Suffering and Evil

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Suffering and the Problem of Evil in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library

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If you live long enough, you will suffer. There is only one alternative. If you live long enough, you may lose your job. You may lose your mind. You may have arthritis or cancer or both. You will be bereaved. You will slow down. You may face divorce. You will certainly face many disappointments. (This is promising to be an interesting evening, isn’t it?) The only alternative to that, of course, is not living very long. But we can sharpen things a little more.

I work on a faculty of about 50 full-time lecturers and another 30 or so part-time, and the number of diseases we have in our respective families is quite stunning. We have one faculty wife with Huntington’s chorea, one of the most hideous diseases, in my non-medical judgment, on God’s green earth. We have some who have died in our families in the last two years, three or four who are currently fighting cancer, one with MS. That’s just a very small community.

Then, of course, we really need to enlarge the horizon, stop thinking in such small individualistic terms. A family I know in the Midwest with eight or ten children … They came from an older generation where that sort of thing was not too uncommon. They had six sons. It was a family of hemophiliacs. All six of these strapping boys were hemophiliacs. When AIDS hit, before the blood supply was cleaned up, all six of them contracted the virus. Where was God? They didn’t do anything wrong. They were just trying to run the farm.

Then, of course, there’s the tsunami. The pictures of devastation will remain with us for a long time. Yet it is probably worth pointing out that there’s the equivalent of approximately three tsunamis every year in Africa at the moment, whether from famine or AIDS or tribal strife or the like. We have just finished the bloodiest century in world history.

Apart from war, we managed to kill something like six million Jews, a million and a half Armenians, a million to a million and a half gypsies, about twenty million Ukrainians, close to fifty million Chinese, about a third of the population of Cambodia, about a million Hutus and Tutsis, and so on, about a hundred million apart from war.

Have you visited Auschwitz? It’s just like the books say. You walk in under the words in iron, “Arbeit macht frei,” work sets you free. Irony is everywhere in that wretched, damned place. Where’s God? Of course, it is important to remember that the biblical writers themselves asked that question from time to time. It is not as if the Bible was given to us in Pollyannaish optimism and now the real tough questions are asked by us.

We’ll think our way through Job in a few minutes. Or there’s Habakkuk. He can quite understand how God can use a nation to chasten another nation, but why on earth should God use a nation, which on any measure whatsoever is more wicked than the first nation, to punish the first nation? Why should he use a really wretched, wicked, vile, barbaric superpower to crush his own covenant people, even if they are unfaithful?

Then, of course, there’s Jeremiah, trying to be faithful and facing opposition every time he turns around. Tradition says, probably rightly, that Isaiah, as an old man trying to escape the forces of Manasseh, ran away into a forest as troops were chasing him and hid in a hollow tree. They found him, wrapped ropes around the tree, and then cut the tree down with a saw with him inside it.

And what shall we say of Elijah or the saints in Revelation under the throne crying, “How long, O Lord? How long?” We still haven’t dealt very much with persecution. When I was a young man, serious Christians read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. That’s now out of date. If you’re a serious reader at all, you need to read The Killing Fields to find out what the church went through in Cambodia.

Now clearly, these topics are serious, and all of us think about them from time to time. We don’t like to think about them very much, but they force themselves upon us. What I would like to do this evening is lay down five pillars to support a Christian worldview that enables Christians to think about these things fruitfully.

If you think you have come tonight to get magic formulaic answers that will resolve all problems, you may as well leave now. You’re not going to get them. On the other hand, I would like to lay out the rudiments of a Christian frame of reference, a Christian way of looking at things, so that at least it is fruitful, helpful, faithful to Scripture, to think about these things in a certain frame.

1. Insights from the beginning of the Bible’s storyline.

The Bible insists that God made everything and that God made us in his own image, and that is what gives us a peculiar dignity. That’s very different from any view that sees us as an accidental concatenation of atoms and nothing more.

If you are a philosophical naturalist, that is, a person who believes all that exists is matter and energy and time and there is nothing else, there’s a sense in which it is difficult to work up, if you’re going to be consistent, a decent indignation. After all, a tsunami, at the end of the day, is nothing more than bouncing molecules.

There is a sense in which it is precisely the Bible’s storyline that gives us a dignity and forces us to ask the tough questions in the first place. But also at the beginning of the Bible’s storyline is the insistence that human beings rebelled, fell, made themselves god, shook their puny fists at their Maker’s face, and started singing with Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way.”

With this came a self-seeking, self-promoting love of anything but having God at the center that the Bible calls idolatry. This generated such loss and chaos and confusion and ultimately death itself that we live with the results today. Now what I’m telling you is not new if you’re a Christian, but I want you to spin out the consequences.

This is very different, for example, from a Hindu worldview. In a Hindu worldview, things are arranged such that if there is good enough effort and integrity, you can cycle back in experience through reincarnation to have another go at things and, over enough cycles, gradually move up, so that the loss and the chaos and the brokenness of the world are bound up with testing us as we work through our lower cycles and try to rise a little higher.

In a Gnostic worldview, all of loss and death and decay are bound up with the material world order, which doesn’t matter all that much. You’re just spirit, essentially. So this broken physical thing, all the suffering of the tsunami is bad, but what is of infinite significance is merely your spirit. Whereas some Christians have tried to argue that, no one who knows his Bible will argue that. The whole thing is God’s world. So there are different worldviews that are bound up with how you perceive origins.

Now the framework that is so important in this regard, it seems to me, is reflection on death itself. We live in a time in Western history when death is almost the only taboo left. I can talk about sex in most conservative churches with alarming frankness, and nobody will raise an eyebrow, but if I start talking about death, we get very nervous.

If I have a group of university students into my home and throw out the question, “All right, tell me what you think about homosexuality,” I guarantee I’ll get a good discussion going, but if I say, “I’d like to tell you how my dad died,” everybody is embarrassed. Not long ago in our church, one of the women (we’ll call her “Mary”) came down with cancer.

She had had cancer seven years earlier, very light breast cancer, if one can speak in those terms. It was in very early stages. They thought there was not going to be a problem, but it came back, and within a few months it was transparent that it had spread and was very dangerous, and despite treatment she was very ill. People got together to pray for Mary in our church. There was one weekend where 285 people came together to pray for just Mary.

Part of the reason was that Mary was an astonishingly energetic woman. She started a business in our area and peopled it with volunteers so that all the profits went to missions. She and her husband kept half of their basement for things reserved for returning missionaries. You know, they come home and they don’t have a toaster or they don’t have blankets. She just kept all this stuff, and she had rules. “No junk. Missionaries deserve better than junk.”

Then she herself started leading short-term teams to Latin America and to Central Europe and so forth. She was an astonishingly energetic, godly, self-sacrificing woman, and now she was ill. When the church gathered for prayer, that weekend I was away, but my wife, who has also had cancer, was there.

The prayers became warmer and warmer. “O Lord God, will you not have mercy on Mary? She has done so much, and we need her so badly. Will you not have mercy on her husband and her children? O Lord God, you have said if two or three are gathered together in your name, there you will be in the midst, and if two or three be agreed about anything, and Lord, there are 280 of us, and we’re agreed we want Mary to live.”

They got more and more enthusiastic and so on. Finally, it was my wife’s turn to pray. She said, “Heavenly Father, we would love it if you would heal Mary, but if not, teach her to die well. She’s going to die anyway, and if the time is now, teach her to die well. Give her a heritage of godly faith with one foot so transparently in heaven that her husband and children will be stamped by it.”

You could have cut the air with a knife. You’re not supposed to say things like that, are you? Letting down the side. It’s no longer 280 people agreeing; it’s only 279. It’s breaking the chain. We found out afterwards that some of the relatives rather wished my wife would go first. A couple of months later, her husband (we’ll call him “Bob”) phoned me. We weren’t all that close, but we’d known them for many years.

He phoned me and said, “I have to talk to you. I have to talk to you.” We went out together, and when he finally cooled down enough for me to find out what he wanted, what he really wanted was permission to talk about his wife’s impending death, because the heated-up atmosphere had meant it had become almost impossible for him to talk and think in those terms. It felt like letting down the side, no longer walking by faith.

It has not always been so, of course. After all, until about a century ago, most families lost one or more children in the course of things, so that most Brits were familiar with death. When my grandfather died in this country, he was put in a box on the kitchen table in the East End, right at the end of World War I, and buried. No medical professionals around. He just died.

When you read some of the literature of the Puritan period and see what some of them said as the Black Death swept through London, they wrote poems like one by an otherwise insignificant poet who ended up his six long verses with a repeated refrain: “For I am sick, and I must die. Lord, have mercy. For I am sick, and I must die. Lord, have mercy.” Now we say, “I am sick, and the NHS jolly well better fix me. What do you think I’m paying my taxes for?”

There is a sense, then, in which we need to think about death more realistically than we do. Do not misunderstand me. I am not putting down the dimensions of the tragedy in the tsunami. We’ll come to that. But we need to think realistically about life and death before we come to the peculiar parameters of that tragedy. Do you remember what the Lord Jesus said in Luke, chapter 13, when there was a tragedy in his day? A relatively minor one. A tower fell, and quite a lot of people died.

