God’s Providence in Suffering: Making Sense of Suffering, Part 3

Don Carson: I suggested earlier that the most conceptually difficult of the six pillars was the fourth, with those two propositions concerning the mystery of providence. At the end of our last session I discussed one thing the Bible speaks about concerning this: suffering as a preparation for believers to help others.

That is, the way that suffering, granted that it is a fallen world, is sometimes used by God, in his providence, to prepare us to help others and to bring comfort with the comfort that we ourselves have been comforted with. This is a very Pauline notion. I would like to take a few moments to tease out some further things that the Bible speaks about that we can conveniently locate under this mystery of providence.

Secondly, suffering as a temporal discipline. That is, suffering as part of God’s means of disciplining us. Now again, there are many passages that talk this way, perhaps none more straightforwardly than Hebrews 12, where we’re told that every good father disciplines his child and God, in particular, always disciplines those whom he loves.

So much so that if God doesn’t discipline you at some point, then you are (the language is very blunt) a bastard, you’re an illegitimate child, because his genuine sons and daughters will be disciplined. God is a good father. That’s very strong language. That means that some of the things we face, some of the sufferings we face, are part of God’s rebuke or punishment or toughening us up.

When you start looking for examples in the Bible, they’re not hard to find. It’s true that on occasion, sickness, for example, may have nothing to do with punishment. For example, in John 9, with respect to the man who was born blind. The disciples don’t have that one figured out yet, and they ask Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?”

What they were thinking is pretty hard to imagine. This guy sinned, so he was born blind? Can you imagine him telling a whole lot of lies in the womb? Or maybe he was punished proactively for what he would do? I don’t know what was in their head. It wasn’t very clear. Yet in any case, Jesus says, “Neither. This is for the glory of God.” So not every sickness is directly related to some particular sin.

On the other hand, in chapter 5 of John’s gospel, Jesus heals a man who has been paralyzed for 38 years, and after he is healed, Jesus says to him, “Go and sin no more …” That is along the line that he has been sinning. “… lest a worse thing happen to you.” The unambiguous implication is that this paralysis stemmed from particular sin. Or remember what is said by the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 11. There, because of some people’s approach to the Lord’s Table, Paul concludes, “This is why some of you are sick, and some of you have actually died.”

In fact, at the risk of a generalization.… I’m not sure this is always true, but there’s a lot of biblical evidence for it often being true, and I think there’s quite a bit from church history that confirms it as well. By and large, when the church is most holy, there is most temporal discipline. One of the marks that God is abandoning his people in judicial punishment is that there aren’t many temporal judgments. It’s as if God is saying, “Okay, go ahead, and do what you want. Watch what happens.”

So it’s when the church is holy, just this side of Pentecost, that you get the Ananias and Sapphira episode. Now if God imposed Ananias- and Sapphira-type discipline every time anybody in our churches ever told a lie that boasted about spiritual realities and thus was a lie against the Holy Spirit, I wonder how many of us would be left next Sunday. That we’re not being chastened may not be so much a mark of God’s goodness to us as a mark of God’s judgment upon us.

So this means, therefore, that when we do suffer, we should not automatically assume that we’re suffering as a direct consequence of some sin. We should at least ask the question of whether God is yelling at us through the megaphone of pain. We should at least ask the question. We shouldn’t conclude too quickly and pretend that we’re guilty of something that we’re not guilty of (remember Job), but on the other hand, sometimes God is curbing us, clipping our wings, warning us, and rebuking us.

He never does so out of malice or because he’s some ghastly father who takes some huge, vicious glee out of being a brutal parent who can beat up on us. No, no. Hebrews 12 says, very emphatically, he does this because he’s the perfect Father. He does it out of love. He cares for us, and it’s for our good. So that’s a second heading under the mystery of providence, where we are enabled to think a little more profoundly about what we might be going through.

Thirdly, suffering that gives us authority in our witness. Sometimes, granted that this is a fallen and broken world, how we handle suffering (by still trusting God) gives us a voice of immense authority in our witness. Do you remember that tsunami a number of years ago? One of the people killed was a young Christian Danish chap and his wife who were there on their honeymoon. He was training for ministry in Denmark, which is an immensely secularized state.

His father was a recently retired minister in the Danish cabinet, whom everybody knew to be a Christian and thought he was a bit of an odd duck. There aren’t many genuine Christian believers in leadership in Denmark. So this father was asked, on national television, how he was going to justify his belief in God in the light of losing his son and daughter-in-law (on their honeymoon, of all things) in a tsunami with countless thousands of others. How would he handle that?

On national television, he quietly said, “I don’t know, except I do know that the God I serve sent his Son, who died most horribly so that I might be forgiven.” Every time they pushed him, he went back to the cross. Every time. All of Denmark was stilled under the integrity of the man’s quiet faith.

