit rising as a sweet smelling savor to God.”295
No suffering is for nothing.
Suffering and Glory
Paul said to his Ephesian readers, discouraged because of his imprisonment, “My suffering is for your glory.” Why? Because that is how it works. Suffering and glory are closely linked. Suffering glorifies God to the universe and eventually even achieves a glory for us. And do you know why suffering and glory are so tied to each other? It is because of Jesus. Philippians 2 tells us Jesus laid aside his glory. Why? Charles Wesley’s famous Christmas carol tells you.
Mild he lays his glory by; born that men no more may die;
Born to raise the sons of earth. Born to give them second birth.
Jesus lost all his glory so that we could be clothed in it. He was shut out so we could get access. He was bound, nailed, so that we could be free. He was cast out so we could approach.
And Jesus took away the only kind of suffering that can really destroy you: that is being cast away from God. He took that so that now all suffering that comes into your life will only make you great. A lump of coal under pressure becomes a diamond. And the suffering of a person in Christ only turns you into somebody gorgeous.
Jesus Christ suffered, not so that we would never suffer but so that when we suffer we would be like him. His suffering led to glory. And you can see it in Paul. Paul is happy to be in prison because “my sufferings are for your glory,” he says. He is like Jesus now. Because that is how Jesus did it. And if you know that that glory is coming, you can handle suffering, too.
Life Story: The Canvas of Suffering
by Gigi
Growing up in the inner city of Oakland, California, in a predominantly black community, I identified as brown, even though I was Brazilian and Amish. With time, I became very passionate about how the gospel engages social issues such as poverty, race, and socioeconomic issues, and I devoted my life to serving in low-income areas for these very purposes. All the while viewing such issues through the lens of a person of color.
Then, in 2009, I moved to South Africa. Overnight, I became white.
I was well aware that South Africa continues to be one of the most racially polarized countries in the world. In 2010, I married an amazing black South African man, becoming one of very few interracial couples in this country. We instantly became a threat to the very fabric of a society built on racial hierarchy and separation, even post-Apartheid. Wherever we went, we felt the piercing stares of the masses.
Just before we met, my husband had planted a church in the largest township in South Africa: Soweto. Townships in South Africa, by definition, are exclusively black communities begun during the oppressive system of Apartheid. Today, they are vibrant communities full of life, culture, and beautiful people, as well as poverty, crime, and much suffering.
In short, overnight I became a “white” woman living in the largest all-black residential area in a country still hemorrhaging from its long legacy of racial distrust, hatred, and anger. I never could have expected what awaited me in this beautiful country among these beautiful and broken people. I longed to be an agent of healing among such devastation, and I continually prayed that God would make me more like Him to serve here. Little did I know how He intended to answer that prayer. It seems that some fruit comes only from suffering.
One month before our wedding, my husband’s closest friend and his most trusted leader in the church was exposed in having multiple moral failures with vulnerable young women in our church. As it turned out, he’d been living a double life for quite some time and hid it from all of us. Having been an elder, he was removed from leadership to go through a restoration process. Though he appeared repentant with his words, it soon became apparent that he was out for vengeance.
On our wedding night, while we slept, there was a fire in our room, which quickly filled with smoke. I woke up feeling like I was choking. We were taken to the hospital and told by the doctors that we never should have survived. They said we both should have died that night.
As a result of the smoke inhalation, chest X-rays showed, I had gotten pneumonia very badly. I was barely conscious for those two weeks of our honeymoon and I don’t even remember most of it. We came home after two weeks to a divided church and vicious rumors circulating. The elder who had been living a double life had made appointments with each of our leaders alleging that we had grossly mistreated him after his sin was exposed. He told many of our trusted leaders and members that I, in particular, had refused to forgive him and wouldn’t even speak to him. Given the great mistrust of white people in this community—and seeing as how I was now considered white—people readily accepted his story as truth. Within six months, we lost seventy-five percent of our church as a result of these lies. We lost most of our closest friends in this web of deceit, and many of them walked out of our lives with unashamed hatred toward us.
