Are you suffering? Don’t harden your heart!

Sufferers usually want to receive comfort but the Biblical authors think they need some warning as well. Ed Welch points out some examples:

Read through Hebrews 3. There is no question—the author is, indeed, warning the suffering church. He stands in the Old Testament tradition of prophetic writing with its alternating warnings and comforts. And it is exactly what we need to hear because in times of suffering, faith wavers, and unbelief is rarely far away.

This unbelief comes in many forms when we experience hard times.

Why is he doing this to me?
God doesn’t really care—he doesn’t really hear.
Sometimes I think God is out to get me.
What have I done to deserve this?
No, I haven’t prayed about it. What’s the use anyway?
It’s not fair. I don’t ask for much from God. Why doesn’t he answer?

All these suggest that we do not really believe God is who he says he is. We decide what we want to believe about him based on our own interpretation of events, and then our hearts turn away from God rather toward him

This is not good.

The rest of the article shares some ideas about how we might come alongside and gently warn sufferers not to succumb to unbelief.

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Wish life were better than. . . ?

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God doesn’t hide His face from the afflicted

“I will tell of your name to my brothers;
in the midst of the congregation I will praise you:
You who fear the LORD, praise him!
All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him,
and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!
For he has not despised or abhorred
the affliction of the afflicted,
and he has not hidden his face from him,
but has heard, when he cried to him.”

(Psalm 22:22-24 ESV)

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A paralyzed body, an unparalyzed faith

Robert Shelby’s boys saved his life. On July 3 Shelby, a pastor in Baton Rouge, was teaching them how to swim when he dove a little too deep and slammed his head into the bottom of the pool, breaking his C-5 vertebra. Unable to move, unable to swim, he was helpless to save himself. For a few moments he hovered between life and death until his young sons realized that something was amiss. They dragged him from the pool, performed CPR and saved his life.

Listen to Tim and David’s podcast where they talk to to Robert about how he and his family have adjusted to his paralysis and how he hopes to return to preaching soon.

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Painful but worth it

John Knight writes about a message that Jason Meyer (new pastor following John Piper at Bethlehem Baptist Church) gave recently:

In the same way, you might go through crosses and losses and cancer and sickness and family trouble and you might be treated unfairly and you might have your name smeared, but the good news is that you are going to go through all of that, get to Heaven and say, “It was WORTH IT!” No one will ever say, “I went through that for THIS? The message of the Christian life is not you become a believer and then it’s champagne and roses after that. The message is, you become a believer, and you will have to swim upstream against the current of the world. It will be hard, it will be painful, but it is worth it!

Pastor Jason Meyer, He Will Be a Risen King! Victorious Over the Last Enemy, delivered December 15, 2012.

His entire sermon was very helpful.  But if you only have ten minutes, go to 36:36 on this sermon, and let his closing remarks on interpreting pain make your heart soar at the incredible goodness and mercy – and future hope we have – in Jesus Christ, including these final words:

If you are justified, you are as good as glorified because there is no fall out in this “golden chain” of God’s grace. No one can snatch you out of your Father’s hand. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how strong your grip is on your father’s hand. It matters how strong your Father’s grip is on your hand. We rest in the glorious knowledge of his resurrection.

I call you to remember the Resurrection. Look at the pain, the shame, and the injustice in the face and say, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling over death by death. Come awake, come awake, come and rise up from the grave. O death where is your sting. O grave where is your victory. O church, come stand in the light the glory of God has defeated the night! The cross gives you a place to take the pain—the Resurrection points to a time when God will take all the pain and injustice and make it stop because he will make it right.

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So where was God?

Many are asking this question in light of the Newtown, CT shooting? Just like many asked it several years ago after 9/11 and after the tsunami that claimed thousands of lives in southeast Asia.

Joe Rigney writes,

It’s questions like these that have driven me again and again to the Scriptures. And what I’ve found there is a wealth of help in navigating the problem(s) of evil — there’s not just one, you know.

There’s the biblical-theological problem: What does the Bible teach on God’s goodness and the reality of evil, and how can we coherently put the pieces together?

There’s the philosophical problem: What is the relationship between creation, sovereignty, causation, freedom, and moral responsibility? God is all-wise, all-powerful, and all-good. Why then does evil exist?

And then there’s the real problem, the deepest problem, the one that in many ways drives the others and maintains their potency. I mean the emotional problem of evil. I mean the deep and profound revulsion we feel toward pain, the sense of outrage that we feel when we witness blatant atrocities and horrific suffering. I mean the howl of the soul that echoes in the recesses of our being when we’re confronted with cancer, genocide, hurricanes, rape, fatal car wrecks, school shootings, earthquakes, sex-trafficking, and the institutionalized murder of the weakest members of the human race. Whatever solution we pose to the theological and philosophical problem of evil should also at least attempt to address the psychological, emotional, and pastoral questions that well up in our hearts and minds.