Then he would add something like, “Of course, I do know I shall see my son again. It’s not a final goodbye because the Christ I serve, who suffered so much for me, rose from the dead. That was just the beginning of a great resurrection at the end of the age.” So you see, everything they threw at him, he turned around to make Christ center: the cross, the resurrection, the final hope …

Now I’m not saying the tsunami was a good thing. I’m not saying the death of his son was a good thing. Nevertheless, in the mystery of God’s providence, sometimes God uses these things to enable people to speak with a kind of clarity and credibility to a watching world which they would never, ever have were it not for those things.

Fourthly, suffering that makes us homesick for heaven. Sometimes, especially for those of us who have watched people die, we know that suffering can serve, in God’s good providence, to make us homesick for heaven. You watch people who have had really remarkably good health suddenly being diagnosed with, let’s say, a brain tumor, which, in all likelihood, is going to take them out in two years. Because they’ve had good health all their lives and are only 56, it all seems so unjust.

They might fight it tooth and nail, saying that they will beat it. They’re not yet ready for heaven. Maybe they ought to be. Maybe they ought to be hungry for a resurrection existence. Maybe, but do you know what actually prepares them? About a year and a half of suffering. The older you get, the more wrinkles you have, the more replaced joints, the number of bypasses, the onset of senility, and so on. Let me tell you, the resurrection body starts looking awfully good!

It can be a great mercy to go through just enough that you start thinking in transcendental terms, rather than acting, as too many of us do, as if this life is all there is. One of the things that suffering does do is free us up a bit to remember that second pillar. That is, there are some implications from the end.

If you have had different kinds of death in your family, you know that these things come and hit you in different ways. My mother died after years and years of Alzheimer’s. Nine years of it. By the end, there was nothing there. Even three months before the end, when she couldn’t say anything, when her stare was vacant, if you held her hand and sang an old piece like “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine …” you’d get a little squeeze.

If you’d quote King James Version at her (that’s what she was brought up on), you’d get a little squeeze. If you’d hold up the pictures of the grandchildren, she didn’t have a clue. However, gradually everything goes. It’s just gone. When she died, let me tell you quite frankly, there weren’t a lot of tears left. The sorrowing had already been done. So in one sense, her long illness, which was not at all pleasant, actually prepared her family for her going into eternity.

By contrast, there was my father. He started preaching again, at the age of 78 or 79, after Mum died. Then he went from preaching a sermon to dead in six weeks. Now in one sense, that was a better way to go, from his point of view, I’m sure. It was also harder on the family, in a strange way. There was less time for goodbyes and the like.

In the peculiar mix of things under God’s sovereignty, in a sense, sometimes these painful things to go through are part of God’s preparing of either the person or the family for a little bit of homesickness for the new heaven and the new earth. That’s not all bad. None of it’s good; I know that. This is a sin-cursed world. Yet granted that, nevertheless, God, in his providence, sometimes uses even these things to make us reorient our visions, hopes, aspirations, and sense of belonging.

Fifthly, suffering as an occasion to testify to God’s grace and goodness. Sometimes, these sorts of things also give us occasion to testify to God’s goodness before a watching world: either God’s goodness, because he has taken us out of them, or God’s goodness, because he’s added more grace.

On the one hand, there is Psalm 40. I suggest when this is over, you go home and read it and re-read it. This is where the psalmist said he was in a miry bog. He was in a slimy bog, and God took him out and put his feet on a safe place. Many shall see it and be glad. As a consequence, David has a new song in his mouth, a new song in his heart. Because of this, he says, “I will not keep quiet in the congregation. I will talk about it.” It becomes an occasion for praise to God.

On the other hand, in 2 Corinthians 12, there is the apostle Paul with this thorn in the flesh, this messenger from Satan. He prays earnestly that God will take it away, and God says, “Nope! Not going to.” So Paul prays some more, three times, earnestly. God says, “Paul, my grace is sufficient for you.”

“Therefore,” Paul says, “I will the more readily glorify in my weakness. I will boast in my weakness that the strength of Christ may be manifest in me.” Isn’t that incredible? Paul has actually got to the place in his suffering where he sees that the weakness (which God himself, in his sovereignty, is putting him through) may be an advantage, so that Paul will learn that God’s strength is manifested in our weakness.

Every once in a while, regardless of what kind of work you do or what kind of ministry you have in the church (you know, “I know that I teach a Sunday school class” or “I know that I’m handling the old folks’ home visitation” or whatever it is that you’re doing), do you sometimes think, “Boy, I’d be a lot better at it if only I …”? (You can fill in the blank there with some nice thing.)

Or it could be in a sport too. “I’d be really, really good if I didn’t have this really weak knee.” Or “I’d be a lot more effective in my investment business, when I make a formal presentation, if I didn’t have this really ugly mole on my face.” “If only I were improved in this area …” Or maybe, “If I had a really first-class education, I’d be a better preacher. In fact, with my background of not such a hot education after all, I went and served, but I wish I’d had a lot more. It would have made me a lot more effective.”

