Where is God in Suffering?

Last time, we left off with a visceral description of suffering. But in suffering there is hope (Romans 5:3-5). David Powlison shows us what that hope looks like.

The Holy Spirit works powerfully and intimately in the age of new creation to communicate God's words, presence, and love into our hearts. Sufferers awaken to hear their Father's voice and to see their Savior's hand in the midst of significant suffering.

You need to hear what God says, and to experience that he does what he says. You need to feel the weight and significance of what he is about. He never lies. He never disappoints (though he wisely sets about to disappoint our false hopes, that we might be freed of our illusions). Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you need fear no evil. He is with you. Goodness and mercy will follow you. This is what he is doing. God's voice speaks deeper than what hurts, brighter than what is dark, more enduring than what is lost, truer than what has happened.

You awaken. You take it to heart, and you take heart. You experience that this is so. The world changes. You change. His voice changes the meaning of every hardship. What he does - has done, is doing, will do - alters the impact and outcome of everything happening to you. Your faith grows up into honest, intelligent humanness, no longer murky and inarticulate. You grow more like Jesus: the man of sorrows acquainted with grief, the man after God's own heart, who having loved his own, love them to the end.

I believe this is the last book David Powlison wrote before he died last year. David knew suffering. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. During this time, he kept people informed of his struggles, but he somehow found joy in his suffering. He found joy even in the reality that he would soon be leaving his loved ones. During his suffering, he changed. His faith grew. He grew more like Jesus. I did not know him well, but he was my teacher many years ago when I took classes at Westminster Seminary. He was a humble, wise man, who lived to help others, step into their lives, and relieve them of their suffering. He experienced it through others and in his own life. He knows what he is talking about. Take his words to heart.

What Does It Mean to Suffer?

In his book, God's Grace in Your Suffering, David Powlison sheds light into the darkness of suffering. Suffering is a heavy word that some may think only applies to situations like being in prison, or dealing with the loss of a loved one, or being terminally ill. But suffering takes many forms. Several years ago, I was at an event and the speaker was from a poor African country, and is now a professor and theologian. He said that while he had witnessed much suffering in his home country - especially physical suffering - it paled in comparison to some of the suffering he witnessed in his ministry among middle-class Americans: Broken families, loneliness, depression, suicides, estranged parents and children, struggling marriages, rebellious children, drug addiction, and other heartaches. Suffering does not discriminate: it knows no economic class, race, ethnic group, or gender. In this fallen world, suffering is endemic. We cannot escape it, but how we respond to it is what defines us, not the suffering itself. What does suffering look like? Powlison offers us a sobering glimpse:

A sufferer's primal need is to hear God talking and to experience him purposefully at work. When you hear, take to heart, and know that he is with you, everything changes, even when nothing has changed in your situation. Left to yourself, you blindly react. Your troubles obsess you, distract you, depress you. You grasp at straws. God seems invisible, silent far away. Threat and pain and loss cry out long and loud. Faith seems inarticulate. Sorrow and confusion broadcast on all the channels. It's hard to remember anything else, hard to put into words what is actually happening, hard to feel any of the force of who Jesus Christ is.

You might mumble right answers to yourself, but it's like reading the phone book. You pray, but your words sound rote, vaguely unreal, mere pious generalities. You'd never talk to a real person that way. Meanwhile, the struggle churning within you is anything but rote and unreal. The pressure and hurt become completely engrossing. You're caught in a swirl of apprehension, anguish, regret, confusion, bitterness, emptiness, uncertainty.

Does this sound familiar? Have you ever felt this way? Do you feel this way now? You are not alone. Jesus promises that even as believers we will suffer. He suffered. But he is always with us. In the next post, I want to share some more insights from David Powlison on how God ministers to us is in the midst of our suffering.

