Judaism, the Problem of Suffering, and Wrestling with God

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Have you ever heard of the Jewish tradition of wrestling with God? It's time for the Line of Fire with your host, biblical scholar and cultural commentator, Dr. Michael Brown. Your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity. Call 866-34-TRUTH to get on the Line of Fire.

And now, here's your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks for joining us today on Thoroughly Jewish Thursday. There is so much to think about in terms of the national tragedy that took place earlier this week with the slaughter of these children and schoolteachers in Avaldi, Texas. And as it is Thoroughly Jewish Thursday, I wanted to bring to you a Jewish dimension of how Jewish people, especially religious Jews, have dealt with the problem and pain of suffering over the generations. And of course, Jewish people, as a people, have suffered in extraordinary ways and so often been the target of attack and hatred and persecution and discrimination and exile and imprisonment and death.

So we want to talk about this. We want to look at the scriptures. And we're going to open the phones, as always, as we do on Thoroughly Jewish Thursday, for your call. So any Jewish related question of any kind, if you're a Jewish listener and you disagree with me about Jesus, or if you've got a question about the Hebrew Bible or Hebrew language, or want to talk about Messianic prophecy or something that relates to the Jewish people today or the state of Israel today, by all means, give us a call.

Phone lines are open. So as long as it's Jewish related, it doesn't have to be on the topic of suffering. But as long as it's Jewish related, your calls are welcome. 866-348-7884.

That's 866-34-TRUTH. You know, in the Bible, you have many psalms of prayer and petition. Right now, as I'm listening to the Bible on audio, I'm in the book of Psalms, and it's striking how many times there are crying out, How long, O Lord? Are you going to forsake me? Are you going to abandon me?

Are you going to abandon your people? How long, O Lord? But you don't just have these psalms of petition and crying out. Even saying, Lord, wake up. It's as if you're sleeping. Think of the boldness of that prayer. I mean, the psalmist fully understands that God, by nature, never sleeps, right? The same psalms tell us that he who keeps Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps. But it seems as if he's sleeping.

Even Psalm 22, which Yeshua prays on the cross at the beginning of the psalm, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It seems and feels right now as if you have abandoned me. That's the feeling.

That's the experience. But along with that, you have words of protest. You have the book of Job, where Job protests against God. He appeals to God against God. He flees to God from God. And he says, you're smiting me.

You're destroying me. But I know if I could go to court with you, I'd be proven right. Well, who's going to prove him right? Well, justice itself, because God set up a just universe. So even though Job goes too far in his accusations against God, there's a great faith behind it by which he knows ultimately, in God's universe, there must be justice.

There must be the setting right of wrongs. The monstrous treating, the monstrous treatment that I'm now getting, Job is thinking, what I'm experiencing from the hand of God. He doesn't know about a devil, right, about Hasatan, Satan. So the horrific things I'm experiencing from God now cannot be reflective of the real nature of God. So you have these words of protest within the Hebrew Bible.

And you have these words of deep question and dialogue. And out of this has grown a genre of what can be called wrestling with God in Jewish tradition. So it is a great reverence for God, a great honor and respect of God. But at the same time, the feeling that we as God's creation are obligated to bring our concerns to him.

So classic example. And in the first place, you see anything like this in the Bible is Genesis chapter 18, Genesis 18. So after the Lord and two angels appear to Abraham and visit him in Genesis 18, then Abraham gets into an extended discussion with the Lord.

So Genesis chapter 18, beginning in verse 16. The men, the two angels, set out from there and looked down towards Sodom, Abraham walking with them to see them off. Now the Lord had said, shall I hide from Abraham when I'm about to do since Abraham is to become a great and populous nation and all the nations of the earth are to bless themselves by him. For I have singled them out that he may instruct his children in his posterity to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is just and right. In order that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him. Then the Lord said, the outrage of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sins so grave. I will go down to see whether they have acted altogether according to the outcry that has reached me.

If not, I will take note. The men went on from there to Sodom while Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Literally the Lord is there in person with him talking face to face. Abraham came forward and said, will you sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?