He asked the question, “Do you think that those on whom the tower fell were more wicked than other people?” There have been some ignorant Christians (may God forgive them) who have suggested the tsunami hit where it did because, after all, they’re Muslims, and God is teaching them a lesson. As for Sri Lanka, it’s not Muslims, of course, but Sri Lanka has begun a course of legislation that is going to make it very difficult for Christians. God was teaching them a lesson.

That’s not what Jesus says in Luke 13. He raises the question himself. He won’t let people duck it. “Do you think that they were more difficult? Do you think that those who suffered in the tsunami were more guilty than you, that they deserved it somehow in a way in which you don’t?” What is Jesus’ answer to his own rhetorical question? “No,” he says. “But I tell you, unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” The likewise there does not mean you will all die in tsunamis, that is, you will all die exactly the same way or with a tower falling on your head.

What he is saying is the most significant thing about what takes place is the death itself. Death is hanging over all of us. In fact, we all stand under this curse because of our own rebellion before God, whether we’re washed away in a tsunami or die of cancer. “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” That’s what Jesus says. There is a sense in which one of the things this tsunami does is make us stop for a moment and realize how fragile we are, how mortal we are, and it is uncomfortable.

At the beginning of World War II in Oxford at the University Church, the man in charge did not quite know how to address the students, so he asked C.S. Lewis to speak to them. The war was still in its early months. Warsaw lay shattered. The Nazi armies were victorious throughout Poland, and it was not going to be all that long before the troops swept west all the way to the coast. Dunkirk still lay in the future.

Everybody knew Lewis was a rising Christian apologist and that he had fought and suffered in World War I. He had been in the trenches. He had been wounded there. He had seen many of his own friends die, mown down as 10 million Brits and Empire people shot at 10 million Germans so that they both died, 20 million mown down by machine guns and howitzers for the gain of a few yards here and there. Lewis got up, and this is what he said. I’m not going to read you the whole thing. I do want you to hear a few of his paragraphs.

“A university is a society for the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians, and at first sight this seems to be an odd thing to do during a great war.

What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing? Or even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or military service, why should we … indeed how can we … continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?

Now it seems to me that we shall not be able to answer these questions until we have put them by the side of certain other questions, which every Christian ought to have asked himself in peace time. I spoke just now of fiddling while Rome burns, but to a Christian, the true tragedy of Nero must not be that he fiddled while the city was on fire, but that he fiddled on the brink of hell.

You must forgive me for the crude monosyllable. I know that many wiser and better Christians than I in these days do not like to mention heaven and hell even in the pulpit. I know, too, that nearly all the references to this subject in the New Testament come from a single source, but then that source is the Lord himself. People will tell you it is Saint Paul, but that is untrue. These overwhelming doctrines are dominical.” That is, they come from the Lord Jesus.

“They are not really removable from the teaching of Christ or of his church. If we do not believe them, our presence in this church is great tomfoolery. If we do, we must sometimes overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them. The moment we do so we can see that every Christian who comes to a university must at all times face a question compared with which the questions raised by the war are relatively unimportant.

We must ask how it is right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology. If human culture can stand up to that, it can stand up to anything. To admit that we can retain our interest in learning under the shadow of these eternal issues but not under the shadow of a European war would be to admit that our ears are closed to the voice of reason and very wide open to the voice of our nerves and our mass emotions.”

A little farther on he says, “Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.”

Then right at the end he says, “War threatens us with death and pain. No man, and especially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane, need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things, but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called ‘life.’ But there is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or of that, of a machine gun bullet now or of cancer 40 years later.

What does war do to death? It certainly doesn’t make it more frequent. One hundred percent of us die, and that percentage cannot be increased. It puts some deaths earlier, but I hardly suppose that is what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes it will make little difference how many years we have behind us. Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering, and a battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all.

Does it decrease our chances of dying at peace with God? I can’t believe that either. If military service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation of circumstances would? Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at 60 or the paralysis at 75 do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past.”

That’s what tsunamis do to us too. Now do not misunderstand me. I am not saying, certainly Lewis is not saying, that war is a good thing or that tsunamis are a good thing, but there is a sense in which they change nothing absolutely. They merely ensure that some of us die a little earlier. The percentages remain the same.

2. Insights from the end of the Bible’s storyline.

We begin with creation and the fall, the Bible’s insistence on our lostness and, therefore, on our death, but then at the other end there is also the prospect of a heaven to be gained and a hell to be shunned that is already there in principle with the existence of death, but now it is laid out in dramatic color in the book of Revelation.

Read Revelation 20–22. Make all of the allowance you like for colorful imagery, but clearly the glory of a new heaven and a new earth pulls us one way and the horror of a lake of fire pushes us another way. These things remind us that, according to the Bible, there is no utopia in between. It is ou topos; that is, no place. There is no utopia in between.

That’s not the impression you get when you listen to our politicians. “If you simply follow my party, we will sort out the crime rate. We will increase money to education. The National Health Service will run like a top. Besides that, immigration questions will all be resolved, and we’ll be a happy, righteous people again. Just vote for my party.”

Nobody believes it. You wonder why they keep saying it. The promise inevitably is a step on the road to utopia, but both history and the Bible teach us that although there are better and worse forms of government and better and worse governors, yet at the end of the day, there is no utopia. None.

In 1993, four years after the Wall came down, Francis Fukuyama, a Japanese-American intellectual history scholar, wrote a book called The End of History. He was picking up the subject from Marxism, although he wanted to give it another twist. In Marxist theory, eventually, once Marxism judged scientific ruled, then there would no longer have to be an oligarchy of Marxist party members who would control the whole show.

No, the new man would arise, and everybody would be so generous and so self-denying everyone would take only what he or she needed from the culture and inevitably give back what he or she could. A “new man” (that was their expression) would arise. The term, of course, was lifted from the Christian gospel. Then history as we know it would end. No more conflict; only peace.

There are few people so blinkered to think that the Marxist vision was correct today. It led to horrible squalor, despite the magnificence of its ultimate vision. The new man never arrived. We never got to the end of history. We just got to overthrowing revolutionary governments, each one more brutal than the one before.

But Fukuyama, when the Wall came down, thought he could see the end, and the end was not Marxism. The end was liberal democracy. What he suggested was that history was coming to an end as we know it, because liberal democracies tend not to fight each other, he said, and the world is becoming more full of liberal democracies.

He said undoubtedly there will be regional clashes here and there for a few hundred years, but history as we have come to know it is ending. The great imperial powers are declining as such. Colonialism is dead. The great contest between Nazism and liberal democracies and between Communism and liberal democracies has been tried. The battles have been fought, the deaths have died, and now we are moving into a time of increasing stability and peace. The End of History, 1993.

I remember reading his book and thinking, “My dear Fukuyama, either Jesus is right or you are, but you’re not both right.” Jesus insists there will be wars and rumors of wars. “Do not be dismayed. The end is not yet.” The Bible insists the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. You show me a political system, and I’ll show you how to corrupt it. You can put in all the checks and balances in the world, but there always will be people who learn how to corrupt it. Utopia is not yet.

Thus, those whose entire horizon is this world, these threescore years and ten, this country, this government, if their life is taken away prematurely, it is unmitigated disaster. But if you start looking at things from a Christian point of view, yes, there is a sense in which all death is painful. The Bible dares speak of death as the last enemy. It is God’s “Thus far shall you go and no farther” placed on every man and woman until the very end. Yet beyond death itself is something more.

“It is appointed unto human beings once to die and after that the judgment,” with a heaven to be gained and a hell to be shunned. Fifty billion years into eternity, whether you died at 30 in a tsunami or at 70 with cancer, will not seem to be a matter of the utmost importance. Do not misunderstand me. I am still not minimizing the tragedy of the tsunami. I’ll come to that. But it is important, first of all, to set these matters in a still broader canvas or they cannot possibly be thought about reasonably from a Christian perspective.

That’s why Paul, when he looks back toward the end of his life on the things he has endured, four shipwrecks (he mentions three in 2 Corinthians 11, but that was before the fourth) and the number of times he was beaten one way or the other, the times he was hungry and without food, the times when he was betrayed by friends and alone, the sufferings he has endured, the poverty on occasion, he dares say, “These light and momentary afflictions are not to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed.”

You understand why the American-African slave wrote songs like, “This world is not my home; I’m just a-passing through.” It was not escapism; it was the simple truth. But if in our culture we are so deeply enmeshed with the horizons of this life that eternity seems distant and vague and unreal, then correspondingly this tragedy will assume even darker proportions than it has.

Again, do not misunderstand me. I do not want for a moment to minimize the tragedy of that tsunami, but Lewis is right. What tsunamis and wars do is teach us our fragility. They focus our minds on our mortality, on our finitude, on our fragility, on the reality of an eternity that hangs open before us all.

