The Three Questions Always Asked in Suffering (Part 2)
Question #2: Where is God in all of this?
When we enter into a time of suffering we tend to experience a feeling of profound abandonment. Jesus surely experienced this. Please look with me at Mark 1:12-13 again, “And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.” Please notice two things.
First, notice how Mark repeats this phrase “into/in the wilderness.” This is odd when you consider that we already know this all occurred in the wilderness. Mark 1:3 tells us that the voice would cry in the wilderness. Mark 1:4 tells us that John the Baptist baptized in the wilderness. And yet, Mark in this pericope of just thirty words expends six of those words in the Greek text to tell us what we already know. What is Mark doing here? He is establishing a contrast. There were people around John the Baptist in the wilderness – tens of thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. Mark strives to make clear that Jesus was driven to an altogether different place – a desolate, God forsaken place quite unlike where John was baptizing.
Second, there may have been no people around, but Jesus was never truly alone. Mark 1:12 indicates the Holy Spirit drove Jesus there and Mark 1:13 indicates that God sent angels to minister to him. Where is God in all of your pain and suffering? He is right there with you and He will never let you down. Deuteronomy 31:6, “Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them: for the Lord thy God, he it is that doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.” God declares in Isaiah 41:10, “Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.”
Roland Bingham documented the painful life of Annie Johnson Flint in his book The Making of the Beautiful. Annie Johnson Flint was born on Christmas Eve 1866 in Vineland, New Jersey. Her mother died when she was only three years of age while giving birth to her younger sister. Her father sent both girls to live with a widow of an old army comrade who had been killed in the Civil War and the widow made it abundantly clear that the girls were not welcome. Their biological father then gave up both girls after he was diagnosed with an incurable disease and they were adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Flint. Annie Johnson Flint eventually went on to graduate from high school and she began teaching primary class. In her second year, she was stricken with arthritis – a condition that steadily grew worse over time to the extent that it became difficult for her to even walk and she had to eventually quit working altogether. Later, both of her adoptive parents died within a few months of each other and she was orphaned for a second time with very little money saved. Doctors told Ms. Flint that she would spend the rest of her days as a helpless invalid because of her condition and she indeed spent 40 years as a shut-in. Roland Bingham writes, "For more than forty years there was hardly a day when she did not suffer pain." Every joint in her body was rigid and she could write but a few lines on paper with great pain. She had to sleep with nine soft pillows carefully arranged on her bed to protect her "exquisitely sensitive, pain-smitten body from the normal contact of the bed-clothing, so distressing it was for her to recline in the hope of rest at night." Through her ordeal Ms. Flint wrote a poem called "He Giveth More Grace."
He giveth more grace when the burdens grow greater,
He sendeth more strength when the labors increase;
To added afflictions He addeth His mercy,
To multiplied trials, His multiplied peace.
When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
When our strength has failed ere the day is half done,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources,
Our Father’s full giving is only begun.
Fear not that thy need shall exceed His provision,
Our God ever yearns His resources to share;
Lean hard on the arm everlasting, availing;
The Father both thee and thy load will upbear.
His love has no limits, His grace has no measure,
His power no boundary known unto men;
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus
He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again
Question #3: How do I cope with suffering?
We cope with our suffering by remembering three things.
First, remember that the pain is temporary. In our text in Mark 1:13, the Bible indicates that Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days. A lot of ink has been spilled on the number 40. Many Bible teachers and commentators seek to find some special significance in this number. It probably has some link to the 40 years of wilderness wandering by Israel after the exodus. But, this is difficult to make out here in Mark’s account. 40 days can simply stand in as an idiomatic expression for a long, but limited period of time. Such is its use in passages like Genesis 7:4, Numbers 13:25, 1 Samuel 17:16, Jonah 3:4, and Acts 1:3. In fact, in later Jewish literature only the number 7 was more common than the number 40. All of this to say this, whatever the trial for you as a Christian, it will end. If not in this lifetime, then certainly in the next.