My health continued to decline. I found out that I had contracted a medically incurable tropical disease, which caused severe exhaustion and weakness most of the time.
By 2011, our thriving, vibrant ever-growing church had dwindled down to thirty people, many of whom still questioned if we could be trusted. As a result of the rumors, some people lost confidence in us, and our salary was cut almost in half. We struggled to pay rent, buy food and gas, and live day to day.
I felt utterly lost and alone, hated and alienated among the very people I left everything to love and serve. I also felt abandoned by God.
By October of 2011, I was so sick that I struggled to live day to day. Living in a poor community in South Africa also meant that pollution was really bad where we lived. My doctor told us that if I continued to live in Soweto, I would likely die within two years.
This shook us to the core. After much prayer, however, we felt the Lord was saying otherwise; that we were to stay and I would be restored.
As we neared the end of 2011, a momentum was finally building in the church again. We had been gutted by the countless trials and were still trying to recover, but the process of rebuilding had begun. We thought the worst was over . . . only to find it was yet to come.
During these two years full of rejection and hatred and violent slander, there was only one person who stood with me through it all. One person who refused to listen to rumors, who was not afraid to speak the truth to those who lied, the only one who openly stood as a friend in a time when it was very unpopular to be associated with me, the one person I could say was like a sister to me.
On December 30, 2011—my thirty-fifth birthday—that one person, my closest friend in South Africa, drowned. And another close friend of ours also drowned trying to save her. Words cannot describe the force of this grief and loss. Losing her was like losing ten people. At that time, she was the sum total of true community for me. We spent about three full days driving around the city delivering the horrible news to her family and her closest friends.
One week after that, my husband and I were assaulted at gunpoint by seven cops for no identifiable reason. It was a terrifying twenty-minute ordeal. I was left wondering, What kind of a wilderness have I come to where those threatening my life are the very ones I’m supposed to trust?
This is merely a “list” of events that we’ve suffered, but the internal turmoil and suffering is incalculable; immeasurable; indescribable. In one of the darkest moments, the Lord drew near. After months of crying out to Him and wondering why He felt so far in the darkest moments, He drew near in a way that I could sense and feel. I was reading Isaiah 53: “He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and like one from whom men hide their face He was despised. . . . He poured out Himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors.”
In some sense, my God “left” the comfort and glory of heaven to put Himself on earth in the weakness of human flesh. That, in and of itself, is unbelievable. But that wasn’t all. He put Himself on earth, laying aside His privileges of being God (Phil 2) for the sake of saving fallen mankind, the single most selfless act in human history . . . only to be “despised and forsaken of men”; to become “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”; to be numbered with the transgressors. My holy, righteous, omnipresent, omnipotent God who spoke all of creation into being at the sound of His voice was regarded as a transgressor. Though He was perfect and innocent, regarded as a transgressor. For the first time in three years, I felt deeply His nearness. I, too, left everything, coming to South Africa as a brown girl longing to love and serve. I, too, was to be numbered with hatred as something that I am not, as a white oppressor with the scores of injustices perpetrated. Though I am far too fallible to be compared with our glorious Savior, I saw His story in mine. I somehow felt for the first time in so long a sense of redemptive purpose in the midst of unspeakable suffering.
I saw it was the gospel message. Although there are seasons of the Lord’s discipline, I saw that suffering is the inextricable base-color thread woven through the fabric of the gospel. It is the canvas upon which salvation has been painted. Somehow in modern-day Christian circles, we tend to see God’s faithfulness as saving us from suffering. And yes, sometimes, in His great mercy, He does save us from suffering. But that is not the mark of His faithfulness. We see in Scripture that many of those He loved deeply are also those who suffered greatly.
This great moment of nearness with my Father didn’t remove the pain or the unspeakable grief, but it filled it with purpose and redemption. By the end of 2012, my health was steadily improving and my relationship with the Lord is steadily being restored. It has taken months of drawing near to Him, but I am now standing on my feet again. Still healing, but definitely standing. I see the fruit of suffering. And I see His story in mine.