THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28 NIV) “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God.” Or “works together with those who love him to bring about what is good – with those who are called according to his purpose.” (NIV margin – other manuscripts) “And we know that all that happens to us is working for our good if we love God and are fitting into his plans.” (LB)

This verse is a life-preserver to those who are going through a storm of suffering. Yet I must add a caveat: You must know how or when to say it to someone who is suffering. It must not be said glibly or casually as though it is a mantra which will solve all problems. Remember that Job’s friends said many true things to Job but they were said insensitively, and untimely. This saying can be used as a hammer to hurt people further if it is used as a neat panacea for suffering.

However we translate this famous verse, the stumbling block, or the kicker, that seems to either stick in the throat that we can’t swallow, or the reassurance that comforts us in the midst of suffering is, ‘in all things’, i.e. that nothing happens by chance, that everything that happens to us is part of God’s purpose for good, what believers in two or three hundred years ago would call Providence.  This challenges us to reconcile acute suffering with our belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving God.

Holmes Rolston, III, Templeton prize-winner for his work in the relationship between science and Christianity, tells the story of family suffering.

On graduation from Hampden-Sydney Seminary in the mid-1890’s, Rolston’s paternal grandfather, Holmes Rolston I, had been called to his first pastorate in Horton, West Virginia. There he had worked among the hardened men of the Allegheny Mountain lumber camps. [He] took with him to Horton his new wife, Jacqueline Campbell.

Life in the lumber camps of West Virginia was harsh. There were no churches yet established in that part of the county. The lumbermen were constantly drunk and fighting. The wooden shack in which the couple lived was cold in winter and full of flies in summer. Despite the hardships, the young pastor and his wife devoted themselves to each other and to their work creating a church community.

In late summer they celebrated the birth of their first child, Archibald Campbell Rolston. The celebration was brief. Archibald was sickly, barely clinging to life from the moment of his birth. In the oppressive August heat the infant never seemed to gain much strength. The lumber camp was a long way from any hospital and his parents watched helplessly as the color of their son’s cheeks paled. Archibald died in the Horton home less than three weeks after his birth. [So many women have suffered through nine months of pregnancy, and the labor of birth, only to see their baby die. One of  my sisters-in-law suffered losing three babies in this way!]

Determined the infant should have a proper burial, Rolston’s grandfather put his son’s body in the back of the one-horse buggy and set out in the early morning for his brother-in-law’s New Providence Church [in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia]. He rode alone for seventy miles, stopping only to rest and water the horse. Upon arrival at New Providence, the pastor found his anguish magnified. His sister-in-law’s own firstborn, a young girl of two weeks name Jacqueline Campbell Wilson, had died the day before his own child. The two Campbell sisters had each lost their firstborn within twenty-four hours. The infants were buried side by side in the New Providence cemetery with a single tombstone recording the double tragedy. Intense suffering seemed to be part of every family story. Acceptance of this suffering as part of God’s order seemed to be a demand of faith.

….Part of what had driven Charles Darwin from his faith was his despair at the amount of suffering, misery, and waste the supposedly benign creator had permitted on earth. Having lost his mother to a tumor when he was a child and his favorite daughter, Annie, to a painful illness when she was only nine, Darwin had cause far beyond the morphology of Galapagos finches to embrace natural selection over divine creation. [This issue of suffering is central to psyche of many who have lost their faith in a loving God. Most atheists have ceased to believe in God because of the suffering they experience. They take their anger out on God by rejecting him.]

…To Darwin’s key question about the purpose of all suffering Rolston expanded on the [teaching] offered by second-century theologian Irenaeus of Lyon. Irenaeus had pointed out how much was to be gained from suffering. One had only to look past the immediate hardship to see the later spiritual gain. Suffering was ‘soul-making,’ providing opportunities to develop the Christian virtues…. The enlivening truth Rolston had learned…during countless hours of counseling his parishioners, and through listening to numerous family stories about the hardships faithfully endured by his southern ancestors was that life survives, and even flourishes, in the midst of its perpetual perishing….Life is suffering, life is suffering through to something higher. [Many people who experience suffering drop out of church life. They simply disappear. They have never learned how to understand the purpose of suffering in their lives. Others return and are prayed for and loved through their suffering. They develop their souls.]