Hans-Georg Gadamer once wrote that a person without a horizon exaggerates the value of what is immediately present, whereas the horizon enables an individual "to sense the relative significance of what is near or far, great or small." "A horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand – not in order to look away from it, but to see it better within a larger whole and in truer proportion…. [F]ar away facts…are more effective than near ones in giving us true bearings." Pain tends to force us to make this temporary life the horizon. And the result is the tendency to magnify the suffering that is immediately present and to value that which is provisional as if it were permanent. It is difficult to look beyond suffering and it is so easy to feel justified in acting as the ultimate arbiters of what is good and what is not even before the appointed time for such judgments. But, our horizon is eternity. This life is a vale of tears. Heaven is our permanent home. And when we get there, God will wipe away every tear and the suffering will be engulfed in glory. 2 Corinthians 4:17 declares, “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” And it is in this that we as the faithful find our true bearings, by fixing our gaze upon a horizon that stretches to eternity – world without end.
Second, remember that God is good. Certainly, the life and sacrificial death of Jesus in the gospel of Mark attests to this – the gospel indeed screams it. D.A. Carson once told the story of a student of his when he was a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He said this, "Let me tell you about a man, we'll call him Bill Johns. That's not his name, but it'll do. Bill Johns was skinny as a bean pole, 6 foot 4, single, went out as a missionary to a Latin American country. [He] learned Spanish well, became a very fruitful evangelist, trainer, church planter and pastor in South America. After about 15 years there, he married a missionary lass who was down there on her own and, rather later in life than most, they had a little girl. When the little girl was about 3 ½, the mission wanted to send both of them back to Trinity where I teach in Chicago so that he could get a PhD in New Testament because they wanted him to up the level of training in Latin America and he knew the language by this time and knew the culture and the PhD would help him. He came to Trinity, started his PhD and his wife at that point, six months into it, was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. The usual – mastectomy, chemotherapy, fighting for her life. But, she seemed to come out of it for a while, things seemed to be alright. He started up his studies again. The church helped him. The mission board helped him. His family, a godly family up in the Twin Cities, helped him. He continued with his studies. Six months later, he was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer. The hospitals in the Chicago area that are known for cancer care – Lutheran General for example is well known for its cancer care – they told him there was nothing they could do for him. The mission sent him to the Mayo Clinic. And the Mayo Clinic said, 'We don't know this will work, but we're willing to take out 90% of your stomach and give you drugs that are actually designed for colon cancer and things like that. They may work. We've had some success.' They took out 90% of his stomach and gave him these experimental drugs. Six months later, skinnier than ever, eating about ten times a day because his stomach couldn't hold much food, he came back to Trinity to work on his PhD. Skinnier than ever. He did another six months and his wife's cancer came back. And she died. Eventually, he came back to Trinity and finished his PhD. The last time I saw him his daughter was now 9 ½ or 10. They were in our church. Going back to Latin America. And as he spoke in our church for half an hour on that Sunday morning, all he talked about was the goodness of God. Because you see he understood the gospel. And that, I tell you, is merely normal Christianity."
Third, and finally, remember that God loves you. Please look with me at Mark 1:11 the verse that comes just before our text, “And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” This is the last thing Jesus ever heard before He entered His trials and I suspect this sustained Him through the struggle. Likewise, if you are a Christian, you are forgiven, clothed in the righteousness of Christ, and adopted into the family of God and He loves you more than you know. Satan often uses the love of God as a cudgel to beat us into submission, to hit us with it in our pain to get us to question it. But, instead of a source of testing, may it forever be a source of strength. Timothy Keller was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2002 and then he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2020 and he died from it in May 2023. He wrote this, “If we ask the question ‘Why does God allow evil and suffering to continue?’ And we look at the cross of Jesus, we still don’t know what the answer is...However, we now know what the answer isn’t. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us.”
Many of you have gone through unimaginable pain. Some of you are going through it right now. Romans 8:28 declares, “And we know that all things (even the worst things) work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” But, it’s hard for you to see that right now because the pain is so loud. And my hope and prayer is that you will hold onto the truths you do know until God makes the good clear. Suffering is hard to understand and answers are elusive. But, we have a Heavenly Father we can trust.
Corrie Ten Boom’s father Casper was a watchmaker and he would often travel to Amsterdam by train to the Naval Observatory and Corrie would often travel with him on these trips. On the train trips home, Corrie would often ask her father about things that troubled her. On one of these trips when she was ten or eleven, she asked her father about a poem she had read in school. One line of that poem read as follows: “a young man whose face was not shadowed by sexsin.” Corrie writes, “I suddenly asked, ‘Father, what is sexsin?’ He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor. ‘Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?' he said. I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning. ‘It’s too heavy,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.’ And I was satisfied. More than satisfied – wonderfully at peace. There were answers to this and all my hard questions – for now I was content to leave them in my father’s keeping.”