GOD AND THE PROBLEM OF PAIN AND SUFFERING PT. 2

Mike Cunningham

December 29, 2013

“I sat in my office on a Tuesday afternoon talking with Jack, and thinking, there’s something terribly wrong here. Jack was angry, confused, and lost. I dipped into Jack’s life and tried to get his story out spoonful by spoonful. He just couldn’t take more than a spoonful at a time. I’ve never had an experience quite like that. His story wrenched my heart and I wept.” “Jack was blind and crippled. But Jack wasn’t born blind and he wasn’t born crippled. When he was born, Jack was a healthy baby boy. But his twin sister came out of the womb tragically deformed. Something snapped in Jack’s mom’s mind; some twisted thing that we’ll never understand or be able to wrap words around. Somehow, in some way, she was convinced that this deformity was Jack’s fault. She assaulted him from Day One. He spent most of his early years locked in a closet-yes, even as an infant. Once, as he tried to crawl out of the closet, she slammed the door on his leg, and maimed him for life. Many nights, she lashed him to the foot of her bed-she just didn’t want to take the time to get up and take care of him. She beat him about the head over and over again. By seven or eight years old, Jack began to loose his sight. By nine years old, he wasn’t able to see enough to go to a normal school. His mother sent him off to school one day, then packed his bags. He went to school thinking it would just be another day. But it wasn’t. People from a school for the blind picked Jack up that afternoon after school. He never went home again. Jack did the rest of his growing up by himself at that school.” “As you hear Jack’s story, you realize right away, yes, his eyes were broken; and yes, his leg had been broken; yes, he is physically disabled. But there was something else, something much deeper. Jack was a broken man. In a combination of deep discouragement, confusion, and rage, Jack essentially said of life, “This just doesn’t make any sense. What’s going on here?” “There is a Latin word that says it all. Anomie. This word captures those moments in life where you feel detached from meaning, detached from purpose, detached from your identity, detached from your values. Literally, if you translate this word, it means this: “There’s no name for this.” My dad stood in front of that car and screamed into the cosmos, “There’s no name for what I’m going through!” Jack looks at his life and says, “There’s no name for this.” Parents stand at the bed of their newly lifeless child. “Children aren’t supposed to die first.” They watch the life seep out of that body and cry, “Anomie! There’s no name for this.” A once vibrant person slides down that mud tube of depression and fear without any handholds. “Anomie! There’s no name for what I’m going through.” A man works all his life on his career and then because of the greed and avarice of his CEO he looses everything-his job, his life savings and his retirement benefits. He screams, “Anomie! There’s no name for this.” A man lives with the marching progress of progressive disease, knowing that an enemy in his cells is steeling his vitality and he can’t do a thing about it. Watching his feeling and body change dramatically, he cries, “Anomie! There’s no name for what I’m going through!’ A wife learns that the man she gave her heart to, the man she planned her future with, the man she dearly loved from her youth, this man has turned his back on her for twenty minutes of sexual satisfaction with someone else. She weeps, “Anomie! There’s no name for what I’m going through! Anomie! Anomie! Anomie!” That’s life in a fallen and fallen down world.” Cited from an article by Paul David Tripp, in the book, “On Suffering,” Pgs. 3-5 In another excellent article in the same book, author Michael R. Emlet says that, “My first encounter with chronic pain came during a summer training program for collegiate ministry the summer before I started medical school. I met a kind and gentle woman there who seemed wise beyond her years. Many months before she had been in a car accident and suffered from chronic daily headaches as a result. I would not have known it by looking at her.” “Flash forward a few years. A gentlemen in our medical practice had a problem with chronic facial pain. He often screamed out when waves of pain hit. Nothing fully suppressed this intense, horrible pain.” “Two very different people. Two very different experiences of chronic pain. Although physical pain is a universal human phenomenon, it is intensely personal and private.” “In Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey’s words, “Pain is the loneliest, most private sensation. We cannot transpose our experiences of pain onto someone else. We can’t say things like, “I have chronic low back pain too, but I just push past it and do what I need to do.” Maybe you have made such comments or heard those comments or something similar from others. Such words are rarely helpful. What they typically communicate is, “I am clueless about your pain, but if you respond like I do, everything will be better.” “What is your ultimate goal in dealing with chronic pain? Is it to remove pain? Or to redeem pain? Is it to take away pain? Or to transform pain. Or is it a little of