Let's pause there for a moment. We're familiar with this narrative. If you've read the Bible, you've heard this, you're familiar with it. But think of the audacity that it takes to ask that question to God. Right, he understands, he's talking face to face with the Lord, with Yahweh. And he asked the question, will you sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? I mean, if he said, I know that you will not sweep away the innocent with the guilty because you are righteous.

That would be one thing. But he's asking the question to force the answer of, of course not. So this is a holy boldness here. What if there should be 50 innocent people within the city, and you then wipe out the place and not forgive it for the sake of the innocent 50 who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty so that innocent and guilty fare alike.

Far be it from you. And then these famous words, shall not the judge of all the earth do right? And the Lord answered, if I find within the city of Sodom 50 innocent ones, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.

Abraham spoke up saying, here I venture to speak to my Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. What if the 50 innocent should lack five? Will you destroy the whole city for one of the five?

Now look at how it gets turned. Instead of saying for 45, it's like this, there's only five missing here. There's only five, went from 50 to 45. You're not going to destroy the city because of five.

Not even talking about all the guilty people in the city. He answered, I will not destroy it if I find 45 there. But he spoke to him again and said, what if 40 should be found there? And he answered, I will not do it for the sake of the 40. And he said, let not my Lord be angry if I go on.

I mean, this takes boldness. What if 30 should be found there? And he answered, I will not do it if I find 30 there.

And he said, I venture again to speak to my Lord. What if 20 should be found there? And he answered, I will not destroy for the sake of the 20. And he said, let not my Lord be angry if I speak with this last time.

What if 10 should be found there? And he answered, I will not destroy for the sake of the 10. This is a kind of wrestling with God in prayer, friends, as we step back from the text and consider this.

This is petitioning, and this is going another step. Lord, I'm gonna ask for this. When we get to Genesis 32, we see a real wrestling with God. All right, Jacob is called Israel because he strives with God and with man.

He overcomes, he wrestles, he's literally wrestling with a man. Hosea 12 tells us it was a malach, an angel. I believe it was the son of God.

And Jacob calls the name of the place, Peniel. He says, because I've seen the face of God. I've seen the face of God. Hanim, his face, El God, Peniel, the face of God.

It's a real wrestling there. But then in ongoing Jewish tradition, you have this aspect of great faith challenging God. I know it sounds irreverent to some. And in my own life, I don't pray in this way. In other words, it doesn't feel natural for me to pray in this way. Simply because when I'm in his presence, I just say, Lord, you're worthy, you're good, you're righteous, you're perfect. All you do is good. And forgive me for my lack of faith or my misunderstanding or whatever.

But I know other people, people of real faith, people who love the Lord, who've gotten to this point of agony, of harsh, that have challenged God. Like, God, there's something wrong. This is not what you promised. This is not the way it's supposed to be.

So I can pray prayers, I guess, like that. Those will flow out of my heart sometimes. But I think of an example of often shared, and with Nancy's permission, shared it publicly. We had lost a number of friends over a period of months. It was just one after the other. They weren't really close to us, but it was one after the other. And then two families we were close to, one lost a 13-year-old boy in a fire, excuse me, in a freak accident, the other a 12-year-old boy in a fire. These were families we were close with, and we knew the kids well. And it was just a few weeks apart.

And I remember the second loss, the final loss, it was about 10 different people in a period of just a few months. But the last two so close to us, and they were children. And Nancy stopped eating, and I said, are you fasting?

She goes, no, I'm going on a hunger strike. It was a way of protesting, saying, God, it's not supposed to be like this. We have descriptions of who you are in the Word, and we have your promises in the Word, and these are fine people who love you. And these kids were kids who honored their parents, and honor your mother and father, your father and mother, that may go well with you, that you may live long in the land. Paul refers to Ephesians 6 as the first commandment with a promise. And yet these kids were God-honoring kids, and they died in these freaking terrible ways. And how could it be? There's a tradition in Judaism that wrestles with these things, and Elie Wiesel even shares this account.