3. Insights from the place of innocent suffering.

I have carefully avoided that element so far, but it needs to be faced frankly. Those little children whose pictures we see on our television screens, parents and all known relatives wiped out, hungry, sick, alone … Do they deserve that? The Bible dares deal with innocent suffering.

Perhaps the most remarkable book in this respect is Job. Let me remind you of some of the themes of Job. Behind the scenes, unknown to Job, the Devil has approached God, as it were, and said, “Yes, you think this Job man is so hot, faithful, godly, righteous, but, of course, the only reason he’s faithful, godly, and righteous is because he’s filthy rich. You’ve blessed him, and he’s secure, so he’s comfortable where he is. Take away everything he has, and he’ll turn around and curse you to your face.”

So God gives the Devil permission to take away everything. Bands of marauding riffs come in, Chaldeans, Sabeans, and others, and pretty soon he’s destitute. There’s nothing there. It’s not just his wealth, but his family. A windstorm takes out his house, and all 10 children die. Still, Job is a man of integrity, and he says, “Naked came I from my mother’s womb, and naked also will I die. The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

“Oh yes,” the Devil says. “Well enough, but he still has his health. Take away his health, and he will curse you to your face.” “Go ahead,” God says, unbeknownst to Job. Job doesn’t know where he fits in all of this. “Go ahead. Any suffering you like. Just don’t take his life.” Pretty soon we see him in pain and disgrace and with festering sores, scraping his scabs with a piece of pottery. His own wife abandons him, and still there is no word of curse from Job’s mouth.

The text openly says that Job is a … Well, our translations say a “perfect man.” The word in Hebrew is tam. He’s whole. He’s complete. He’s a good man. Does he deserve any of this? Weren’t there any better candidates for all of this suffering than Job, for goodness’ sake? Talk about unjust suffering, innocent suffering. Then his friends fly in, these “experts.” “Job, do you believe that God is good?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you believe that God punishes the evil and rewards the just?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then why are you suffering like this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, surely if you’re suffering like this it’s because God, who is sovereign over all of these things, knows that in some sense you must deserve it. So what you must do is repent before God.”

“Well, I know God is good, and I know he’s just, and I know he’s sovereign and that he could have stopped it, but quite frankly, I can’t repent, because I didn’t do anything to deserve this. This just isn’t my fault. I really am not worse than any of my neighbors. In fact, let me tell you some of the things I’ve resolved to do.”

He starts listing all of the things he resolved to do, how he resolved always to help the poor, how he resolved to turn his mind and his eyes away from anything that would induce lust, how he committed himself to praying preemptively for his own children, lest they should at any time fall astray.

“Oh, now, Job, you’ve really gone too far. You’re actually suggesting that God himself, then, is unjust. You say you are suffering unjustly. If you are suffering unjustly and you believe God is sovereign, then it has to be God’s fault. Do you want to say that?”

“No, I want to say God is good, but I am also saying this isn’t fair. I am suffering unjustly. What I really wish is that I had some sort of mediator, a lawyer who could go between us. I’d like God to come down here, and I’d like to ask him a few questions.”

“Job, you’re getting right to the knife edge of blasphemy. You say you believe God is sovereign and good, and now you’re ready to question him and call in a lawyer? What are you going to do? Sue the Almighty?”

“I don’t want to go so far. Though he slay me, yet will I trust him. But I tell you, this is not fair.”

“Job, Job, for goodness’ sake, shut up and repent. If you just repent, the Lord will restore the blessings upon you.”

“How can I repent of something I didn’t do? If I do that, it will not be because I’m truly repenting. It will be because I truly am evil, because then I will be admitting that I’m doing something I didn’t really do just so I can have some blessings. How can I do that?” The debate gets hotter and hotter and hotter.

Finally, God speaks from heaven and says, “Job, have you ever designed a snowflake? Where were you when I made a hippopotamus, when I cast Orion across the sky? Did you give me advice on how to do it?” Rhetorical question after rhetorical question until Job finally says, “All right, I see the point. I’ll keep quiet. There’s a lot I don’t understand.” God says, “Stand up on your feet like a man; I’m not finished yet,” and he asks him three more chapters of rhetorical questions.

At the end of it, Job says, “I repent.” Now you must understand what he means. He does not mean, “I repent of the evil that clearly brought this judgment down upon me.” That is not what he means at all. He repents, rather, of the attitude that dares stand in judgment of God. What he does not say is, “Ah, now I understand.” In other words, Job becomes content not to know.

That could be a great cop-out, a horrendous cop-out, but the thing is Job understands so much about God. He knows so much of the reality of God, both in his experience and in what God has done in the past. Those things are givens for him. If, then, now he finds there are some things he does not understand, he is prepared to acknowledge that his tiny slice of things, his small corner where he sees and experiences life, is so infinitesimally small compared with all that God knows he’s prepared to shut up and trust this God anyway.

Now the critics hate what comes next. A number of years ago I was writing something on the book of Job, and I started reading widely in the commentaries and literary studies and so on. I found something very remarkable. This is a day, of course, in which literary critics love moral ambiguity. If you can have a book or a film in which the hero turns out to be halfway corrupted and the wretched opponent turns out to have a heart of gold, you’re on the way to winning an Oscar.

If you have a 1950s cowboy film instead, where you know the good cowboy is wearing a white hat and the bad cowboy is wearing a black hat and you know who’s going to win, then no matter how good the technology, how spectacular the action sequences, it doesn’t matter. It still is a piece of shoddy B-class at best. That’s why even Spider-Man has to be conflicted.

So now you have this piece of literature, the book of Job. It sounds so wonderful, arguing over moral issues, no resolution anywhere, doubt and conflict and who’s good and who’s bad and “Are the friends who were justifying God right or is Job right?” and God answers with magnificent ambiguity. Good stuff this, almost an Oscar.

Then you get chapter 42, and it sounds like the Lone Ranger in the Eisenhower years. God comes in and gives him twice the number of cows and twice the number of sheep and twice the number of goats, and he’s filthy rich, and he’s honored again throughout the entire East, and his wife has 10 more children (I wonder what she thought of that), and everything has a nice happy ending.

The critics say, “Give me a break. This is clearly some thickheaded, dim-witted editor who added this chapter centuries after the original drama took place. You can just see on the very surface of things the first-class mind producing this stuff at the first instance, and now some dimwit has to give it a happy ending at the end. Good grief!”

But Job 42 is to the Old Testament what Revelation 21 and 22 are to the New Testament, for at the end of the day, God is no one’s debtor. There may be all kinds of mystery along the way, but at the end, not only will justice be done, but justice will be seen to be done, and Job is willing to wait. From a Christian point of view, there will be all kinds of injustices, some of which we suffer, some of which we observe, but if God is God, we are willing to wait.

There will be some things we do not understand and times when we’ll squirm with embarrassment and wish we had more answers at our fingertips. Maybe in our darkest moments we, too, will start wrestling with God and wondering what is going on and have our moments when we’ll cry, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him,” and other moments where we’ll be right on the edge of cursing God and saying, “I wish I had a lawyer; I’d sue.”

But if we begin to see God in his transcendent glory, we will sometimes perceive how very small we are with our explanations, and we’ll be willing to wait for the end when justice will be done and will be seen to be done.

4. Insights from the mystery of providence.

Let me come at this through a side door, as it were. You’re going to have to trust me for a few moments before you perceive that this is relevant after all. Let me offer you two propositions, both of which I would be prepared to defend at great length, two propositions I hold are taught in Scripture, both of which are true and both of which thinking Christians will believe.

The first proposition is God is utterly sovereign, but his sovereignty never functions in such a way as to mitigate human responsibility. In other words, even though God is everywhere seen as sovereign, we are never seen as simple pawns. The view that says God is sovereign and that’s the end of things is always in danger of confusing God’s sovereignty with mere fatalism.

Now the second proposition. Human beings are morally responsible creatures. That is, we believe, we disbelieve, we obey, we disobey, we choose, we refuse to choose, and these things are morally significant, but our moral responsibility never makes God absolutely contingent. That is, it never makes him secondary or caught out in surprise or manipulated by us.

In other words, for all of the insistence on choice and belief in the Bible, “Yet for me and my house, we will choose the Lord,” nevertheless, these things never function in Scripture in such a way to bring God down a notch so that he’s only second or third tier, such that maybe God has done all he can, poor chap, and now it’s up to us to get things right, to give him our counsel and our prayers and to give him our hearts. Otherwise, poor chap, he’s frustrated and wringing his eternal hands in heaven. No, we are morally significant creatures, but God is never made absolutely contingent.

Now I would want to argue that any well-informed, thinking Christian will want to drive toward believing both of those propositions. Let me give you three passages of Scripture where, as far as I can see, they are as abundantly clear as anything is in Scripture. In Genesis, chapter 50, verses 19–20, after Jacob is gone, Joseph’s brothers come to him and are afraid that he will take out his wrath against them now that their father is dead.

