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Suffering
Rev. Martin Geluk
Andrew Kuyvenhoven, former editor of The Banner, commented in an issue
of the magazine [8/4/1985], that he had many books that helped him
understand what the biblical text says without helping him much in
hearing what God says to him as a member of the church after Pentecost.
Kuyvenhoven made that remark when he was dealing with Lord’s Day 6 of
the Heidelberg Catechism where it is asked: “How do you come to know
this?” [Q.19] The “this” refers to Christ the mediator who came to set
us completely free from our sin and to make us right with God. The
Catechism answers that the holy gospel tells us and that this gospel was
already revealed in Paradise, and then God also proclaimed it by the
holy patriarchs and prophets, and portrayed it by the sacrifices and
other ceremonies of the law; finally, He fulfilled it through His own
dear Son.
From this Kuyvenhoven made the point that the gospel needs to be
understood in such a way that we see it pointing us to Christ
everywhere, from Genesis to Revelation. It’s the history of redemption
principle. A passage or a book from the Bible must not only be
understood in its historical setting, however important that is, but in
the full light of God’s revelation in Christ. As Kuyvenhoven said, we
have to read the Bible backward.
Trying to understand suffering
When we read the book of Job then one must first of
all try to understand the subject of suffering as Job wrote about it.
That is, I must imagine myself as best I can, to be a contemporary of
Job and try to understand his suffering. But if that were all I did,
then I would not be of much help to people who suffer today. All I could
offer is the historical setting of Job, which would be informative, even
exemplary, but not all that meaningful for today’s sufferers.
Secondly, therefore, one must try to come to the suffering of Job in the
light of the New Testament. I must try to understand what God has
revealed in Scripture about suffering in the light of Christ, and in
what the church after Pentecost can expect by way of suffering. Then
from that vantage point I must look at Job.
The Christian of today wants to know why God gave Job his suffering and
how this may help to further understand the problem of suffering, his
own or that of others. And yes, even understand God a little more, who
gives or allows suffering.
My interest in the subject of suffering is also due to pastoral
considerations. Church members suffer more than usual when there are
illnesses of a long duration. Family members suffer deeply when tragic
deaths have occurred. My wife and I have both seen our parents die after
experiencing much suffering themselves as well as the surviving spouse
who cared for them day and night. And we are not the only ones who faced
such situations.
How some see suffering
From time to time the claim is made by some that God
does not want anyone to suffer. The Lord Jesus, they say, wants you to
be healthy, and some add, wealthy, as well. Others even go as far as
saying that sickness is the result of sin and since Jesus has overcome
the power of sin, we may ask and claim in faith the wellbeing that God
wants us to have. Texts from the New Testament are quoted to show that
we should be engaged in victorious living.
When some poor sufferer is confronted with such a theology, then often
their suffering intensifies for they are now confused as well. They may
be familiar with Lord’s Day 10 of the Heidelberg Catechism where we are
asked what we understand by the providence of God. They have been taught
that God is sovereign over all things and in order to fulfil His plan of
salvation, may allow rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, health
and sickness, prosperity and poverty. These things, which to us may be
seen as good and bad, positive and negative, do not come by chance but
from God’s fatherly hand. For it is God who rules even over the smallest
of things. But now a sufferer may be wondering what to make of his
suffering if it is true that God always wants health and victorious
living.
Suffering and God
How does one respond to claims like those above? A
helpful discussion on the subject of suffering is found in Francis
Andersen’s Tyndale Old Testament Commentary, IVP, 1976, on Job. Andersen
has a respect for the sovereignty of God and for the unique character of
Scripture where God has revealed Himself. In the preface to his
commentary, he says one must not be presumptuous to comment on the book
of Job. Andersen is willing to humbly learn because this Bible book is
so full of the awesome reality of the living God. In the presence of God
one can only put a hand over one’s mouth like Job did [40:14]. God has
revealed Himself, yet He preserves at the same time the inaccessible
mystery of His own being.
So it is impossible to fully know God, and therefore we may never fully
understand suffering. Yet God makes it possible to understand something
of suffering because He spoke about it in His Word. On the one hand, God
is forbidding, yet on the other hand He fascinates us irresistibly. In
God there is both kindness and severity [Rom.11:22] and by realising
this we are made to understand a little more of why Job suffered so much
and how in the end he is satisfied and even joyful.
