Chapter 15: Thinking, Thanking, and Loving

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
by Tim Keller
 
Chapter 15: Thinking, Thanking, and Loving
 
Paul was one of the most prominent sufferers in the Bible.
Paul endured a multitude of physical, emotional, and spiritual hardships.
How did Paul handle all of this suffering?
He relied on the peace, comfort, and contentment that comes from God.
 
The Peace that Passes Understanding
Philippians 4 provides some of the most helpful advice about how to find peace in the midst of suffering.
Paul says that we do not need to be anxious, but that through prayer and thanksgiving we can present our requests to God.
We can experience a peace from God that surpasses our understanding. This peace will protect our hearts and our minds—even through intense times of suffering.
What is the peace of God?
An inner calm and equilibrium—a contentment in all circumstances.
Not merely an absence, but a presence.
Not just an absence of fear or worry. It is the presence of God and the sense of being protected.

Modern self-help books speak of emptying our minds of negative thoughts; the Bible teaches us to fill our minds with godly and true thoughts.
It is not just positive thinking or willpower.
It is a sense that no matter what happens, everything will work out all right (even if it doesn’t seem that way now).
It is a living power that comes into our lives from God and enables us to face the realities of life.
How do we find this peace?
3 disciplines revealed in Philippians 4.

 
The Discipline of Thinking
Thinking on what is noble, right, and pure:
Not just lofty, exalted thoughts.
Paul is teaching us to think on biblical truths-especially God’s work of salvation for us in Christ.

Christian peace comes by thinking more, not less.
Romans 8:18—Paul “reckons” / “thinks” that the sufferings of this world can never compare with the glories of the next.
Don’t separate sound biblical, gospel teaching from the peace and comfort that God grants to us.
We find comfort and peace in the truths of God and what he has accomplished for us and promised to us.
Paul is offering us a different vantage point from which to view our experiences.
We can find peace by looking at the larger picture from God’s viewpoint.
Jonathan Edwards on Christian happiness:
The “bad things” will work together for good (Rom 8:28).
The “good things”—adoption into God’s family, justification in his sight, union with him—cannot be taken away (Rom 8:1).
The “best things”—life in heaven, new heavens and new earth, resurrection—are yet to come (Rev 22:1ff).

 
The Discipline of Thanking
Thanksgiving is put over against anxiety. It is hard to be anxious at the same time that you are being thankful.
Paul instructs us to give God thanks as we bring our requests to him, even before he answers!
Paul is calling on us to trust God’s sovereign rule of history and of our lives. He is telling us that we will never be content unless we acknowledge that our lives are in his hands and that he is wiser than we are.
Romans 8:28 does not teach that every bad event has a “silver lining” or that every terrible thing is actually a good thing if you look at it properly.
No, it teaches that all things (even bad things) will ultimately together be overruled by God in such a way that the intended evil will, in the end, only accomplish the opposite of its designs—a greater good and glory than would otherwise have come to pass.
God is sovereign, so we should trust him.
Paul goes a step further: God is sovereign, so we should thank
We are to thank him for whatever he sends us, even if we don’t understand it.
 
The Discipline of Reordering Our Loves
Think on things that are lovely, admirable, excellent, praiseworthy.
These are things that are not only true but also beautiful and attractive.
Paul is urging us to not just order the thoughts of our minds but also to order the affections of our hearts.
To maintain equilibrium in troublesome times, we need to not only think the right things; we need to love the right things.
The Greek Stoics said that we should love our virtue/character the most because it is something we can control.
The problem is that we really can’t rely on our own virtue or character, because we are frail, finite, sinful creatures.
What we need for peace is to love that which is immutable—unchangeable.
God is immutable and cannot change. He will never fail us. God’s presence and love cannot disappoint or fail or be lost—even through death.
So, do we have to give up loving everything except for God?
No, we must properly order our loves.
Our problem is not that we love our career or family too much, but that we love God too little in proportion to them.
To get the calm, tranquility, and peace that comes from God, we must love him supremely, as our first love.
 
Relocating Your Glory
Our glory must not be in our own endeavors or abilities or in what other people may think of us.
Our glory—our source of joy, meaning, purpose, worth, identity—should be God.
Too often we elevate good things to supremely important things, and our suffering is intensified proportionately to the degree that our glory is located in the things that are affected by our suffering.
 
The Horrible, Beautiful Process
Suffering is like a furnace—it is painful but creates purity and beauty and strength.
How does it do this? Suffering puts its fingers on good things that have become too important to us.
We respond to suffering not by throwing those things out, but by turning to God and loving him more.
You can’t really understand your heart when things are going well.
Suffering reveals the false gods.
 
The Secret of Peace
How can we bring ourselves to love God more?
It is not by trying to work on our emotions. That won’t work.
We focus on God, but not in the abstract. We focus our attention specifically on God’s revelation to us in his Son, Jesus Christ.
By looking to the person and work of Christ we will come to love the immutable and find tranquility.
2 Corinthians 5:21 – Jesus became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
Christ endured ‘peacelessness’ so that we might receive eternal peace.
Instead of thinking you are being punished—look to the cross.
Instead of thinking that God doesn’t care—look to the cross.
The incomprehensible peace of God comes to our hearts through Jesus Christ (Philippians 4:7).
 

"Chapter 14: Praying"

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
by Tim Keller
 
Chapter 14: Praying
 
The Uniqueness of Job
The book of Job faces the question of evil and suffering with emotion and realism as well as intellectual and theological skill.
Its main theme is innocent suffering—why do so many good people have a disproportionate number of afflictions, while many dishonest, selfish, and greedy people have comfortable lives?
Job treats this issue with balance and nuance. It does not give simple, pat answers.
Job critiques all of the common answers to the problem of evil and finds them wanting.
Religious answer: you must have done something wrong or bad
Secular answer: there is no good reason, and a good God wouldn’t allow this—so there is no God.
One of the main messages of the book of Job is that both the religious and the secular answers are wrong.
 
My Servant Job
Job is described as a man who was blameless and upright. He was beyond reproach.
Satan accuses Job before God and says that Job fears and follows God for the benefits that God gives him.
If Job is just serving God for the benefits, then God has failed to make people into truly loving servants.
Satan wants to frustrate God and his purpose to turn people into joy-filled, great and good worshipers of him.
 
Becoming “Free Lovers” of God
God allowed Satan to test Job, because God knew that Job already loved him for himself. But Job’s love needed refinement. The suffering was allowed to bring Job to a level of greatness.
The opening of Job reminds us that there is a difference between external religiosity and internal heart love and devotion to God.
How do we develop a true, internal love for God that is not just a response to his good gifts or benefits?
Our love for God might begin with a heavy dependence and reliance on his benefits, but as the relationship deepens we will grow to love God for himself alone and grow to depend less on his benefits to love him.
The only way to grow to this point in a relationship is for it to be tested through difficulty and suffering.
Suffering provides us with an opportunity to notice our mercenary nature of our love for God and move beyond it to a deeper, truer love.
Job was not fully the servant he should be, and could be, and God was going to enable him to attain that kind of greatness the only way it can be attained—through adversity and pain.
Job would become more fully someone who serves God for nothing and loves God for himself alone.
 
God and Evil
The book of Job teaches a very asymmetrical relationship of God to evil.
In other words, the world is not dualistic, with two equal and opposing forces of good and evil vying for supremacy.
The Bible shows us that God is sovereign and is completely in charge.
He has total control over Satan, and Satan can only go as far as God allows.
At the same time, God is not viewed as being the one directly bringing the affliction on Job.
All things are within his sovereignty, but God does not will the evil in the same way that he wills the good.
 
The Speeches of Job and His Friends
The speeches of Job’s “friends” wound him deeply, because they are accusatory, and they give pat answers to difficult and mysterious afflictions.
They assume in a moralistic way that Job’s sufferings are directly related to his sinful actions.
The solution is to repent and confess his sins to God, and God will restore him.
The counsel of Job’s friends has elements of truth, but they are too disjointed and too simplistic to be helpful.
Job’s friends approach the world through a mechanical/formulaic lens.
They have no room for mystery, and they in essence put God on a leash and can’t imagine him acting in a way that is outside their moralistic formula.
Job’s sufferings are not punishment for his sin, nor are they a corrective to bring him back from a foolish path.
Job’s sufferings are intended to give him an “enlarged life with God.”
Job rejects the counsel of his friends. He knows that their domesticated view of God is wrong.
He also knows that God is just and he cannot curse God or reject him.
Job takes the harder path of mystery, and this leads him to the real lesson that God intended for him.
If Job had accepted the rationale of his friends, he would have missed the real purpose and benefit of what he was going through.
 
The Lord Appears and Job Lives
The book ends with several surprises.
The first is that God shows up, and yet he does not destroy Job. Job lives.
God does come in a “storm” with strong, challenging language. But this is actually a form of God’s grace to him.
God “answers” him, which suggests a personal conversation between Job and God.
God did not come to judge or denounce, but to invite Job into a deeper relationship.
 
The Lord Does Not Answer—and Yet He Does
One of the surprises of the book of Job is that God does not answer Job’s demand for explanation.
Job expected an explanation from God, and his friends expected God to condemn Job.
Neither get what they were expecting.
God does answer, but not in the way that any of them were expecting.
God offers Job no explanation for the things that have happened to him.
If he had, Job would have missed the purpose of the suffering, which was to bring Job into a deeper relationship with God where he would learn to trust and love God without the benefits and without all the answers.
To withhold the full story from Job, even after the test was over, keeps him walking by faith, not by sight.
He never sees how it all fits together. He sees God instead, which is far greater.
 
The Lord Is God and You Are Not
God’s reply to Job reminds us of his absolute power, wisdom, and sovereignty. He is God, and we are not.
God’s knowledge and power are infinitely beyond ours.
A seven-year-old cannot question the mathematical calculations of a world-class physicist. Yet we think that we can question how God runs the world!
The way of wisdom is to acknowledge that God alone is God and knows best.
In our complaints over our circumstances, there is the implication that we could propose to God better ways of running the universe than those God currently uses.

 
Job Is in the Right and You are Wrong
Surprisingly, in the end, God rebukes Job’s friends, not Job.
They assumed Job was in the wrong, because of all his suffering that he supposedly “deserved.” But God rebukes them and tells them to ask Job to pray for them.
God’s vindication of Job as an innocent sufferer speaks of God’s grace and forgiveness.
It also reminds us that God is always near his people, and we should continually seek him in the midst of our suffering.
 
“My Servant Job”—Again
God graciously allows Job the last word!
Job humbles himself before God and worships him.
He retracts his earlier statements, and acknowledges that God is sovereign and wise.
He speaks of now having “seen” God. The suffering has brought him into a deeper experience of the presence of God.
 
