Pain and Suffering

Nothing happens outside of the decorative will of Almighty God.

If you believe in that kind of sovereignty then sickness is a part of that plan and purpose. Christians get cancer. Christians get dementia. Christians lose limbs. God's people.

The choicest of God's people. How should we respond when pain and suffering comes our way? What does suffering teach us about God?

And why do some use suffering to accuse God of either not being good or not being all powerful? Over the next few days on Renewing Your Mind, you'll hear messages from Derek Thomas' practical and pastoral series in the book of Job. A book that provides great wisdom and insight into the question of suffering. If you'd like to study the entire 12-message series, we'll send it to you along with R.C. Sproul's book, Why Is There Evil? When you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.

You'll also receive digital access to the messages and the study guide. To address the topic of pain and suffering, here's Dr. Thomas in the book of Job. Well, turn with me to Job chapter 2 and we'll read the opening verse together. Again, there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord and Satan also came among them to present himself before the Lord. Back in chapter 1, Satan came into God's presence, back there in chapter 1 and verse 6. There was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord and Satan also came among them.

And the Lord said to Satan, from where have you come? And at the end of the first chapter, Satan had been given permission to bring devastation into the life of Job, into his family, the loss of his ten children, and the loss of everything that Job had in terms of wealth. And Job's wealth was in terms of camels and sheep and so on. He was a wealthy man.

But now in chapter 2, well, a boundary had been set in chapter 1. He may touch all that Job has, but he wasn't allowed to touch Job himself. Satan had made the accusation, verse 9 of chapter 1, does Job fear God for no reason? Does Job fear God for no reason? The only reason why Job fears God is because life is good. He has everything. Life is easy for Job.

He has a good lifestyle. But take that away and he will curse God to his face. Well, Job did not do that. And in chapter 1 and verse 21, he had responded, The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Now, Satan is brought before God once again. God introduces him as a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. He still holds fast his integrity, although you incited me against him to destroy him without reason. That's an interesting phrase, isn't it?

It's the Hebrew word hinam. It's as though God is saying to Satan, You incited me to do something to my servant Job when there was no reason, when there was no cause. It might create in us a sense that life is unfair, that life is random. If God himself does things when there's no reason for it, there's no cause for it, there's seemingly no justification for it. Well, at least it looks like that. It looks like that to Satan. It sometimes looks like that to us. God does things in his providence, in his decree. He permits things to happen, and there seems to be no reason for it.

There seems to be no cause for it. I was experiencing some difficulty some twenty years ago, and it was a personal family issue, and I remember confiding in a dear friend of mine. He was an Old Testament professor, and only Old Testament professors would write notes like this, and he says, I have pretty much given up trying to read providence, but I wonder if you are having one of those hinam trials.

I had to go and look up what the word hinam meant. I realized it was a Hebrew word, and realized that he was quoting from chapter 2 of the book of Job, that God appears to us sometimes to do things without reason, without cause, without evident justification that we can fathom. Think of Alfred Lord Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade.

This is an account, of course, of the Russians and the Crimean War in the 1850s or so. Ours not the reason why, ours but to do and die. Is that how we are supposed to approach life and its trials and difficulties? We don't ask for reasons. We don't ask for justification. We just obey. We are just soldiers in the battle, and we are not privy to the causation, the factors that lie behind certain strategies and decisions. Ours is just to obey, just to do and die.

Is that it? Well, this is another day, chapter 2 and verse 1. There was a day when the sons of God came. Another day. Again, there was a day. A second day.

We are not told how much time separated this one from the first one. And this time, Satan answers the Lord, verse 4, and says, Skin for skin, all that a man has he will give for his life. But stretch out your hand, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face. And the Lord said to Satan, Behold, he is in your hand. Only spare his life.

Satan is given permission. There's a boundary. You may not kill him. God sets a boundary. He says, Thus far and no further. But within this boundary, within this sphere, this side of the boundary, you may do as you will, you may do as you wish.

You may touch him, but you may not kill him. Well, this raises lots of problems, lots of issues, lots of difficulties. This raises issues about health. People say it, don't they? If you have your health, you have everything. People say that. It's not true, of course.

It's nonsense. You can have everything and not have your health. What kind of philosophy is that to somebody who is ill, to somebody who is sick, somebody who has got cancer, battling cancer? Have they lost everything? Can they never be happy? Can they never find contentment? Can they never find a sense of purpose and meaning in life? Is it all gone because they're sick?

No, we don't believe that. Count it all joy when you fall into various kinds of trials, James says in chapter 1 and verse 2. We'll go on to talk about Job in chapter 5 of the book of James. Job experiences sickness. It resembles what we have come to know of as age, perhaps. The body wasting away, sores developing on your skin, and so on. The book will describe some of the characteristics of his sickness. His teeth seem to fall out, his breath seems to be putrid, and so on. The expression skin and bones comes from the book of Job. A wasting disease, some have tried to give it a label, elephantiasis, perhaps.

