Four pointers on suffering

Four pointers on suffering:

1. The world's not right

2. We're not innocent

3. God's not indifferent

4. This life's not ultimate

(Sam Allberry)

David Attenborough's problem with evil

Someone says: ‘I believe a God of infinite mercy created every single species and the Lord looks after us and all the animals.’ Well, what about that little African boy, five years old, sitting on the banks of a river, and he’s got a worm in his eye that’s going to turn him blind in three years? Did this God that you talk about actually design this worm and say: ‘I’ll put it in this boy’s eye?’ To suggest that God specifically created a worm to torture small African children is blasphemy as far as I can see.

(Metro interview with David Attenborough, 29 January 2013)

This is what I wanted to say to David Attenborough on my commute this morning:

1. I don't know how God can be both loving and sovereign over that African boy's plight*.

2. This is how I know that he must be:

• God the Father has always loved God the Son. From eternity past and without change he has been pouring his love out on his Son and he always will. That is who God is and if he ceased to do that he would cease to be who he is - God the Father.
• God the Father sent his Son to die in agony, abandoned by his friends and abandoned (but still loved) by the Father he had spent eternity with.
• God the Father did not do that because he loved someone or something more than his Son. He did it to glorify (John 17:1) and bring joy (Heb 12:2) to his Son who loved his world and his church.

So God's love and God's bringing humans to places of suffering are not incompatible. We've seen that in Jesus of Nazerth, the Son of God. Therefore, it is rational (in the same way that empircal science is rational) to believe God when he promises us that:

• He has always loved us;
• He has planned for us all to suffer and die; and
• He does that because he wants to bring us joy and glory.

* can someone help me remember where I read a quote somewhere recently? It said something like: "we can argue whether God permitted, allowed, purposed, or caused something, but the fact is 'God...'". Dorothy Sayers maybe?

Why does God allow suffering?

The job of the Christian apologist is to make that question harder to answer, not easier.

Discuss.

Suffering in this world (and the next) is more horrible than you think, God is more powerful over evil than you can conceive and he is more loving towards you than you can imagine. So... "My God, why have you forsaken me?"

God who offers too little or too much to the sufferer

I believe that one of the most important discoveries of Trinitarian theology in our time is the discovery of the suffering love of the suffering triune God. All cheap and easy talk about a God of sovereign power who is in control of a world in which there is so much poverty, suffering and injustice is obscene... The only gospel that makes sense and can help in what Moltmann calls our "godless and godforsaken" world is the good news of a god who loves enough to suffer with and for a suffering humanity.

But such a gospel, especially as it has caught on and become popular, has its dangers too. Too much talk about the "presence" of God in "solidarity" with suffering can become a way of hiding a deep skepticism about whether God is powerful enough to do anything about their suffering... People who suffer for one reason or another want more than just "God suffers with you and we Christians do too." They want to know whether there are a God and a people of God who can and will do anything to help them. Whether they know it or not, they want to hear about and experience the good news of a Trinitarian God who wills and preserves life, who liberates oppressed people from whatever or whoever oppresses them. They want to hear about and experience a crucified and risen Christ who is stronger than the powers of sickness, suffering, sin, and death. They want to hear about and experience the power of the Holy Spirit who brings new life where there is death and new beginnings where there are dead ends.

One of the biggest problems in theology today is how we can find our way between a theology of the suffering love of God that offers too little and a theology of the sovereign power of God that promises too much. I believe that the solution lies in thinking through the implications of what we said earlier about faith in the sovereignty of God as hope for the future - faith that God's loving and just will will be done.

(italics original, pp. 53-54, Shirley Guthrie, Always being reformed: faith for a fragmented world)

I just stumbled across this quotation by accident. It is from a man who turns out to be a significant American mainline Presbyterian. I think it is a great reflection of someone who has thought and lived deeply.

As I mused on it it struck me that the measure of whether we believe that God is both these things is prayer. You do not pray to someone who you think does not sympathise with your condition, but also you don't pray to someone who you think can do nothing about it. Therefore, one of the best ways we can communicate to a sufferer that God is both sympathetic and is powerful is praying for/with them.

Job's good comforters

We often focus on Job's miserable comforters, but right at the end of the book we see some exemplary comforters:

"Then came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and ate bread with him in his house. And they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him. And each of them gave him a piece of money and a ring of gold." (Job 42:11)

Job's relatives do the following:

• They are physically present. Notably this is in the important act of eating together with him.
• They show him sympathy (better translation from my limited knowledge: "they mourn expressively")
• They comfort him, presumably particularly with words
• They help him practically with money.