And many, it'll sound strange, you'll think, I don't get this. But in the Holocaust, a group of men came together one day and decided that they were going to put God on trial. Jewish man, was he liable for the suffering of the Jewish people and the murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust? And they argued both ways and concluded that he was guilty, and then they went from there to say their evening prayers to worship and honor God. You say, I don't get it. It's an unusual thing, but it's something that imputes such righteousness and goodness to God and such closeness with us towards him, that you can have these kind of scenarios. I'm just saying, these are traditions found in the midst of suffering and pain, and they've helped give people an outlet for their faith to then continue to worship God. We'll be right back.

866-34-TRUTH with your Jewish-related calls. This is how we rise up. It's our resistance. You can't resist us. This is how we rise up.

This is how we rise up. It's the Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on the Line of Fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Hey friends, we are hoping to have some announcements for you soon about going back to Israel.

I'll tell you more about that in a moment. Here's the phone number again to call. Now's a great time to call. We'll be able to get to your questions.

866-34-H-7-884. If it's Jewish-related, then it is kosher for us on Thoroughly Jewish Thursday. Alright, let me just switch subjects for a moment, then go back to this Jewish tradition of wrestling with God, and tell you a very moving story from a brother I met with in Bethlehem a few years ago. But I've been to Israel, I don't know, 17, 18 times, something like that. But every time I went before the last three times, every time I went, it was exclusively to do ministry.

So that's how I was in Israel. Speaking at a conference, equipping believers, doing some kind of outreach, whatever. That's why I was there, and that's why I wanted to be there.

The idea of leading a tour group over there never appealed to me. So one of my dear colleagues said, Mike, you've really got to do it. It's a great blessing to the people that go, they're dramatically changed. It gives you great time with folks that follow your ministry. It's a blessing to the ministry as well to do it. So I agreed.

I said, okay, we'll do it. So we had a busload the first time that we did it, and it was great. I mean, as much as I knew that people would be impacted, I was still amazed by how deeply they were impacted.

Really, I was blown away by it. The only problem was that being on the bus all day, you only sit next to one other person if you're on the bus, right? During the tour, you have a tour guide, so most of the time I'm not going to be teaching during the day. So I thought, okay, what can I do to make it more of a time where I'm spending good time with the tour group, and we're all being productive while we're there. So what we started to do, and we did it the next couple of trips, was I would do teaching at key sites, like Mount Carmel, where a lot of you call it on fire from heaven, or we do baptisms at the River Jordan, or key things that each day we connect in a key way, and then at night we do something together.

Maybe I'll be speaking somewhere, come to the meeting with me, or we'll bring in someone to do worship, or I'll do a Q&A, or we'll do a live broadcast from Israel. People can sit in. So this way it's kind of, hey, we get more time altogether, and they get the full tour as well. So we did a couple more tours. I thought, okay, this is great.

People are loving it. I'm getting good time with the tour groups, and it's all good. We were ready to take two buses to Israel before COVID hit.

It would have been May of that year. So we were ready with our buses, about a hundred people going, and we delayed it, we delayed it, and then we finally canceled it. And I thought, you know, I think I'm done doing these tours, and next time I go to Israel, it'll just be exclusively to minister to the people there. Well, some friends started reaching out to me, hey, Mike, are you going back to Israel, because if you do, I want to go. And then someone else, hey, are you going to take a trip to Israel, because if you do, I want to go. And this stranger follows me on Facebook from Burma, Myanmar, runs into me at the Dallas airport, said, do you do tours to Israel, because if you go, I want to go. I thought, okay.

And I started to get excited about it again. Suddenly I was really psyched, and as many times as I've been to the Kotel, the wall, we call it the Wailing Wall, here, but just the Kotel, the wall in Israel, as many times as I've been there, welcoming the tour group there, sometimes I've gotten there early, and then met the tour group there as they come from another location, and just greeting them as they come up and see the site and praying together there, it always moves me. So, we are doing our best to lock in details for going back to Israel for a tour next year.

We don't have the details yet, but as soon as we do, we'll announce it, you'll have many months to get ready to go, but hopefully we can have an amazing time there. There really is nothing like it on the planet. When I was speaking at a controversial anti-Zionist conference in Bethlehem a few years ago, I was the one pro-Israel speaker that was there, and by invitation for that reason, to go against what they were saying and then for them to challenge me, I met with a Christian brother there, he's lived in Israel, or specifically Bethlehem area for some years, and tragically he lost his son to cancer. And when he tells stories about his son and his upbeat spirit, his optimism, I mean, think of a boy, just a kid, I don't know, 11, 12 years old at the time, I don't know the exact age, but he loses his leg to cancer.

