Understanding Suffering

In many cases, we go into the refiner's fire so that God will remove the draws from our lives, draw us close to Himself, and in the process of pain and suffering, we are made more like Christ. As I look back on times of suffering in my own life, I can see how God used those times to draw me closer to Him. Perhaps you can see that in your own life. Yet we don't always have that perspective when we're in the midst of grief and suffering. You're listening to the Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. How should we understand suffering and how as Christians should we respond? This week on Renewing Your Mind, R.C. Sproul will be helping us deal with various difficult problems in the Christian life. And today, as he looks at suffering, he considers a number of ways that the world tends to respond and can influence us and then directs us to the Bible's teaching on how Christians should think about suffering.

Here's Dr. Sproul. Several years ago, I was invited to give a lecture at Covenant College down in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. And I remember the address that I gave at that time was called the locust, not locust like the insect, but the locust of astonishment. That is the place where we focus on what is really amazing to us. And I pointed out in that address on that occasion that we sing Amazing Grace and give lip service to the sense in which we are amazed by grace. But I wonder how amazed we really are, where we have become so accustomed to the mercy of God, the patience of God, and the grace of God that we begin to take it for granted and to assume it, and then pretty soon to demand it.

And so that when He is gracious to us, we're hardly surprised. But I find that what is most astonishing, characteristically to Christians of our day, is when they are visited by tragedy or affliction or suffering. And many times the presence of suffering in our life undoes us and brings us to a state of a spiritual crisis. And I think part of the reason for that is that we hear in the culture these ministers who tell us that once you come to Christ, all your problems are over, and that God doesn't ever will sickness or pain or affliction, and so that when these things happen to us, we have a crisis of faith. And on that occasion in Tennessee, I used a portion of Scripture from the thirteenth chapter of Luke's gospel as a taking off point for the discussion. There in Luke 13, verse 1, we read this narrative.

There were present at that season some who told him about the Galilean s, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And Jesus answered and said to them, Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered such things? I tell you, no. But unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Were those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse sinners than all the other men who dwelled in Jerusalem?

I tell you, no. But unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Now what's going on here is that the people come to Jesus, and they're asking this question basically, How could God allow these things to happen? If God is good, how can He stand by and let the tower fall upon the heads of innocent people just minding their business, walking down the street, or allow them to become victims of this savage attack of Pilate's forces?

They mix the blood of the people with the sacrifices. We're surprised when these things happen. And what we may be even more surprised at is Jesus' response. He said, If you think that these things happened to these people because they were worse sinners than anybody else, I tell you, no.

But unless you repent, you will likewise perish. Now what's our Lord doing here? I think what He's saying to His inquiries is this.

You're asking me the wrong question. The question you should be asking is, Why didn't that temple fall on my head? Why wasn't my blood mixed with the blood of the sacrifices with the Galileans? And somehow we assume that God owes it to us to give us a life free of suffering. Now we have to be careful when we look at this whole question of suffering because though we have this passage here in Luke, we know in John chapter 9 the disciples come with a question to Jesus about a man who had been born blind. And they say, Whose sin was it? The man or his parents that this fellow was born with this affliction? And what does Jesus say?

Neither. You've come to me with a false dilemma. It wasn't as a punishment to the man, and it wasn't as a punishment to the father or the mother.

It was that the Son of Man may be glorified in this occasion. But the reality of suffering is something we all have to deal with, and we deal with it in a pagan world. And part of the problem that we experience in dealing with this particular difficult problem is that so often we hear views of pain and suffering that are pagan views of pain and suffering. And we need to understand the difference between a Christian understanding of suffering and pagan views of suffering. In the short time that we have today, I'm going to mention four different varieties of views of suffering that have been popular at one time or another in the pagan world.

And the first one is what I'm going to call the docetic view. I call it the docetic view because it is the view that views suffering and pain as an illusion. This is the view of suffering that is basically one of denial. It says that suffering is just a matter of the mind. It's not real, and we need to understand that it's simply an illusion. But really, as a philosophical discussion, it has little value to somebody on a hospital bed to say that suffering is not real, because we all know it is real. There is such a thing as pain.

There is such a thing as sorrow, and it is no solution to the problem to deny the reality of it. A second way in which pagans have dealt with the problem of suffering and evil is found in what I call the historic or classic Stoic view. And you hear the axioms of Stoicism creeping into our popular culture when you hear such statements as, keep a stiff upper lip or don't let anything get you down.