Lewis on his book The Problem of Pain

the only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering; for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that

when pain is to be borne,

• a little courage helps more than much knowledge,
• a little human sympathy more than much courage,
• and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.

(formatting mine, from the Preface of The Problem of Pain, p.xii)

Seeing in 2D

Dave Bish mentioned that Tim Keller says that we need to console as well as confront our culture. It reminds me of David Powlison’s observation in his excellent seminars on Biblical Counseling at Bethlehem Baptist Church that a failing of the early Biblical Counseling movement was an emphasis on counselees as sinners to the exclusion of their experience as sufferers.

It helps me a lot to remember both these two dimensions:

We are:

Actors	AND	acted upon
Sinners	AND	sinned against
Under the penalty of our sin	AND	under the power of Sin
Sinners	AND	sufferers
People with misdirected desires	AND	with unfulfilled good desires

We need:

Confrontation and forgiveness	AND	consolation
Mercy	AND	justice
Penal substitution	AND	Christus Victor

Augustus Toplady knew both dimensions when he wrote:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee;
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.

Any more terms to add?

Four responses to God's strange works

I recently read Romans 9 with a friend. Even accepting that the passage is more about redemptive history and God's purposes for Israel and the Gentiles than individual predestination it is still hard to swallow the God who freely chooses.

However, Romans 9-11 also shows us how Paul responded to this the difficulty of God's strange works of rejecting some. What he exemplifies for us applies to experiences of suffering as much as it does with the specific issue of predestination.

1. Be humble and recognise who you are. "who are you, O man, to answer back to God?" Paul asks (Romans 9:20). "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?" God asks Job (Job 38:2).
2. Be comforted that Christ experienced the worst. It is not in Romans 9-11 but "we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses" (Heb 4:15), we have Christ who suffered physically, emotionally and spiritually on the tree. And he has not left us alone but is present with us by his Spirit.
3. Be hopeful because God has good purposes. In Romans 9 he rejected the Jews "in order to" bring in the Gentiles. He brought Job to the end of himself, but then "blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning" (Job 42:12). He saw his Son crucified to raise him again to the highest place. It may be difficult to see, but he works all things together for good (Rom 8:28).
4. Be prayerful and cry out to him. God doesn't want passive stoicism in the face of his strange ways, but he wants us to wrestle with him, continually holding him to his promises. So Paul says that his "heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved" (Rom 10:1).

Mourning with those who mourn

Listening to: Fairport Convention: Leige and Leif

I'm finally reading Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change by Paul Tripp. It is living up to all the hype I have heard. Highly recommended.

These are my notes on Chapter 8 (Building Relationships by Identifying with Suffering) and the third element of four which Tripp identifies a part of a "Loving Ministry Relationship":

1. Enter the person's world
2. Incarnate the love of Christ
3. Identify with suffering
4. Accept with agenda [for their change]

Suffering is common

We are all sinners who suffer. This is something we have in common with everyone. Yet we often respond to sufferers by distancing ourselves from them. We presume that their suffering is something we won't experience, and struggle to relate to them. As a result our ministry often boils down to platitudes, promises of prayer, and gestures.

The bible on suffering:

1. God is sovereign over suffering
2. God is good
3. God has a purpose for our suffering
4. The bible explains the ultimate reasons for our suffering
• Fallen world
• our flesh
• other's sin
• the Devil
• God's good purpose
5. Suffering is real and evil is wrong.

Sufferers usually feel alone, isolated and alienated from others and from God.

If we have suffered to the extent that we know these feelings then:

• This means we can identify with sufferers.
• We are called minister to those in pain.

Hebrews 2:10-12

Christ suffered as our brother. The title "brother" implies:

1. We are in the same family.
2. We are in a similar position in the family
3. We share similar life experiences

This captures our relationship to sufferers. We do not stand above them, as gurus, or those who have arrived. Instead we stand alongside them.

This posture is essential because it recognises that:

1. "God sends people my way, not only so they will change, but so I will too."
2. "We are not what people need. Our purpose is to connect them to a living, active, redeeming Christ. He gives them what they need...I stand alongside you and point you to the Father.
3. It helps to give our stories power, because as we are honest about our failings and sufferings, it shows the relevance of our experiences of God's grace.

Christ was "made perfect" through his suffering. Just as Christ's suffering had a purpose, so our suffering has a purpose. Analogous to Christ, we are sanctified and grow through suffering. We share this with our brothers and sisters who suffer, and it:

• Makes truth we speak concrete, carrying them out of the abstract into the familiar.
• Encourages us to be humble and honest.
• Makes our personal story more about God than me.
• Makes our life a window through which people see the glory of Christ.
• Results in worship of Christ

2 Corinthians 1:3-11

Model of Christian compassion (vv.3-7):

Purposeful suffering --> experience of God's comfort --> ability to comfort others --> community of hope.

