Understanding Suffering: Dealing with Difficult Problems with R.C. Sproul

several years ago i was invited to give a lecture at the covenant college down in lookout mountain tennessee and i remember the address that i gave at that time was called the locus not locust like the insect but the locus of astonishment that is the place where we focus on what is really amazing to us and i pointed out in that address on that occasion that we sing amazing grace and give lip service to the sense in which we are amazed by grace but i wonder how amazed we really are where we have so become

so accustomed to the mercy of god the patience of god and the grace of god that we begin to take it for granted and to assume it and then pretty soon to demand it and so that when he is gracious to us we're hardly surprised but i find that what is most astonishing characteristically to christians of our day is when they are visited by tragedy or affliction or suffering and many times the presence of suffering in our life undoes us and brings us to a state of a spiritual crisis and i think part of the

reason for that is that we hear in the culture these ministers who tell us that once you come to christ all your problems are over and that god doesn't ever will sickness or pain or affliction and so that when these things happen to us we have a crisis of faith and on that occasion in tennessee i used a portion of scripture from the 13th chapter of luke's gospel as a taking off point for the discussion there in luke 13 verse 1 we read this narrative there were present at that season some who told him about

the galileans whose blood pilate had mingled with their sacrifices and jesus answered and said to them do you suppose that these galileans were worse sinners than all other galileans because they suffered such things i tell you no but unless you repent you will all likewise perish were those eighteen on whom the tower and siloam fell and killed them do you think that they were worse sinners than all the other men who dwelt in jerusalem i tell you no but unless you repent you will all likewise perish now what's going on here is that the people

come to jesus and they're asking this question basically how could god allow these things to happen if god is good how can he stand by and let the tower fall upon the heads of innocent people just minding their business walking down the street or allow them to become victims of this savage attack of of pilots forces they mix the blood of the people with the sacrifices we're surprised when these things happen and what we may be even more surprised at is jesus response he said if you think that these things happen to these people because

they were worse sinners than anybody else i tell you no but unless you repent you will likewise perish now what's our lord doing here i think what he's saying to his inquirers is this you're asking me the wrong question the question you should be asking is why didn't that temple fall on my head why wasn't my blood mixed with the blood of the sacrifices with the galileans and somehow we assume that god owes it to us to give us a life free of suffering now we have to be careful when we look at this whole

question of suffering because though we have this passage here in luke we know in john chapter 9 the disciples come with a question to jesus about a man who had been born blind and they say whose sin was it the man or his parents that this fellow was born with this affliction and what does jesus say neither you've come to me with a false dilemma it wasn't as a punishment to the man and it wasn't as a punishment to the father or the mother it was that the son of man may be glorified in this

occasion we go to the whole book of job which spends an entire book of the bible wrestling with the question of the problem of suffering and we are introduced to the drama of a man who is the most righteous man in the world who then is reduced to the worst level of pain and misery and suffering of anyone in the world so much so that his friends began to think he must have been the chief of sinners to have deserved this fate of so much pain and job crawled up on a dung heap and cursed

the day of his birth and yet he said though he slay me yet will i trust him but job asked with anguish the question why god and i think that's a natural thing a normal thing for the christian when we are visited with pain and affliction and the tragic for us to cry out in pain saying why well we have to be careful when we ask that question to ask the question why when we're earnestly seeking an answer is a legitimate thing but the question why can be a thinly veiled accusation we can be saying

why when we say it like that the only answer we can legitimately expect from god is why not and we need to keep that in front of us at all times but the reality of suffering is something we all have to deal with and we deal with it in a pagan world and part of the problem that we experience in dealing with this particular difficult problem is that so often we hear views of pain and suffering that are pagan views of pain and suffering and we need to understand the difference between a christian understanding of

suffering and pagan views of suffering in the short time that we have today i'm going to mention four different varieties of views of suffering that have been popular at one time or another in the pagan world and the first one is what i'm going to call the docetic view i call it the docetic view because it is the view that views suffering and pain as an illusion this is the view of suffering that is basically one of denial it says that suffering is just a matter of the mind it's not real and we need to

understand that it's simply an illusion we get to that in for example in the religion of christian science i once had a lengthy discussion with a a a adherent of christian science who told me that evil was not real that it was just an illusion and also pain and suffering and all the things that are connected with it and i said well i'm standing here disagreeing with you in fact we were debating the issue in front of a group of people and i said and i'm telling these people that evil is real and that there

really is such a thing as pain and suffering do you agree with that and he said no of course not he says that's why i'm taking the opposite position i said do you think it's good that i'm telling these people that evil is real he hesitated because he knew he was now impaled on the horns of a dilemma because if he says yes uh it's it's good that i'm saying what i'm saying then he surrendered the argument and if he says no it's bad that i'm doing what i'm doing then he's also surrendered the argument