There's a vivid description in chapter 2 and verse 8. He took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he sat in the ashes. You know, that sore that you just want to scratch, and you just can't stop scratching.

I'll have you all scratching now in a second. But do you understand, this is a disease, but more than that, it's a life-threatening disease. This disease is threatening to take his life. Is sickness part of God's will for us? Is sickness part of God's plan for us? If we believe in the sovereignty of God, if you believe that nothing happens outside of God's decree, everything happens because God decrees it to happen. Nothing happens outside of the decorative will of Almighty God. If you believe in that kind of sovereignty, then sickness is a part of that plan and purpose.

Nothing happens. Even the sickness, even disease, is part of God's plan. But it raises issues, the problem of pain, the problem of suffering. Either God lacks the power or He lacks the goodness. If God is sovereign, then He must lack the good. He's not good, or either He's good, but He's not sovereign, that age-old dilemma. How can both be true and His own children be sick? Well, you can deny His power.

That would be one philosophical, theological trajectory to go. You can deny God's power. Rabbi Kushner, for example, when bad things happen to good people. When bad things happen to good people. Oh, you may question the premise of the book that no one is good. We're all sinners. We're all, by nature, fallen sons of Adam. But let's give Rabbi Kushner the benefit of that one. When bad things happen to good people.

Let's change the title a little. When bad things happen to the Lord's people. When bad things happen to Christians. Christians get cancer. Christians get dementia. Christians lose limbs. God's people.

The choicest of God's people. I have some vivid memories of friends of mine who loved the Lord, who served the Lord. They were preachers.

I have vivid memories of a dear, dear, faithful preacher who loved the truth, who loved the Bible, who loved the doctrines of grace. I can still see him with a Bible on his knees, but the Bible is upside down. And there are foul words coming out of his mouth. He had completely lost control of all reality. He was so far gone.

Couldn't even reach him anymore. And I remember sitting there praying with him as he's cursing me. This was a preacher of the gospel. And in my heart I'm saying, Lord, why? Why this man? This good man? This godly man? This man who spent his entire life proclaiming the doctrines of grace and preaching the gospel and you use so mightily. And now in this last season of his life, it's as though Satan has been given permission to do his worst.

Why? Maybe God isn't as powerful as you think he is. So Rabbi Kushner says, when bad things happen to good people, God isn't in control. Satan is in control. We live in a dualistic universe. Sometimes God is in control and sometimes evil is in control. Satan is in control. It's like the toss of a coin.

Depends on where you are, depends on which time frame you're in, depends on which zip code you live in. And you can be in a zip code where sovereignty rules and then you can drive up a highway and turn a corner and then all of a sudden you're in a black hole, a pocket. You're in a wormhole. A fold in space and evil is in charge. And evil is dominant. And that's the kind of universe that we live in.

That's one solution to the problem of pain. Another is to deny God's goodness. God is sovereign. But he's not necessarily good.

But he's not good in the way that you think he is good. Islam believes that. Islam believes in sovereignty, the will of Allah. Everything is the will of Allah. No matter what it is, it's the will of Allah.

You can rape women and children and behead people for no apparent reason. And it's the will of Allah. And God isn't good.

Goodness is in some subcategory in the doctrine of God in Islam. Or you can deny pain itself. Pain isn't real.

Pain is a figment of your imagination. Mary Baker Eddy. Christian Science. I love this little limerick.

And you need to know that Deal is a place in Kent, near Ramsgate, southeast of England. And a Christian scientist from Deal once said, Although it isn't real, when I sit on a pin and it pierces my skin, I dislike what I fancy, I feel. You've got to think about it. But it's a beautiful little limerick on the nonsensical nature of pretending that pain isn't real.

Because you certainly experience it, but you only fancy that you experience it when you sit on a pin. Well, for most of us, that's just complete nonsense, of course. Pain is all too real in our lives, in our families, in our homes, in our churches, in the world around us. The world is full of hurt and sickness. And sickness, well, it dominates some people's lives.

It dominates families and marriages. It thinks of a little child suffering from cancer in a hospital. Texts that come, as they did to me last week, suggesting that perhaps this little child wouldn't live very much longer. And then in God's sovereign providence, there's a turning and better news, and an indication that perhaps through a fairly long and difficult trajectory, hope is emerging once again. Some of you have been there. Some of you know exactly what I mean. Is healing always God's will?

Well, clearly not. Paul, for example, talks to Timothy. Timothy has stomach problems, maybe an ulcer, one of those grumbling ulcers.