Do you ever think like that? Make up your own example. Don’t most of us think like that at some time? As if God weren’t in charge. As if God weren’t sovereign. As if God didn’t know about the bad knee, the mole, the stutter, the education, and all the other things. The fact of the matter is that in 2 Corinthians 12, Paul understands. He learns. He learns that when he is given wonderful, spectacularly great revelations that others haven’t had, it’s a mark of the grace of God in his life that God has also given him sufferings that others haven’t had.

He said, “Otherwise, I would be tempted to be really, really arrogant. It’s to keep me from arrogance because of the things I have received.” He wants to make sure that nobody will think more of him than measuring him by what he says and does. Do you hear that? Most of us go through life fearing that people will not think enough of us.

Paul goes through life fearing that people will think too much. If he has to be assessed at all, let them assess him not by some secret revelation that he’s had or some esoteric claim to another Damascus-road experience. Let them assess him just by what he does in the public arena, what he says and does.

Meanwhile, if God gives him this thorn in the flesh, this messenger from Satan, “I will glory in it,” he says, “because I learn thereby that God’s strength is perfected in my weakness.” This means, somewhere along the line, you have to glory in your moles! You have to glory in your awkwardness, the wrinkles, and all the rest because that’s the context in which God uses you.

If you were so stunningly beautiful, so magnificently a hunk, all your hair after all, built, swift with your tongue, bright, a first-class education, really good with your hands, charm coming out your little fingers, such a gift of the gab, so persuasive in all of your work, rich (so you can be generous and don’t have to depend on anybody), a really excellent Bible teacher, really good with young people, and on and on.… What sort of arrogant son of a gun would you be? No, no. God is so wise. This is a fallen and broken world, and we’re looking for all the wrong things.

In the mystery of God’s providence, even those things that we go through in life are all part of teaching us a certain kind of dependence on grace. So we learn to be grateful for the things God has given us and learn to be grateful for the weaknesses we have, too. God delights in doing things through us when we’re not all that bright, not all that clever, not all that powerful, not all that good looking, and not all that intelligent. He does things through us in any case because God will not give his glory to anybody.

So that whether in the case of a David in Psalm 40, where God does take him out of the muck and plants his feet on the rock, or in the case of a Paul in 2 Corinthians, where God doesn’t take him out of the muck but just adds more grace.… In both cases, it becomes a reason for public testimony to the grace of God, the sustaining strength of God, and the goodness of God in our lives.

We would not be able to articulate this if we were so full of confidence, smoothness, and giddy success all the time that we thought, somehow, we had all of life nicely tapped, thank you. It would merely become an excuse for one more round of idolatry. Well, much more could be said, but I’ll let that pass. The mystery of providence.

1. Insights from the centrality of the incarnation and the cross, including the resurrection and all that flows from it.

I wish we had the time to go through passage after passage where biblical texts speak of the person and work of Christ. When I was a boy, we sang:

What grace is this that brought my Savior down?

That made him stoop to leave his throne and crown?

The One who made the stars, the sea,

The One who threw out every galaxy;

What condescension, oh, how can it be?

What pain he suffered and what agony,

When on the cross, he died

For sinners crucified.

What grace is this? What grace is this?

“The Word became flesh and tabernacled for a while among us.” God making himself present among us. Then after this long section in Romans 1:18–3:20 that talks about sinfulness there is one of the great atonement passages in the New Testament: Romans 3:21–26, the passage Luther called “the central point of the epistle to the Romans and of the whole Bible.” Work your way carefully through Romans 3:21–26. I wish I had time to expound that for about an hour and a half.

The whole point is that God presented Christ as the propitiation, the sacrifice that turns God’s wrath away from us, so that God could simultaneously be just and the one who justifies us. That sentence is so rich and so full of “God talk” and theological vocabulary that we hear the words and recognize that they’re sort of pious. They wash over us, but they don’t mean a lot. Let me just unpack that a little bit.

Do you know the difference between propitiation and expiation? Yes? No? You’re not sure? Let me unpack the difference between expiation and propitiation. It’s very important. In expiation, God cancels sin. The object of expiation is sin. God expiates sin; he cancels sin. In propitiation.… Well, that’s tricky.

In the pagan world, where you have lots and lots of gods and godlets, then the idea is that the sacrificer propitiates one of these gods in order to get their favor. The effort is to make the gods propitious, or favorable. It’s an effort to make the gods smile on us. Pagan religion is a tit-for-tat religion. I scratch your back; you scratch my back.

So if you want to make a sea voyage, you go and offer up a sacrifice to the god of the sea, Neptune, in the hope that the god of the sea will smile on you and give you a safe passage to Tarshish. That’s what you do. If you’re going to give a speech, then you offer a nice sacrifice to the god of communication, Hermes (in the Greek world) or Mercury (in the Latin world), because you want the god of communication to bless you in your endeavor. You try to propitiate the god to make the god favorable.