Joseph then says to his brothers, these brothers who have betrayed him, sold him into slavery, and now he’s in the position of having absolute sway over them as the equivalent of prime minister of Egypt … He says, “Am I God to stand in place over you? In those wretched events when you sold me into slavery, do you not understand? You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.”

Isn’t that a remarkable statement? He does not say, “God’s purpose was to ensure that I be brought down to Egypt in an air-conditioned limousine, but unfortunately you mucked up his plan and, as a result, I got there as a slave.” Nor does it say, “You sold me into slavery, but that’s all right. God is a very good chess player, and he did the next move. He’s so clever, you know. He came along on his white charger and rescued me.” No, in one and the same event, “You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.”

That is what Christians have meant by the mystery of providence. That is how God works even in ugly things to bring about good purposes in this fallen and broken world. Another example is Isaiah, chapter 10, verse 5 and following. There Isaiah addresses the regional superpower of Assyria. God says to this regional superpower through Isaiah, “Woe to the nation who lifts itself up against me. Shall you boast as if you’re acting in great strength without reference to me? Do you not know that I am the one who has given you strength to do everything?

But that’s not what you think. No, no, no. You go around boasting. You say, ‘Is not Calno like Carchemish, that is, cities I have trounced in both instances, and this city like that city? I’ve beaten them all. Now I come to Jerusalem. I’ll beat that one too. Even my courtiers are the equivalents of kings elsewhere. Do you not understand that I can push down and oppress and do anything I like?’ ”

God replies, “Shall the saw boast itself against the one who wields it? Shall the ax boast itself against the one who swings it? Because you are acting like this, after I have finished using you as a carpenter uses his tools, I will hold you accountable for everything you’ve done.” Every time I think about that, my brain hurts. How do you put all that together? Stick that in your theological pipe and smoke it.

God is sovereignly using Assyria, but at the same time he’s holding Assyria accountable for doing all kinds of bad things with the wrong attitude. But do you want to see the best example of all? Come to the cross. Read Acts, chapter 4, verses 26–27. Begin at verse 23. Peter and John are facing their first whiff of persecution, and after they’re released they come back to their own people. They begin to pray.

The Christians pray using the language of Psalm 2. “Why do the heathen rage and the nations of this earth imagine a vain thing? The kings get together and plot against the Lord and against his Messiah, against his Anointed One. But he who sits in the heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision.” They’re quoting the psalm. Then they say, “Indeed …” This is the way the psalm is worked out. “Pontius Pilate and the rulers of the Jews and King Herod and all of these people conspired against your holy servant Jesus.” Then they pray, “They did what your hand had determined would be done.”

Now if you have the first verse without the second, it would mean Jesus went to the cross simply because of a human conspiracy. The reason Jesus went there was because of Pilate, because of Herod, because of a lot of frustrated Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, because of the politics of the first century. That’s why Jesus went to the cross.

But if you have the second verse and not the first verse, then the reason Jesus went there was because God ordained the whole thing, but if he ordained the whole thing and they were just puppets and just had to do what they had to do because God had ordained it, then it’s hard to think why any of them were guilty. They were just doing what God had sovereignly ordained.

If Pilate wasn’t guilty and Herod wasn’t guilty and the Jews weren’t guilty, if nobody was guilty, why did Jesus have to go to the cross in the first place? There was no guilt to pay for. They were just puppets, pieces of machinery, cogs in the universe under God’s sovereign hand. To make sense of the cross at all, you have to realize that those two propositions are both true. God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty does not mitigate human responsibility.

Human beings choose. They believe. They disbelieve. They disobey. They are morally responsible, accountable creatures, but that never renders God absolutely contingent. Now how both propositions can be true is a very difficult question indeed. Philosophers call it compatibilism. It’s simply the belief that both of these propositions are mutually compatible.

Compatibilism doesn’t say, “And I can explain exactly how you put them all together.” Compatibilism works hard at showing why there’s no necessary reason to think they’re false, but it acknowledges that there are some big unknowns in there. For example, this means God foreordained the cross. He predetermined the cross. Right? But do you hear that language, foreordained and predetermined? That presupposes sequence and time, but the Bible insists God was there before the universe. In that sense, he is timeless.

What’s the relationship between the eternal God and time? I don’t have a clue. I’ve read a lot of books on the subject. I could talk to you about it for a couple of hours, and at the end of it I would end up by saying, “I don’t have a clue.” I think I could give you several theories that don’t work, but there are quite a lot of them that might, and I don’t know.

I don’t know either how God can be, on the one hand, sovereign and transcendent and, on the other hand, personal. By saying that he’s sovereign and transcendent, ruling over all, I’m saying he is above space and time. He’s above space and time and he rules over all, yet at the same time he’s personal and interacts with us.

But all I know of personhood from my experience in this life is finiteness. I talk to my wife. I ask her a question. She answers. She asks me a question. I answer. We work at something together. She finishes. I finish. There’s sequence, interchange, give and take. That’s personhood, isn’t it? As opposed to a machine, which is programmed in some fashion.

I don’t always know what answer my wife is going to give me. She certainly doesn’t know what answers I’m going to give her, because I don’t know them myself half the time either. There’s variability and finitude and uncertainty bound up in the very notion of what it means to be a person. But if there’s anything the Bible is very certain about it is that God is, on the one hand, sovereign and transcendent and, on the other hand, a person who interacts with us, made in his image as a person, as person to person.

How can that be? I don’t have a clue. Again, I think I could lecture on it for quite a long time, but at the end of it I would still say, “I don’t have a clue.” I could tell you some theories that don’t work. I can see the Bible insists they’re both true, but I don’t know enough about God to know how they come together.

Those two propositions I gave you turn on such uncertainties as the very nature of God and of God’s existence in eternity interacting with us, and I don’t have the answers there. So Christians learn to live with the mystery of providence. That means we begin to trust him to work things out even when we don’t have the answers of exactly how he’s in charge.

We try to let each of the propositions function in our lives the way they function in Scripture and not let them function in our lives the way they never function in Scripture. Let me explain what I mean. God is sovereign. That’s true. Does that truth ever function in Scripture to say, “And because God is sovereign, quite frankly it doesn’t matter what you do, because God is just going to do it”? That leads to fatalism.

The Bible never lets God’s sovereignty function that way in Scripture. It functions, instead, in Scripture to give us confidence that he still knows what is best and is still in charge and that all things work together for good to those who are the called according to his purpose. It becomes important to listen to how God’s providence works in Scripture, granted that there are mysteries there about how to explain it.

Then we discover, for example, that God in his providence sometimes uses suffering as a temporal discipline. He rebukes us. He chastens us. The first minister I worked with when I was a young man had been a hockey player. I’m a Canadian. Hockey is our national sport. He had been a hockey player for the NHL, the National Hockey League. That is top of the heap.

The Lord broke his ankle three times before he was converted. He was running away from a Christian home and a Christian heritage, and he became one of the most fruitful church planters in French Canada because of this temporal judgment. I’m sure he didn’t think about that when he was lying in the hospital with his broken ankle.

Moreover, suffering in God’s providence, granted that this world is broken, is sometimes used to prepare us for helping others. My wife, this side of her own cancer and double mastectomy five years ago, has become an angel to I don’t know how many cancer victims. She had all the worst of it, and she comes alongside with prayers and practical support and knows where they are emotionally and so on. I’m sure there are some in this congregation who are in exactly the same place. You’ve learned to help others because you’ve learned to weep yourself.

Granted that it’s a fallen and broken world and that suffering is not good; nevertheless, suffering in God’s providence can function like that. Suffering can also be a form of witness. I just came back from Denmark. I was in Denmark this whole past week, and I leave tomorrow to go back to Chicago. While I was in Denmark, I learned that the son and his wife and two children of a former minister (that is, a political minister, a minister of the crown) lost their lives in the tsunami.

In fact, this young man and his wife and two children worked for IFES (their equivalent of UCCF) and he was known to have an immensely influential future, already thinking theologically way ahead of his birthdays. He’s dead. The father was interviewed on national television. “Well, Mr. Fleming, wouldn’t you say God is unjust to allow this to happen for so promising a young man?”

“No, it’s a broken world. We’re all going to die sometime, and I’m so grateful for the years I had with my son.”

“But what would you say about a God who would force such suffering on you?”

“I would say that the greatest suffering in the universe took place in Jesus, which is why my sins are forgiven, and I am as sure as I am standing here that someday I will see my son again, because someone else took a much greater suffering than my son ever had to face.”

Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying the death of the son was a good thing. It was not an intrinsic good, but granted that this is a fallen, disordered, broken, chaotic, death-dealing universe, I tell you, in God’s providence sometimes the suffering leads to witness of immense power. Talk to some of the Christians in southern Sudan, Christians who have been enslaved, raped, starved into famine. Two million deaths in the last 15 years.

Moreover, suffering sometimes serves to make us homesick for heaven. I’ve been in the ministry a lot of years now. I’ve watched people die just like that, and I’ve also watched some very healthy people who are so strong, Christian men and women, good people, but quite frankly bound up with this world and its interests and their business and their grandchildren and so on, then be struck with some wretched disease that brings them lower and lower and lower. As everything is stripped off them, they become homesick for heaven. Granted an eternal perspective, that’s a blessing.