The Image and Anti-Image

In Chapter two of his book, Benjamin Gladd digs deeper into the consequences of the fall of mankind. He notes that Genesis 4-5 is paradigmatic for how the godly line of man and the ungodly line begin to interact with one another and fulfill the promise of Genesis 3:15. Cain becomes the poster-child for what Gladd calls the "anti-image" of God. God, according to Genesis 1-2, constructs a cosmic temple, so it's not surprising that those in his image do the same. "But Cain perverts his God-given responsibility as a priest and instead of building a city that brings glory to God's name, he builds a city for the glory of his son Enoch. The habits of the anti-image are beginning to take root."

Gladd goes on to show how the fallen images and redeemed images engage in the world. I find it interesting to see the power of God's image in man and how he enables us to be like him in many ways; on the flip side, how we can use those abilities to work against that image:

"Adah gave birth to Jabal; he was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock. His brother's name was Jubal; he was the father of all who play stringed instruments and pipes. Zillah also had a son...who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron" (Genesis 4:20-22). Humanity is beginning to understand and interact with the created order in new and exciting ways. Here we see the development of farming, music, and manufacturing processes. Genesis 1:28 and Genesis 2:15 somehow linger in the background of these verses. Despite the fall, humanity still possesses God's image. We are created to understand and engage the world around us. Yet, Lamech's wickedness in Genesis 4:23-24 demonstrates that fallen humanity will always contort and pervert the divine calling. Daniel Migliore puts his finger on this tension when he writes, "We human beings are a mystery to ourselves. We are rational and irrational, civilized and savage, capable of deep friendship and murderous hostility, free and in bondage, the pinnacle of creation and its greatest danger."

Not only do I see this tension in all of mankind, but in myself.

Being in His Presence

"The Levitical priests had a full job description, but the essence of their work was that they were invited to come into God’s house (the tabernacle). Could there be anything better? Of course, priests didn’t just casually wander into the Holy of Holies—the throne room itself—that was reserved for the high priest, once a year. But otherwise, the Lord cleansed and dressed his priests and they could wander around all other parts of the tabernacle, confident in his earnest invitation and blessing.

"Who among us feels worthy of such an invitation to be this close to God? No one. Our sin and shame suggest that we should be far from him. But he created us to draw near, to be priests, and he makes a way for all of us to do that."

[Excerpt from Ed Welch, "Created to Draw Near: Our Life as God's Royal Priests"]

A Different Perspective on Cosmology

I'm continuing to read Benjamin Gladd's book, From Adam and Israel to the Church. Gladd starts where, as most people do, with the creation of the cosmos and the creation of Adam. Here is something I found interesting that I never really thought about before when considering the creation of the cosmos: Like the tabernacle described in Exodus, God created the universe to house his glory, as a space for him to dwell with mankind. Or as Gladd states, "The cosmos as God's temple."

The author draws parallels between the language used in building the tabernacle and the temple, and the creation account. He finds language parallels in Genesis 1-2 and Exodus 39-40. Parallels to the building of the temple are also identified:

The outer courtyard of the temple contained the washbasin and the altar, symbolizing the sea and the land (1 Kings 7:23-25; Ezekiel 43:14-16). Moving a step closer to God's presence, the second section of the temple, or the holy place, symbolized the visible heavens and was lined with gold, containing the altar of incense (1 Kings 6:20), the bread of the Presence resting on the table (1 Kings 7:48), and ten lampstand fashioned out of gold (1 Kings 7:49). The final and most sacred section of the temple was the holy of the holies, which symbolized the invisible heavens, where God dwells.

Gladd continues with more comparisons and concludes with a quote from theologian Michael Morales: "The cosmos was understood as a large temple and the temple as a small cosmos."

Gladd goes on to draw more specific parallels between the temple and the garden of Eden, showing how the latter becomes the center of God's activity on the earth: "Much like Sinai, Eden ought to be understood as a mountain that houses God's glory."

I never made this connection between cosmology and the dwelling place of God. I don't know if Gladd is heading in this direction, but it seems that the trajectory of God's dwelling place is getting increasingly intimate: From the universe, to Eden, to the tabernacle and temple, to Christ dwelling among us, and, finally, to the human heart. I believe a word for this dwelling is the Hebrew word "shekinah," which means "he caused to dwell."

