of Chicago for five days with only five dollars in my pocket.5 But I’ve been healthy and safe for the most part, and privileged to live in a prosperous country free of any severe persecution for my faith.
Why, then, am I qualified to write about suffering, holiness, the nature of God, and victory over suffering? It’s because I’ve delved deeply into biblical revelation and found some answers. What wisdom I have comes somewhat from personal experience, somewhat from the testimonies of a few wonderful saints of God I’ve known well, but mostly from the gracious gifting of the self-revealing and voluntarily suffering God who speaks through the Bible. I take no credit for what I share, but rejoice that I have something truly important to report.
Here’s a further word about the Bible as my key source. Suffering is one of the Bible’s main themes, maybe its largest theme. It begins with an account of how evil and death came into the world. The major Exodus story recounts Israel’s forty years of intense trials in the wilderness after the terrible slavery experienced in Egypt. The Exile is the story of a deep shadow cast over a large portion of the journey of God’s people. Exodus-Exile loom over the whole Old Testament. In addition, the Wisdom literature is largely dedicated to the problem of suffering. Ecclesiastes ponders the perplexing questions of evil and our human mortality. Job cries out. The Psalms sing out, often in pain.
There’s no end to this biblical recounting and grabbing for help in the face of suffering. The New Testament books of Hebrews and 1 Peter are almost entirely devoted to helping people face relentless sorrows and troubles, while Revelation screams of persecution faced by God’s faithful people across the ages. Towering over all, of course, is the Bible’s central figure, Jesus Christ, who comes to us as a man of sorrows crucified for the sins of the world. The biblical writers knew the depths of the human experience and point to the possible heights of the way through it. See chapter two for some key biblical signposts and truth anchors.
How I Got Started
Being steeped in biblical revelation was clearly one reason I began exploring and writing about the jagged faith journey through suffering. Another reason was having a wife and then two dear friends die after years of battling cancer, while two more were still in the fight and my sister almost lost her battle. Then came my reading of a series of sermons on suffering by one of the Scottish greats, James Stewart.6 Finally, I had the privilege of editing and publishing Larry Walkemeyer’s A Good Walk Home, an extended parable about the often painful tensions of living and dying well.
The unusual Walkemeyer work is about the art of dying. It acknowledges the classic work of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross on the stages of the standard journey people travel through the grief process.7 This seasoned pastor then turns to the sayings of Jesus on the cross to get a little road map for the treacherous trip taken by the Master and later by his disciples. What constitutes a healthy, holy journey home? We’re all on this trek whether we think much about it or not. What Jesus said and did shows us how to die and, maybe more importantly, how to live on the way to our eventual home.
Observes Walkemeyer at one point, “When one is wisely and well-prepared for death, then all the best of life lies ahead.”8 C. S. Lewis once added: “God whispers to us in our pleasures . . . and shouts in our pain.”9 So, careful attention to suffering may be the best way to the needed wisdom about dying and living.
Walking toward God’s fullness of life is the best way to survive the jolts along the jagged faith journey. And jolts there will be. In Walkemeyer’s book we encounter a “satisfaction spring” and a “reunion river,” but also a “shadow valley,” “confusion cave,” and “reconciliation rocks.” A smooth road is not promised for the traveling of the disciples of Jesus. What is promised are signposts along the way that say “8” and “9” and “10” (see chapters two and three). Follow them and the way becomes a sure road enabling a successful faith journey. It leads finally to the open arms of the loving Shepherd.
Along the way, however, being afflicted and blessing the Lord can and will go together. “I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and be glad. O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together!” (Ps 34:1–3) That’s what this book is all about, helping the afflicted to hear and be glad, despite whatever negative circumstance and unanswered questions obstruct the way.
I walked into a coffee shop and saw on the shelf some shiny bags for sale. I had no idea what was in them. On the outside it said, “THINK JERKY.” My mind went somewhere other than to the grass-fed beef jerky on sale as convenient snacks. I thought of the irregular routes our lives typically take, proceeding in a very jerky manner, pulled one way and then another.
A friend emailed me. He was twenty-five, married just one week, and had just been told that he has cancer and will be “enjoying” his honeymoon between chemotherapy treatments. That was an abrupt twist in the trail he didn’t expect or want! That’s often how it goes for us fragile humans. Honeymoon and chemotherapy shouldn’t but can go together.
Downton Abbey was an award-winning TV series pitting hundreds of years of British aristocracy against the tides of social upheaval and technical progress. It’s set on the fictional Yorkshire country estate of Downton Abbey between 1912 and 1925. Depicted are the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and their domestic servants. They strive to maintain a way of life that was slowly disintegrating. Who wants to watch a culture falling apart? Many people apparently.
By 2015 this series had become one of the more widely watched television drama shows in the world. Millions watched in many countries for six seasons. Why? Excellent writing, period costuming, and superb acting, yes, but there was more, including dramatic scenes of suffering, betrayal, war, pretension, passion, perversion, fire, frustration, etc. Convention was crumbling, a way of life shifting. It’s an experience feared and understood in any culture at any time. Suffering is a constant experience, faith in God or not.
Should You Read On?
One would hope that the lives of Christians would be free of such destabilizing things as suffering in its many forms, but they are not. We can learn much from the long and troubled history of the Jews, the dramas of the early Christian church, and the many scared saints of the centuries. Chapter two dips into the mixed messages and truth anchors found in the Bible about suffering. Then chapter three highlights key wisdom to guide our travels on the jagged pathway of faith. Since the questions are not new, the best answers need not be created from scratch.
In fact, some aspects of our current times complicate good thinking about the difficult issues raised by suffering. The church, especially in the Western world, has become infused with constant thoughts of comfort, wellness, and peace with the surrounding society. There has been so much said by television preachers about a “prosperity gospel”—if I’m faithful to Jesus he will be faithful to me by giving me my fair share of health and wealth. Surely, it’s wrongly argued, the Master doesn’t want to be represented in an advanced culture by second-class citizens deeply disliked by the general public.
If that kind of thinking is yours, and you’re satisfied with such “worldly” wisdom parading as the Christian gospel, please don’t read on. You won’t like what you find. You’ll encounter unwelcome straight talk about suffering being central to God’s own experience with the fallen creation and Christians very calling to be God’s representatives. Assumed everywhere in what follows are two central truths which I understand to be at the heart of biblical revelation: (1) Suffering lies at the core of God’s very being because of the divine love; and (2) Suffering is central to who Christians are supposed to be in this fallen world because of their imitating the ways of Jesus.
These central truths are hardly welcome in rich and self-seeking cultures, sometimes not even in the church that supposedly represents the loving God who self-sacrificed in Jesus Christ. They just don’t fit and will never be popular, but there will be no compromise here. Truth is what it is, and we are supposed to be the disciples we are supposed to be, pain and all.
If you prefer to move through life with ease and expect God to lavish you with all good things as rewards for believing, find a different book to read—but beware. At some point, things will be very different than