The Stoics believed that we live in a world that is controlled by material forces, and these material forces operate according to fixed deterministic laws. And we have absolutely no control over what happens to us in this environment. What happens to us is our faith or our karma. It is just the result of these impersonal forces out there, and we have no freedom to determine our own destiny. The only place where we do have the ability to exercise our freedom and to impact the state of our existence is by directing our attitudes or our emotions with respect to things that befall us. That is, I can't stop being hit by a truck this afternoon if that's the way it's going to be, but I do have some power to decide how I'm going to react to it internally. And so, what the Stoics sought to achieve was what they called philosophical atarachia, or peace of mind.

You've maybe never heard the term atarachia, except as a brand name for a tranquilizer in the pharmaceutical world. But that Greek word is the word that means peace of mind whereby nothing disturbs our equanimity. Now, the Stoics also sought to reach that state by practicing diligently the art of what they called imperturbability. That is, you practice controlling your emotions to such a degree that nothing will perturb you, nothing will upset you. And so, you marshal these internal resources to get a thick skin or hide over your feelings so that if you do enter into an arena of pain or of affliction, you won't let it get you down.

You keep the stiff upper lip and bear it in quietness and so on. The third way in which pagans have sought to deal with suffering historically is through a method expounded by the Stoics' chief rivals in their day, the hedonist. And the hedonistic view is defined in this way. Hedonism historically is that philosophy of life that describes or defines the good in terms of the elimination of pain and the acquisition of pleasure. Now, in the ancient world, there were two different types of hedonists in their philosophical orientation, one that I'll call the crass hedonists and the other group I'll call the more refined hedonists. Of course, that viewpoint, either in its crude form or in its refined form, still addresses people today. We still have Epicureans, and we have a culture that has been drenched and saturated in the philosophy of hedonism. In fact, there's never been a time in American history where we've had such a high rate of alcoholism and of unbridled sexual behavior and intoxication and addiction to hard drugs. And most of the psychologists and sociologists look at this phenomenon of our day, which we have given ourselves over to the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure.

Why? In many cases, because of a response to an extremely negative view of life. It's not an accident that suicide is the highest ranking cause of death among certain age groups in this nation, because people are taught now and bombarded by all kinds of sources telling them that they have emerged from the slime, their cosmic accidents, their life is meaningless, their suffering is therefore meaningless. And so, they try to dull the pain and the ache of the anxiety of being hurled into a meaningless existence by seeking relief in the stupor of pleasure. There's nothing new about that.

Just the dimensions are different. We remember Paul, when he addressed the Corinthians and gave his magnificent defense of the resurrection, when he was going through that discussion at one point, he said, if Christ is not raised, let us do what? Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. See, that's the creed of the hedonist. Sooner or later, tragedy, death, pain, suffering, and affliction are going to get me. So, I only go through life once. I'm going to grab all of the gusto I can get right now, and I'm going to fill up on pleasure, because tomorrow I die.

In the meantime, it's party time. And so, this approach to hedonism in many ways is motivated by a fear of and a desire to escape from the pangs of suffering. We talk of those who drown their sorrows in a bottle, and perhaps the most popular psychoanalysts of our culture are the bartenders that are found on every street in every metropolitan area, because there are a lot of people who are unhappy, who are suffering, and who are in pain, and are desperately trying to find solace and relief from their pain any way that they can. Well, these are just some of the ways in which people cope with the reality of pain and suffering. And obviously, the biblical view of suffering is on a collision course with these views, because the one overarching principle of the biblical view of suffering is this, that suffering for the Christian is never an exercise in futility. It is never an exercise in futility, but that suffering is used by God for redemptive purposes among His people.

And we are told where to put the locus of astonishment. We're told by Peter, we're told by James, that we ought not to think that it is something strange when we are called upon to suffer, because the Christian faith is born in suffering. The way of salvation is the Via Dolorosa, the way of sadness, the way of the cross. And Christ Himself promises His people, in the world you will have tribulation, you will have afflictions. Paul says that He fills up in His own body the afflictions that have not yet been completed in the body of Christ, His church, that we all are called to participate in the sorrows of Christ, who was called a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

And there's a difference between that and stoicism. I don't know how many times when I'll go into the home of Christian folks where somebody has just died and people feel like they're not allowed to weep, they're not allowed to express any kind of sorrow or mourning or grief, that they're supposed to be stoics, and we won't allow them to grieve. We'll say to them that that's an act of unbelief or something like that, as if when Jesus went to the place of Lazarus after He had died, no one would ever know what He was going to do. Still, He entered into the grief of the moment, and our Lord Himself wept. He was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. And the Scriptures make it plain that grief is a legitimate human emotion, and there is nothing sinful about mourning the loss of a loved one. That emotion of grief, the emotion of sorrow in and of itself is perfectly legitimate.