The story of Job is of interest to us, not only to know what happened to
Job but to also discover more of God’s nature. And if some day someone
has a shattering experience resulting in much suffering, then such a one
may also find joy in suffering as a result of knowing God better through
the book of Job and by looking also to the suffering of Christ.
Andersen wrote his commentary in the second half of the 1970’s when
times were turbulent in various places in the world because of the
horrors of wars, subsistence, poverty and racism. Those horrors are
still there today. Newer wars have replaced old wars. Atrocities are
still being committed. Some have causes that are far deeper and go back
much further than the television pictures may suggest. The news on
television only gives us the present. We see the carnage of another bomb
explosion in Ireland but we know that the suffering in Ireland is bound
up with a lot of causes that go back hundreds of years. We see and hear
of many African people suffering from AIDS but know that this disease
has its origin in widespread homosexuality and promiscuity that has been
going on for years. We are appalled at Sierra Leone guerillas hacking
off the arms of even little children, but apparently this barbaric
practice already went on when wars were fought in the Congo many years
ago. What we need to realise is that some of the suffering that we see
today has roots in sin and evil that may go back lots and lots of years.
The innocent sufferer may have nothing to do with those particular sins,
yet his life is made miserable through the cruelty of others.
The book of Job, says Andersen, is about unchanging human realities,
such as war, destitution, sickness, humiliations, bereavement and
depression. But this Bible book is also about the unchanging goodness of
God who transforms our human agony into justice, kindness, love and joy.
It is about ‘the terror of the Lord’ [2 Cor. 5:11], and His great
tenderness [Jam. 5:11]. It is the story of one man who held on to his
life in God with a faith that survived the torrents of utter loss and
expanded into new realms of wonder and delight.
The unbeliever and believer’s approach to suffering
Human misery, says Andersen, is the larger sum of
evil in all its forms. What he is saying is that all suffering can
ultimately be traced back to the fall into sin. There was no suffering
before that. But a non-Christian does not buy that. He has many
explanations of evil and God does not figure in any of them. But for the
Christian, suffering is a unique problem because of the very fact that
the Christian believes in one God who is all-powerful and all-loving.
The believer can see why the unbeliever prefers to leave God out of the
equation. The unbeliever argues as follows: If God were perfectly good,
then He could not tolerate the existence of violence, disease, etc.;
therefore there must be some limit to His ability to control such
events, that is, He is not almighty. Alternatively, if God does have
complete power over everything that happens, His failure to curb the
wrongs that occur must be due to the fact that He does not see anything
wrong in them, that is, He is not good.
Some Christians, perhaps won over by a kind of theology often found in
Pentecostal churches, have no problems at all in seeing the qualities of
goodness and sovereignty in God. In fact, these are the very reason why
they expect miracles of healing. These Christians assume that God always
wants our physical wellbeing because He is good and loving. And seeing
that God is also all-powerful, the way to health and victorious living
is, therefore, open to us and we should go that way in faith.
Job, however, also believed God was all-loving and all-powerful, but his
struggle was not like the modern expectation of God that He wants to
give you total wellbeing. His struggle was the length God went to in
causing him suffering. It was God who gave Job an extremely bad time. It
was God who gave Satan permission to torment Job.
Some Christians appeal to God’s love and power, because they see these
as a means to bring miraculous deliverance and victory from sickness,
destitution and depression, etc. Basically such a Christian believes God
does not want you to suffer. Suffering in all its various forms must,
therefore, come from the devil, who is seen to be as powerful, or nearly
as powerful, as God is.
Satan cannot act independent of God
Not the book of Job, or the book of Revelation, or
the prophetical books of the Bible, or the Psalms, nor the Lord Jesus,
give Satan independent or shared power with God. God has never shared
His sovereignty with the devil and God’s love and power are not only to
be seen in acts of deliverance from sickness, wars, deaths, etc, but
also in that He brings these trials.