The Other Innocent Sufferer
Job, the righteous, blameless man, is a type of one greater to come.
Jesus was the ultimate righteous sufferer.
The one who knew no sin was made sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
Through suffering, Job became a companion of God.
When we suffer without relief, when we feel absolutely alone, we can know that, because Christ bore our pain, he will be with us.
In suffering, we are walking the same path Jesus walked. So, we are not alone. In fact, we are on a path that leads us closer to him.
 

"Chapter 13: Trusting"

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
by Timothy Keller
Chapter 13: Trusting
Expressing our sorrow in lament is not in conflict with an abiding trust in the goodness and sovereignty of God.
Language of lament and language of trust are found throughout the Bible in the face of life’s suffering.
Both sets of texts are in the Bible, and they are both important.
We should not interpret one group in such a way that it contradicts or weakens the claims and assertions of the other.
Joseph’s Story
The story of Joseph begins with a long string of terrible events that happened to him.
Joseph probably asked God to deliver him on many occasions—but there was just silence.
Joseph prayed for years and years for help from God—and never received a single answer.
It was not until all of the events unfolded that Joseph could look back and understand God’s purposes.
The Hidden God
Was God not there in all those years of difficulty and hardship in Joseph’s life?
No, he was there, and he was working.
He was hidden behind the scenes, but he was also in complete control.
The number of “coincidences” that had to come together for the events to unfold as they did is astounding, and a number of those events were difficult and painful.
But what would have happened if Joseph had never gone to Egypt?
If Joseph had not gone to Egypt:
Many people would have died from starvation.
His own family would have been wiped out.
Spiritually, his family would have been a disaster.
Joseph corrupted by pride and his father’s favoritism
The brothers corrupted by anger
Jacob corrupted by his addictive, idolatrous love of his youngest sons
The Joseph story shows us that even when people make choices of their own accord, even evil choices, that God is still sovereign and in complete control.
God was working out his purposes throughout all of the events—even in the smallest details of the daily lives and schedules and choices of everyone.
God “works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will” “for the good of those who love him” (Eph. 1:11; Rom. 8:28).
How did all the events of the Joseph story unfold?
They came about through suffering:
The terrible years of crushing slavery for Joseph
The terrible years of debilitating guilt for the brothers
The terrible years of grief and depression for Jacob
All of this was God’s plan to save lives.
After the pain, comes a “harvest of righteousness and peace” (Heb. 12:11).
Trusting the Hidden God
It is perhaps most striking of all to realize that if God had given Joseph the things he was likely asking for in prayer, it would have been terrible for him.
God was hearing and responding to Joseph’s prayers for deliverance, rescue, and salvation, but not in the ways or forms or times Joseph asked for it.
During all the time in which God seemed hidden, Joseph still trusted.
We do not always get to see how everything fit together in God’s plan like Joseph did, but we must trust God regardless.
At Dothan, Joseph prayed for deliverance and the answer was 20 years in the making. Also at Dothan, Elisha prayed for deliverance (2 Kings 6), and the answer came immediately.
God was just as present and active in the slow answer to Joseph as he was in the swift answer to Elisha.
Very often God does not give us exactly what we ask for. Instead he gives us what we would have asked for if we had known everything he knows.
We must never assume that we know enough to mistrust God’s ways or be bitter against what he has allowed.
We must also never think we have really ruined our lives, or have ruined God’s purposes for us.
You cannot destroy God’s good purposes for us, and you can’t break God’s love.
Everything Hangs Together
Everything that happens is part of God’s plan, even the little things and the bad things.
Nothing happens by accident.
Very seldom do we glimpse even a millionth of the ways that God is working all things together for good for those who love God, but you can be assured he will not abandon you.
“Everything is needful that he sends; nothing can be needful that he withholds” – John Newton
The Ultimate Joseph
Joseph was a forerunner of Jesus.
Like Joseph, the Lord Jesus
Sold for silver coins
Denied and betrayed by his brethren
Unjustly put into chains and sentenced to death
Prayed for deliverance from God
Accepted the suffering as God’s will
Forgives his tormentors
Knew God intended good from evil
Promoted to power and intercedes for us
Looking at the cross, not knowing the whole story, we would have said: “I don’t see how God could bring any good out of this.”
But what we would have been looking at is the greatest, most brilliant thing God could ever do for the human race.
On the cross, both justice and love are being satisfied—evil, sin, and death are being defeated.
Don’t turn from God when we can’t fit events into our limited understanding.
We must trust God, even in the darkest times, because God is sovereign and good.
Even though we cannot know all the particular reasons for our crosses, we can look at the cross and know God is working things out for our good.
God accomplishes his salvation through weakness, not strength. Jesus triumphs over death by dying, winning by losing.
The grace of God grows more through our difficulties than our triumphs.

"Chapter 12: Weeping"

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
by Tim Killer
 
Chapter 12: Weeping
 
The Disappearance of Lament
Our suffering is not redemptive; Christ’s suffering was redemptive. Our suffering is leading to our sanctification and ultimate glorification.
By and large, the church has lost the use of lament as a proper biblical response to troubles and misery.
The Psalms, however, are filled with examples of lament, cries of distress and grief.
Job and the Prophets are filled with examples of cries of lament.
 
Some church traditions have minimized the use of lament, out of fear of portraying a lack of faith or doubts about the love of Christ.
This approach to suffering does not do justice to the full range of emotion displayed in the Scriptures.
Faith in God is not necessarily a stoic faith, emotionally detached from the realities of life.
Job legitimately expressed grief with powerful emotion and honesty.
 
A Bruised Reed He Will Not Break
In light of the Bible’s use of lament, it is not right for us to simply say to a person (or ourselves) in grief that they need to pull themselves together. We should be more gentle and patient.
A bruised reed he [the Servant] will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. In faithfulness he will bring forth justice; (Isa 42:3, NIV)
The Servant is to be identified as the Messiah, Jesus (see Matt 12:20).
 
Jesus cares for the fragile and the broken. He loves people who are beaten and battered and bruised.
He binds up the brokenhearted and heals our wounds (Ps 147:3; Isa 61:1).
God’s care for the depressed prophet Elijah is an example of his mercy to the “bruised reed.”
The angel does not come to Elijah in rebuke or in an attempt to manufacture joy; he comes with care and provides him nourishment.
 
Rest, nourishment, and encouragement are not all that Elijah needs, but that is what he needs in the moment.
Later, God will challenge him out of his despair by reorienting Elijah’s vision of the situation.
God takes a balanced approach with his prophet. He is a person with a body and a soul. He needs physical rest and nourishment. He needs emotional encouragement, and at the right time he needs to be spiritually challenged.
 
Isaiah 42:3 means that Jesus is gentle with the bruised and never mistreats
Richard Sibbes: Think “…if Christ be so merciful as to not break me, I will not break myself by despair….”
Suffering people need to be able to weep and pour out their hearts, and not to immediately be shut down by being told what to do.
 
Weeping in the Dark
We need to allow more room and freedom for lament. Lament is not a lack of faith.
Reading and praying the Psalms of lament back to God can be good counsel to those in grief.
Psalm 88 ends without a note of hope, and is a biblical reminder that darkness may go on for a length of time before the light comes.
 
Times of darkness can reveal God’s grace in new depths.
Psalm 88 is in the Bible for a reason.
It reveals that God remains this man’s God not because the man puts on a happy face and controls all his emotions, but because of grace. God is patient and gracious with us. Salvation is by grace.
Heman is not praising God, but lamenting to God, and it is inspired Scripture.
 
It is perhaps when we are still in unrelenting darkness that we have the greatest opportunity to defeat the forces of evil.
In the darkness we have an opportunity that is not really there in better times.
We can choose to serve God just because he is God, not because things are going well.
In darkness, we can learn to love God for himself, and not for his blessings, while our love for other things lessens.
 
The Darkness of Jesus
Psalm 88 also reminds us that our darkness can be relativized by Jesus’ darkness.
God never abandons his children, but will use the darkness to make us into what he wants us to be.
Psalm 39 reminds us that Jesus endured the ultimate darkness for us. God turned his face from Jesus, as he died for our salvation.
Jesus died so that we would never be abandoned by God, even in darkness.
 
Jesus went into suffering for us. He did not abandon us despite all his own suffering. Do you think he will abandon you now in the midst of yours?
Because of Jesus—there is always hope, even in the darkest moments of your life.
 
Grieving and Rejoicing
What does it mean to “rejoice in suffering”?
Don’t think of it in purely subjective, emotional Rejoicing does not mean just to “have happy emotions.”
It also does not involve denying the real sorrow that you are experiencing.
1 Peter 1:6-7 does not pit rejoicing and suffering against one another.
We can and must rejoice in suffering if we are to grow through our suffering rather than be wrecked by it.
 
In the Bible, the “heart” is not identical to emotions. The heart is the place of your deepest commitments, trusts, and hopes.
Our emotions, thoughts, and actions flow from these commitments.
To “rejoice” in God means to dwell on and remind ourselves of who God is, who we are, and what he has done for us.
Our emotions may or may not follow us in this remembrance.
 
Rejoicing in suffering happens within
Grief and sorrow drive us more into God and show us the resources we never knew we had.
Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Did he not have joy in God?
The joy of the Lord happens inside the sorrow. The weeping drives you into the joy, it enhances the joy, and then the joy enables you to feel your grief without it sinking you.
 
Rather than expecting God to remove the sorrow and replace it with happiness, we should look for a “glory”—a taste and conviction and increasing sense of God’s presence—that helps us rise above the darkness.
 

"Chapter 11: Walking"

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
by Tim Keller
 
Chapter 11: Walking
 
“When through fiery trials
Thy pathways shall lie,
My grace all sufficient,
shall be thy supply;
The flame shall not hurt thee;
I only design
Thy dross to consume,
And thy gold to refine.”
-How Firm a Foundation-
 
Walking with God in Suffering
One of the main metaphors in the Bible for facing affliction is walking.
Walking through darkness
Walking through deep waters
Walking through slippery and dangerous mountain paths

Walking indicates progress.
We are to walk through suffering without shock and surprise, without denial of our sorrow and weakness, without resentment or paralyzing fear, yet also without acquiescence or capitulation, without surrender or despair.
 
The metaphor of walking through fire is one of the most helpful metaphors.
When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior… Do not be afraid, for I am with you (Isaiah 43:2-3, 5)
Believers are not promised exemption from trouble.
The promise is that God will be with us, walking beside us in it.
 
Suffering is like a refiner’s fire, like a forge or furnace (1 Peter).
A furnace can obliterate or improve, depending on the object placed into the fire and the manner in which it is treated.
Adversity is like a fire that, rather than destroying you, can refine, strengthen, and beautify you, as a forge does with metal ore.
 
When gold is put through fire it may soften or melt, but it will not kindle and go to ashes.
The impurities that are mixed with the gold are burned up or separated from the gold, making the gold more pure and beautiful.
We have many blemishes in our character that we are often blind to in ourselves.
Suffering comes and reveals our impurities and draws them out, in order to refine us.
 