• God is the source of compassion. Therefore:
  • God is the comfort we offer people (not 'it will all work out' etc)
  • As God's children we should be marked by his compassion
• The comfort we have received in past suffering is to be passed on in ministry, not hoarded.
• Suffering is how we share in Christ, and so experience his comfort. It is a sign we are in Christ.
• Our suffering belongs to God, and we must put Christ on centre stage as we suffer. "When we feel like dying, he calls us to greater death".
• Purpose of suffering is to fill us with hope.

Method of Christian compassion (vv.8-11):

Practical steps for telling your stories of how God used your sufferings to encourage others:

• Tell a completed story
• It must be old enough to have reached it's ending in how God helped you (not "misery loves company")
• Be honest in describing your struggles and failures
• Be discerning and purposeful
• Limit details.
• Focus on God
• Make God the key actor in the drama
• Tell your story with humility about your continuing need for grace.
• Make it clear that you are not what God needs - God is
• Make the goal of the story worship.

"Misery loves company" v the active God

There have been some ugly responses from Christian's to the disaster in Haiti. There have also been some pretty weak ones. Neither are likely to be much comfort to the sufferers, or convincing to those observers hearing them on the news. Gerhard O. Forde characterises the weak responses we hear most in the UK:

God is supposed to be more attractive to us because he identifies with us in our pain and suffering. "Misery loves company" becomes the unspoken motif of such theology. (p. viii, On Being a Theologian of the Cross)

As Forde points out, the reason this is so unhelpful is that Jesus is seen to be utterly passive in this theology. We follow our leader, and those who see Jesus in this way are similarly passive in their response to suffering. They have nothing to say; although they may offer to pray, they don't seem to expect God to actually do anything as a result.

The story of the Bible, from Creation to New Creation, has something much more powerful to say. It warns us that suffering is God's judgment on humanity's sin - although that does not mean that particular events are caused by particular sins of particular people. But joyfully it also tells us that God hates suffering and, because he is not passive in his hating, has gone to war against it to destroy it completely for all who share in the New Creation life of Jesus Christ.

The classic question "if God is both able and willing to prevent evil, why is there evil?" may be unanswerable from our perspective; or at least answerable only partially. But that doesn't mean the church has nothing to say. It can say that is that God is not passively waiting to be examined but has acted, is acting and will act to save his people.

Marching some of the way in the protest of Protest Atheism

I'm not sure I would be a big fan of Moltmann, although I haven't read him. But in a spare moment today I enjoyed reading Richard Bauckham's preface to The Crucified God.

The God who, omnipotent and unaffected, remains simply sovereign over the horrors of twentieth-century western cultural history is the God against whom what Moltmann calls 'protest atheism', represented by Albert Camus, finds it morally necessary to rebel. But is this God truly the Christian God? For Moltmann and others, the crisis of credibility of classical theism provides Christian theology with the opportunity to return to the biblical story of God, with its centre in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, in which, Christian theology has always believed, God defines for us who he truly is. Here God is not only the authority responsible for the world, to whom protest against meaningless suffering can be directed, but also the fellow-sufferer, who enters into the hell of abandonment and suffers it in love for the godless and godforsaken [...] In Jesus' cry of godforsakeness, God the divine Son not only shares the godforsakeness which is at the heart of suffering, but also takes up the cry of protest against it.

(p.xii, The Crucified God)

With this kind of theology I'd always want to keep the balance that God is both the forsaken and the one who forsakes. But nevertheless I think that is a helpful quote as far as it goes.

We must work the works

As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' Jesus answered, 'It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. (John 9:1-4)

This man was not blind 'just' so Jesus could show his power in healing him. He was blind so that he may make the journey of faith that he makes in John 9 from believing Jesus is 'The man called Jesus' (v.11) to a 'prophet' (v.17) to 'from God' (v.33) to 'Lord' who he worships (v.38). The work is not the miracle of healing but the miracle of faith.

It is also not just something that Jesus did. That is why 'we must work the works of him who sent me'.

Jesus promises we will do 'greater works' than the works he does (14:12). Jesus says the works which the Father does he does in him he does by 'the words that I say to you'. Therefore the 'greater works' are the preaching of the Gospel. That is not only why one man was born blind but why suffering continues even today.

We rightly want to see suffering end, but God allows it to continue because he is 'patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance' (2 Peter 3:9). But night is coming...