The book of Job, says Andersen, allows no dualism of any kind. We cannot
remove from God any part of reality. Evil is not a realm over which God
has no control. The devil is not in charge of any area where God can’t
enter. There is no limitation in either the power or the goodness of
God. It is God, only God, who is responsible for all what happens to
Job, as shown so clearly in chapters 1 and 2.
Job’s misery cannot be blamed on ‘nature’ or ‘the devil’, for these are
but His creatures. And because this is so, one can understand the
struggle of faith in Job, or in anyone else for that matter. The
struggle is about seeing God as being all-loving and all-powerful when
He is also the One who causes suffering. This faith-struggle is evident
when the believer asks: why am I suffering? Why is God doing this to me?
Why is God not putting a halt to atrocities that occur in the world?
The friends of Job
When Job had sunken deep in his despair, his friends
came and told him that his misery was God’s punishment. Job’s suffering
meant he was paying for his sins. Job’s friends were orthodox men who
believed that each person reaps what he sows. They reasoned that Job
must have done something wrong, for why else would God have dealt him
these blows! The friends see God disciplining Job in order to bring him
to repentance.
Job’s friends were not entirely wrong. The principle of ‘you reap what
you sow’ is found throughout the Bible. God’s covenant with Old
Testament Israel was in the form of: life through obedience, or death
through disobedience [Lev.26; Deut.27-30]. In it’s overall teaching the
Bible has God saying that the rightness of right should lead to
wellbeing, and the wrongness of wrong should lead to disaster
[Ps.34:12,13; Gal.6:7; 1 Pet.3:10]. The difficulty, however, says
Andersen, is that the connection between sowing and reaping is not
always so obvious. Life is much more complex than this simple formula.
Human suffering is more than a system of rewards and punishments.
In an aside, Andersen briefly mentions that eastern religions have no
real problem here. Their solution is this: whatever suffering a person
may experience in this life might well be compensated for in the next
life. Suffer with dignity and without complaining, therefore, for in
some future reincarnation your present inequality and injustice will be
reversed. But reincarnation of eastern religion is totally foreign to
the Bible.
Coming back to the seemingly sound orthodoxy of Job’s friends, Andersen
says their argument crumbles before the Word of God who describes Job as
“blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil” [1:8; 2:3].
Throughout his ordeal, Job maintained his integrity, with God’s
endorsement. God finds fault, not with the Job’s speeches but with the
speeches of Job’s friends. Although in the end of the book, God does
also rebuke Job for contending with Him. What was it in God that Job had
so much difficulty with? Job struggled with God expressing His justice
in such unprovoked torture.
Andersen warns here that in upholding the biblical teaching of original
sin and human depravity, one must be careful not to deny any possibility
of goodness in human conduct. Andersen’s warning is worth pondering
about for if we deny God’s common grace in man, then the book of Job
loses its meaning. We’re thinking of Job’s righteousness as being held
up as genuine. This does not mean that Job, or Jesus’ mother Mary for
that matter, did not have original sin. Like all people, Job had a
sinful nature from birth, which inclined him to sin and caused him to
commit actual sin. But notwithstanding his sinful nature, God also said
of Job that he was “blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns
evil.”
Why God uses suffering
Job not deserving the calamities he received from
God, which his friends did suppose were a punishment from God, raises
the question whether God was unjust to Job. And by implication is God
unjust to all others who suffer, but not as a result of their own sinful
actions? The teacher in the book Ecclesiastes, like Asaph in Psalm 73,
had also wondered if God is unjust, for he too observed that very often
the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer [8:14].
But if it was only a straightforward system where the righteous receive
rewards and the wicked punishment, then suffering would no longer be a
perplexing problem. However, life is much more complex. That becomes
clear when we observe that in the Bible suffering is not always an
indication that God is punishing or correcting. God also brings
suffering in order to teach something, or He uses it to discipline and
warn [Pr. 3:11; Heb.12:12ff.]. Here we see already that suffering has a
positive side to it.
The tendency, explains Andersen, is to seek an explanation of suffering
in terms of cause and effect. People look backwards for a connection
between prior sin and present suffering. However, the Bible looks
forwards in hope and seeks explanations, not so much in origins as in
goals. The purpose of suffering is seen not in its cause but in its
results.