From the beginning - from the opening pages of Genesis - God has been working to bring his glory closer and closer to his people. His desire to be close to us - to dwell with us - has been there from the start and all his actions have been to that end. What a great story. What a great God.

The Nature of the People of God

I'm reading a new book on biblical theology by Benjamin Gladd: From Adam and Israel to the Church: A Biblical Theology of the People of God. The author used to be a dispensationalist, but has migrated to a Reformed covenant theology. Dispensationalism is a popular interpretation of the scriptures that argues that the Bible is organized by distinct dispensations, or strict epochs, unique periods of history. At the heart of dispensationalism is the separation between the Christian church and ethnic Israel, that these are distinct people groups and that each functions within its own dispensation. In other words, God is dealing with ethnic Jews as descendants from the Old Testament narrative in a completely different way than he is dealing with the Christian church. One God, two peoples. Covenant theology sees this differently. One cardinal aspect of covenant theology is that the ONE people of God spans the history of redemption. From Genesis 1-2 to Revelation 21-22, there remains one covenant community. The church is the culmination of God's gathering of his people; first the Jews of the Old Testament who remained committed to his promises of a coming Messiah and then to all people who have faith in Jesus Christ. God does not have a separate plan for salvation for ethnic Jews; there is one salvation through Jesus Christ, and the true Israel is comprised of all of the restored people of God. All of God's people are called to one faith through Jesus Christ. Ethnic Jews are not called to a unique salvation, but to the same salvation as the Gentiles in Christ - the true Israel.

While his change in theology was the impetus for the book, the covenant theology - dispensationalist debate is not its focus. The author's main focus is to "examine the nature of the people of God from Genesis to Revelation through the lens of being in God's 'image.'" His objective is to walk us through the Bible's teaching on what it means to be part of God's family.

This book has 12 chapters. My plan is to pick out something particularly interesting in each chapter and share it with you. Let's see how it goes!

Jeremiah's Wake-Up Call

I'm starting to read through the book of Jeremiah - one of my favorite Old Testament books. The passages in Jeremiah are heartbreaking, as God is reaching out to his people and they ignore him. They have forgotten all that he has done for them and have moved on to other gods. From Chapter 2:

Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the clans of the house of Israel. Thus says the Lord:
“What wrong did your fathers find in me
that they went far from me,
and went after worthlessness, and became worthless?
They did not say, ‘Where is the Lord
who brought us up from the land of Egypt,
who led us in the wilderness,
in a land of deserts and pits,
in a land of drought and deep darkness,
in a land that none passes through,
where no man dwells?’
And I brought you into a plentiful land
to enjoy its fruits and its good things.
But when you came in, you defiled my land
and made my heritage an abomination.
The priests did not say, ‘Where is the Lord?’
Those who handle the law did not know me;
the shepherds[a] transgressed against me;
the prophets prophesied by Baal
and went after things that do not profit."

The parallels to today cannot be ignored. As members of the Church, how often do we forget what God has done for us? He has given us so much, but most of the time we act as if we are poor, complaining about what we wish we had instead of appreciating what we do have. From a wider perspective, the Church is its own worst enemy. So many pastors and church leaders "who handle" his Word, do not know him. They add and subtract from his Word to fit some social, political, or cultural agenda, leading people to seek after things which ultimately "do not profit." Many who have grown up in Christian homes have forsaken their faith, becoming hostile to it, worshipping some cause or themselves, seeking meaning and redemption "in a land of drought and deep darkness" instead of enjoying "a plentiful land" and enjoying "its fruits and its good things."

Although written thousands of years ago, Jeremiah's words are a wake-up call to the world and God's people to return to him:

"Return, faithless Israel, declares the Lord.
I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful, declares the Lord;
I will not be angry forever."

As the new year begins, pray for ourselves that we may love God more and more; pray for the lost that they may know the true God; and pray for the enemies of God's people that their hearts may be changed so that, like Saul, they may become God's followers and friends, like Paul.