5. Insights from the centrality of the cross.

We’ve been heading in that direction, but you cannot, as a Christian, think in any other categories. I have the permission of my daughter to tell you this story or else I would not tell it to you. She has just finished her undergraduate degree in music performance and is now applying for graduate school, so what I’m telling you happened quite a few years ago when she was much younger. She was 15. We were living in England at the time.

Her best friend in North America, where we lived at the time two years out of three … Her best friend and she were very close. They bounced off the school bus and came and raided our fridge, then went down the street and raided their fridge. They went everywhere together and did everything together. The friend, Melissa, was a strapping five-foot-eleven. She was blond, athletic, energetic.

That year we were living in Cambridge, the arrangements were made with the family for Melissa to be flown over and come and spend Christmas with us. The night before I was to drive down to Heathrow and pick her up from the overnight flight, we got a phone call from the parents. We knew Melissa had had the flu or something and they weren’t quite sure what it was. Now they phoned to say that it wasn’t the flu; she had just been diagnosed with leukemia.

Well, to cut a long story short, we flew our daughter home that Easter on her own. She stayed with Christian friends and went to spend every day in the hospital with her for 10 or 12 hours. Pretty soon, when our daughter was there, she was the only one who cleaned out the trach tube. She started bullying all of Melissa’s friends to come in and say hello. After three or four weeks, Tiffany flew back to Cambridge.

To make a long story short, in June Melissa died. In July we flew home. My daughter is one of these where it all hangs out. We have another child who has always been the other sort. “I’ll tell you if I want to, when I want to, and not one second before, thank you very much.” But with Tiffany, all you have to do is put your arm around her and give her a hug and say, “Come on, tell me about it.”

So on the whole she grieved well and she was honest about it and she was realistic, and I was pretty proud of her considering she was only 15. This is a pretty hard thing to take when you’re only 15. In September, I heard her crying in her room and I tapped on the door and wandered in. I gave her the hug and said, “Come on, tell me about it.” She burst into tears and said, “Daddy, God could have saved my best friend, and he didn’t, and I hate him.” Then the tears really came.

So I held her and let her cry, and then I said to her, “I’m glad you told me. God knows what’s in your heart in any case. No point pretending otherwise. Might as well speak the truth. To be frank, you’re not saying much more than Job and some of the psalmists say when they get to the end of their tether. They’re pretty close. But before you become too convinced that God has it in for you, I want you to ask two questions. Just two. First, do you want a God like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp?”

The Robin Williams film had just come out a short while earlier. Genie on steroids. The point is the genie in Aladdin’s lamp can do anything but, at the end of the day, is entirely under the control of whoever holds the lamp. Is God like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp who can do absolutely anything and must be under your control or you will not have him, or is this God so big that despite all of your intelligence sometimes you’re going to face stuff you don’t understand?

I then said, “The second question is how will you measure God’s love? Will you measure it by how comfortable you are with some event that has just taken place, as awful as it is, or will you measure it by the height of a little hill outside Jerusalem where Almighty God in the person of his Son died, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God?

When you have no answers anywhere else, when mystery seems to be blanketing everything, when loneliness and tears are swamping you and your vision is so blurred you can’t see straight, go back to the cross, for that is where you’ll find the deepest, most moving, most steadfast demonstration of God’s love for a broken, disordered, death-dealing, disaster-prone world.”

Any Christian who spends much time at the cross cannot come away and say, “God doesn’t love me.” Moreover, that is also one of the things in the New Testament, the example of Christ in this respect, that fires the Christian’s willingness to suffer unjustly because our Master did. Read 1 Peter 2.

Now let me conclude with some brief practical observations. I merely articulate them. First, this approach to the question of suffering is not a simple proof-texting approach, a couple of quick verses to answer all questions. It is a question of worldview formation, and it can be thoughtfully assessed only by comparing this worldview with other worldviews that are out there.

It can’t be overthrown with a quick objection. It shapes the way we think, our priorities, what we understand of our origins, where we’re going, who God is. It is sweeping and comprehensive, and it is born out of spending a lot of time in the Bible.

Secondly, all five of these pillars together deeply affect one’s stance. It’s out of this that an apostle can say something like, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, which is far better. These weak and momentary sufferings are not to be compared with the glory that is yet to be revealed. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

Thirdly, this lecture has focused on intellectual and worldview issues. That’s what I was asked to do, and that’s important. It is important to think about these things, but I would be the first to insist that when people are actually going through a crisis, something rather different may be needed. With respect to the tsunami, we need helicopters, vast sums of money, fresh water, food, ongoing support that will rebuild and restructure, workers, counsel, a new tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean, policing to stop the looting. We need all of those things, don’t we?

At the funeral of a loved one, when you are by the grave with the parents of a 6-month-old who has just died, do you really want to give a 45-minute speech on the nature of the mystery of providence? Friends of mine when I was quite a young man had their firstborn, and he had a case of severe spina bifida. The baby lasted 10 days. It didn’t have any eyelids.

We took turns dropping artificial tears in the baby’s eyes so they wouldn’t dry out and crack, so the parents could get some sleep. A lot of hugs, a lot of overnights dropping artificial tears into the baby’s eyes, cutting the grass, picking up food, sorting out the mail, paying the bills. The stance I’m giving here is important but primarily as a prophylactic. That is, it’s advanced medicine. It’s the frame of reference a Christian needs to adopt before the evil day comes.

Sometimes Christians go into suffering, and besides the suffering they face, they face an additional suffering because they don’t have their theology sorted out. They don’t know who God is very well. They don’t know what their Bible is very much. Whereas, in fact, if these things are in place, then when the evil day comes, you find far more comfort from Scripture and from reflecting on God and trust the God who is at the heart of the mystery of providence and go back to the cross and in the midst of your tears you rejoice.

When you are in the crisis itself, the crisis which is coming to each one of you if you live long enough, for the vast majority of you, the tears will be so sharp you won’t be able to listen very well then. This is something that needs to be in place in your life and thought before the evil day comes.

Finally, Christians who get to know God well do not, as a rule, think in terms of these issues. That is, Christians who get to know God well tend not constantly to be asking the question, “How is it that God can be fair? I don’t understand.” That tends not to be the case. Rather, what I observe in Scripture and in history both is that when the people of God are closest to reformation and revival, instead of charging God with injustice, they are busy saying, “O Lord God, you are right, and I am unjust. Will you not have mercy?”

Read, for example, Nehemiah 8–9. The people have been through the exile with all the suffering that meant, all the war and the turmoil, the broken families, the slashed lives, the poverty, and now they’re back and struggling to make their way, and the people seeking God and reformation and revival are not saying, “Well, let me think this one through here. The mystery of providence is a bit tough here. Is this compatibilism or is it not? Shall I charge God with injustice or shall I not?”

When people are closest to God, almost inevitably they start saying instead, “O Lord God, you are just. Treat us not simply with justice, but have mercy upon us.” For you see, in the midst of the suffering, you find out that God is good. If you’re a Christian who knows God at all, that’s what you find out.

Let me close by telling you about Mike Wheeler. Mike Wheeler went to Bolivia as a missionary quite a number of years ago, a single young man. He was there for about 15 years as a missionary and learned Spanish fluently and became a very effective missionary. While he was there, he met a young woman who had also gone out single. After about 15 years for both of them out there alone, they got married, and they had their firstborn a little later in life. They were in their early 40s when their daughter came along.

By this time, he was enmeshed in the whole church life of Bolivia, and the mission wanted him to come to Trinity, where I teach, to do a PhD in New Testament. They wanted to start upgrading some of the theological education that was available, and they wanted to bring in two or three Bolivians, but most of them didn’t have enough education, so he was the first on the list to come in for a PhD. He had missionary training and some theology already, and he already spoke and thought like a national, so he was sent back.

He no sooner arrived than his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. The program went on hold for a bit as they worked through all of that. It was stage IV. It was pretty serious. On the other hand, she seemed to come out of it all right, and he resumed his studies, worked away at it. As she was in the final stages of beginning to come out of things, then he was diagnosed with stomach cancer.

The stomach cancer was so advanced the hospitals in the Chicago area … Metro Chicago is the size of metro London. They have excellent research hospitals. Lutheran General there is one of the best cancer hospitals in the world. They wouldn’t even touch him. The mission decided to send him up to the Mayo Clinic. The Mayo said they didn’t think anything would work but they would be willing to try.

They took out 90 percent of his stomach and gave him experimental drugs that were really designed for colon cancer. Lo and behold, he came out of it. He was already six-foot-four and a bit thin. Now he was as skinny as a bean pole and having to wake up and eat every two or three hours because he had no stomach to store any food, but he began to come out of it and resumed his studies again. Then his wife’s cancer came back, and she died.