both? Certainly, continue to pray for relief of pain. Take those steps to relieve pain in your life, whether it is consultation with a physician, physical therapy, medications or other pain control modalities. These means may or may not be helpful. Either way, pain relief cannot be our ultimate goal. Remember that Scripture speaks both to the benefit of experiencing suffering and to the benefit of relieving suffering. Scripture ultimately holds these together in Jesus Christ. If your hope is that God will redeem your pain experience so that you might better reflect Him, that you might be better equipped to minister comfort to others who are hurting, then you can be absolutely certain that God intends to transform your pain in that very way.” “How does this transformation occur? There’s no formula. But a starting point is to use the right lens to interpret your life, hardships, and pain. A Christ-centered gaze reframes your experience. It helps you to see the shape of Christ’s grace and mercy to you in your time of need.” “Your suffering occurs in Christ. Your story (including pain) is embedded in His story (including pain.) Your pain has a bigger context than your individual world. Your suffering (which at first glance might appear to be a completely isolated subjective experience) actually occurs in the larger context of your triune God working out His purposes in history, a history that ultimately climaxes in the coming of Christ.” “Why is this connection with Christ so important to see? Suffering after the cross is different from suffering before the cross. Your suffering now, as a believer, has a Christ-oriented perspective that your Old Testament counterparts did not experience. Your pain and suffering involves a participation in the very sufferings of Christ. Several passages bring that idea out.” 1 Peter 4:12-13 (NIV) 12 Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. 13 But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. 2 Corinthians 1:5 (NIV) 5 Just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. Philippians 3:10 (NIV) 10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, “I don’t know about you, but I want to delete all the italics and keep the “good parts!” I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection, period. Thank you very much. But Paul is saying that these three things-knowing Christ, knowing the power of His resurrection, and participating in the fellowship of His sufferings-are all part of the same package. There is solidarity with your Savior when you suffer. You walk, in a sense, in Jesus’ very footsteps: suffering and then glory.” “Paul also makes this amazing statement: “Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of His body, which is the church” (Col. 1:24). Paul is not saying our sufferings add any redemptive or atoning value to Christ’s work on the cross. There’s nothing deficient about Jesus’ suffering or humiliation. But what it must mean is that there’s a purposeful link between the suffering of Christ and our own suffering.” “The sum total of Christ’s suffering are a necessary part of moving God’s agenda forward unto the consummation of His kingdom.” In other words, your suffering today, your pain today, is actually part of the engine that drives forward redemptive history. It drives forward, pushing back the curse. Suffering and glory: that’s the currency of the Kingdom of God.” “In fact, suffering reveals Christ to a glory starved world. Paul says this in his second letter to the Corinthians: 2 Corinthians 4:10-11 (NIV) 10 We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 11 For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. “This is difficult to understand. Could it be that our Christian culture’s conception and our own conception of what it means to manifest Jesus is too often self-sufficiency in disguise? Most of the time, many of us do not get away with looking stronger than we actually are. Yet the message of the New Testament writers is that true glory reveals itself in weakness, not strength. So every time you take a faltering step of faith in the midst of your chronic pain to love God and to love others in concrete ways, that is glory under construction. That is glory in the making.” “What implications arise from having this Christ-centered lens through which to view suffering? First, the very experiences that threaten to drive you the furthest from God are the exact experiences that bring you into the closest possible fellowship with your Savior. Do you believe that? “I believe, Lord. Help me overcome my unbelief.” “Secondly, your connection with Christ means that your identity is bigger than that of a chronic pain sufferer. Your long-term experience of pain, or any other chronic illness, has the potential of defining who you are. Listen to what Paul says: Romans 8:17 (NIV) 17 Now if we are children, then we are heirs–heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. “Paul is saying that your suffering actually confirms your identity as a child of God. It does not undermine that identity, even though it sometimes feels that way in the midst of your pain. We need a gaze that helps us see that we are a people who suffer with Christ. Our lives inextricably connect with His life.” Ibid pgs. 