But, it depends on our response.
Adversity does not automatically cleanse the impurities from our character.
We must recognize, depend on, speak with, and believe in God while in the fire.
Knowing him personally while in our affliction is the key to becoming stronger rather than weaker in it.
 
Three in the Furnace
The promise of Isaiah 43:2-3 became literally true in the story of the three young Israelite men in Babylon (Daniel 3).
They would literally have to go through fire, into the furnace, for their faith in God.
They exhibited complete trust in God and so were able to be confident yet humble in the face of their affliction.
They confidently believed God could and would rescue them, but they also humbly acknowledged that they did not know the mind of God.
 
Faith is not believing that God will do something, no matter what, without any exceptions.
Faith is believing that God will do something, if it is God’s will to do it.
We can be confident in the power and might of God, but at the same time not be arrogant in our expectation that God will do exactly what we think he should.
A prayer not answered exactly as requested is not an indication of the weakness of our faith or of the weakness of God’s ability to answer.
 
Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were ready for deliverance or death. They were already “spiritually fireproofed.”
God would deliver them from death or he would deliver them through
God would be glorified either way.
Their greatest joy was to honor God, not to use God to get what they wanted in life.
As a result, they were fearless. Nothing could overthrow them.
 
Four in the Furnace
The three Hebrew young men did not go through the fire alone.
As Isaiah 43 said, God walked with them through the flames.
The fourth “man” who appeared was likely the Angel of the LORD, or a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus Christ.
When Jesus came to earth, he entered into our weakness and walked beside us through the difficulties of life.
He experienced them with us, and then endured the ultimate suffering for us.
 
Jesus endured the fire alone in our place so that we might be forgiven by God.
Now we can have the assurance of God with us in the fire, because Jesus suffered for us alone in the fire.
 
Lessons of the Furnace
If you believe in Jesus and you rest in him, then suffering will relate to your character like fire relates to gold.
Suffering is the only way to:
know who you truly are, including your strengths and weaknesses
become a compassionate person who helps others who are hurting
develop a profound trust in God that will fortify you against the disappointments of life
become wise about how life goes

 
God is with us in the fire. He has lived it, so he understands. He is near and available to be known and depended upon.
He walks with us, but will we walk with him?
If we have created a false “God-of-my-program,” then when life falls apart we will simply assume he has abandoned us and we won’t seek him.
 
How do we come through suffering strengthened and not broken?
We must walk with God.
Treat God as God.
Know God is there with you.
Remember the gospel.

Going into the fire without the gospel is the most dangerous thing you can do.
A heart forgetting the gospel will be torn between anger and guilt.
We must remember that Jesus went through the ultimate fire to save us. Now he will be with us in the smaller fires of our lives to purify us.
 
Ways to Walk with God
Walking is nondramatic, rhythmic.
It consists of steady, repeated actions you can keep up with over a long time.
A walk is a day in and day out praying, Bible and Psalms reading, obeying, talking to Christian friends, going to corporate worship, committing to and fully participating in the life of the church.
A walk with God is a metaphor that symbolizes slow and steady progress.
         
Walking with God means that, in general, you will not experience some kind of instant deliverance from your questions, sorrow, or fears.
There will be progress, but it will typically be slow and steady progress that comes only if you stick to the regular, daily activities of the walking.
Walk
Grieve and weep
Trust and pray
Think, thank, and love
Hope

 
These are complementary actions, not stages or steps.
Some may be more important at different times depending on the person, the circumstances, and the type of adversity.
No two paths through suffering are identical.
All of these, however, are helps that the Bible gives us for walking with God through suffering.
 

Chapter 10: The Varieties of Suffering

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
by Tim Keller
 
Chapter 10: The Varieties of Suffering
 
Suffering has a tremendous capacity to help us grow.
Suffering does not deepen and enrich us automatically.
The same traumatic experience can ruin one person and make another person stronger and even happier.
How can we be prepared to handle suffering in a such a way that it leads to growth?
 
Diversities of Suffering
One way to be better prepared to handle suffering is to be aware of the fact that suffering comes in all varieties and shapes. Not all suffering is the same.
The Bible contains a remarkable degree of diversity on teaching regarding pain and adversity.
Suffering has a great number of causes as well as a wide variety of responses.
We cannot adopt a “one-size-fits-all” approach to suffering—either its causes or proper responses to it.
 
The Suffering We Bring on Ourselves
Some suffering we bring on ourselves through immoral or unwise choices.
Biblical examples: David and Jonah
Suffering brought on by our own choices can be used by God to discipline us and to wake us up to our own weaknesses and failures.
God may use this type of suffering to humble us and lead us to turn to him.
The lesson of this kind of suffering is often humility and repentance.
 
The Suffering of Betrayal
Some suffering is not brought about by our own failures, but by the betrayal or cruelty of others.
Biblical examples: Paul, Jeremiah
Suffering caused by good and brave behavior—a response of the wicked to the righteous.
Standing up for what is right or a just cause may bring suffering.
Personal relationships may encounter betrayal; others may turn on you in their own self-interest.
The temptation will be to become bitter and harbor anger.
Certainly, justice should be pursued when necessary, but a vengeful spirit should be avoided or this type of suffering will lead to bitterness.
The lesson of this type of suffering is to learn the grace of forgiveness and trust in God’s justice.
 
The Suffering of Loss
There is also the common or “universal” suffering of loss due to our own mortality, weakness, decay, and death.
The curse of sin has affected us all, and no one can escape this kind of suffering.
We will all endure the futility of life in a sin-cursed world, whether disease, natural disaster, loss of a loved one to death, or our own death.
The lesson with this type of suffering is to direct our eyes on God and to the various forms of comfort and hope that our faith offers us.
 
The Suffering of Mystery
Some suffering is incredibly horrendous, extraordinary, and “senseless” and can be classified as mysterious suffering.
Biblical example: Job
There is no simple answer to this type of suffering as Job and his friends discovered.
The point of Job’s suffering was not to fix any one particular thing in his life but to lead him to trust and obey God simply for who God is, not in order to receive something or to get something done.
Job’s suffering was not a chastisement or a lesson aimed at changing a particular flaw in Job’s life. But it was still used as a powerful vehicle both for Job’s personal growth and for God’s glory.
The lesson was about the whole tenor of Job’s life, and his need to base it fully, with all his heart, on God.
Job-type suffering requires a process of honest prayer and crying, the hard work of deliberate trust in God, and a re-ordering of our loves.
 
Diversities of Temperament
Not only are there various types and causes of suffering, but the way people respond to suffering is also quite varied depending on a person’s temperament, personality, and individual circumstances.
Aspects of internal affliction in response to suffering:
Isolation
Implosion
Condemnation
Anger
Temptation

Every instance of suffering likely contains a mixture of these internal responses—different for each person.
These responses highlight the infinitely complex and diverse condition affliction can be.
 
Diversities of Pathways
Every affliction is virtually unique.
Every sufferer will need to find a somewhat different path through it.
Some counsel is helpful to some, but the same counsel could be hurtful or irritating to others – even if the counsel is true.
The timing, tone, and motivation behind true counsel is crucial in order for it to be helpful and comforting.
Truths need to be grasped in the right order for that person in that situation.
“When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me” (Ps 23:4).
It turns out there is more than one path through the valley.
The Lord, the perfect Guide, will help you find the best way through it.
 

Chapter 9: Learning to Walk

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
by Tim Keller
 
Chapter 9: Learning to Walk
 
What about Our Glory?
Suffering glorifies If God is treated as God during suffering, then suffering can reveal and present him in all his greatness.
Suffering also prepares a glory for us.
The glory that suffering prepares for us is not the same as the modern concept of self-improvement or happiness.
Ironically, happiness does not come by seeking happiness, but by seeking God and his kingdom. Loving God and loving others honors God and produces happiness in us as a byproduct.
 
We should trust God, not because it will get us something, but because God is worthy of our trust and worship.
If we don’t seek to find ourselves but to find God, we will eventually find both God and ourselves.
If we seek not our own benefit but God’s glory, it will lead paradoxically to a development of our own glory, that is, of our character, humility, hope, love, joy, and peace.
So, we must not waste our sorrows, but grow through them into grace and glory.
 
Productive Suffering
Contrary to Western secular culture that sees no purpose in suffering, the Bible presents a productive and valuable purpose in suffering.
Suffering can reveal flaws in our character that we might not otherwise see, such as lack of courage, selfishness, or self-love.
Going through sorrow, even depression, can cause us to appraise our own limitations and flaws more accurately, and help us to realize how little control we may have over our circumstances.
 
Suffering does not automatically improve your life.
Suffering will change you one way or another. It will leave you a much better person or a much worse one than you were before.
“Avoidance coping and denial” leads to avoidance strategies like drinking, drugs, etc. and ultimately to self-destruction.
“Active coping and reappraisal” leads to doing the hard inner work of evaluation, learning, changing, and growing.
 
How God Uses Suffering
God uses suffering to remove our weaknesses and build us up in primarily four ways:
Suffering transforms our attitude toward ourselves.
Humbles us
Removes unrealistic self-regard and pride
Reminds us of how fragile we are
Leads us to examine ourselves and see weaknesses, because it often brings out the worst in us.


 
Suffering will profoundly change our relationship to the good things in our lives.
Realize that some things have become too important to us (idols).
Often, the magnitude of our suffering is in direct proportion to the excessive weight we put on the things we have lost or are in jeopardy.
Suffering provides an opportunity to invest more of our hope and meaning in God and others.

 
Suffering can strengthen our relationship to God as nothing else can.
Lewis: “In prosperity God whispers to us, but in adversity he shouts to us.”
When times are good how do you know that you really love God and are trusting God?
Only suffering can reveal the impurities or falseness of our faith in God.
Suffering drives us to prayer.

 
Suffering is almost a prerequisite if we are going to be of much use to other people.
Adversity makes us much more compassionate than we would have been otherwise.
Having received comfort from God in our suffering, we are in a better place to minister God’s comfort to others who are suffering.  (2 Cor 1:3-7)

 
God’s Gymnasium
The Bible speaks of suffering using the metaphor of a gymnasium.
Heb 12: suffering is painful, but later on it produces righteousness and peace for those who are being trained (exercised) by it.
In the gym, our weaknesses are exposed for what they are, and then they are purposefully exercised to strengthen them.
In the gym, you feel you are getting weaker, but later on this results in strength and endurance.
 
In suffering, like in the gym, we need the right application of pressure and discomfort in order to be strengthened.
So, the suffering that God brings into our lives has a limit and has a purpose.
So, our response to suffering should not be to despise it or to faint under it; we should move forward through the exercises.
Our motivation and hope is to look to Jesus who also endured suffering on the way to glory.
 