He finished his studies, and a few months ago he stopped in our church, his daughter now about 8. He stopped in our church because ours is one of the supporting churches. He was on his way back to Bolivia with his daughter. Do you know what he talked about for half an hour? He talked about the goodness of God. I tell you, brothers and sisters in Christ, from a biblical point of view, that was merely normal Christianity. It wasn’t even extraordinary. It was just normal, because we look at things from the perspective of the cross.

He was so grateful, for example, that his daughter hadn’t lost both her parents. He was grateful for the outpourings of love and grace shown him from friends and family and church and Trinity. He was rock solid certain he would see his wife again someday and he still had useful work to do. He weighed everything in the light of the cross, and he was just grateful for the Lord’s goodness. Let us pray.

Open our eyes, Lord God, that we may understand more of you and your purposes, your sovereignty but also your compassion. Like as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear him. He knows us. He remembers our frame. He knows that we are dust. You have been so forbearing with us, Lord God, and supremely you have shown your love to us in the person of your Son. In a world that is full of decay and death and disaster, we are no longer surprised by it, for this world is not our home.

This is a death-dealing world, and we are wrapped up in it. In all of our solipsism, in all of our idolatry, in all of our self-affection, we marvel more and more that we enjoy so many good things. At the same time, Lord God, we do pray for those who weep, and we want to be good stewards of the grace of God, whether in the articulation of the gospel or sending food in helicopters, for we are no better, and we hear the words of the Master saying, “Unless you repent, you shall all likewise perish.”

So help us, Lord God, for the sake of Christ, to be faithful in whatever time and circumstances you place us and to taste deeply of your mercy, of your goodness, and to bear witness to it, and to trust you even when we understand so little, knowing that one day we will understand much more and we shall see you as you are.

The glories of the new heaven and the new earth and the prospect of resurrection bodies call us forward, so that we understand again and again that here there is no continuing city, here there is no utopia, and we join Christians in every age who cry out, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” Forbid, Lord God, that we should get into the sucking secularism of our surrounding culture, where we blame everybody but ourselves and happily curse God as if we are so wise and good. Oh no, Lord God. Help us to walk with humility of mind and gratitude and faithfulness and service. For Jesus’ sake, amen.

Male: Someone just grabbed me over coffee, and they’re not brave enough to ask the question, so I will anonymously ask it to you for them and for us. They asked if God was in control of the earthquake and all the movements under the earth that caused the tsunami, and what are the implications if he was?

Don Carson: Well, I would have thought that, in part, that’s what the last hour and a quarter was about. Yes, you do want to say that God is in control. Otherwise, you must start going through your Bible cutting out verses. Start by slicing out Romans 8:28 and large chunks of Isaiah and so on. But one of the entailments of the large worldview I laid out is that, by and large, in the Bible believers are surprised that God is so good and doesn’t give us more judgment.

That’s a hard one to come by in our day and age, because we think we’re basically good people who have a few little sins that have to be forgiven here and there, whereas the Bible’s stance is that we are so immensely self-focused and God-denying we deserve hell itself. The Bible actually goes so far in the book of Revelation, chapter 14, as to say … This is where I would have gone if I had said more about heaven and hell.

It actually goes so far as to say that all of the previous judgments throughout the entire Bible that have fallen on the people … That includes war and famine and pestilence and the destruction of Jerusalem that was so bad mothers started eating their children because the starvation was so bad. All of the disasters you can think about are viewed, believe it or not, as the diluted form of God’s wrath, and the fullness of the wrath still is yet to come. That is so alien to the way we think today, because we don’t deserve it. We’re basically nice people.

I don’t want to eliminate the complexities of innocent suffering and all the rest. I do want to say that there is such a reversal in expectations. When things are going well, do we say, “God has been so good to us”? Does the press start saying, “It’s unbelievable, considering how wicked we have been, how merciful God is to us. The economy is not doing too badly. There weren’t all that many rapes and muggings in London this past year. It’s wonderful that God is as merciful to us as he is.” We never think like that, do we?

Rather, whether we face a big disaster or merely a disaster that happens to us personally, we follow the advice of Job’s wife: “Curse God and die.” I want to say that when Jesus in Luke, chapter 13, faces a disaster, a smaller one but still significant for the people of his day, and people begin to ask the question, “Well, were the people on whom the tower fell worse than others?” Jesus does not say, “No, no, no. You’re asking the wrong question. God really isn’t in charge of fallen towers. That belongs to another department.”

Rather, he actually goes so far as to say, “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” So there is a sense in which every single disaster, like every single death … That was the significance of C.S. Lewis’ argument. It was profoundly biblical. Every single disaster, like every single death, is still a mark of God’s sovereign judgment on a damned race. That’s the truth. It may not be very comfortable, but it’s the way the Bible looks at things.

Then the good news seems like all the better news in the light of that, doesn’t it? Even though we do deserve wrath, yet mercy is poured out upon us, not only in countless temporal blessings, but in forgiveness, in regeneration, and, ultimately, in a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.

Male: Thank you very much for this excellent talk. I don’t want to give too much emphasis on the Devil, but you spoke about Satan and when he went to Job. How much do we need to realize that the Devil is working with a power of darkness in day-to-day living?

Don: Good question. The answer really falls out of another area where I introduced the subject but didn’t work out all of the implications. That is, the whole area of compatibilism. For the Devil, likewise, is a responsible, evil moral agent, but that does not mean that as a responsible, evil moral agent he ever makes God absolutely contingent.

What I worry about when people start talking about God and the Devil is that sometimes they have them in different compartments. You know, it’s a nice bright sunny day. God did that. This day it’s raining cats and dogs and you had a picnic planned. The Devil did that. The economy goes up. God did that. You have a tsunami. The Devil did that.

Somehow you have two hermetically sealed off, competing players, and you hope that at the end … You can’t believe with that model that God is decisively stronger. If he was decisively stronger, he’d just whop the Devil off and that would be the end of it. So you hope he’s a better chess player and eventually he’ll have enough clever moves that he’ll finally win in the end.

There is a movement today called open theology that argues precisely along those lines, but I would want to say that what you must see is that compatibilism is everywhere in Scripture. God is always sovereign, but not only human beings, all moral sentient beings, including the Devil himself, are responsible agents. The Devil, for all of his work, is cast into the lake of fire in Revelation 20, and he’s held responsible for it until he is finally cut off and destroyed.

That’s why the Bible can speak, then, of the Devil going about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. He goes about as an angel of light, deceiving if it were possible the very elect. He’s the prince of the power of the air. He has the power of death, we’re told. Although, over and against that, we’re told the person who ultimately has the power of death is Christ himself.

Once again, you see this compatibilism works out. The fact that people die is a mark of our sin. It’s a mark of the Devil’s guile. It’s a mark of the Devil’s triumph. We still remain, in some sense, in his domain, and yet Christ has risen, Christ is King, Christ is Lord, and the Devil can only go so far, and then God himself says, “Thus far you shall go and no farther.”

Within that framework, we have assurances like that of 1 Corinthians, chapter 10, verse 13. “There is no temptation …” Which comes from the Devil or from our own innate nature, one of the two. “There is no temptation taken you but what is common to human beings, but God is able and will not allow you to be tempted above what you are able to bear, but will with the temptation make a way of escape that you may be able to bear it.”

Once again, you see the goodness and the severity of God, in a sense, but bound up with the hiddenness of the mystery of providence. This doctrine of compatibilism was one that our forbearers well understood. It’s absolutely everywhere in the Reformed tradition, especially in the Puritans, and in other traditions as well, in one sense or another, but it’s one we’re losing today. As we’ve made God smaller and smaller and smaller, God is no more than a reasonably clever chess player.

The loss is significant, because it means that when something does happen, you start saying, “Well, that was the Devil’s work. I guess that one got by God or he wasn’t strong enough or maybe he was taking a walk or, you know, in a fallen world the Devil is going to slip some by. He’s going to win some moves.” It’s a long haul we’re comfortable with. In which case, you are robbed of any comfort of God bringing good out of evil.

That’s not the language that is used when Joseph is sold into slavery. It’s not the language used of the cross. In one and the same event, there is outrageous evil, and you ought to be outraged by it, and still God remains sovereign to put a curb on it and to bring good out of the evil in such a way that evil will be seen for what it is and God will be glorified in the end and his people secured. That’s the theological frame of reference in which Christians are taught to think in the Bible. I know it’s awkward, but I think it’s basic. In one sense, it’s elementary. Does that scratch where you itch?

Male: In terms of the Christian biblical worldview that you’ve been setting out earlier, how does the question of animals suffering fit into that? It’s one thing to say, “Human beings, unless you repent, you’re going to perish likewise,” but there obviously is a range of created beings, some higher and some lower, and I’m particularly thinking of the more sensitive developed animals. There’s a lot of suffering that goes on there. How does that fit in with the worldview?

Don: “The whole created order groans in travail, waiting for the ultimate adoption of sons.” It seems to me that there’s quite a lot of evidence in the Bible that pictures the entire created order swept down by human death and the ensuing curse and so on. We live in a tension between what some brands of theology have called common grace. It’s not as bad as it could be.

