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