Preparing the Mind for Suffering
Suffering will come, and we have a responsibility to walk through suffering in the right way for it to achieve its intended effects.
So, we need to prepare our minds for suffering before the suffering arrives.
The more deeply you know and grasp the Bible’s teachings before the adversity comes, the more comfort they will be.
A growing understanding of the Bible and a vital prayer life are the greatest preparation for affliction.
 
 
 
 
Preparing the Heart for Suffering
Suffering is not just an intellectual issue, but a personal problem. So, we must prepare the heart as well as the mind to properly walk through suffering.
Developing a consistent, vibrant, theologically deep, and relationally real prayer life is the best way to prepare the heart for suffering.
If our understanding and experience of God’s love are strong before the affliction comes, they can serve as anchors that keep us from being overwhelmed by the adversity.
 
When suffering first hits you, the gap between what you know with the mind and what you can use out of your store of knowledge in the heart can be surprisingly large.
When troubles come, you will need God’s help to find the particular insights, consoling thoughts, and wisdom you will need to get through.
Biblical truths previously known in the mind will have to be revisited in the heart and applied to the current real life experience.
 
It is one thing to have biblical truths stored in the warehouse of the mind. It is quite another to know how to apply them to your own heart, life, and experience in such a way that they produce wisdom, endurance, joy, self-knowledge, courage, and humility.
It is one thing to believe in God but it is quite another thing to trust
Walking through suffering requires not just knowing about God, but knowing God.
 

Chapter 8: The Reason for Suffering

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
by Tim Keller
 
Chapter 8: The Reason for Suffering
 
People and cultures long to bestow meaning on suffering and evil.
Suffering has been explained by the Christian faith more thoroughly than any other religion or worldview.
In Christianity, suffering is not meaningless.

God has a purpose in suffering and evil.
God is accomplishing his purposes through suffering, not in spite of it.
God will one day finally eliminate suffering and evil.
In the person of Jesus Christ, God has suffered himself and has purposed to overcome suffering and evil.
Whatever God’s purposes for suffering, they are motivated by love for his people.
Suffering is the means God chose to redeem us, and suffering is one of the main ways we become like him and experience his redemption.
Though suffering is painful, it is also filled with purpose and usefulness.

 
On Not Wasting Your Suffering
Modern Western culture devalues suffering and finds no usefulness in it.
Evidence suggests that people need adversity in order to reach higher levels of strength and maturity.
Three benefits to suffering seen in many individual experiences:
People who endure suffering become more resilient.
It strengthens relationships and opens the door for deeper friendships.
It changes priorities and philosophies.

 
 
 
People who have never suffered are likely to have naïve views about life’s meaning.
Trauma has a way of shattering belief systems and robs people of their sense of meaning. It forces people to put the pieces back together, and often they do so by turning to God or some other higher, unifying principle.
The Bible assumes that suffering creates resilience (Rom. 5:3-4), and that it draws us nearer to God as our refuge.
 
To Glorify God
We, as God’s image-bearers, exist to glorify God in all of life.
So, one purpose of suffering is to glorify God through it.
Many biblical passages link suffering with the glory of God.

This Christian teaching that we can glorify God through suffering does not fit with the popular “prosperity gospel.”
God is worthy of our praise and admiration, because it is the only adequate and fitting response to his infinite perfection.
 
God, by his very nature, is the most supremely beautiful and all-satisfying Object.
God commands us to glorify him because it is only be doing this that we will ever find the rest, satisfaction, and joy in him that we were made for.
In every action by which we treat him as glorious as he is, we are at once giving God his due and fulfilling our own design.
 
The God of Glory
Much of Christian faith and practice hinges on the glory of God.
The glory of God is the combined magnitude of all God’s attributes and qualities put together.
“His infinite beyondness”
God is beyond our comprehension, and this is perhaps one of the aspects of the biblical God that people dislike the most.
People want a God they can figure out and control.
 
The glory of God also means his supreme importance.
Hebrew word “kabod” – expresses God’s “weightiness” or significance.
If anything matters to you more than God, you are not acknowledging God’s glory. You are giving glory to something else.
The glory of God is also his absolute splendor and beauty.
 
Greek word “doxa” expresses “praise and wonder, brilliance, and beauty.”
Edwards: “God is glorified not only by His glory’s being seen, but by its being rejoiced”
Glorifying God means obeying him not because we have to but because we want to—because we are drawn to his brilliance and beauty.
Glorifying God means to be delighted in him and to be satisfied in him.
 
No Graven Image
How, then, can we glorify God in our suffering—and how can suffering help us glorify God?
Many of us have “graven images” the idol of a God who always acts the way we think he should. We imagine a God who supports our plans, how we thought the world and history should go.
This is a God of our own creation, a counterfeit
Such a god is a projection of our own wisdom, of our own self.
 
When suffering comes, the demise of our plans shatters our false god. This enables us to be free to worship the True God.
Suffering introduces us to a God we cannot fully understand or control, who is infinitely perfect, wise, and glorious.
Suffering challenges us to leave behind our false images of God and embrace the True God who is incomprehensible and glorious.
When we trust God even when we don’t understand, we glorify him.
 
Glorifying God to Others
Trusting God in suffering also glorifies him to others.
When believers handle suffering rightly, we are showing the world something of the greatness of our God—and perhaps nothing else can reveal him to people in quite the same way.
In the early church, Christians used suffering to argue for the superiority of their faith because they endured suffering better than the unbelievers.
Peace, love, and forgiveness in the face of suffering 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
Even when we think no one is watching how we go through suffering, God and the angels are watching and rejoicing in our spiritual growth through adversity.
How we endure suffering matters, because our existence is not just about this world that we can see or even just about the here and now. There is a spiritual world beyond our vision, and there is an eternity beyond this lifetime.
No suffering is for nothing.
 
Suffering and Glory
Though counterintuitive, suffering and glory are closely linked in the Scriptures.
Suffering glorifies God to the universe and eventually even achieves glory for us.
Philippians 2 – Jesus humbled himself and endured suffering on the path to glory. He did it in love for us to the glory of God.
Our suffering may be for the good of others, or to make us more like Christ, or simply to glorify God through our trust in him when we don’t
 

Chapter 7: The Suffering of God

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
by Tim Keller
 
Chapter 7: The Suffering of God
Christianity is unique in teaching that God is sovereign over suffering and also made himself vulnerable and subject to suffering.
Holding both the sovereignty of God and the suffering of God together is crucial to a Christian understanding of suffering.
We see glimpses of God’s suffering in OT:
God’s love and compassion for Israel.
God’s grief over human sin and evil.
God’s deep love for his people means that our condition affects his heart.

 
We need to hold and maintain two biblical truths:
The living God is a self-maintaining, self-sufficient reality that does not need to draw vitality from outside. God does not need us.
God experiences emotions, such as joy, pleasure, pain, and grief.

Heart involvement leads to suffering. The more you love someone, the more that person’s grief and pain become yours.
God is not an abstract deity, but a person who experiences emotion and suffering.
 
The Suffering of God the Son
The suffering of God comes into clearest focus in the Son of God, Jesus Christ.
Jesus experiences the ordinary pressures, difficulties, and pains of normal human life.
Jesus experienced the ultimate suffering in his Passion, his betrayal, trial, torture, and death on the cross, when he bore the wrath of God for our sins and was forsaken by his Father.
God took into his own self, his own heart, an infinite agony—out of love for us.
 
The NT speaks of Christ continuing to suffer in the persecution of his people (Acts 9:4).
Jesus so identifies with his people that he shares in their sufferings.
The NT also speaks of Christians sharing in Christ’s sufferings (1 Pet 4:13; Phil 3:10).
Our sufferings do not add anything to the suffering of Christ, his atoning work for our salvation.
Because we are in union with Christ, we “fellowship” with Christ in our suffering.
 
Christ learned humanhood from his suffering. We learn Christhood from our suffering.
Just as Jesus assumed human likeness through suffering, so we can grow into Christ’s likeness through suffering, if we face it with faith and patience.
 
The Suffering Sovereign
These two complementary (not contradictory) truths must be held together:
God is capable of emotions and suffering.
And, God is completely sovereign over suffering.

The God who has no causal relationship to suffering is no God at all, certainly not the God of the Bible…who is both suffering and sovereign. Both beliefs are necessary to the Christian assertion that suffering has some meaning.
 
If God is out of control of history, then suffering is not part of any plan; it is random and senseless.
On the other hand, if God has not suffered, then how can we trust him?
It is because God is all-powerful and sovereign that his suffering is so astonishing. If God were somehow limited or out of control, his suffering would not be so radically voluntary—and therefore not so fully motivated by love.
 
If even God has suffered, then we cannot say that he does not understand, or that his sovereignty over suffering is being exercised in a cruel and unfeeling
Since he has not kept himself immune from our pain, we can trust him.
Because suffering is both just and unjust, we can cry out and pour out our grief, but without the toxic bitterness.
Because God is both sovereign and suffering, we know our suffering always has meaning even though we cannot see
 
The Final Defeat of Evil
The Bible teaches us to look forward to a final judgment as the decisive answer of God to all such questions, as the solution of all such problems, and as the removal of all the apparent discrepancies of the present.
In our world of justice, we only have the capability of punishing evil, but we do not have the power to undo
God has the power to undo it.
The Bible promises more than just Judgment Day.
 
Judgment Day is accompanied by the coming of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the renewal of heaven and earth.
The death of Jesus not only secured our salvation; it assured the restoration of all things at the end of time.
The cross of Christ was the worst human evil in the history of the world; it was the worst that human and non-human evil against God could do.
 
Yet, in God’s plan the worst evil ever committed accomplished the ultimate victory over evil.
The very moment Jesus was dying on the cross, he was “disarming the powers…triumphing over them by his cross” (Col 2:15).
It is a wounded and resurrected lamb who is able not only to judge wrongdoing but actually to undo the damage that evil has wreaked on creation.
 
Without the suffering of Jesus, evil wins.
It is only Jesus’ suffering that makes it possible to end suffering—to judge and renew the world—without having to destroy us.
At the cross, evil is turned back on itself.
Calvin: “On the cross, destruction was destroyed, torment tormented, damnation damned…death dead, mortality made immortal.”
 
Christ’s suffering on the cross humbles We have no other position than at the foot of the cross. There we find the wisdom to reject optimistic theodicies and tragic philosophies. God’s answer to suffering is evil turned back on itself at the cross.
While Christianity never claims to be able to offer a full explanation of all God’s reasons behind every instance of evil and suffering—it does have a final answer to it. The answer will be given at the end of history.
 
No More Tears
The cross secured the defeat of evil in the past, on Calvary, but now it also guarantees a final experience of that defeat in the future in the renewal of all things, when every tear will be wiped away
The suffering of Jesus has ended
The Bible teaches that the future is not an immaterial “paradise” but a new heaven and a new earth.
The Christian hope is unlike any other religion or philosophy.
 