All of the signs of the original glory are there in dilute form, the spectacular light refracting off ice-covered trees in the winter, the glorious call of a cardinal in an Illinois snowfield, or a swooping hawk. It’s all part of God’s world, yet at the same time, as Kipling used to say a hundred years ago, “Now this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky, and the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.” The law of the jungle is kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.

That, too, it seems to me, is part of the pattern of a broken, fallen universe, which is why the ultimate hope in Scripture is never simply that we’ll live a little longer in exactly the same disordered world, but a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness, and there will be no more death and no more tears and no more suffering, and so on. It seems to me that it’s a much bigger thing than just my individual having stolen a cookie. It’s a whole disordered universe with all the curse that entails until God, in fact, makes all things new.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Don’t know. You see, when the Bible does talk about the new heaven and the new earth, what it focuses on … We focus on, “Will I see my great-aunt Maude, and will I see my 6-month-old son? Will my French poodle make it?” In a sense, even those sorts of questions are really bound up with my happiness in the categories of this world, just sort of extrapolated a bit the other side.

Whereas, although the Bible does encourage us to think that we will see our brothers and sisters in Christ in a new heaven and a new earth, read Revelation 21–22, and the whole focus is on the sheer centrality of God and of the Lamb. The glory of it all is, “And we shall see him face to face. There is no temple in that city, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. There is no light in that city, no sun or no moon, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its light.”

Even the streets of gold and the water of the river of life from the throne of God and the trees on both sides that heal the nations … All of those things are designed to show that all of the restorative powers that bring about peace and serenity and security all come from the throne of God. The whole vision is profoundly, immaculately God-centered, Lamb-centered, so I think sometimes even when we’ve thought of heaven, we’ve thought in essentially fallen categories.

I travel quite a bit, and usually, granted the size of America, I travel by air, but every once in a while I have to go somewhere where I can drive. I have an old beat-up Ford with a decrepit tape deck, but I have a little unit I can plug into the tape deck so I can also play some CDs now and then. My tastes in music are horribly eclectic. No class at all. I just like bits and pieces from everywhere.

Not too long ago I was riding somewhere, and I had in some Roger Whittaker, if you please. Now those of you who are younger don’t have a clue who I’m talking about, but I like his sort of gravelly voice and his singing folk music from all over the world and so on. He was singing a song of Cape Breton. I was a Canadian. I can relate to that.

The last stanza was, “If my life could end perfectly, I know how I’d want it to be. God’s gift of heaven would be made up of three, my love, Cape Breton, and me.” I thought to myself, “My dear Roger, you’ve just about defined hell.” Because Roger and his love are going to breed like rabbits. They’re going to produce another generation of sinners and kill everything all over again.

The vision of heaven is not Cape Breton and Roger and his love. It’s God and everything ordered around him. Now if that involves a few poodles, fine, I’m happy, but I think if there are no poodles there, we won’t worry about it too much in the light of his glory.

Female: Is Luke 21, signs of the end of the age, anything to do with this disaster?

Don: Luke 21 and the parallel in Mark 13 and in Matthew 24–25, sometimes called the Olivet Discourse or the Eschatological Discourse … Those texts say, “There will be wars and rumors of wars, but be not dismayed, for the end is not yet.” In other words, it seems to me that what the texts promise is that there will be disorder, there will be suffering, there will be death, including war, right to the end of the age.

That’s why I said in the lecture that either Fukuyama was right or Jesus was right. Fukuyama thinks that now we’ve come to the end of … Well, Fukuyama has changed his mind in the light of the towers coming down. He has written another book that has gone in another direction. But in 1993 he thought we’d come to the end of history. Jesus’ view of things is different.

The towers come down. “Yes, well, unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” There are wars and rumors of wars and storms and tsunamis and all the rest. This is a disordered, broken world. So they’re signs of the end in the sense that they are constantly with us. I don’t think Luke 21, rightly understood, is saying that all of history will be pretty smooth until you get right to the very end, and then you’re going to have a whole lot of wars and rumors of wars and tsunamis.

Rather, they’re signs of the end in the sense that all of these things presage the death and decay of this old order of things, as Revelation puts it, which will all pass away. In that sense they’re signs of things, but not in some more imminent sense, that now we’ve had a tsunami we know for sure Jesus is coming back within the next three years or anything like that.

Male: Talking about the broader subject of suffering, do you think that for the Christian it would be fair to say it comes down to an issue of perspective, as to whether we find our perspective from Christ or from worldly values?

Don: Yes. I mean, what you have said is entirely true but needs to be teased out. If you just say that to some people, it won’t be enough to satisfy them at all, but on the other hand it’s a sort of generalized comment that could be fleshed out not simply by one lecture, but by many hours of them. So there’s a sense in which that’s correct, whether we look at things from a God’s-eye point of view or from a fallen-world, secular point of view. That is correct.

Male: What do you say to people who may very well be quite sympathetic to the idea of there being a sovereign God but who are rendered catatonic by the suggestion this is God’s wrath?

Don: It depends on who the person is and what the circumstance is. If it’s in the context of them just having lost their spouse of 35 years, that might not be the best time to have the conversation. On the other hand, if they’re willing at all to enter into a Bible study and actually read some Bible with you, then sooner or later they’re not just arguing with you; they’re arguing with the Bible, and that’s great fun. I’d much rather people argue with the Bible than with me.

At the same time, it is also helpful to explain some things to them. What we mean by wrath is so often bound up with bad temper or short fuse or want of discipline. We sort of lose it. That’s what we mean by being wrathful. Whereas God’s wrath is never whimsical, never bad-tempered, never short-fused, and he never loses it. His wrath always in Scripture is a function of his holiness as it confronts sin.

Then it’s worth at least asking the question, “Do you think God should be in any way upset with, let’s say, Pol Pot or the Holocaust?” If the person has the cheek to say, “No, he’s just a big loving granddaddy,” then my question would be, “And how do you know? Or is that just a projection of softheadedness? Does that make him morally superior to say, ‘I don’t really care what Hitler does’?” Most people don’t answer that way. They go, “No, there are some things God should be upset with.” Then the answer is, “What things? And how do you know?”

There is a very helpful little book by a Trinity graduate who has been in evangelism in universities now for 20 years. He has streets and streets of experience. His name is Randy Newman. The book came out just last year from Kregel. It’s a book of questions. That is, it goes through the Gospels, first of all, and shows how often Jesus meets an objection or a question with a question.

Instead of just giving the canned answer, he forces people to think by answering a question that takes the implication of their question one stage further in order to start undermining the presuppositions they’re bringing with their question. Then he starts showing in area after area of life how we can do the same thing, and that’s one of them he treats in about six or seven pages. He works out whole conversations of “If they say this, you say …” You’re working out a biblical theology that’s asking questions.

If somebody comes and says, “Oh, I don’t believe God …” and you say, “Oh, of course you have to believe that; the Bible says so,” well, now you just have confrontation, and you’re not going to go anywhere in this day and age where tolerance is the magic pill. It’s sometimes better at that stage to start asking questions. “Oh, that’s very interesting. Is wrath always bad-tempered? Were you ever angry with your kids?”

“Oh yeah, but sometimes I lost it.”

“Well, did you always lose it or sometimes you think it was justified?”

“Well, sometimes it was justified.”

“Do you think it would have been better if when your kids were really doing something naughty you had smiled and said, ‘Oh, I don’t give a rip’? Would that have made you a better parent?”

You see, you’re just asking questions until you’re finally forcing people to start thinking over the presuppositions that come with it. So there are some pastoral ways of getting at this sort of thing. Now I haven’t dealt with any of that here. I’ve been trying to lay out the big issue, so I’ve been painting big strokes, but pastorally, when you start asking how you get to the person who says, “I think in this generation,” one of the things you can do is start asking the right kinds of questions.

Male: I’ve just come back from the UCCF conference [inaudible]. It’s interesting watching how church leaders have responded to the whole thing, both in the media and from the pulpit as well. It seems that just about everybody has gone in Scripture either to Job or alternatively to Luke 13 to say [inaudible].

Tonight is the first time I’ve not heard mentioned at all other passages that you might conceivably go to in Scripture, like Revelation and the book of Amos. If you were doing a talk to university students on campus or to people who haven’t got some sort of personal agenda like [inaudible], how would you handle it, and what Scriptures would you bring, and would you deal with the judgment issue at all?

Because it’s my own experience that usually when people ask the question about, “Why does God allow suffering?” there’s often a much bigger question behind it, and it’s the question, “Is God fair and just?” and behind that is the question, “Can I trust myself or give my life to God who might allow or perhaps even cause such things to happen? That’s a lot of questions. I’d be really grateful for your insights.

Don: Again, I’ve answered it in principle this evening already. It’s like the question about the Devil where I dealt with compatibilism, and then that teases out in that direction. Similarly, by saying at the beginning on the first two points that a tsunami is really just a lot more of the deaths we have all along and those are always a mark of God’s judgment … We live in a sin-disordered, God-cursed world, so that every single death is a mark of God saying, “Thus far shall you go and no farther.”