But, how can you speak of God presenting Christ to be a propitiation? That was a question that was raised by a very pious liberal in the 1930s in Britain. His name was C.H. Dodd. He said, “Listen. Read the Bible: ‘God so loved the world that he gave his Son.’ If God already loves the world so much that he gave his Son, how can the giving of the Son make God propitious? He’s already so favorable that he gives the Son! How can the death of the Son, then, make God favorable? How can it do that? He’s already favorable.”

Therefore, he says that the word that is found in our Bibles today in Romans 3:24–25, propitiation, can’t actually be propitiation; it must be expiation. There’s no sense in which Christ’s cross work propitiates God because, after all, God is already so propitious that he gave his Son.

However, in that case, what do you do with the fact that the previous two and a half chapters have all talked about the wrath of God? The God who loves the world so much he sends his Son is also the God described in these chapters as the God who stands over against us in wrath. God reveals his wrath from heaven against all wickedness of wicked people who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. What do you do with that?

So this produced a long debate that went on, actually, for decades. For those of you who read theology books, one of the more important contributions in the 1960s was by an Australian called Leon Morris, who wrote a book titled The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross. It’s still worth selling your shirt for and buying! A more recent book by Mike Ovey, Andrew Sach, and Steve Jeffery, Pierced for Our Transgressions, is still worth reading and buying.

What they pointed out was how regularly this notion of propitiation (that is the word that’s used) is found in contexts that speak of God’s wrath. For the fact of the matter is that, biblically speaking, God stands over against us in wrath because he is holy. Hence, the 600 times that the Bible speaks of the wrath of God. Hence, everything that flows out of Genesis 3 and the first pillar.

God does stand over against us in wrath. He would not be a nicer or better or superior God if he really said to all sinners everywhere, starting with me and ending up with Hitler or anyone else in between, “I don’t really care what you do. You know, I’m a nice sort of God. So I will just smile, and it won’t matter.” In fact, he’s a holy God, and it does matter. He does care when his name is besmirched.

He stands over against us in wrath, but he stands over against us in love too. He’s the God who cries, “Turn, turn! Why will you die? The Lord has no pleasure in the death of the wicked.” He’s the God who cries, “Turn, turn! Be saved, you ends of the earth!” He’s the God of whom it is said, “God so loved the world that he gave his Son.”

He stands against us in wrath because we are sinners. He stands over against us in love because he’s that kind of God. Although his invitation is to all, he stands in a peculiar relationship of love to those whom he draws to himself by the power of his Spirit. Not because we’re any better than anybody else, but because he is that kind of God.

So that when you read these verses, in Romans 3, you’re supposed to see, from the previous three chapters, God stands against us in wrath. Now God sets forth his Son to be the propitiating sacrifice, the one who by his death, by taking our sin and our guilt upon himself, turns aside the Father’s righteous wrath so that God can be seen to be just while justifying the ungodly. So that God can be just, vindicated, while justifying the ungodly.

I’ll tell you one of the reasons why this is a little hard for us to see sometimes. Have you ever used this illustration when you’ve been explaining substitutionary atonement to your friends? It’s a bit like a judge who pronounces sentence on some nasty piece of work. It might be five years in prison or a fine of $50,000 or whatever. He pronounces the verdict and sentences the bloke. Then he steps off the bench, takes off his robes, and goes to prison himself or pays the fine himself. It’s that kind of substitution.

Have you ever used that kind of illustration? In one sense, that illustration is good. It shows something of the substitution that takes place, instead of that person bearing the sin and the blame, the judge himself takes it. However, do you know why this illustration rings so false in our ears? Because in our ears, the judge is the administrator of a larger system.

The judge is never the offended party. If a mugger mugs a judge, the judge is supposed to recuse himself or herself from the case because legally, the mugger has offended against the state or against the laws of the land or, in a monarchy, against the crown or against Parliament. He has offended against Congress or against something, but not against the judge. The judge is merely the administrator of a larger system. So much so that if the judge is the victim, then the judge is supposed to recuse himself.

Therefore, a judge in our system doesn’t have the right to get off the bench and pay the penalty. That would be unjust! He owes it to the system to be fair, to be just. He owes it to the laws of the land. He owes it to the court. He owes it, as a matter of principle, to administer justice fairly. He doesn’t have the right to take the other person’s place.

God, however, is always the offended party. He is the judge, and he never recuses himself. Never. He doesn’t have to in order to preserve justice because his justice is perfect, even though he is the offended party. So God is the offended party, and in perfect sovereign freedom, he can step off that bench if he wants to, so long as he maintains justice, so long as payment is made, and so long as the penalty is paid. He pays it himself.