Christianity offers not merely a consolation but a restoration—not just of the life we had but of the life we always wanted but never achieved. And because the joy will be even greater for all that evil, this means the final defeat of all those forces that would have destroyed the purpose of God in creation, namely, to live with his people in glory and delight
 

Chapter 6: The Sovereignty of God

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
by Tim Keller
 
Chapter 6: The Sovereignty of God
 
Many philosophies and religions approach human suffering and evil too simplistically.
The Bible’s picture of suffering is the most nuanced and multidimensional.
Two foundational balanced truths:
Suffering is both just and unjust.
God is both a sovereign and a suffering God.

These paired truths present a remarkably rich and many-sided understanding of the causes and forms of suffering.
 
Suffering as Justice and Judgment
Genesis 1-3: Suffering in the world is the result of sin.
All forms of suffering enter the world after Adam and Eve’s disobedience:
Spiritual alienation, inner psychological pain, social and interpersonal conflict and cruelty, natural disasters, disease, and death.

All of this natural and moral evil stems from our ruptured relationship with God.
Romans 8:18f.: The world is under the curse of frustration or futility.
 
The world is now in a cursed condition and falls short of its design.
A frustrated world is a broken world, in which things do not function as they should, and that is why there is evil and suffering.
God placed the world in this condition for judgment, but God has not abandoned the world or us.
God had in view a plan for the redemption and renewal of all things.
 
Once human beings turned from God, there were only two alternatives, either immediate destruction or a path that led to redemption through great loss, grief, and pain, not only for human beings, but for God himself.
The existence of suffering in the world is really a form of God’s justice.
God often metes out retributive justice, in which people get what they deserve.
Biblical wisdom literature is clear that suffering comes in many instances because of foolishness or wickedness.
 
 
Suffering as Injustice and Mystery
While suffering in general is the result of sin in general and while God does sometimes bring retributive justice on individuals for their foolishness or wickedness, the Bible is also just as clear that individual instances of suffering may not be the result of a particular sin.
The fact of suffering was held to be the result of sin, especially original sin, but this did not mean that each instance of suffering could be causally linked to a specific sin and its divine punishment.
 
While the human race as a whole deserves the broken world it inhabits, nevertheless evil is not distributed in a proportionate, fair way.
Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes are linked together in a complementary
Proverbs emphasizes the foundational moral order of God’s world, the way things should work in a just world.
Job and Ecclesiastes emphasize the fact that this world is broken, and suffering is not always linked to morality in a consistent way.
 
Proverbs shows us the reality of God’s order, Job points to its “hiddenness,” and Ecclesiastes to its “confusion.”
In the NT, John 9 shows us that suffering is not necessarily linked to past immoral actions. God’s ways are inscrutable.
Much suffering is disproportionate and unfairly distributed. Much suffering is mysterious and unjust.
 
Suffering as the Enemy of God
Suffering is an intrusion into God’s good creation, and often evil and suffering occur without regard to an individual’s moral decency or deserts.
The Bible is insistent that suffering is not outside of God’s control, but we must understand evil as the enemy of God.
Jesus’ emotional reaction at the tomb of Lazarus was not mere sadness; it was righteous anger and indignation toward the violent tyranny of death.
Jesus came to destroy death and the one who “holds the power of death.”
 
Jesus is furious at evil, death, and suffering. Evil is the enemy of God’s good creation, and of God himself.
Jesus’ entire mission was to take on evil and end it.
But Jesus could not just come as judge to end evil, or we would all be destroyed and without hope.
Jesus came in weakness to the cross in order to pay for our sins, so that someday he will return to wipe out evil without having to judge us as well.
 
Suffering, Justice, and Wisdom
Understanding that suffering is both just and unjust leads us to wisdom about how to face suffering.
Wisdom is an awareness of complex reality.
Suffering is something that God has justly imposed on the world; we deserve to live in a broken world because of our sin.
At the same time, the created order is broken, and suffering and pain are disproportionately distributed.
 
So, we cannot look at individuals who are suffering and assume a moral superiority over them.
When suffering inexplicably comes to us, it means that we can cry out to God in confusion.
If we ignore the fact that suffering is both just and unjust then we will be out of touch with the universe as it really is.
This balance—that God is just and will bring final justice, but life in the meantime is often deeply unfair—keeps us from many deadly errors.
 
The Sovereignty of God
Second pair of balancing truths:
God is a sovereign and yet a suffering

God is not merely “all-powerful,” but sovereign over every event in history.
God is not merely “good and loving,” but entered our world and became subject to greater evil, suffering, and pain, than any of us have ever experienced.
 
The doctrine of the sovereignty of God in the Bible has been described as compatibilism.
God is completely in control of what happens in history and yet he exercises that control in such a way that human beings are responsible for their freely chosen actions and the results of those actions.
Human freedom and God’s direction of historical events are completely compatible.
 
The Bible’s description of God’s sovereignty is not in any way like the Greek concept of “fate” or the Islamic concept of “kismet.”
God’s plans work through our choices, not around or despite them. Our choices have consequences, and we are never forced by God to do anything—we always do what we most want to do.
God works out his will perfectly through our willing
 
God “works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will” (Eph 1:14).
God’s plan includes even the “little things” (Prov 16:33).
There are no accidents.
God’s plan also includes the bad things (Psalm 60:3).
Suffering is not outside of God’s plan but a part of it.
Jesus’ suffering and death was a great act of injustice, but it was also part of the set plan of God.
 
God’s Plan and our Plans
God plans our plans.
Prov 16:9 – “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.”
While we make our plans, they only fit into the larger plans of God.
Joseph’s brothers’ evil actions and God’s overriding sovereign plan to rescue Abraham’s descendants.
Romans 8:28 – God is working in all things—even the hard and painful—for our good.
 
The enemies of Jesus acted in full accordance with their own desires and wills and yet fulfilled the ultimate plan of God for his crucifixion.
Pharaoh hardened his own heart in accordance with his own will and stubbornness, and yet we read in Exodus that this was a part of God’s plan to harden Pharaoh’s heart.
The Christian doctrine of God’s sovereignty is a marvelous, practical principle, and no one can claim to know exactly how it works.
 
The sovereignty of God is mysterious but not contradictory.
We have great incentive to use our wisdom and our will to the best effect, knowing that God holds us to it and knowing we will suffer consequences from foolishness and wickedness.
On the other hand, there is no action that we can take that will thwart or alter the eternal, wise plan of God.
We have the assurance that even wickedness and tragedy are being woven together by God into his wise plan.
 

Chapter 5: The Challenge to Faith

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
by Tim Keller
 
Chapter 5: The Challenge to Faith
 
Answers for the Heart
The visceral argument against God happens at the heart level.
We all have “reasons of the heart” or intuitions:
Explanations that give some light to the mind and…
Are comforting and satisfying to our souls

“Reasons of the heart” affect and change attitudes and actions.
Christianity offers three “reasons of the heart” that help us understand suffering.
 
The first Christian teaching that offers “reasons for the heart” is Creation and Fall.
Our intuition that death and suffering are wrong is correct – this was not the original created order. The original creation did not have death or suffering.
Because humanity rejected God’s authority, everything about our world stopped working as it should. The original design of the world is broken.
 
The original good pattern of the world God created is not completely eradicated, but it now falls far short of its original intent.
The doctrine of the Fall gives us a remarkably nuanced understanding of suffering.
Hard work should lead to prosperity, but it doesn’t always work out that way. There is frustration and injustice.
Pain and suffering should be equal to the sin committed, but this is frequently not the case.

 
The world is too deeply broken to divide into a neat pattern of good people having good lives and bad people having bad lives.
We can never say that a particular instance of death or suffering is the direct result of a specific sin; however, we can say that death and suffering in general are the result of humanity’s sinfulness in general.
So, given our record, we cannot protest that the human race deserves a better life than the one we have now.
 
Acknowledging the Christian doctrines of Creation and Fall provides a “reason for the heart” that brings humility.
The prevailing notion is that it is God’s job to provide a world for our happiness and enjoyment (practical Deism).
But the problem is that real life does not match up with this expectation.
The problem is not with God; the problem is with our starting assumption.
If there really is an infinitely glorious God, why should the universe revolve around us rather than around him?
 
When we consider how far we have fallen short of God’s commands and moral absolutes, we really should wonder why God allows as much happiness as he does.
The doctrines of Creation and the Fall remove the self-pity that afflicts people with a deistic view of life; instead, they point us to true humility before God.
These teachings strengthen the soul, preparing it to be unsurprised when life is hard.
 
The Renewal of the World
The second Christian doctrine that speaks so well to our hearts is that of the final judgment and the renewal of the world.
Most moderns hate the idea of God judging people, but if there is no Judgment Day, then there is no justice.
If there is no justice, all the wrongs ever committed are left untreated.
If there is no Judgment Day, then we either lose all hope and meaning, or we are forced to take justice into our own hands.
 
The biblical doctrine of Judgment Day, far from being a gloomy idea, enables us to live with both hope and grace.
We can work for justice now, knowing that whatever is left unjudged will be remedied at Judgment Day.
It also allows us to be gracious and forgiving. If we know that ultimately all wrongs will be judged, then we can live at peace and leave vengeance to God.
Belief in Judgment Day keeps us from being too passive or too violently aggressive in our pursuit of justice.
 
An even greater hope for us is what lies beyond Judgment Day.
The Christian doctrine of resurrection and the renewal of all things gives hope because we do not merely receive a consolation for the life we have lost but a restoration of it.
We get a glorious, perfect life in a renewed material world.
In God’s working all things together for our good, could it be that our suffering now will cause us to enjoy eternity more?
 
How can we know light without darkness? How can we know courage without danger? Or grace and mercy without sin?
“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” (Romans 8:18, NIV)
Jonathan Edwards taught that because of our fall and redemption we will achieve a level of intimacy with God that could not have been received in any other way.
 
What if, in the future, we came to see that just as Jesus could not have displayed such glory and love any other way except through suffering, we would not have been able to experience such transcendent glory, joy, and love any other way except by going through a world of suffering?
 
The Wounds of God
The Christian doctrines of incarnation and atonement also serve as hopeful resources for our hearts.
In a general sense, we deserve suffering because of the Fall. But in specific cases of suffering we cannot understand the mind of God or question God.
There is more consolation, however, because in Christ, we have a God who is fully acquainted with our suffering, having endured it himself. We have a God who has suffered with us and for us.
 
The Sovereign God himself has come down into this world and has experienced its darkness. And he did it not to justify himself but to justify
He bore the suffering, death, and curse for sin that we have earned.
He takes the punishment upon himself so that someday he can return and end all evil without having to condemn and punish us.
The full incarnation of Christ means that his suffering was real. He is able to empathize with our weaknesses.
 