…To be chosen by God is not to be protected from suffering. It is a call to suffer and to be delivered as one passes through it…. So far from making the world absurd, suffering is a key to the whole….The capacity to suffer through to joy is a supreme emergent and an essence of Christianity…Life is gathered up in the midst of its throes, a blessed tragedy, lived in grace through a besetting storm….Christ lived a life of sacrificial suffering so that humanity could reach something higher….Christ’s death on the cross was necessary for the possibility of human redemption from sin. (Saving Creation: Nature and Faith in the Life of Holmes Rolston III, Christopher J. Preston, 216-222)

Believing that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” requires believing that there is a purpose in suffering. Purposeless suffering is a soul-destroyer. We have to believe that there is a purpose, and that that purpose is ‘for the good of those who love God.’ We may not see or understand that purpose, but we have to have faith that such a purpose exists, and that good will eventually come out of it. God is ceaselessly, energetically and purposefully active on our behalf to make good come out of our suffering. The key is our attitude to, and trust in, God. We have to believe that God is good and that he is love. We cannot love God otherwise. If we believe that God is good and that God is love, then we can endure anything.

Jeanie Miley writes about a woman who was a cancer patient getting treatment at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

‘Over the course of the study of Job, she had sat at the very edge of the crowd. Now, she wore the telltale turban. She had become pale and weak, and yet there was a light to her eyes and a brilliance to her smile that dazzled me. “Don’t stop affirming the goodness of God,” she said to me, and then she simply knocked me over with her simple affirmation of faith. “You know, I’m not going to live,” she continued, “and I’m at the bottom, but what I have discovered is that it is people who have been to the bottom, who learn that God is there, right there with us, and that God is love.”’ (Jeanie Miley, Sitting Strong, p.31)

Jesus said, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.” (John 10:27-29) If we believe in the love of God, and that life is a calling to fulfill God’s purpose, then we will see all things as opportunities for soul-making. How we handle the events of our lives, whether they be pain or pleasure, contributes to our spiritual formation, to our spiritual maturity. “Endure hardship with us, like a good soldier of Christ Jesus.” (2 Timothy 2:3) Life is a battle for the victory of hope over despair. In the battle we will be wounded. But however badly we have been injured, we must continue to believe that we will be healed and made whole. That is God’s ultimate purpose for us as we trust in him.

My grandfather fought in the trenches of World War I and returned home with very little in the way of physical wounds. Yet emotionally he had suffered unspeakable horrors. What purpose was in it? He died at age 46 before I was born. His life affected my mother, and ultimately, myself. Perhaps it contributed to my entering the ministry. Something good may have come out of his suffering but only two generations removed.

Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd who owns the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me – just as the Father knows me and I know the Father – and I lay down my life for the sheep.” (John 10:11-15) If this God in Christ, suffers and dies for us, to fulfill his purpose for us, then we can be assured that he is good and that he loves us enough to work through all things for our good.

In the Amelia Plantation Chapel Lenten Meditations for 2011, Iris Jacobsen wrote, “Sometimes bad things happen to good people, sometimes things that should be so simple are not. Sometimes we plan and we hope about how things will go, but they simply do not turn out that way…. All of my life I have heard and respected spiritual people who have talked about events being the will of God. This poem has helped me to understand the things that have happened and given me hope; perhaps it will help you as well.

The will of God will never take you

Where the grace of God cannot keep you,

Where the arms of God cannot support you,

Where the riches of God cannot supply your needs,

Where the power of God cannot endow you.

 

The will of God can never take you

Where the Spirit of God cannot work through you,

Where the wisdom of God cannot teach you,

Where the army of God cannot protect you,

Where the hands of God cannot mold you.

 

The will of God will never take you

Where the love of God cannot enfold you,

Where the mercies of God cannot sustain you,

Where the peace of God cannot calm your fears,

Where the authority of God cannot overrule for you.

 

The will of God will never take you

Where the comfort of God cannot dry your tears,

Where the Word of God cannot feed you,

Where the miracles of God cannot be done for you,

Where the omnipresence of God cannot find you.

…God will help us endure, grow and win the victory over the things that happen in our lives. That is the will of God.”

Ray David Glenn suddenly lost his beautiful, young wife, and mother of his son, to a brain tumor. He went through an intense period of grieving that tested him. I will never forget him sharing his experience of that time with a group of us, and concluding with these words of the Heidelberg Catechism, which I had never heard before.

“What is your only comfort in life and death?

That I am not my own, but belong – body and soul, in life and death – to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

 He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.

He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven:

in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

 Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.”

Only a person who has suffered can fully affirm that faith and appreciate that comfort.

(Ted Schroder, SOUL FOOD, Volume 4, pp.68-73)