That’s why Christians have called the cross, amongst other things.… It’s a lot of things, but amongst them, at the very heart, it’s a penal substitutionary sacrifice. It’s substitutionary in that Christ takes my place. It’s penal in that what he is doing is paying off my penalty. He’s paying off the punishment that I should receive. It’s a penal substitutionary sacrifice. Now it can be configured in a lot of different ways. A lot of different ways of thinking of the cross are presented in the New Testament, but that one lies at the heart of absolutely everything.

C.H. Dodd so hated penal substitution as a notion that he fought it all his life. When he was involved as the senior editor of the Bible translation of the New English Bible, he came to this passage. As he and his senior committee people were working through Romans 3:21–26, he was heard, muttering under his breath, as he worked through the Greek text, “What rubbish,” whereupon one of his colleagues of more orthodox temperament wrote a limerick:

There was a professor called Dodd

Whose name was exceedingly odd;

He spelt, if you please,

His name with three “D’s,”

While one is sufficient for God.

That is a quintessentially British way of handling theological controversy. It has nothing to do with anything, but it is a spectacularly good put-down.

Now in Romans 3, Paul will not get away with things. Christ is the one whom God has presented as the propitiating sacrifice so that God can simultaneously be vindicated as just in all of his decisions and be the one who justifies (who declares not guilty, who declares just, those who put their faith in him).

Now then, what does that have to do with the Odyssey? What does that have to do with all of our talk about suffering? Many, many, many things. Theologically, all of our suffering comes directly or indirectly from the fall. All the way through to hell itself! There is a sense in which some temporal suffering here, whether war or disaster or the like, is already, biblically speaking, a kind of pre-configuration of the ultimate suffering.

Christ comes and takes the ultimate suffering of his people. He takes our penalty. So he’s not just a God who stands back and looks in magnificent detachment at all those poor, hopeless, little rebels down there. He comes and takes the supreme curse upon himself. That changes everything you think about God.

If you start arguing with some voices in our age, “I just want God to be fair,” where does that end? Perfect fairness will see us all consigned to the pit. Do you really want God to be fair? The Bible speaks of God’s mercy as well as God’s wrath. The Bible doesn’t picture God merely as a distant judge, a deist figure who stands a great distance from us and, occasionally, declares his fatwā.

No, in the fullness of time, God sent his Son. “The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us.” Yes, he’s the son of David. “To us a child is born, to us a son is given; the government will be on his shoulders, but he will be called the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.”

So the Christians who are thoughtful can never think of their sufferings apart from Christ’s sufferings as he faces, in his own limitless person, the judicial wrath of his father that his own people might go free.

I know a family where, when the daughter was about 15 years old, she lost her very best friend to leukemia. The friend who died was a strapping blond of almost six feet, healthy, vigorous, athletic, and bright. From diagnosis to death, despite the very best efforts of very good medical care, it was only six months.

This family that I know, their daughter had just turned 15 that summer. It was a Christian family. They talked about these things. They prayed about these things. They grieved over these things, and they tried to work them through. It wasn’t suppressed or anything like that.

In September, however, the father went by his daughter’s room and heard her crying quietly inside the bedroom. He tapped on the door and went in. He put his arms around her as she quietly wept, and he said, “Come on, tell me about it.” She said, “Daddy, God could have saved my best friend and he didn’t. I hate him,” and she burst into tears.

The father said, “You know, I’m so glad you’ve told me this. There’s no point in hiding it in any case. God knows what you’re thinking. He knows your thoughts before you actually think them yourself. You might as well be honest before him. There’s no point in pretending. I’m glad you felt free enough to tell me, but before you decide that God is a miserable wretch, I want you to think about two things.

First, do you really want a God like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp? Remember the genie in Aladdin’s lamp? It could do absolutely anything, perform any miracle, but is always under the control of whoever holds and rubs the lamp. Do you want a God like that? So God can do absolutely anything, but always at your beck and call? In which case, who is God? Do you really want a God like that? Are you wiser than God to tell him what he should and shouldn’t do?” You’re really back to the mystery of providence and to innocent suffering. You’re back to Job and Habakkuk and the mystery of providence.

Then the father said, “The other thing is this: Before you decide that God doesn’t love you, you have to face the fact that, in the Bible, God’s love is measured by a little hill outside Jerusalem. When nothing else seems fair, when nothing else seems right, and when the pain is unbearable, yes, you remember that you lost your friend, but don’t you dare forget that God lost his Son. In fact, he didn’t lose him, he gave him. When you can’t put it all together, at least fasten on that. Because nothing else will stabilize you.” That little girl, you see, is my daughter.

So after you’ve finished all of your theological explanations, you still have to come back to the basics of elementary Christian confessionalism: “Christ died for sinners, of whom I am chief. God demonstrates his love in this: that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He who has not withheld his own Son, but freely given him up for us all, how shall he not also, along with him, freely give us all things? Who shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus?” Then you’re into the closing verses of Romans 8. All because of the cross. What else can ever finally sustain you?