Not only did he endure the physical horrors of pain and suffering; he also went beyond the worst human suffering and experienced cosmic rejection and a pain that exceeds ours as infinitely as his knowledge and power exceeds ours.
Jesus experienced Godforsakenness on the cross when he assumed our guilt.
No other religion or philosophy even comes close to the Christian doctrines of incarnation and atonement. God voluntarily became weak and became a suffering servant to save unworthy sinners because he loved us.
 
We do not know the reason God allows evil and suffering to continue, or why it is so random, but now at least we know what the reason is not. It cannot be that he does not love us. It cannot be that he does not care. He gave us Christ.
If God actually gave us reasons for why he did everything he did, our finite minds would not even be able to handle it.
We may not fully understand God’s reasons, but we can understand his love.
 
The Light in the Darkness
Eventually, the lesser lights of our lives will go out (love, health, home, work). When that happens, we will need something more than what our own understanding, competence, and power can give us.
Why did Jesus not come as a conquering king and seek to eliminate injustice at his first coming?
It is because the evil and the darkness of this world comes to a great degree from within us.
 
Christ had to save us spiritually before he could renew the world and establish true peace.
If Christ had come to bring social, political, and economic renewal without dying as an atonement for our sins, then there would be no humans
In his purge of evil and injustice, he would have to purge us. Instead, he came to redeem us, so that one day he might renew us and all of creation.
 
Jesus did not come to earth the first time to bring justice but rather to bear it.
Jesus died on the cross in our place, taking the punishment our sins deserve, so that someday he can return to earth and end evil without destroying us.
Jesus’ death and resurrection created a people in the world who now have a unique ability to diminish the evil in their own hearts as well as a mandate to oppose the evil in their communities.
 
Jesus is the light of the world.
If you know you are in his love, and that nothing can snatch you out of his hand, and that he is taking you to God’s house and God’s future—then he can be a light for you in dark places when all other lights go out.
His love for you now—and this infallible hope for the future—are indeed a light in the darkness, by which we can find our way.
 

Chapter 4: The Problem of Evil (Part 2)

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
by Tim Keller
 
Chapter 4: The Problem of Evil (Part 2)
 
Review
The Problem of Evil in Context
Secularism as a set of beliefs

The Argument(s) against God from Evil
Logical and Evidential Arguments

“Soul-Making” and Suffering
Theodicy of “soul-formation”

God, Freedom and Evil
Theodicy of “free will”

The Problem with all Theodicies
Too ambitious; a “defense” is better

 
The Logical Argument and the “Noseeums” Objection
The classic logical argument:
A truly good God would not want evil to exist; an all-powerful God would not allow evil to exist.
Evil exists.
Therefore, a God who is both good and powerful cannot exist.

This argument has a hidden premise:
God could not possibly have any good reasons for allowing evil and suffering to exist.

Is it possible that God could have reasons for allowing evil to exist that, in his mind, outweigh the desirability of the non-existence of evil?
Is it possible that in our finite, human, limited understanding, we cannot possibly know what God’s reasons might be for allowing evil?
If God has good reasons for allowing suffering and evil, then there is no contradiction between his existence and that of evil.
If God is infinitely knowledgeable—why couldn’t he have morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil that you can’t think of?
If you have a God infinite and powerful enough for you to be angry at for allowing evil, then you must at the same time have a God infinite enough to have sufficient reasons for allowing that evil.
The belief—that because we cannot think of something, God cannot think of it either—is a mark of great pride and faith in one’s own mind.
 
The Evidential Argument and the Butterfly Effect
The logical argument from the problem of evil says God cannot possibly exist. The evidential argument says that evil and suffering simply make God’s existence improbable.
The problem is that this evidential argument suffers from the same limitations and logical fallacies as the logical argument.
It rests on the same premises and has the same Achilles heel.
If we are unable to prove that God has no morally sufficient reasons for evil, we are certainly unable to assess the level of probability that he has such reasons.
To insist that we have a sufficient vantage point from which to evaluate percentages or likelihood is to again forget our knowledge limitations.
If there is an infinite God and we are finite, there would be no way for us to lay odds on such things.
The intricacies of the universe and the virtually infinite possibilities within it make it inconceivable that we as human beings could state with any confidence what the likelihood or probability of the existence of God would be.
The “butterfly effect” is the idea that even the most miniscule of events can have ripple effects throughout history that are unknowable and incalculable.
If we cannot accurately calculate the effects of a butterfly’s flight path or the roll of a ball down a hill, how do we think we can accurately assess the future effects of something more complex and sorrowful, such as the death of a young child?
If an all-powerful and all-wise God were directing all of history with its infinite number of interactive events toward good ends, it would be folly to think we could look at any particular occurrence and understand a millionth of what it will bring about.
Only an omniscient mind could grasp the complexities of directing a world of free creatures toward previsioned good goals.
Many evils and sorrows seem pointless and unnecessary to us—but we are simply not in a position to know or to judge.
 
The Visceral Argument from Evil
The logical and evidential argument arises from intellectual thought, but the visceral argument arises from meeting sorrow and hardship in real life.
Most people who, in the face of real evil, object to God’s existence do so not for philosophical reasons but for visceral ones.
This distinguishes between the global problem of evil and the local problem of evil. The local problem of evil is the one that involves my life and those close to me.
The experience of real evil and suffering can make the existence of God seem implausible, unreal to the heart.
There is an emotional side to it, but there is also an inherent moral logic to the visceral reaction to evil.
The visceral reaction causes moral outrage to arise without our hearts and our thoughts.
The failure of the visceral argument against God is that not all react the same way to great evil. Some turn from God in the face of great evil, but others come out with their faith intact and even strengthened.
In Nazi death camps, many lost hope and their faith, but many also found faith in such circumstances.
The Christian hope of the resurrection and the renewal of the world enables us to view the present power of death in terms of its empty future and therefore in the knowledge of its sure defeat.
 
The Boomerang Effect
Not everyone who experiences radical evil automatically loses faith in God.
The visceral reaction to suffering has within it some arguments, some assumptions, that may not be conscious at first.
The visceral response to suffering is not just a response. We are telling ourselves something about it; we are interpreting it in a particular way.
There is a moral assumption in the minds and hearts of those who find suffering weakening their faith rather than strengthening it.
The assumption is that God, if he exists, has failed to do the right thing, that he has violated some moral standard.
It is an argument against God from the standpoint of a moral judgment.
But this moral outrage against God creates a conundrum for the skeptic who disbelieves in God.
A moral feeling means I feel some behavior is right and some behavior wrong and even repulsive.
But, if there is no God, where do such strong moral instincts and feelings come from?
Evolution cannot explain the feeling that all humans have of moral obligation and “rightness.”
If there is no God, on what basis do you say to someone, “What you have done is evil,” if their sense of morality differs from yours? Why should your moral feelings take precedence over theirs?
This is a conundrum because the very basis for disbelief in God—a certainty about evil and the moral obligation not to commit it—dissolves if there truly is no God. The ground on which you make your objection vanishes under your feet.
The visceral argument against evil, the moral outrage we feel, has a boomerang effect. Our feeling of moral outrage assumes something (objective morality) that cannot exist if there is no God.
In being upset with God about evil, you are relying on God (and his morality) to make an argument against God.
The awareness of moral evil in the world is actually an argument for the existence of God, not against it.
Unless we allow ultimate reality to be moral, we cannot morally condemn it.
We cannot assume a morality on which to judge God unless God and his morality exist.
If you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness, then you have a powerful argument for the reality of God.
You can’t even talk about “justice” without standing inside a theistic framework, that is, an implicit acknowledgement of God’s reality.
To talk about justice, you have to talk about objective morality, and to talk about objective morality, you have to talk about God.
The problem of senseless suffering does not go away if you abandon belief in God. Instead, abandoning the faith removes many resources for facing suffering.

Chapter 4: The Problem of Evil (Part 1)

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
By Tim Keller
 
Chapter 4: The Problem of Evil (Part 1)
 
The Problem of Evil in Context
•        The Problem of Evil:
o   If you believe in a God who is:
All powerful and sovereign
Perfectly good and just
o   Then, the existence of evil and suffering poses a problem.
•        Some view this problem of evil as the single strongest objection to the existence of God and the plausibility of Christianity.
•        The problem of evil is usually used in arguments against the existence of God and Christianity, but all religions and philosophies must wrestle with the problem of evil, not just Christians.
•        Secularism is also a set of beliefs, and it is possibly the weakest of all worldviews at helping its adherents understand and endure the “terror of life.”
•        Christian theology is much better equipped to prepare its adherents for suffering than secularism.
•        The problem of evil and the existence of God has been a philosophical question going all the way back to the Greek philosopher Epicurus.
•        But it was not widely discussed or have popular appeal until after the Enlightenment.
•        After the Enlightenment, human beings became far more confident in their own powers of reason and perception.
•        When people inside the “immanent frame” consider evil and God, the skeptical conclusion is already largely inherent in the premises.
•        Modern discussions of the problem of suffering start with an abstract God:
o   Imagined as all-powerful and all-good
o   But not all-glorious, majestic, infinitely wise, and the creator and sustainer of all things.
•        “If evil does not make sense to us, well, then evil simply does not make sense.”
•        The premises of secular culture “stack the deck” in their favor.
•        Our beliefs are formed not only through reason and argument but also through social conditioning.
•        God is already questionable since secular culture’s highest value is the freedom and autonomy of the self, and the existence of a being like God is the ultimate barrier to that.
•        We are quick to complain about evil and suffering in the world because it aligns with our cultural biases.
 

 
The Argument(s) against God from Evil
•        The logical argument: seeks to prove that there certainly is no God because of the existence of evil.
•        The evidential argument: reasons there probably is no God because of the existence of evil.
•        Through much of the 20th century the dominant view of philosophers was that the argument against God from the problem of evil was conclusive.
•        It claimed that Christianity was not just less plausible but logically impossible.
•        However, Alvin Plantinga argued convincingly that “the existence of evil is not logically incompatible with the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good God.”
•        His argument was so successful that it was widely conceded by all sides that the logical argument against God didn’t work.
•        So, skeptics turned their attention to the evidential argument, namely, that suffering is not proof but evidence that makes the existence of God less probable, although not impossible.
•        The evidential argument suffers from some of the same logical problems as the logical argument.
•        Yet, the confident assertion so common “on the street,” that suffering and evil simply disproves the existence of God, has been almost entirely abandoned in professional and academic circles.
•        The key to understanding the weakness of both the logical argument and the evidential argument against God is to distinguish theodicy from a defense of God.
 