59-66. David Powlison also wrote an excellent article in the same book. He says that, “Helen had been betrayed by her husband. He had played the part of the dutiful, churchgoing husband, father, and provider for many years. Their two children were in college. But unbeknownst to Helen, he had maintained mistresses in three cities. Helen had trusted him with all the family finances, including a half-million dollars she had inherited. He siphoned off all her money into his name. He spent much of it and ran up debts besides, financing a lifestyle of gambling immorality, and partying. She’d been ignorant of the adulteries and fraud, but she was not unaware of other evils. For many years their sexual relationship had been a private agony to Helen. He routinely forced her to commit acts she found repellent. In public his demeanor was usually pleasant; he was seemingly good-natured, quick-witted, worldly-wise, successful, confidant, responsible. But in private he could be ill-humored. He would berate her for minor failings and threaten her with a beating. He routinely derided her as an ignorant and incompetent female, blaming her for all problems that arose. Helen suffered in silence, until bankruptcy brought the secret life into the open. Helen professed Christ sincerely, and had sought God as her refuge amidst the low-grade sexual and verbal violence to which she was accustomed. But when everything exploded, she found her presumed refuge insubstantial and insecure. All along, genuine faith in God as refuge had intertwined with Helen’s tendencies towards keeping up appearances: “Put up with it, keep quiet, pretend it’s not really happening, and everything’s OK.” Now she couldn’t keep silent. She was in trouble.” “What could she say? How should she think? What should she do? Where does God fit amidst such devastation? Psalm 10 was uttered and written for those who have been victimized by others. Psalm 10 was written for Helen. It is a message of honest anguish and genuine refuge. It is not a message about pretending. It is a message about facing both reality and truth.” “Ministry to Helen must help pick up many pieces. She needs the daily comfort, consolation, and encouragement of pastor and friends. She needs the church to play giving-hardball with her husband about his sins. (He skipped town two weeks later and moved in with one of the mistresses. He was excommunicated by the church for his impenitence.) Helen needs legal advice. Over the next two years her husband fought and obstructed every phase of legal proceedings.) She needs immediate financial help, and then financial council about where to go from here. She needs medical advice, about whether she had had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from him. She needs corporate worship: to praise God, to hear the Word of God, to participate in the Lord’s Supper, to join in interceding with God. She needs council, to console her in grief. She needs council, to nourish good fruits already present: faith, buds of forgiveness and love. She needs council, to deal with her own sin struggles: bitterness, fear, and unbelief. Most of all, Helen needs God. She needs to know that God is present, powerful, listening, just, caring, and understanding. She needs God to do something. Psalm 10 is for Helen. It is also for the family in Sri Lanka that must live amid the constant uncertainty about where the next terrorist attack might occur: “The bus that blew up had been packed with both explosives and ball bearings in order to inflict terrible injuries, and it was in our section of town, not some place remote from where we drive every day.” Psalm 10 is for the young man who was subjected to systematic torture, mind control, threats, and sexual violence as a child in boarding school. It is for the pastor who faces malcontents in the church who are out to get him. It is for the worker in the shop being persecuted for her faith because she won’t join in drunkenness and immorality. It is for the college student whose professor has an ax to grind against God. It is for the family who lives in a high crime neighborhood. It is for the recent widow on whom a home-repair scam preys. It is for anyone under assault from external temptations. It is for anyone exposed to the intellectual culture or the mass media culture of this modern and post-modern age. We live in a world where a roaring lion prowls, where many people are not friends wishing your welfare, but enemies wishing to use you and harm you.” As usual, we’ve covered a lot of ground in this morning’s message and there’s lots of food for thought in it. I encourage you to study it carefully and then slowly ponder it. I don’t know about you, but when I’m suffering intense physical and/or emotional pain, I want immediate relief. Furthermore, whenever I cry out in my anguish and plead with God to show me mercy and all I get in return is silence, I become very fearful wondering if He’s even there. After all, if He doesn’t exist and isn’t present in my suffering, I know that I will plunge myself into the depths of depression and despair. As you can see, that hasn’t been the case. That’s the reason I would like to share with you folks some of what God has taught me concerning pain and suffering. Lord willing, next week….