2. Insights from what it means to take up our cross (and thus, from the persecuted global church).

Do you remember the spectacular scene in Matthew 16 and parallels where Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” They responded, “Some say this, some say that.” “What do you say?” he asks again. Peter says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” and Jesus blesses him for it. “You’re blessed, Peter, son of John, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.”

Now that’s all wonderful, but you have to understand that when Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ, by Christ, he did not mean exactly what you and I mean. When you and I refer to Jesus as the Christ, inevitably, we think of him as the Christ of the whole New Testament, including his death, burial, resurrection, ascension to the right hand, impending return, and all the rest. We can’t think of an uncrucified Christ.

When Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, however, he still doesn’t have a category for a crucified Messiah. You read the following verses, and it becomes very clear. You see he doesn’t have that category. He has it right; I mean, he’s blessed of God in that he really does understand that Jesus is the Messiah, when a lot of people hadn’t even got that far. On the other hand, he does not see the Christ as the crucified Messiah, does he?

So much so that when Jesus goes on, right after this confession, in Matthew 16:21 and following, to start speaking, then, about how the Son of Man must go to Jerusalem, be persecuted, be put to death, and on the third day, rise again, Peter takes Jesus aside and says, “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you! Messiahs win. Especially ones that can do miracles the way you can do miracles. That’s pretty hot stuff. How is anybody going to stand over against you? Messiahs win, and on this one, Jesus, you have it wrong. Messiahs don’t die, they win.”

So Jesus turns to him and says, “Get behind me, Satan! You do not understand the things of God.” Then Jesus goes on to talk about how we must take up our crosses and follow him. That’s the remarkable connection. The same connection is made in Mark 8. Now when we today speak of taking up our cross, sometimes we mean it in an almost flippant way:

“This wretched toothache has been bothering me all weekend, but, you know, we all have our crosses to bear.” “You should see my mother-in-law! But we all have our crosses to bear.” “My kid has just turned 15 and, boy, do we have our crosses to bear!” We have these expressions, don’t we? Maybe not very fair and sometimes not very polite but, in any case, a long way removed from the New Testament.

In the New Testament, nobody made jokes like that, because the Romans had three methods of execution, and crucifixion, the cross, was the worst of them. It was only for scumbags and slimeballs. It was for slaves and non-citizens. Only the emperor himself could ever sanction crucifixion being imposed on a citizen. It was filled with both shame and pain. You were crucified naked in a public place, and it could take days for you to die.

In all of the ancient literature and pictures are philosophers and teachers and parents saying, if there’s a crucifixion site nearby, “Make sure you walk around it so your children don’t see it. Never talk about the cross. Never talk about crucifixion in the home. It’s a horrible subject. You never talk about it. This is not a subject fit for conversation.”

It was always filled with shame. It’s a bit like trying to make jokes in our society about Auschwitz. There are some things you don’t joke about. Auschwitz is one of them. In the ancient world, there were some things you didn’t joke about. Crucifixion was one of them. Yet we make jokes about, “Well, we all have our crosses to bear.”

When you took up your cross in the ancient world, it was the crossbar. After sentence had been passed, after you had been whipped and beaten one more time, you were supposed to take up the crossbar to the place of execution, where the upright was already in the ground. There you were stretched out on the cross and attached to it. The whole thing was hoisted up, and there you died.

So when you took up your cross, you were really dying to yourself. There was nothing more to live for. You had only pain and shame left. That was it. Now Jesus comes along and says, “Unless you take up your cross and follow me, you cannot be my disciples.” Talk about seeker-sensitive! It’s amazing, isn’t it? Elsewhere, he says, “Unless you take up your cross daily.” How would you like to be crucified every day? That’s what Paul says: “I die daily.”

Now obviously, most of us aren’t called to die daily in some literal sense, and yet there is something to it, isn’t there? A desire to follow Jesus: “If he was crucified, I’m not better than my Master, so maybe I need to be crucified too.” Isn’t that what Jesus argues, at a lower level, in a passage like John 16? “If the world doesn’t like me, then it won’t like you. If they despised me, then don’t be too surprised if they despise you. A servant is not better than his Master.”

Then you watch what happens to the first apostles facing the first whiff of persecution. The first time they’re beaten up, do you remember what the text says of them? “They rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer for the name.” It’s like they were saying, “I’ve finally made it!” Isn’t that terrific? “I’ve finally made it into the realm of the persecuted.”

It’s not just Acts; it’s everywhere in the New Testament. Do you remember Philippians 1:29? “It has been granted to you,” Paul writes grandiloquently, “not only to believe on his name, but also to suffer for his sake.” It’s been granted. It’s a grace word. It’s your great privilege to come to faith, and it’s your great privilege to have come to suffering for his sake.

Isn’t that what Jesus says in the Beatitudes? “Blessed are those who are persecuted for my sake and for the gospel’s.” Isn’t that what you find in Philippians 3:10? “Oh, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering.” Let’s be quite frank. Most of us know those verses if we’ve been Christians for a while, but we’re quietly grateful that it happens to Christians in Iran, but not here, thank you.