It can easily become a spirit of self-pity or of bitterness, but those are distortions of legitimate emotions, and the legitimate emotion of sadness and sorrow are not only permitted by Scripture, but in many cases commended. When Paul speaks of the great benefit of our justification, whereby we're adopted in the fellowship and the family of God, he says, being justified, therefore you have what? Peace with God, access into His presence. And then he goes on to say, and in the midst of this, because of your relationship to God, you are able to endure tribulation, knowing that tribulation works patience and patience character, and these things will not leave us ashamed. So that God uses tribulation, He uses our pain not simply to punish us, but to polish us, to sanctify us.

In many cases, we go into the refiner's fire so that God will remove the dross from our lives, draw us close to Himself, and in the process of pain and suffering, we are made more like Christ. And then Paul reminds us that the sufferings of this present time are but for a moment. They are not the final answer, and that the sufferings that we are called to endure in this world aren't worthy to be compared with the glorious things that God has stored up in heaven for those who love Him. So in one sense, our suffering becomes a bridge to glory. Now that doesn't mean that we are supposed to go out and look for suffering and to say, thank you, Lord, every time the sky falls on our heads. And there are people who try to do that, and that can be a form of denial.

It can be more docetic than it is Christian. We don't rejoice that we have a headache. We don't rejoice that we have cancer eating away at us. What we do rejoice in is the presence of God in the midst of our pain. But again, we have to understand, lest we fall into being absolutely undone and astonished whenever affliction hits us, that we are to expect it. It's part of our call as Christians that God has called us into a fallen world, to minister into a world that is a veil of tears, and it's a place of pain, and there's no way that we can ever expect to escape it. Now suppose I'm afflicted with suffering.

Why? Why am I afflicted? Well, there could be several reasons. It may be that God needs to correct me and that it is part of His corrective wrath to make me sick or to bring me low.

He does that. There are manifold examples of that in Scripture. How did Miriam get leprosy?

God gave her leprosy to bring her to repentance. But we can't jump to the conclusion that every time we get sick or every time we suffer, that is, there's a direct correlation between our disobedience and the pain that we're experiencing. Again, Job is exhibit A to refute that argument. Job was more righteous than anybody else, and yet he suffered more than anybody else, and it would have been a terrible mistake to assume that there was a direct proportionate relationship between the degree of his guilt and the degree of his pain.

We mustn't do that. And so we don't always know, and we don't have to know. What we have to know is Him, because when Job demanded an answer for his pain and asked God to speak to him and explain it to him, and God finally appeared to Job and interrogated Job for several chapters, what answer did Job get from God?

He didn't get one. God didn't say to Job, you're suffering this pain for this, this, this, and this. The only answer that Job got to his affliction in the final analysis was God Himself, the presence of God.

And in effect, what God was saying is, Job, here I am. I am with you. Trust me. Now, when people say, trust me, it's time to run. But when God says, trust me, it's time to trust. Let me finish by reminding you that our God never promised any of us that we would never go into the valley of the shadow of death.

What He did promise us was that He would go with us. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. We have the Good Shepherd. We have His presence. We have His consolation.

That doesn't mean we're removed from the arena of pain, but that we are upheld in the arena of pain. How easy it can be to forget the trustworthiness of God in the midst of a trial. So I love Dr. Sproul's reminder that when people say, trust me, it's time to run.

But when God says, trust me, it's time to trust. Today's message on Renewing Your Mind is from R.C. Sproul's series, Dealing with Difficult Problems. The entire series addresses how to deal with anger, how to deal with anxiety, forgiveness, and even navigating how to discern the will of God. This practical series, along with digital access to the study guide, can be yours on DVD for a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. You'll also have lifetime streaming access to the series in the free Ligonier app. So call us today at 800-435-4343, or give your gift at renewingyourmind.org.

This offer ends Wednesday, so don't delay. As forgiven Christians, we can still feel a sense of guilt at times. And for unbelievers, they carry a weight of guilt with them wherever they go. So how do we deal with guilt? That's tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. you