Book: Walking with God through Pain and Suffering
Quotes of Book: Walking with God through Pain
Paul looks back to this when he writes: I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. . . . For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God {Rom 8:18, 20–21}. The word frustration can also be translated as "futility." To be futile is to fall short of your purpose, to stretch and exert but see it all come to nothing. The world is now in a cursed condition that falls short of its design. Human beings were not created to experience death, pain, grief, disappointment, ruptured relationships, disease, and natural disasters.215 The world we were made to live in was not supposed to be like that. A frustrated world is a broken world, in which things do not function as they should, and that is why there is evil and suffering. book-quoteIn the Old Testament book of 2 Kings, we read the story of Naaman, a wealthy and powerful general of the Syrian army.149 He was suffering terribly, dying slowly of leprosy. Hearing of a powerful God in Israel, he traveled there with both money and a threatening letter from his own ruler. He went to the king of Israel and demanded to be cured of his leprosy. Like so many of us today, Naaman thought money, influence, and expertise could address his suffering. So he went to the person in the culture who had the most of these things and expected a resolution. In response, the Israelite king tore his robes and replied: "Am I God? Can I kill and bring back to life?" {2 Kings 5:7}. In other words, he said, "Don't look to me to do something only God can do!" The whole Western world today needs to listen to this cry of the king of Israel. When we confront suffering, we think that what will solve it is a change in public policy, or the best expertise in psychology and therapy, or technological advances. But the world's darkness is too deep to be dispelled merely by such things. It is wrong, in our pride, to believe that we can control and defeat the darkness with our knowledge. book-quoteIn the secular view, this material world is all there is. And so the meaning of life is to have the freedom to choose the life that makes you most happy. However, in that view of things, suffering can have no meaningful part. It is a complete interruption of your life story- it cannot be a meaningful part of the story. In this approach to life, suffering should be avoided at almost any cost, or minimized to the greatest degree possible. This means that when facing unavoidable and irreducible suffering, secular people must smuggle in resources from other views of life, having recourse to ideas of karma, or Buddhism, or Greek Stoicism, or Christianity, even though their beliefs about the nature of the universe do not line up with those resources. book-quote