In that frame of reference, then, wars are a mark of God’s judgment. Disasters are a mark of God’s judgment. This is a sin-cursed, disordered world. So it is important to say that, but it is also important to say while you’re saying that that this does not mean those who suffer those sorts of things are necessarily more evil than those who don’t.

The significance of Luke 13 and related passages is not that this means there was no evil being done in those nations that got hit. The significance is, rather, that they are not more evil than we are. It’s very important to keep saying that. I have heard people say a lot of very foolish things. Some people from fundamentalist camps saying things like, “Well, they were all Muslim nations, so they got what they deserved.” Well, Sri Lanka is not exactly a Muslim nation, so their geography isn’t very good, let alone their theology.

It’s important to keep saying that too in this age when people’s antennae are not only strong about judgment but they’re very strong about anything that seems like putting somebody else down. So it is important to keep saying things like Luke 13 and related passages, yet, at the same time, the fact that this is a disordered world is itself a function of God’s judgment upon human beings.

That can only be worked out when people have a good theology of the fall, a real vision for what idolatry looks like to God and how utterly offensive it is, and how the Bible pictures these things as not the full outpouring of God’s wrath but merely the down payment, as it were. In the greatest New Testament atonement passage, Romans 3:21–26, it goes so far as to say that God had left the sins formerly committed, that is, before the cross, unpunished.

All those things that had been punished in the framework of pestilence and sword and so on, they’ve only had the small little bit of it. They haven’t really faced the real punishment yet. That is either faced in hell itself or it’s faced in the cross. That’s where it’s really faced. So there is a whole theology of judgment that is bound up with this. I was trying to hint at all of those things or say those things by trying to set up the big framework to begin with.

If you start asking, “How would I use that sort of thing in an evangelistic setting?” part of the problem is when you do university missions today, people often have sort of Bible expositions on the one hand, and then they have apologetic questions at some other set of meetings, and then they have sort of a Q&A “grill a Christian” sort of time.

Those apologetic sessions are often squeezed in in the British scene to lunch hours, where you have 20 or 25 minutes max, 35 if you really, really squeeze, and I don’t know any way you can deal with this subject adequately to a hostile audience in 35 minutes. I just don’t know how to do it, because they’re worldview formation issues. That is, you have to get a lot of other things in place.

Increasingly, when you’re bearing witness today in evangelism, whether at work or in university, you’re dealing with such massive biblical illiteracy that you say something and they say something and you’re not even on the same planet, and it takes time to build. Let me give an illustration. I was on CNN with Larry King a few months back for something or other. Occasionally they have a token evangelical on for something or other, and I was the token that particular time.

The way they do these things … I mean, he’s out in Atlanta, and I was in Chicago, and another party was out in California. They’re all put together by satellite, and you don’t see anybody but the camera, but everybody on the screen thinks you’re either in the same room or you have different heads there. It was done sort of at the last moment, so they sent a car for me. Now I’m not used to being driven around, but I could appreciate it.

On the way down, I was busy studying in the back of this limo, trying to avoid being an absolute twit on TV, and so was ignoring the driver. I got down there and did the taping, and then on the way back I was relaxing and trying to chat the guy up a bit, find out who he was. It turned out he was a 59-year-old Jewish man whose parents had been killed in the Holocaust. He was divorced and was living with a 29-year-old woman who was studying philosophy of religion for her PhD.

He knew I was down there for a religious program, so he was trying to talk about this so he’d have something to talk about with his 29-year-old wife. I asked him if he had any children. He said, “Yeah,” and I could see he was very hesitant. Then he opened up. He had a 33-year-old daughter who was comatose and the question was when they were going to pull the plug. She had been driving her four-wheel drive in Kansas on icy roads. It flipped, and she was brain dead.

I said, “How are you handling this?” He said, “Well, the only way I can handle it is just, you know, molecules bounce. What can I say? Molecules bounce.” So I said to him, “Is that the way you view the Holocaust too? Molecules bounce. What can you say?” I was trying to push his button. He was outraged immediately. “No, that was evil. That was revolting. That was cruel.” “So it’s not just ‘molecules bounce,’ then?” Long pause. “Are you saying that the death of my daughter was evil?” “Yep.”

He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I’m not saying she was more evil than others. I’m saying that according to the Bible, death is an evil thing that has come about as the fruit of our common humanity in rebellion against God. It’s a terribly evil thing, and we ought to be outraged. The apostle Paul speaks of it as the last enemy. If you just think molecules bounce, you lose the rightness of outrage at the death of your daughter. This is not the way it’s supposed to be.”

By this time he was listening. I thought, “Oh, this is going pretty well.” Little did I know. I said to him, “Tell me, would you look at this a little differently if you really believed with all your heart there’s life after death?” “Oh,” he said. “I know just what you mean. My daughter has a wonderful garden. I’m sure she’d like to come back as a butterfly.” Missed again. Where do you even start with these conversations?

Anybody who’s doing any sort of witness nowadays with the degree of biblical illiteracy around, you’re wondering if you’re on the same planet half the time. What you discover is, increasingly, the only way you can deal with that sort of thing is not in a 20-minute apologetic. It just can’t be done. It has to be done within the framework of a longer series or inductive Bible studies, a follow-along thing. It just can’t be done that fast. At least I can’t do it.

So I think that just in the same way you have to have a different sort of evangelism if you’re going to Thailand and evangelizing Buddhists … It has to be done within the framework of a different frame of reference, a different worldview. You can explain the gospel to a Buddhist, but you can’t do it in 20 minutes.

Male: Does that mean, then, that given that most university evangelism takes place in a lunch hour context when you only have a 15- to 20-minute talk and 30 minutes to field questions and that most media events you have 35 seconds for a sound bite, so it’s even more difficult, and we’ve seen many Christian leaders struggle in the media with this and in the printed work as well … Does this mean we shouldn’t be trying to address these issues? How should we be reacting?

Don: It means that you have to be realistic about what you’re accomplishing in a university mission. I’ve been doing university missions now for 30 years. It used to be that 30 years ago, when people got converted at a university mission, most of them got converted during the mission, 80 or 90 percent of them during the mission and a trickle afterwards.

That’s reversed. It’s now a few people in the mission, and then you hope there has been enough sowing of the seed that you get a whole lot of them in “Christianity Explained” or “Christianity Explored” or one of those afterwards for six or eight or ten weeks, and it’s in the follow-up. That’s when people get converted. It’s partly because they’re so bone ignorant.

Likewise on TV. I don’t do a lot of TV, but when I’m told in advance what the thing is, what I tend to do nowadays … I didn’t do it at first. I’ve learned from having gotten burned a few times. I work hard at the subject before I go there, and then the last day before I go, I write one-liners. I think it all through, and then I try to write as many one-liners as I can to cover it so that in the debate, in the context, I can drop one-liners in. That’s what I was doing in the back of the limo on the way down.

That’s not massive evangelism. That’s just trying to handle the media. It’s trying to say something for Christ, something for the truth, that will stir without thinking you’re going to get a worldview across. You’re just not going to do it. This Chad Fleming in Denmark didn’t give a whole apologetic. He didn’t lay out a Christian worldview. He spoke with simple sentences that gave his testimony. “I am as sure as I am here today that I will see my son again.”

That spoke volumes. That’s not giving a justification for it. It’s no apologetic. It’s not handling the Scripture. On the other hand, the pastors who hear this sort of thing, if they have any brains at all, are going to use this kind of thing as a way of saying, “How do you find Peter Fleming’s faith?” or something like that. You can use these sorts of things to follow on with more sequence and content and structure.

I just think it’s getting harder and harder in a world more and more biblically illiterate to make sense of the gospel in one-liners or in 15-minute … It’s not just that it’s illiterate. It’s that it is actively hostile, so there are some things that have to be unlearned as well. So I’m pretty realistic about what is being done in university campuses.

You get a certain percentage, especially in a more conservative university … A university like Cambridge has so many ex cuique people amongst the parents of the students who are now there that you have a certain percentage of failed Christians already there who are somewhat biblically literate. So you have a certain higher percentage in a university like Cambridge than you do in Exeter, because so many kids go back to the same university their parents did. At least that used to be the case. That’s beginning to decline as well.

As a result, you have a higher percentage of people, even though it’s still a low percentage today, who have some sort of biblical heritage. So some of them are likely to get converted during the mission itself. They’re being reminded of the things … Things are coming together. They’ve already had their consciences pricked, and Mom and Dad are back home praying for them, and so on.

But the more you’re dealing with biblically illiterate people, I think you have to be realistic about what you can do in 15 minutes, which is no reason for not doing something, but I never do a university mission nowadays unless I have direct input into the follow-up Bible studies of what’s coming next. If they’re not going to pay the price and do that kind of stuff and organize it the way I want it organized with the materials I want and so on, I won’t go. I’m wasting my time.