Maybe he has acid reflux before days when over-the-counter medicines now, and good medicines, and they work, and so on. And he says to Timothy, take a little wine for your stomach's sake, for medicinal reasons you understand. Or trophimus, he leaves behind in Ephesus a sick. This is the apostle.

This is the apostle who has powers of miracles, performing miracles, but he has to leave trophimus behind. So even the apostle wasn't able to heal everybody. And then in 2 Corinthians 12, we read that he wasn't even able to heal himself. He has this thorn in the flesh, whatever that was. And it might have been something to do with his eyesight, because of something that he says in Galatians about seeing what large letters.

I have written to you, and he prays three times for this to be removed, and God doesn't remove it. So healing isn't always part of God's will. God intends for some of us to walk in the paths of ill health, of the body, of the mind. Clearly that's a part of God's will for some of his people, as it was for Job. A terrible, wasting disease that threatened to take away his life. And we're introduced to Mrs. Job.

We haven't heard from her before. And we're introduced to Mrs. Job at the end of chapter 2. We read of Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, struck Job with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, and he took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he sat in the ashes. Then his wife said to him, Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die.

Curse God and die. Well, Mrs. Job has not fared well over the centuries by commentators on the book of Job. Augustine referred to her as diabolia jutrex. You don't need to know any Latin to know that's not a compliment.

She is the devil's advocate, Augustine said. Calvin preached 159 sermons on the book of Job from 1554 to 1555 over a period of about 14 months. There weren't Sunday sermons, there were midweek sermons, lunchtime sermons, priest Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and occasionally on a following Wednesday in that sort of rotation. But it took about 14 months in the middle of the 16th century. And Calvin referred to Mrs. Job as organum satani.

And again, you don't need to know any Latin. It's not a compliment. Aquinas, Satan spared Job's wife for this very purpose as his tool to employ. Well, I've always felt as though the commentators were overly strident in their comments on poor Mrs. Job. You know, she has lost ten children too. And perhaps there's a milder interpretation here that she's saying to her husband, having drawn the conclusion that the reason why this suffering has come is because God has cursed them. And she doesn't want to see her husband suffering anymore, so curse God and die and get it over with quickly.

Well, Job's response, of course, is he said to her, you speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Foolish in the biblical sense, yeah. The fool who says there is no God in that sense. She's speaking from a worldview that is ungodly. She's speaking from almost like an atheistic worldview.

She's speaking like somebody who's denying the existence of God. Shall we receive good from God and shall we not receive evil? In all this, Job did not sin with his lips. That's a staggering statement, isn't it, from Job. Shall we receive good from God and shall we not receive evil from God?

You see, Job's commitment here to, well, a doctrine of sovereignty, even in his sickness. Not just good things, but evil things, too. Now, he's not saying God is the author of evil.

Westminster Confession, for example, the 1689 Baptist Confession of the 17th century. And they're only following medieval theology in this, saying that God is not the author of evil. Otherwise, that would make God himself a sinner. What is the connection between God and evil? Well, he's in control. Nothing happens outside of his control. But things happen according to first causes and second causes.

Things fall out by first and second causes. And again, this wasn't just a Reformation doctrine. It wasn't just a Puritan doctrine of the 17th century.

This was, in fact, the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas in the medieval era. Shall we accept good and shall we not accept evil? What is Job saying to us? Well, whatever the philosophical and theological answer to the question of the problem of pain may be, it is absolutely paramount that we live our lives in the absolute certainty that nothing is outside of God's ultimate control. Good days and bad days. Good things and bad things.

What does Paul say in Romans 8, 28? All things, and this is something that we know, all things work together for good. That's where we want to rest.

That's where we want to stay. That is where we want to stay, and that was Derek Thomas reminding us of the wonderful truth that ultimately, for the believer, all things work together for our good and for God's glory. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Monday, as we spend three days in Dr. Thomas' popular series covering the book of Job and dealing with the very sensitive and very real topic of suffering. If you haven't taken a deep dive into Job to learn what we discover about the character of God and to uncover some of the lies about suffering that even today we can hear from family and friends as we walk through that valley, then I encourage you to get Dr. Thomas' 12-message series. We'll send it to you on DVD, unlock lifetime digital access to the messages and the study guide, and we'll send you R.C. Sproul's book, Why Is There Evil?, when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800-435-4343. Your support helps bring the comfort of the Gospel and God's sovereignty to believers around the world, so give your gift by using the link in the podcast show notes or by visiting renewingyourmind.org. A digital version of this offer is also available at renewingyourmind.org slash global for those living outside of the U.S. and Canada. Thank you for your generosity. When you find yourself in the midst of a trial, the dark night of the soul, where do you find hope? Join us as we continue this series on Job tomorrow, here on Renewing Your Mind. .