Scripture Reference: Romans 5:3-5 – 2 Corinthians 4:8-9 – l Peter 5:10
“We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Romans 5:3-5
“We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed.” 2 Corinthians 4:8-9 NLT
“And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.” l Peter 5:10
During the months after my (Central Pain Syndrome) diagnosis, I ordered every book on pain and suffering I could get my hands on. Books from John Piper, Randy Alcorn, CS Lewis and many others. I often remember stories from one of those books, but can’t readily look it up.
One such story was from an ER Doctor who suddenly found himself in a crisis of faith due to God’s providence. Here’s what I remember.
Midway through his surgical training, he found himself in the middle of a shift in the ER that ended up turning his faith upside down. He was a nominal Christian, with an understanding of God grounded in sentimentality rather than biblical truth. I’ve tried to imagine what he went through that night.
When paramedics rushed three dying young men through the sliding doors of his emergency department, his meager faith unraveled. One teenager had been bludgeoned with a baseball bat while his 4-year-old son watched; another had been stabbed in the chest; a third, shot in the head. In each case, he fought and failed to save their lives, and then watched helplessly as their families crumpled to the ground in grief.
He had dealt with tragedy in the ER many times before, but not to this extreme. After work the next morning, he felt hollowed, as if a vital part of him had been torn out from its roots. He said that although his body ached for rest, he drove two hours from home in desperation to connect with something good and true.
He stopped at a bridge spanning the Connecticut River and tried to pray, but through closed eyelids he saw only the blood staining his gloves and three boys’ eyes fixed in their final gaze. He could still hear their mothers’ screams as they collapsed to the floor in anguish.
As He stood on that bridge, He was overcome with grief. And over and over again, the question troubled him: How could a good God allow this? How could he allow people to look at one another, to perceive no worth, and then to devastate life with a trigger pull or a swing of a bat?
After years of stumbling through life without Scripture, the only answer he could discern that day was silence. He decided that God must not exist, and as he trudged back to his car, he spoke of how he abandoned his faith on that bridge.
Yet he knew that God did not abandon him. Within a year, he would use his pain — the very calamity that had cracked his brittle faith in two — to draw him to the Father.
A Question That Never Goes Away
The subject at hand led me to focus on a man that was no stranger to suffering and pain. A favorite author since my youth. CS Lewis has always been a model for me of someone who has clawed his way through his share of unimaginable grief and sorrow, while trying not to lose his faith. I want us to take a look at some of his thoughts.
While few people glimpse the tragedies and triumphs of the trauma bay, questions about suffering and faith have troubled humankind for ages. For centuries, academics and lay people alike have wrestled with “the problem of pain”, as C. S. Lewis phrases it.
The problem, in brief, is how a benevolent and all-powerful God could permit pain and suffering in the world he created. This has been the age old question from time and eternity, and a key reason that many atheists use against us.
Lewis himself penned an entire book to address the question. This was only one of his books that I’ve had in my library since the 70’s. After my diagnosis in 2014, it was one of the many books I gobbled up as I was in the midst of my own crisis of faith.
In The Problem of Pain, he argues that pain and suffering are in fact compatible with, rather than contradictory to, the God of the Bible.
His commentary includes a famous quote that struck me like a thunderclap in the wake of my own faith struggles, and that continues to guide and refine me during my many dark nights of the soul. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (91).
Problem of Pain
Lewis himself was no stranger to suffering, having lost his parents at an early age and fought in World War I. And then later, he would grieve his wife’s untimely death. In The Problem of Pain, such personal experiences nuance his writing and combine with his deftness as an apologist to offer a thorough, careful exposition of suffering through a Christian lens.
In keeping with his tradition of intellectual rigor, Lewis offers a particularly strong argument for suffering as a necessary consequence of the fall.
“Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil,” he writes. “Every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt” (90).
Pain and suffering are the penalties for our corruption of the created order (Genesis 3:16–19; Romans 6:23), and they signify our rebellion against a good and holy God.
And yet, Lewis does not oversimplify the place of suffering in the Christian life. Instead, he acknowledges that God can and does work through pain for the ultimate good of his people (Romans 8:28).
Given our depravity, Lewis argues, God’s love for us must necessarily be corrective and remedial (Hebrews 12:6). With hearts like ours, to give us what we always desire would be to ignore the reproof necessary to shape us into the image of Christ.
Smashing Our Idols
Left to ourselves, Lewis notes, we are content to cleave to our sins and to make idols of what we fashion with our own hands (Romans 1:25). “The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it,” he writes (90). Through the “megaphone” of pain, therefore, God prods us to acknowledge our need for him, for our good and for his glory:
Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. . . . What then can God do in our interests but make “our own life” less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness? (94)
“Pain rouses us from spiritual deafness, convicts us of sin, and reminds us that his grace is sufficient.”
According to Lewis, when pain crashes into our lives, it prompts us to seek happiness in God rather than in our own self-sufficiency. How true this was in my life. I only had two choices; I could get bitter and turn from God in my suffering, or I could allow this great trauma in my life to draw me into a closer, more dependent relationship with God.