Joe has written more extensively about this in “Confronting the Problem(s) of Evil.”  It’s worth reading if you or someone you know is struggling with this deep issue.

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Where can I run and hide?

Paul Tautages:

Where do you run to when the storms of life beat upon you with unrelenting persistence? Where do you hide when trouble chases you like a hound pursuing a fox? Where do you find peace when fear overtakes you and anxiety places its tight grip around your neck? Where do you go when grief casts its dark shadow over your faith? The answer to all four questions is the same—or, at least, it should be. It is God. We must run to God. We must hide in God. We must find peace and rest in God while our souls wrestle and hurt inside. He alone is the One who can meet our deepest needs while He nurtures us and teaches us what it really means to trust Him with every trial.

These are Paul’s words.  But then he adds God’s Word along with those of songwriter. Keep reading here.

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Why doesn’t God do more to restrain evil and suffering?

Randy Alcorn:

God may already be restraining 99.99 percent of evil and suffering.

Why does the chaos that breaks out in some corner of the world always prove the exception rather than the rule? Why haven’t tyrants, with access to powerful weapons, destroyed this planet? What has kept infectious diseases and natural disasters from killing 99 percent of the world’s population rather than less than 1 percent?

In the collapse of New York’s Twin Towers, fifteen thousand people came out alive. While this doesn’t remove the pain felt by families of the nearly three thousand who died, it shows that even on that terrible day, suffering was limited.

Keep reading more of Randy’s thought-provoking post.

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More helpful posts on Newtown, CT massacre

Two Master’s Seminary graduates pastor the Newtown Bible Church.  One of them Joey Newton writes about the tragedy in “Weeping with Those Who Weep: A first-hand response from Newton”:

The church I pastor is three miles from the site of Friday’s slaughter, where 26 people were murdered. Certainly this event will in some way define and shape the spiritual life of the community for decades to come. I know it will profoundly affect my family; many of those killed were the same age as one of my three daughters.

I spent last Friday in the counseling center the town set up, where families had gathered waiting to hear the names of their child, or to see if any new information came out. At one point an official came in and let everyone know —as best he could—that if their children were still unaccounted for, than certainly they were among those who had been slain. All afternoon there was, understandably, weeping. All I could do was take any opportunity I had to minister grace to them.

Jeff Purswell offered these “Pastoral Words and Prayer on the Newtown Tragedy.”  He reminds us that Scripture informs our response to this tragedy, informs our interpretation of this tragedy and opens our eyes to the opportunities that lie before us in light of this tragedy. A brief excerpt:

 And as tragic as these killings were, Christ’s power is even greater than the tragedy, even greater than the evil, even greater than the anguish. Ultimately, that’s where our hope as Christians lies. We long for answers that will satisfy, but we long in vain. Because God doesn’t give us precise answers. But what he does do, just as he did to Job, he offers himself. He has revealed to us in Scripture, and preeminently in his Son, he has revealed to us his character. And so we don’t know why this happened, but we do know that he is here and that he is good and that he is wise and that the is powerful and he is at work in the most horrific circumstances. He’s at work to bring about his redeeming, restoring, saving purposes.

John MacArthur addressed the issue of “Why Does God Allow So Much Evil and Suffering” at a Regional Ligonier Conference a few years ago.  You can watch it here. Reformation Theology provides a summary of that message here.

Trevin Wax interacts with some of the contributing factors to such a violent crime as this in “Are We a Violent People?”

While the tendency in the coming days will be to point our fingers in multiple directions, I recommend we point the finger right back at ourselves. Could it be that we are a violent people? Consider…

• We are horrified by the slaughter of innocent children in Newtown, but we are entertained by children killing children in The Hunger Games.
• We react with disbelief at the gruesomeness of the news reports, but then plug in our video game consoles so we can shoot, stab, and decapitate lifelike people on the screen.
• We weep and mourn the stolen innocence of our children, but the bestselling books in our country involve violent sexual fantasies and sadism/masochism.
• We sing carols and hymns in remembrance of the victims of violence, but our iPods are filled with explicit lyrics of rage that are particularly degrading to women.

Should we be surprised when reality eventually mirrors our fantasies?

Talk to Christian believers in other parts of the world and you will quickly discover that we have a reputation for consuming movies, music, and video games that promote a mindset of violence. Whenever I have brought up these concerns with my fellow American friends, I have gotten blank stares and then a quick denial that violence in any way represents us.

I remember when I took my son to see Wall-E, only to find kids in kindergarten going to see Hulk with their parents. I know church kids who sat in the front row of The Dark Knight.

Let me be clear. Even the Bible includes narratives of violence. I’m not opposed to violence as a means of representing evil in books and movies. My concern is that the proliferation of violent depictions has desensitized us to the point that the association of violence with evil is lost within violence itself.

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How Could God Allow Suffering

D. A. Carson tackles this question many will be asking in light of the Sandy Hook slaughter of innocent lives

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