unless he can conclude that i'm a fig newton of his imagination and just an illusion as we're debating the point but really as a philosophical discussion it has little value to somebody on a hospital bed to say that suffering is not real because we all know it is real there is such a thing as pain there is such a thing as sorrow and it is no solution to the problem to deny the reality of it a second way in which pagans have dealt with the problem of suffering and evil is found in what i call

the historical uh classic stoic view and you hear the axioms of stoicism creeping into our popular culture when you hear such statements says keep a stiff upper lip or don't let anything get you down the stoics believed that we live in a world that is controlled by material forces and these material forces operate according to fixed deterministic laws and we have absolutely no control over what happens to us in this environment what happens to us is our faith or our karma it is just the result of these impersonal forces out there and we have no

freedom to determine our own destiny the only place where we do have the ability to exercise our freedom and to impact the state of our existence is by directing our attitudes or our emotions with respect to things that befall us that is i can't stop being hit by a truck this afternoon if that's the way it's going to be but i do have some power to decide how i'm going to react to it internally and so what the stoics sought to achieve was what they called philosophical attirachia or peace of mind you've maybe never heard

the term atarakia except as a brand name for a tranquilizer in the pharmaceutical world but that greek world word is the world is the word that means peace of mind whereby nothing disturbs our equanimity now the stoics also sought to reach that state by practicing diligently the art of what they called imperturb ability that is you practice controlling your emotions to such a degree that nothing will perturb you nothing will upset you and so you marshal these internal resources to get a thick skin or hide over your feelings so that if you do enter into

an arena of pain or of affliction you won't let it get you down you keep the stiff upper lip and bear it in in quietness and so on the third way in which pagans have sought to deal with suffering historically is through a method expounded by the stoics chief rivals in their day the hedonist and the hedonist or the hedonistic view is to find in this way hedonism historically is that philosophy of life that describes or defines the good in terms of the elimination of pain and the acquisition of pleasure now in the ancient world

there were two different types of hedonists in their philosophical orientation one that i'll call the crass hedonists and the other group i'll call the more refined hedonists the crass hedonists were called the sirenix and the siren eggs had were crewed in their pursuit of pleasure they are the ones that are depicted in the movies of the roman bacchanalia and the orgies and all of that stuff where they would go to these banquets and and gorge themselves with food until they were completely satiated and then they'd go out stick their fingers down their throats regurgitate so

they could go back in and fill their stomachs with more food they lived lives of unbridled licentiousness as much sex and drink and food and physical sensuous pleasure that they could possibly enjoy and that was their way to happiness but again this crass school of hedonists uh was short-lived because it didn't take them long to figure out that if you have an unbridled appetite for pleasure that has no moderation or no balance to it the pain of the consequences of such unbridled self-indulgence will be felt very shortly and acutely there are only so many hangovers

that you can have until you begin to realize that there's not as much pleasure in this activity as you maybe thought there was and so a new version of hedonism was developed in a more refined sophisticated way by those who were called the epicureans and there they didn't seek maximum pleasure but rather optimum pleasure the most amount of pleasure you can have without at the same time increasing the threshold of pain and that's why they became gourmands and in their uh eating habits and and all the rest and learned the best wines and for them

it was just a little bit of adultery just enough to keep life exciting and not enough to to drive you to destruction of course that viewpoint either in its crude form or in its crash in its refined form still addresses people today we still have epicureans and we have a culture that has been drenched and saturated in the philosophy of hedonism in fact there's never been a time in american history where we've had such a high rate of alcoholism and of unbridled sexual behavior and of intoxication and addiction to hard drugs and most of the

psychologists and social sociologists look at this phenomenon of our day which we have given ourselves over to the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure why in many cases because of a response to an extremely negative view of life it's not an accident that suicide is the highest ranking cause of death among certain age groups in this people here in this nation because people are taught now and and bombarded by all kinds of sources telling them that they have emerged from the slime they're cosmic accidents their life is meaningless their suffering is therefore meaningless and so they try

to dull the pain and the ache of the anxiety of being hurled into a meaningless existence by seeking relief in the stupor of pleasure there's nothing new about that just the dimensions are different we remember paul when he addressed the corinthians and gave his magnificent defense of the resurrection when he was going through that discussion at one point he said if christ is not raised let us do what let us eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die see that's the creed of the hedonist sooner or later tragedy death pain suffering and affliction are

going to get me so i only go through once life once i'm going to grab all of the gusto i can get right now and i'm going to fill up on pleasure because tomorrow i die in the meantime it's party time and so this uh this approach to hedonism in many ways is motivated by a fear of and a desire to escape from from the pangs of suffering we talk of those who drown their sorrows in a bottle and perhaps the most popular psychoanalysts of our culture are the bartenders that are found on every street