“Soul-Making” and Suffering
•        Theodicy is a justification of God’s ways to human beings.
•        A theodicy seeks to give an answer to the big “Why?” question. Its goal is to explain why a just God allows evil to come into existence and to continue.
•        It attempts to reveal the reasons and purposes of God for suffering so listeners will be satisfied that his actions regarding evil and suffering are justified.
•        The theodicy of “soul-making”
o   The evils of life can be justified if we recognize that the world was primarily created to be a place where people find God and grow spiritually into all they were designed to be.
o   Suffering is about the process of growth which results in a positive and responsible character that comes from the investment of costly personal effort.
o   Is the highest good that we become comfortable and trouble-free or that we become spiritually and morally mature?
o   Our indignation against God for suffering is greatly magnified by an unexamined premise that God, if he exists, exists to make us happy, as we define happiness.
o   Weaknesses:
      Pain and evil do not appear to be distributed according to soul-making need
      This theodicy does not speak to or account for the suffering of little children or infants who have no opportunity to mature or grow in character.
 
God, Freedom, and Evil
•        The “free will” theodicy
o   God created us not to be robots or animals of instinct but free, rational agents with the ability to choose and therefore to love.
o   But if God was to make us able to choose the good freely, then he had to make us capable of also choosing evil.
o   So, our free will can be abused by us and that is the reason for evil.
o   The argument is that God made us free so that we would love him freely.
o   This theodicy also argues that evil is not an object or “thing” like other created objects, and so was not created by God.
o   Evil is the condition that results when some good thing that God made is twisted or corrupted from its original design or purpose.
o   The “free will” theodicy has become very popular in Western culture because we have been taught to think of freedom and choice as something almost sacred.
o   Two problems with “free will” theodicy:
      It fails to distinguish between moral evil and natural evil. The “free will” theodicy addresses moral evil—but how can it explain natural evil?
      It maintains a libertarian view of free will that is contrary to the Scriptures.
      Is it really true that God could not create free agents capable of love without making them also capable of evil?
      The Bible presents God himself as sovereign and free, and not just capable of love but the very fountain and source of all love. Nevertheless, God himself cannot be evil.
      If God has a free will yet is not capable of doing wrong—why could not other beings also be likewise constituted?
      One day God will make a world that is completely free of suffering and also a world not capable of choosing evil. Yet we will obviously still be capable of love.
      The Bible’s teaching on freedom differs from modern secular views of freedom: all sin is slavery, not freedom.
      The Bible also teaches that God can sovereignly direct our choices in history without violating our freedom and responsibility for our actions.
     Is having libertarian freedom of will worth the horrendous evils of history?
     The “free will” theodicy does not sufficiently explain why God allows evil and suffering.
     God’s reasons must extend beyond the mere provision of freedom of choice.
 
The Problem with All Theodicies
•        All theodicies are insufficient and have inherent problems, because they are asking the wrong questions and approaching the “problem of evil” from the wrong perspective.
•        It is both futile and inappropriate to assume that any human mind could comprehend all the reasons God might have for any instance of pain and sorrow, let alone for all evil.
•        It may be that the Bible itself warns us not to try to construct these theories.
•        A better approach than theodicy is to formulate a “defense” for the “problem of evil.”
•        A defense does not attempt to tell a full story that reveals God’s purposes in decreeing or allowing evil.
•        A defense simply seeks to prove that the argument against God from evil fails, that the skeptics have failed to make their case.
•        A defense shows that the existence of evil does not mean God can’t or is unlikely to exist.
•        In making a theodicy, the burden of proof is upon the believer in God.
o   An account must be made so convincing that the listener says to the believer, “Now I seek why all the suffering is worth it.”
•        In a defense, the burden of proof is upon the skeptic.
•        The statements “There is a good, omnipotent God” and “There is evil in the world” are not a logical contradiction.
•        It is up to the skeptic to make a compelling case that they actually contradict each other.
o   He or she must provide an argument so convincing that the listener says to the skeptic: “Now I see why, if evil exists, God cannot or at least is not likely to exist.”
 
 

Chapter 3: The Challenge to the Secular (Part 2)

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
By Tim Keller
 
Chapter 3: The Challenge to the Secular
 
•        Secular philosophies of suffering do not do a good job of actually helping people in the midst of their suffering.
o   In the real world, many people ignore the counsel of the secular philosophies.
o   Instead, they fall back to the more traditional and spiritual explanations for suffering.
 
Where Were the Humanists?
•        In times of crisis, the humanists are often absent.
•        Clear religious and spiritual language is not questioned and is even welcomed in times of tragedy and grief.
•        Religion provides more than just “community” in times of grief and suffering.
•        Religion gives sufferers larger explanations of life that make sense of suffering and help them find meaning in their pain.
•        Secular humanism is incapable of providing true community and is incapable of providing a satisfying theology to help in times of suffering.
•        True community is only forged when people unify around something that is more important than their individual self-interests to which all share a higher allegiance.
•        “Humanism suffers… from the valorization of the individual” and cannot sustain true community.
 
Is Atheism a Blessing?
•        Atheism claims a superiority in times of suffering because it does not have to wrestle with questions of the goodness of God and the problem of evil.
•        Atheism offers consolation to the bereaved by offering “rational truths” such as non-existence and no suffering after death.
•        Atheism just moves on and seeks to find a rational and scientific solution to the cause of the suffering.
•        Atheism exaggerates the “problem of evil.” It was not a problem before the rise of the “immanent frame” and radical individualism.
•        A strong theological foundation is able to wrestle with and handle the presence of evil in a Theocentric world.
•        Atheism claims a better response to suffering by advocating for solutions such as “social justice” and “human flourishing.”
•        Two problems with Atheism’s claims:
o   Issues of social justice have historically been championed more by religious movements than secular ones.
o   Atheism’s naturalistic foundation offers no clear or rational basis for morality or justice.
§  Science and empirical reason cannot be the basis of morality, since they can tell us how people live but not how they ought to live.
•        Is it really a comfort to the bereaved to tell them that death is the end of everything and “there is no suffering in death”?
•        This is “too brutal to be honest.”
•        It makes little sense to point to a state in which we are stripped of all love and everything that gives meaning in life and tell people that they need not fear it.
•        The secular view of “non-existence” pales in comparison to resurrection.
•        When real life suffering comes, historical experience shows us that people find more consolation in religion and spirituality than in the secular view.
•        This intuition—that we are not just a concatenation of matter and chemicals but also a soul—is one of the most widespread convictions of human beings in the world today and through the ages.
 
Suffering and the Turn to the Spiritual
•        The modern, individualistic search for meaning in personal happiness cannot bear up under suffering.
•        To “live for meaning” means not that you try to get something out of life but rather that life expects something from us.
•        True “meaning” is found when there is something more important than your own personal freedom and happiness, something for which you are glad to sacrifice your happiness.”
•        The atheistic, naturalistic worldview is incapable of sustaining parents of severely disabled children.
•        The typical naturalistic definitions of “personhood” or “human being” do not apply to severely disabled and mentally handicapped children.
•        Only belief in the human being as body and soul can help parents care and love these children as human beings, made in the image of God.
 
The Failure of the Secular
•        The secular view of life does not work for most people in the face of suffering. Why?
o   Human suffering comes in an enormous variety of different forms.
§  Not all suffering is victimization.
o   The Western secular view of the world is too naïvely optimistic about human life.
§  The “this world” solution is never coming, and life is unhappy and hard for the majority of people.
 
The Expansion of the Self
•        Suffering’s main challenge to secular cultures is that it reveals the thinness of the World Story they give their adherents.
•        A culture must give its people a story that accomplishes at least two things:
o   It must give hope.
o   It must cause a society to “cohere.”
•        At the heart of every story is a big idea, what life is all about.
•        America: God→ Nation→ Self
o   Emphasis on Self: People who are their own legislators of morality and meaning have nothing to die for, and therefore nothing to live for when life takes away their freedom.
•        The “life story” that modern culture gives people does not have any ultimate goal more important than one’s own comfort and power.
•        When we have no meaning beyond personal happiness, suffering can lead very quickly to suicide.
 

 
A Different Story
•        The Christian “story” gives people meaning beyond personal freedom and happiness and has a place for suffering in the story.
•        Suffering is at the heart of the Christian story.
o   Suffering is the result of our turn away from God.
o   Suffering is the way through which God in Christ came and rescued us.
o   How we suffer now is one way we become more like Christ.
 
The Call for the Humility
•        The secular view puts too much confidence in human ability to solve problems and eradicate suffering.
•        But suffering is too complex and deep to be solved by money, technology, or human ingenuity.
•        Suffering has a spiritual dimension that cannot be solved empirically.
•        We should look for cures and solutions, but realize that we are incapable of solving the problem of suffering. Only God can do that.
•        Suffering can often lead us to do the hard “soul work” of humility.
•        One of the main teachings of the Bible is that almost no one grows into greatness or finds God without suffering.
•        As Christ loved us enough to face the suffering of the cross with patience and courage, so we must learn to trust in him enough to do the same. And as his weakness and suffering, thus faced, led to resurrection power, so can ours.
 

Chapter 3: The Challenge to the Secular

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
By Tim Keller
 
Chapter 3: The Challenge to the Secular
 
•        Secular philosophies of suffering do not do a good job of actually helping people in the midst of their suffering.
o   In the real world, many people ignore the counsel of the secular philosophies.
o   Instead, they fall back to the more traditional and spiritual explanations for suffering.
 
Where Were the Humanists?
•        In times of crisis, the humanists are often absent.
•        Clear religious and spiritual language is not questioned and is even welcomed in times of tragedy and grief.
•        Religion provides more than just “community” in times of grief and suffering.
•        Religion gives sufferers larger explanations of life that make sense of suffering and help them find meaning in their pain.
•        Secular humanism is incapable of providing true community and is incapable of providing a satisfying theology to help in times of suffering.
•        True community is only forged when people unify around something that is more important than their individual self-interests to which all share a higher allegiance.
•        “Humanism suffers… from the valorization of the individual” and cannot sustain true community.
 
Is Atheism a Blessing?
•        Atheism claims a superiority in times of suffering because it does not have to wrestle with questions of the goodness of God and the problem of evil.
•        Atheism offers consolation to the bereaved by offering “rational truths” such as non-existence and no suffering after death.
•        Atheism just moves on and seeks to find a rational and scientific solution to the cause of the suffering.
•        Atheism exaggerates the “problem of evil.” It was not a problem before the rise of the “immanent frame” and radical individualism.
•        A strong theological foundation is able to wrestle with and handle the presence of evil in a Theocentric world.
•        Atheism claims a better response to suffering by advocating for solutions such as “social justice” and “human flourishing.”
•        Two problems with Atheism’s claims:
o   Issues of social justice have historically been championed more by religious movements than secular ones.
o   Atheism’s naturalistic foundation offers no clear or rational basis for morality or justice.
§  Science and empirical reason cannot be the basis of morality, since they can tell us how people live but not how they ought to live.
•        Is it really a comfort to the bereaved to tell them that death is the end of everything and “there is no suffering in death”?
•        This is “too brutal to be honest.”
•        It makes little sense to point to a state in which we are stripped of all love and everything that gives meaning in life and tell people that they need not fear it.
•        The secular view of “non-existence” pales in comparison to resurrection.
•        When real life suffering comes, historical experience shows us that people find more consolation in religion and spirituality than in the secular view.
•        This intuition—that we are not just a concatenation of matter and chemicals but also a soul—is one of the most widespread convictions of human beings in the world today and through the ages.
 