Here Andersen refers to the healing by Jesus of the man born blind [John
9]. The disciples, like Job’s friends, looked for the cause and asked if
the blindness was because of the man’s sins. And if not because of his
sins, then perhaps because of his parents’ sins. Jesus replied that
neither the man nor his parents sinned [vs.3]. As with Job, this man and
his parents were not excluded from the effects of the fall into sin. The
Lord said that neither he nor his parents sinned in order to explain
that suffering is not always the direct result of sin. The man was born
blind, explains Jesus, so that the work of God might be displayed in his
life [vs.3].
That’s also why Job suffered, so that the work of God might be displayed
in his life. Ultimately we must say that God does many things so that
His works are displayed. Other examples are God causing Joseph much
suffering in Egypt, God hardening the heart of Pharaoh, Paul having been
a fanatical Pharisee prior to him becoming the apostles to the Gentiles,
and so on. Even the election and rejection by God of sinners, mysterious
to us as that biblical doctrine may be, is to God a reason to show His
mighty works [Rom. 9:22-24; 11:32-36].
When the suffering goes on and there is no healing
In the end Job was healed in more ways than one. His
health was restored, other children were born to him and his material
possessions were even greater than before. But healing does not always
come. Sometimes we wait in vain for God to deliver us. At least not in
ways we expect. Here Andersen counsels patience and faith. We may never
see the goal of our suffering. God has His own reasons and these may
remain hidden until all is revealed at the second coming. But in due
season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart [Heb.12:3].
At first this may seem to be cold comfort. The suffering goes on and it
is deep because it seems to be individualistic and a lonely burden. Yet,
says Andersen, no person stands alone. We’re all linked to others, and
ultimately to all in one, vast web of inter-personal humanity. And
through this vast web God works out His purposes. Moreover, the sufferer
can fortify others by his example. The ills of his life can sweeten a
man or turn him sour.
A person becomes sour, for example, when he is inclined to complain that
his suffering is caused by the unfair treatment others have given him.
“Why didn’t God stop them?” he protests. But has he a right to be
bitter? Andersen suggest that he might ask himself what his life would
be like if God paralysed his arm each time he lifted it to strike an
angry blow, or to steal.
Life’s ills can also sweeten a person, in that his suffering has brought
him nearer to God than before. No one likes to suffer and none want to
repeat a time of suffering that was deep and long. Yet, in the time of
need the sufferer can go to God for comfort and strength. He thus
experiences a fellowship with God he might not have experienced if he
had not suffered.
Jesus and suffering
In Jesus we also see an innocent sufferer. In fact,
Jesus was altogether pure. But He was a man of sorrows and acquainted
with grief. What crushed Him was the guilt of our sin. His suffering was
for the good of others. Let us remember that next time we suffer. God
may cause the New Testament Christian to suffer so that others may be
spared from suffering. A man may offer his life for his friend, for
example.
Job’s cries makes one think of Gethsemane and Gogoltha, and Job’s many
‘whys’ remind one of Jesus’ ‘why?’ on the cross. Both Job and Christ
suffered as innocent ones and both were forsaken by their friends. But
Christ’s suffering was substitutionary, that is, His suffering was for
the believers’ benefit, in that they no longer have to suffer hell for
their sins.
We are blessed through Jesus’ suffering and it brings us into the
fellowship of God. And Jesus Himself experiences much joy when He sees
the good of His suffering, in that many are made righteous
[Is.53:10,11].
Andersen remarks that ‘all meanings’ of suffering converge on Christ.
Because of God’s purposes through Christ, the suffering of man is never
without meaning. The sufferer may not see it but others may benefit from
it. Fellow humans may not understand God’s purpose for the moment
either, and therefore it is better to show compassion rather than to
attempt explanations. And even if the suffering is deep, the Lord does
not forsake. In fact, in suffering, the nearness of God may be
experienced in ways not known to those who have never known despair. In
our perplexing it is best to look to Christ, because, says Andersen, in
Him God Himself has joined us in our hell of loneliness. Christ has
acquired a new completeness through what He endured [Heb. 5:7-9]. That
the Lord Himself has embraced and absorbed the undeserved consequences
of all evil, is the final answer to Job and to all the Jobs of humanity.
As an innocent sufferer, Job is the companion of God.
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