in every metropolitan area because there are a lot of people who are unhappy who are suffering and who are in pain and are desperately trying to find solace and relief from their pain any way that they can well these are just some of the ways in which people cope with the reality of pain and suffering and obviously the biblical view of suffering is on a collision course with these views because the one overarching principle of the biblical view of suffering is this that suffering for the christian is never an exercise in futility it is never

an exercise in futility but that suffering is used by god for redemptive purposes among his people and we are told where to put the locus of astonishment we're told by peter we're told by james that we ought not to think that it is something strange when we are called upon to suffer because the christian faith is born in suffering the way of salvation is the via dolorosa the way of sadness the way of the cross and christ himself promises his people in the world you will have tribulation you will have afflictions paul says that he

fills up in his own body the afflictions that have not yet been completed in the body of christ his church that we all are called to participate in the sorrows of christ who was called a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and there's a difference between that and stoicism i don't know how many times when i'll go into the home of christian folks where somebody has just died and people feel like they're not allowed to weep they're not allowed to express any kind of sorrow or mourning or grief and that they're supposed to be

stoics and we won't allow them to grieve we'll say to them that that that's an act of unbelief or something like that as if when jesus went to the place of lazarus after he had died knowing what he was going to do still he entered into the grief of the moment and our lord himself wept he was a man of sorrows acquainted with grief and the scriptures make it plain that grief is a legitimate human emotion and there is nothing sinful about mourning the loss of a loved one that emotion of grief the emotion of

sorrow in and of itself is perfectly legitimate it can easily become a spirit of self-pity or of bitterness but those are distortions of legitimate emotions and the legitimate emotion of of sadness and sorrow are not only permitted by scripture but in many cases commended we are told in the old testament that it is better to go to the house of mourning than it is to spend your time with fools herman melville once made the statement that until we understand that one grief outweighs a thousand joys we will never understand what christianity is trying to make

us when paul speaks of the great benefit of our justification whereby we're adopted in the fellowship in the family of god he says being justified therefore you have what peace with god accessed into his presence and then he goes on to say and in the midst of this because of your relationship to god you are able to endure tribulation knowing that tribulation works patience and patience character and these things will not leave us ashamed so that god uses tribulation he uses our pain not simply to punish us but to polish us to sanctify us in

many cases we go into the refiner's fire so that god will remove the draws from our lives draw us close to himself and in the process of pain and suffering we are made more like christ and then paul reminds us that the sufferings of this present time or but for a moment they are not the final answer and that the sufferings that we are called to endure in this world aren't worthy to be compared with the glorious things that god has stored up in heaven for those who love him so in one sense our suffering

becomes a bridge to glory now that doesn't mean that we are supposed to go out and look for suffering and to say thank you lord every time you know the sky falls on our heads and there are people who try to do that and that can be a form of denial it can be more docetic than it is christian or it can be more you know as i say treating the pain as if it were illusory when in fact it's very very real we don't rejoice that we have a headache we don't rejoice that we

have cancer eating away at us what we do rejoice in is the presence of god in the midst of our pain but again we have to understand lest we fall into being absolutely undone and astonished whenever affliction hits us that we are to expect it it's part of our call as christians that god has called us into a fallen world to minister into a world that is a veil of tears and it's a place of pain and there's no way that we can ever expect to escape it now suppose i'm afflicted with suffering why why

am i afflicted well there could be several reasons it may be that god needs to correct me and that it is part of his corrective wrath to make me sick or to bring me low he does that there are manifold examples of that in scripture how did miriam get leprosy god gave her leprosy to bring her to repentance what is jesus saying here unless you repent you all likewise parries sometimes the suffering that we have in this world is because god is correcting us or disciplining us but we can't jump to the conclusion that every

time we get sick or every time we suffer that as there's a direct correlation between our disobedience and the pain that we're experiencing again job is exhibit a to refute that argument job was more righteous than anybody else and yet he suffered more than anybody else and it would have been a terrible mistake to assume that there was a direct proportionate relationship between the degree of his guilt and the degree of his pain we mustn't do that and so we don't always know and we don't have to know what we have to know is him

because when job demanded an answer for his pain and ask god to speak to him and explain it to him and god finally appeared to job and interrogated job for several chapters what answer did job get from god he didn't get one god didn't say to job you're suffering this pain for this this this and this the only answer that job got to his affliction in the final analysis was god himself presence of god and in fact what god was saying is job here i am i am with you trust me now when people say

trust me it's time to run but when god says trust me it's time to trust let me finish by reminding you that our god never promised any of us that we would never go into the valley of the shadow of death what he did promise us was that he would go with us yea though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death i will fear no evil for thou art with me thy rod and thy staff they comfort me we have the good shepherd we have his presence we have his consolation that doesn't

mean we're removed from the arena of pain but that we are upheld in the arena of pain