Chapter 2: “The Victory of Christianity”

Walking with God through Pain and Suffering
by Tim Keller
 
Chapter 2: “The Victory of Christianity”
 
Philosophy to “Save One’s Skin”
•       One of the most important tasks of any philosophy or religion is to teach us how to face death.
•       One of our greatest desires is to be loved and not be alone. So, we dread dying and our loved ones dying on us.
•       We fear the slow march of time and the irreversibility of things.
•       To live life well, capable of joy and love, we must learn how to conquer these fears.
•       We must locate a meaning that can’t be touched by death. This can be done only by philosophy or religion.
 
Salvation through Reason
•       The Greek Stoics believed in an impersonal “Logos” or rational orderliness that governed the universe.
•       Moral“absolutes” could be rationally deduced from the natural world.
•       The task of the human mind and reason was to perceive and align with the orderliness of the world.
•       Face Death and Suffering:
o  Live in accord with the universe and accept fate.
o  Reason over emotion.
o  Death is not the end, but a transformation to a new form.
 
Submitting to Fate, Detaching from the World
•       Cicero/Seneca(Stoics) taught that death is not an evil thing and should not be feared.
•       Grief is unavoidable, but it should be controlled. Ultimately, sorrow and grief are useless,with no positive function.
•       Submit to fate and not protest or struggle against it.
•       Stoicism similar to Eastern philosophies that taught the illusory nature of reality.
o  No real evil or suffering
o  No real individuals or material world
o  Everything is actually a part of “the One, the Absolute Spirit”
•       Stoicism and Eastern philosophies similar in that they diminish the individuality of the person and speak of an eternal existence, though not individual or personal.
•       Their solution is to see everything as impermanent. Don’t get attached to anything. Don’t live in hope. Hope causes suffering.
 
A Greater Hope
•       Christianity differed greatly from both Greek and Eastern philosophies.
•       Early Christian teachers argued that Christianity made more sense of suffering.The actual lives of Christians proved it. Christians suffered better than the pagans.
•       Augustine made the argument that Christians suffered and died better and that this made Christianity“the supreme philosophy”
•       The Christian approach to pain and evil was superior because it offered a greater basis for hope.
•       It offered the hope of bodily resurrection and a restored world.
•       The resurrection meant that we would live in eternity as individual persons, not impersonal aspects of the universe.
•       Our personalities will be sustained, beautified, and perfected after death in resurrection, and we will know and be known.
•       The“Logos” of the universe is not an impersonal, rational orderliness, but a person—Jesus Christ—who can be loved and known.
 
A Greater Room for Sorrow
•       Christian consolation gave far more scope to expressions of sorrow and grief.
•       Christians can truly grieve and sorrow, but bathed in hope.
•       Suffering is not dealt with through self-control and detachment but through relationship and hope.
•       Christians don’t face adversity by stoically decreasing our love for the people and things of this world so much as by increasing our love and joy in God.
•       Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace.
•       Christianity strongly rejected impersonal fate along with its randomness and chance.
•       Christianity believes in a single, personal Creator God who sustains the world in wisdom and love and provides fatherly care for his children.
 
The Victory of Christianity
•       Christianity eventually became the dominant worldview in Western civilization for nearly 1500 years.
•       The Christian doctrines of resurrection and future restoration remedied “irreversibility as a kind of death in the midst of life.”
•       The Christian’s future hope was real and personal, bodily and eternal. It was a restoration of life.
•       Christian teachers and preachers developed a mature and nuanced theology of suffering and counsel for the “cure” of suffering souls.
•       Gregory the Great taught that suffers were in the hands of a wise God.
•       He rejected the moralistic view of Eastern philosophies (and Job’s friends)that suffering is directly linked to our sins. Suffering in general is because of human sin, but its role is more complex than a simple moralistic explanation.
•       Particular forms of suffering may be God’s chastisement for specific sins, but they may not be.
•       Suffering may also be intended not to correct or punish past wrongs but to prevent future ones.
•       Suffering may have no other purpose than to lead a person to love God more ardently.
 
Luther’s Reformation of Suffering
•       The Medieval church over time developed a moralistic, meritorious view of suffering.
•       Accepting suffering with patience can eliminate some of your sin debt and helps you earn favor with God and admission to heaven.
•       Martin Luther and the Reformation sought to correct this theological error.
•       Salvation is by grace alone through faith alone merited by the finished work of Christ alone.
•       Before we can have the joy and love that helps us face suffering, suffering must first empty us of our pride and self-sufficiency leading us to find our true security in Christ.
 
The Theology of the Cross
•       “Theology of the cross” vs. a “theology of glory.”
•       The Gospel presents the exact opposite of what human beings expect. God comes in Christ to save not in power and glory but in weakness and humility and suffering.
•       Only through weakness and suffering could sin be atoned.
•       In Christ, the God-forsaken sinner has a Savior who has taken on himself the full depths of human estrangement from God—and overcome it.
•       Christians cannot suffer with Christ before they have embraced the full benefits of Christ’s suffering for them.
 
The Rise of the “Immanent Frame”
•       Enlightenment philosophy with its emphasis on the rational and scientific replaced the transcendent with the immanent.
•       Humanity’s answers no longer came from outside themselves, from a transcendent God, but from inside themselves by reason.
•       This brought increasing confidence in human ability and reason and moral ordering.
•       God was altered by Deists and was now an impersonal creator, designer who created the world for our benefit that now operates on its own without his direct involvement.
•       Humanity’s purpose became to use reason and free will for human flourishing,pushing God to the edges.
 
Natural Evil and the Lisbon Earthquake
•       With the new immanent view of God, natural evil and suffering became increasingly an argument against the existence of God.
•       The secularity of Deism made the problem of evil worse by making us more proud in our ability to reason and by making the world about us instead of about God.
 
Residual Christianity and the Problem of Evil
•       Christianity in Western culture as unwittingly been influenced by Deism and the“immanent frame.”
•       We now live in a culture (even in many churches) of “moralistic, therapeutic deism.”
•       We are in control of our own destiny, able to discern for ourselves what is right and wrong,and we see God as obligated to arrange things for our benefit, especially if we live a good enough life according to our chosen standards.
•       Theism without certainty of salvation or resurrection is far more disillusioning in the midst of pain than is atheism.
 
 
 

Introduction and Chapter 1: The Cultures of Suffering

Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering (by Tim Keller)
Introduction and Chapter 1: The Cultures of Suffering

Introduction

Suffering is everywhere and unavoidable.
The purpose of the study is to help us take life seriously and anticipate suffering and understand its purpose and meaning in our lives.
In the face of suffering, many deny the existence of God, but just as many find God through grief and pain.
Suffering has the power to pull non-Christians to God and to pull Christians into a deeper experience of God's reality, love, and grace.
Suffering is one of the main themes of the Bible.
The central figure of the Bible is Jesus Christ, a man of sorrows.
The great theme of the Bible is how God brings fullness of joy not just despite but through suffering.


Chapter 1: The Cultures of Suffering
 
Training for Suffering

Nothing is more important than to learn how to maintain a life of purpose in the midst of painful adversity.
A society/culture can greatly serve its members by helping them face terrible evil and adversity.
Modern western culture is more unprepared to face suffering than perhaps any other culture today or in the history of the world.


Edified by Our Miseries

Non-western cultures help their people to be “edified by misery.” They perceive the causes of suffering in highly spiritual, communal, and moral terms.
Moralistic View
Self-transcendent View
Fatalistic View
Dualistic View

 
Interrupted by Our Miseries

Western culture is very much different from these other religious and philosophical systems of dealing with suffering.

Western culture adopts a naturalistic view of the universe.
There is no God, no invisible spiritual forces, no eternal bliss, no moral battle between good and evil.
It is a universe of blind physical forces, and people fall victim to bad circumstances by mere chance.
Suffering has no purpose. It has no meaning at all.
By and large, the goal of Western culture has been personal freedom and happiness. 
Pain and suffering are at complete odds with freedom and happiness, so in the secular worldview suffering is to be avoided at all costs.
This is why suffering is so traumatic for citizens of Western culture. It has no place, no meaning, no purpose. It is an interruption of our lives, not a part of it.
The sufferer is a victim, under attack from natural forces devoid of intentionality.
In older cultures suffering has been seen as an expected part of a coherent life story, a crucial way to live life well and to grow as a person and a soul. But in Western culture, if the meaning of life is individual freedom and happiness, then suffering is of no possible use. It is to be avoided, managed, minimized as much as possible.

 
Victims of Our Miseries

Because suffering has no meaning and happens by blind chance, the sufferers are victims.
The responsibility for responding to suffering is taken away from the sufferer.
Older cultures viewed suffering as an opportunity for the sufferer to do some internal “soul work”—learning patience, wisdom, and faithfulness.
Contemporary Western culture does not see suffering as an opportunity or a test.
Sufferers are referred to experts to help them cope with the symptoms of their suffering without addressing the underlying issues or life story. These experts include psychologists, doctors, therapists, etc.

 
Outraged by Our Miseries

Since suffering has no meaning, there are only two responses in the secular worldview:

Manage the symptoms (pain, stress, anxiety, etc.)
Look for the cause of the pain and eliminate it.
Older cultures sought ways to be edified by their sufferings by looking inside, but Western people are often simply outraged by their suffering—and they seek to change things outside so that the suffering never happens again.
So, in the secular worldview suffering is an accident. Our response to it is to find a solution or technique to eliminate the material/natural cause of suffering. The goal is a better society in the here and now with no thought of an eternal reality.

 
Christianity among the Cultures

The Christian view of suffering is completely unique from the secular as well as other religious and philosophical views.
Unlike the fatalistic view, Christianity does not put emphasis on human honor and glory. Christians cry out to God in prayer, not accepting circumstances as that of blind fate.
Unlike Buddhists, Christians believe that suffering is real, not an illusion.
Unlike moralistic views like karma, Christians believe that suffering is often unjust and disproportionate. Life is not always fair. Suffering is not always the result of a direct cause/effect relationship with someone’s personal mistakes or transgressions (Job/Jesus Christ).
Unlike the dualistic view, Christianity does not see suffering as a means of working off your sinful debts by virtue of the quality of your endurance of pain.
The Christian understanding of suffering is dominated by the idea of grace. In Christ we have received forgiveness, love, and adoption into the family of God. These goods are undeserved, and that frees us from the temptation to feel proud of our suffering.
Christianity teaches that, contra fatalism, suffering is overwhelming; contra Buddhism, suffering is real; contra karma, suffering is often unfair; but contra secularism, suffering is meaningful. There is a purpose to it, and if faced rightly, it can drive us like a nail deep into the love of God.