What I suggest to you is that most of the passages that talk about suffering in the New Testament (not all, but most of them) actually have to do with suffering for righteousness with persecution. Re-read 1 Peter. Oh, there are some overtones of other kinds of suffering, whether you’re suffering justly or unjustly, and so on. Even if you’re suffering unjustly, however, then you put a stamp on it that makes sure that you yourself are righteous in it, without retaliating, because we serve a Master who didn’t retaliate.

Everything becomes part of the pattern of taking up our cross, in some essentially minor way compared to Christ who did take up this cross and die on our behalf. Then suddenly, you begin to realize that in the matrix of living and serving and dying in a sin-cursed world, if some of your friends mock you at work or actually kick you out of the home.… I had a Jewish friend at university when I was a young man. He was an orthodox Jew. When he became a Christian, his parents actually had a funeral for him.

I could introduce you to Christians I’ve known in various parts of the world. A big part of my job is to be in very many different countries. Do you realize there have been something like 9,000 martyrs in Indonesia in the last six years? There have been not fewer than 2 million martyrs in the last 20 years, worldwide. There have been more Christian martyrs in the last 150 years than in the previous 1,800 years combined.

That’s only the martyrs; that’s quite apart from those who have just been beaten up, suffered, lost property, or just laughed at and marginalized. Where, then, will the church stand in the West when it faces these things? It has been granted to the church this privilege … to stand up and rejoice that at last it’s counted worthy to suffer for the name.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not for masochism. That’s not the idea. It may be that there are times when God gives us remarkable freedom that we are to enjoy! That’s true too, but there is also a wonderful privilege in taking up our cross, dying to self-interest, and recognizing that it is a grace-gift to suffer for the name.

I grew up in a home in French Canada where Baptist ministers alone spent eight years in jail between 1950 and 1952. We kids used to get beaten up fairly regularly because we were maudits Protestants. Oh, it’s changed there now. That was part of the heritage, though. It changes the way you look at reality.

So now it’s important not only to read older books that many of us of another generation used to read all the time, such as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, but nowadays it’s also important to read the up-to-date ones, like the one about Don Cormack on the killing fields of Cambodia. That’s must reading to understand that, in this generation too, God has raised up another generation of men and women who love the cross, and not only the cross of Christ, but in some measure, the cross we are called to lift up and bear. I shall conclude with four practical reflections.

First, this approach is not a simple proof-texting approach, a couple of quick verses to answer all questions or “A verse a day keeps the Devil away.” What this is attempting to do is establish a Christian, biblically faithful worldview. It can be thoughtfully assessed, as it were, only by comparing it with other competing worldviews, checking out everything by Scripture, and bringing everything to the centrality of the cross and resurrection.

All six of these pillars stand or fall together. If you understand them and hold them with a passion, then when the deepest struggles come, your faith will be much more informed and your confidence in Christ will be much more secure. You will be far more stable, even as you cry out in the agony and the loneliness.

Secondly, I have focused, in essence, on theology (that is, what the Bible actually says, put into some sort of systematic guise). That’s what I’ve been doing. However, I would be the first to insist that when people are actually going through the worst actual crisis, something rather different may be needed first. In a really large-scale crisis: helicopters, food supplies, fresh water, blankets, housing, security, getting rid of the dead bodies, rebuilding, police, and so on.

But even then, to be able to do all of this in the name of Christ. Because we are not interested in relieving only suffering at the end (that’s hell) by the preaching of the gospel, nor only suffering right now (that’s emergency relief). Precisely because we have an organic view of all of history, we see that all of the suffering is, in one sense, of a piece.

We’re interested in relieving all suffering, all the way through to the suffering of hell, which is why we do good and proclaim the gospel. We still remember that we are exhorted, in the parable of the good Samaritan, to do good. “Do good to all, especially those of the household of faith,” Galatians 6 says.

There is an entailment in loving your neighbor as yourself, yet because we put it in the Bible’s framework of a huge storyline that takes us from creation all the way into eternity, when we speak of relieving suffering, we should not think we have “done our job” after we’ve written a check for UNICEF or even after we’ve spent a year or two in the Peace Corps.

We see that, at the end of the day, we want to help men and women made in the image of God, because they are made in the image of God and are destined for eternity. We cannot readily separate the relief of suffering now from the ultimate relief of suffering. It’s all of a piece until finally, the only thing that finally relieves suffering is the gospel of Jesus Christ itself. We proclaim Christ crucified.

Thirdly, what sort of comfort, then, can one give to those who suffer who are not Christians? One can often give all kinds of practical helps, show affection and kindness, but one should never, ever give false comfort. When dealing with a first-class reprobate who is dying, from whom you have no confidence that they know Christ in any sense, how dare you pat them on the shoulder and say, “Your suffering will soon be over”?

