Suffering and the Gospel, Part 1

This post is the first in a short series in which I hope to explore some of the Biblical connections between suffering and the gospel. The word and is important. I don’t mean suffering for the gospel (as important a theme as that is). What I mean is: what does human suffering have to do with the gospel? What do cancer and natural disasters and terrorist attacks and car accidents have to do with the cross of Christ? Are there Biblical connections?

I believe there are—and, in fact, I believe these connections are as wide as the Bible itself. Not only that, but grasping these connections is key to developing a full, robust, biblical understanding of suffering.

There’s a certain urgency in developing such an understanding. Suffering is a universal experience. If you have a pulse, you either have or will experience suffering. My sad conviction is that far too few Christians today have an adequate Biblical understanding of suffering. And this leaves them in an extremely vulnerable place when the waves of suffering finally do reach the shores of their life.

For some people, suffering leads them to abandon their professed faith. This is particularly prone to take place if they have false expectations regarding suffering. If they think that God is supposed to make their life comfortable, successful and pain-free, prolonged suffering can lead them to conclude that God has either failed them, doesn’t love them, or just plain doesn’t exist.

Perhaps just as common is another kind of spiritual shrivelling—when a suffering person does not abandon Christianity, but instead redefines it along the lines of their experience. Their anemic theology can’t process how a big, mighty, sovereign Creator could allow his people to suffer so horribly. So, in order to cope, they scale back their understanding of God and His place in the universe.

They no longer worship God as the One who fills heaven and earth and accomplishes His will in everything that happens. They no longer view Christianity as a comprehensive worldview, Scripture as a complete revelation of absolute truth that is binding upon all.

Instead, their faith retreats and becomes something small and private. The world is a big, scary place, and God— instead of being the King over all—becomes more and more like a private therapist or a reassuring friend, a close co-sufferer who cheers for us and helps us feel okay in the midst of the big world out there, a world that often shocks Him as much as it does us.

Scripture tells us so much more. It tells us that God is the sovereign king over all creation who upholds all things by the Word of His power. He is not sleeping or helplessly standing by when people are diagnosed with cancer or planes fly into buildings or hurricanes develop over the ocean. He works all things according to the counsel of His will (Eph 1:11). Whatever He pleases, He does, in heaven, on earth, and in the sea (Psalm 135:6). He is King and Lord (Dan 4:34-35).

And He’s told us all we need to know about suffering, why it exists, and what we are to make of it. We don’t even need to look much further than the first three chapters of the Bible to find this vital instruction.

In fact, the very first words of Scripture lay a crucial foundation for understanding all of this: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1).

Just stop and think about the profound realities summed up in these few words. In the beginning,

a spiritual God created a material heavens and earth.
the invisible Creator made a visible world of sight and smell and sound and taste and touch.
the eternal Trinity formed a temporal universe.
the self-sufficient, self-sustaining One created something that was outside of Himself, which was not Himself, and yet which depended on Him for its moment-by-moment existence.

Why? What was His reason for doing this? That answer to that question is crucial to understanding all that will come next.

At least two passages in Scripture explicitly describe the eternal Creator’s purpose in creating the physical heavens and earth. The first is the familiar words of Psalm 19:1-4: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their measuring line goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.”

The second is from the first chapter of Romans: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Rom 1:19-20)

God created the heavens and the earth to communicate truth about Himself. From the vast galactic superstructures to the wonder of 8.7 million species of life on earth to the complexities of the smallest cell, the choir of creation sings to us with innumerable voices about the creativity and knowledge and wisdom and power and glory of God.

In other words, the universe is a megaphone proclaiming truth about God. That’s why it was created. “From him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom 11:36).

And when we see that the physical world was designed to communicate spiritual truth, we’re primed to grasp the purpose of the curse in Genesis 3—and from there, God’s intention in all of our suffering.

More to come.