And he tells his dad jokingly afterwards, hey, you only have to pay half the amount now when you buy me a new pair of sneakers. I mean, that was the spirit of the kid, but he ultimately lost his son to cancer. Those who've had similar battles and lost children, you can relate to this in a way that I can't. So, in church settings, he felt a certain artificiality. His experience, I'm not saying church is everywhere, his experience, either he couldn't really talk about what he was going through because people couldn't handle it, or just, praise the Lord, we're going to pray, everything's going to be alright. For him, it didn't help him process the grief, it didn't help him wrestle with God over these things, because he's wondering, God, you have the power to heal, you've given promises, where is the healing?

That's a kid's suffering, I would never do that to my own child, and yet you're letting these things happen. So, he began to find some of these traditions in Judaism about wrestling with God. He met Jews, Israelis, different ones, and saw the way they handled suffering and hardship in their own life, and even though he absolutely thoroughly, completely believes in Jesus as the Savior, he found something among the people and the tradition that really ministered to him, and so he moved to Israel and became a real friend of Israel and the Jewish people as a Christian follower of Jesus. Those of you who've been through real suffering, those of you who've suffered terrible loss, those of you who've experienced different hardships that would make many of us just faint in terror and pain, you understand that that can destroy your life, or with God's help, it can make you a more compassionate person, a stronger person, a person of greater character, a person of greater perseverance, a person of greater love, and you've watched people destroyed by suffering in their own lives, you've watched them become fearful or bitter or angry or hopeless or depressed or suicidal, you've watched marriages fall apart, and you've seen others who become more Christ-like through the suffering, who draw closer to God, who become more compassionate, who have backbones now that are immovable because there's such strong people of faith having been purged in the fire. So these are very, very difficult things, but things that can make us or break us. And I want to take you into a really, really interesting story here that ties in with our subject matter. Of course, during the Holocaust, Jews basically unarmed in Germany and Eastern Europe, and Nazis and their allies with such tremendous force and power, and many of the Jews not really knowing what was happening to them until it happened, there was very little resistance along the way, and in certain ways, how could you resist?

What do you do? You resist, you're instantly killed, you hang on, maybe you can survive, so there's this wrestling back and forth do we just try to make it to the end, do we wait for liberation, somebody's got to stop this madness? If you fight now, you definitely die. Maybe the moment you fight, your kids are killed.

It's an agonizing, difficult situation. But there were examples of resistance. The extermination camp, Treblinka, so this was not a work camp, it was an extermination camp. The people that came in there were exterminated.

You did not live for long in Treblinka. So there were workers there just enough to keep the extermination camp going. There was a resistance there that ultimately destroyed the camp before Jews were executed there. But only a handful survived, so they lived to tell their story. And then the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland was another place of resistance. Again, against impossible odds, and with so little weaponry to fight against the monstrous Nazi army and all their power, and starvation diets and all of that, there was resistance.

There was fighting back. And after the Holocaust, writings were discovered. The Jewish historian in the community, Immanuel Ringelblum, the one that took it on himself to document what was happening. How do you preserve what you write?

How do you get it out? Well, what he did is put his writings in these tin cans which were then buried underground, and then subsequently discovered. So, so much of the history became known in that way. So there is an author who was living in South America, a Jewish man named Zvi Kulitz, and he claimed that it was all fictional.

Okay? It was all fictional. He claimed to have discovered a hitherto unknown writing from one of the religious Jewish resistance fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto.

Claimed to have found this. And when it was published, it was published as if it was legitimate. Now, he always meant it as a work of fiction, but it was so convincing that it began to circulate as if it was this real battle that this religious Jewish man, Yossef Rakover, had with God. I want to share some excerpts of this when we come back. You've probably never heard anything quite like this.

It's a fictional work, but it's put back in this time of Jews fighting against the Nazi army in Warsaw. We'll come back to this as we talk about wrestling with God in Jewish tradition. ... ... ... ... ... It's the Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on the Line of Fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...