There is a sense in which, again and again and again, even though in the height of the crisis we may not be able to unpack the whole storyline we still have to present Christ (and him crucified). Again and again and again. We do not do this out of arrogance or condescension, but as poor beggars telling other poor beggars where there is bread, as people who have known and tasted of the grace of God showing other men and women where the cross stands.

Finally, Christians who get to know God well and sense his comfort, by the Spirit poured out upon us in the wake of the cross and resurrection, do not, as a rule, think very commonly in terms of theodicy (that is, how to explain suffering). Christians who get to know to know God well do not think often in those terms, but instead in two others.

A) Confession

There is a wonderful example from Nehemiah 8 and 9. There, Nehemiah and the other leaders, the priests, lead the people in prayers of confession. The whole point of those chapters is they look through their sufferings, and they acknowledge that the sufferings that have come upon them have come upon them because of the sin and rebellion and idolatry that they and their fathers and their forefathers have demonstrated generation after generation.

So when they see themselves pushed to the very end, their question is not, “How can you do this to us, God?” Their question is, rather, “O Lord God, in the midst of our deserved suffering and need, will you not again show mercy on us because you are a compassionate God?”

Biblically and historically, when there are times of genuine reformation and revival, you do not have many Christians writing books on theodicy. That is, books about suffering and how to think it through. What you have, instead, are books of confession. One of the scariest things in our age is how many books are out there trying to defend God. I know it has to be done; I’m doing it today, for goodness’ sake!

However, there is a sense in which, if the church of Jesus Christ were right on the portals of reformation and revival, we wouldn’t gather so much to hear three or four hours on how to justify the ways of God to human beings. We would be gathering, rather, for confession and repentance. It is a standard pattern in Scripture. Re-read Nehemiah 8 and 9.

B) The goodness of God

When Christians begin to understand this well, I think, they’re much more inclined to speak of the goodness of God. I want to tell you about another chap. It won’t hurt to tell you his real name, but I’ll put in another name. We’ll call him Greg. Greg went out as a single missionary to Bolivia quite a number of years ago. He was single, about six-four, and lanky as a beanpole. He went to Bolivia, which has a lot of short people! He learned the language well, and the mission liked his work.

Eventually, the mission sent him to Trinity, where I teach, to do a PhD so that he could go back to Bolivia to upgrade the theological education that was going on there. When he arrived, he actually brought his wife with him. They had each gone to Bolivia as single missionaries, met out there, and got married out there, albeit a little later in life. They had one little girl, who was then 3, not quite 4. They came back to Trinity so he could spend three years doing his PhD with us.

About six months into the program, his wife, who was about 40, was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. Stage IV is almost always a death sentence; it’s usually only a question of time. There are some exceptions, but it’s very high risk. She fought it with all of the chemo and radiation and all the rest. She got back on her feet, more or less. He took a hiatus from his studies as he nursed her and looked after their little girl, and so on. She was coming back on track, and he started studying again.

He got so far, and then he was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer. Chicago has a lot of very good cancer hospitals, especially Lutheran General, but they wouldn’t touch him. They looked at him and said, “This is a death sentence.” The mission liked him so much that they paid to send him up to the Mayo Clinic.

They said there was really nothing for this; the only thing they could recommend was to take out virtually all of his stomach. They were willing to try, experimentally, if he wanted to go through it. They were going to use drugs that were developed recently for colon cancer and thing like that, and they weren’t sure they were going to work.

They took out 90 percent of his stomach and started him on all of these drugs. The cancer, so far as we could tell, disappeared. Lanky beanpole became skinny-as-a-rake beanpole, as he had to eat just little bits of food every two or three hours because he didn’t have a stomach that was big enough to hold anything.

After another six or eight months, he came back to Trinity and started working on his PhD again. He made it through the comprehensive exams and started working on his dissertation. Then his wife’s cancer came back, and she died. He was surrounded by lovely families, the seminary community, and churches. Nevertheless, he had just lost his wife. His little daughter was now about 7 or 8.

He finished up his dissertation, and about three or three and a half years ago he came back to our church (our church was one of their supporting churches) on his way back to Bolivia with his little daughter, then age 9. He was going back to Bolivia as a single father. Do you know what he preached on for 40 minutes? The sheer overwhelming goodness of God. I tell you, that is normal Christianity. Let us pray.

So fill our vision and our understanding, we beseech you, with a sheer horror of sin and its guilt and entailments. Fill our vision far more comprehensively with the glory of Christ Jesus: his perfections and his wisdom, his suffering on our behalf, his promised coming, the ultimate kingdom, the consummation of a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness toward which we press.

Bring us back, again and again, to the cross. Help us to be willing to recognize our own blindness, our own myopia, our own smallness of understanding, so that even when we understand so little, we will understand, we will see, we will believe that you are great, sovereign, good, and trustworthy. All of this, heavenly Father, for the glory of your dear Son and for the good of the people for whom he shed his life’s blood. In Jesus’ name, amen.