I chose the latter. I agree heartedly with Lewis who said regarding pain; – It rouses us from spiritual deafness, convicts us of sin, and reminds us that his grace is sufficient and his power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).
Pain, then, is entirely compatible with a good, powerful, and loving God, and in fact speaks of his love for us — a love that is neither sentimental nor flimsy, but robust and self-sacrificial. A love so radical that he gave his only Son for us (John 3:16).
Waking up a Deaf World
Although Lewis builds his analysis with reason and logic, his assertions have biblical precedent. As Paul explains in Romans 1:18–23, evidence of God’s existence surrounds us in abundance, but we shield our eyes from his glory.
We jealousy cultivate the fallacy that we are entirely in command and self-sufficient, that we have no need for him, and that we owe him no debt. We do what is right in our own eyes rather than seek God’s will and righteousness (Proverbs 14:12; 21:2).
Meanwhile, God knows what we need (Matthew 6:8) and will work through our pain to steer us back to his guiding light and love. The Bible is replete with such examples. Jonah, the wayward prophet, ran from God and didn’t pray until he was locked within the darkness of the fish’s belly (Jonah 2:1–9).
Jesus waited until Lazarus had died before journeying to his home, so he could reveal to the mourning throng that he was the Christ (John 11:15, 40–42). Samson repented of his transgressions and defeated the Philistines only after God had stripped away his strength and his pride (Judges 16:28–29). Throughout the Bible, God works through suffering to awaken his people to their need for him.
“Throughout the Bible, God works through suffering to awaken his people to their need for him.”
Lewis said, “after I walked away from God, I had no claim to hope. I discerned no meaning, no glint of mercy lining the dark moments. I saw only the horror of life, the pervasive suffering.” And in that darkness, God roused me to look to him.
Rousing Me to Faith
Early on after my first stroke, the Lord began speaking to me through my pain. Night after night I would cry out for relief, for a little loosening of the burning. The Lord had just enrolled me in the school of affliction, and I was only in my first semester. Over the past nine years, I have tried to understand the Lord’s silence.
Long ago, I’ve accepted the fact that I will more than likely have to endure the depth of this affliction until He calls me home. Once I accepted that truth, I began to cry out and pray daily for strength, and for the courage to endure from one day to the next.
The Lord speaks to us through our pain if we will let Him. Knowing that I can claim His many promises has brought me hope on many rough nights. Scripture began alive like no other time in my life, and without it, like the Psalmist says, – Unless Your word had been my delight, I may have perished in my affliction. (PS 119:92)
The Lord was using my affliction to arouse my faith, building my trust in Him as He has me in the furnace of sorrow and pain. The greatest joy these past nine years is to watch my intimacy with the Father grow, and my desire for the world to diminish.
Often, while traveling for a prison visit, I sing the lyrics of a favorite tune, “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus”, over and over again.
O soul are you weary and troubled No light in the darkness you see
There's light for a look at the Savior And life more abundant and free
Turn your eyes upon Jesus Look full in his wonderful face
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim In the light of his glory and Grace
His word shall not fail you he promised Believe him and all will be well
Then go to a world that is dying His perfect salvation to tell
Turn your eyes upon Jesus Look full in his wonderful face
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim In the light of his glory and grace
O soul are you weary and troubled No light in the darkness you see
There's light for a look at the Savior And life more abundant and free
Turn your eyes upon Jesus Look full in his wonderful face
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim In the light of his glory and grace.
I praise God for how He speaks to us through so many amazing Hymns of old that provide comfort to the soul during days and nights when our faith is stretched thin.
Not only that, but I’ve tried my best to do as God’s Word says. “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
Final Thought
Not only are pain and a loving God compatible, but on this side of the cross, we can rejoice in our sufferings. God works through our pain to refine us, to strengthen us, and to instill us with hope. He works through it to draw us to himself, to rouse us with a megaphone, and to convict us of our desperate need for him.
He works through our suffering because — like a father guiding his children toward the one right path — he loves us (Matthew 7:13–14). It’s all about us drawing closer to God through every minute in the furnace of affliction.
God used my time in the darkness to rouse me to his grace. He used it to open my eyes to the truth that his own Son also suffered. Our Savior knows our agonies (Hebrews 4:15). He bore the Father’s wrath for us. And when we are downtrodden, weary, and crushed beneath the suffering of this world, he is gentle and lowly and offers a light burden for our souls (Matthew 11:28–30).
God has left His suffering servants with the knowledge, that although they may not fully understand why they find themselves in the furnace, – they can learn to rest in the sovereignty and providence of His grace.
Job never got an answer, and the same may be true for you and me. As we grow in grace, God willing that we may have the kind of faith that can say as Job did, – “Thou You slay me, yet I will trust in You.” Just one of my many life verses.
Help us O Father God when we find ourselves in Your school of affliction. Help us to embrace our trials rather than running from them. May our lessons be from Your divine hand, may our faith be strengthened, and may we always know that Your grace remains sufficient for us. Amen
"The greatest earthly blessing that God can give to any of us is health, with the exception of sickness.” CH Spurgeon
From: Fight the Good Fight of Faith & Life Journal: by Gregg Harris
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