Some Christian teachers assure us, “God wants to heal your disease so the world will take note and believe.” God says, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” Prosperity seminars teach, “God wants to bless you with financial abundance.” Jesus taught, “Blessed are you who are poor”—and warned, “It is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Scripture-distorters stump, “God wants to see his children happy.” Jesus says, “Blessed are you who weep now” (Luke 16:31; 6:20-21; Matthew 19:23).
Did Jesus die to give the good life to everyone with faith enough to grab it? You be the judge. Our Savior himself was poor, and most of the early Christians were poor. “Not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.” The Macedonian believers faced “extreme poverty.” James had his head cut off. Peter was imprisoned. Stephen was stoned. John died in exile on a barren island. The Jerusalem Christians were hounded from their city. Aquila and Priscilla were expelled from Rome. Mark quit under the rigors of his missionary journey. Peter described Christians all across Asia Minor as suffering “grief in all kinds of trials.” Many were slaves. Many were women with unbelieving husbands who didn’t understand them. Many were singles, filled with longing but afraid to marry due to the uncertain times. Many were “publicly exposed to insult and persecution.” They fell sick. Their property was confiscated. They felt the pull of temptation, knew what it was to sin, knew the pain of a bruised conscience. All belonged to churches with real problems. All needed constant encouragement to keep going. Perhaps a page from Paul’s diary says it best:
[I have] been exposed to death again and again. Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked.9
Having what they didn’t want—wanting what they didn’t have. In all this they merely obeyed their Savior who said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Yet by sharing his sufferings they tasted “the power of his resurrection.”
The Bible could be no clearer. God does ask his children of every nation and walk of life to suffer. Only two places on this planet are exempt—a few acres in southern California, and a few in Florida, both run by a friendly talking mouse who wears suspenders.
Five
ALL TRIALS GREAT AND SMALL
BEFORE YOU READ CHAPTER FIVE…
Thirty seconds after the 1995 terrorist bomb exploded in Oklahoma City, people lay writhing everywhere in pools of blood. Some of you were there. For those who weren’t, imagine yourself there. Near you lies a woman—face, torso, and arms shredded with glass shrapnel. An artery has obviously been hit, but you can’t tell exactly where from a few feet away. The horror of the sight may make you feel faint. You may feel confused and panicked. You may feel afraid that another bomb will go off. You may feel like cursing or praying. You may feel a thousand things—but if you don’t stop feeling and start thinking about how to stop her flow of blood and attend to her shock, this woman may die.
But shouldn’t people have feelings after such a blast? Oh, yes. Intense suffering calls for deep emotions. In the aftermath, Oklahoma and the nation would weep and weep. We should weep. God weeps. “To everything there is a season…a time to weep.” But there is also a time to think. Neither can replace the other.
The next two chapters are difficult emotionally. They deal with a doctrine many Christians stumble over. If any reader is reeling from unspeakable loss, choking on the bitterest of pills, heartsick beyond comforting and unable to look upward—God understands. Please, close this book and weep before the Lord. If you read anything, read the Psalms. This is not the time to gag down closely reasoned arguments.
But when you are able, even though your pain is still great, the Bible is full of commands to “think,” “ponder,” “consider,” “weigh,” “judge.” Jesus often turned questions about life, death, and suffering back onto the questioner. “What is written in the Law?” he would ask. Folks would blink, flip the pages, think out loud, and come up with the relevant passages. But this didn’t end the discussion. Now came the real work: “How do you read it?” he would ask. That is, what do you think it means? No room for sloppy or sentimental thinking there.
What we think about God influences our friendship with him. It affects how much glory we give him. But our imaginations about God aren’t reliable—ancient speculations about the kind of birthday present he might like led cultures into human sacrifice. Nor can we simply trust our emotions about him—if we conceive of God as we’d like him to be, we’re sure to recreate him in our own image. We’re liable to become like the people Paul described: “They are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge” (Romans 10:2).
The Bible is our only safe source of knowledge about God—and it requires thinking. God’s persistent invitation in every age remains: “‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord” (Isaiah 1:18).
This is the chapter that will raise eyebrows. It’s the section about God being in control even when troubles come. For understandable reasons, most non-Christians and many Christians clear their throats uncomfortably at the notion of a God who claims to be holding the reins. After all, the horses often seem out of control and the stage coach ready to run off the road. For some, the coach has already flipped and landed on them. From underneath the wreckage, perhaps someone is thinking as follows:
Okay, we can agree that God’s plan for Christians includes suffering. That was your first point. But the second point has some of us concerned, the one about his plan being “specific” for each person, about trials being “distributed” to us. Surely you can’t mean that God himself actually makes humans suffer. The Bible says God is love—but if the trials I’m facing come from him, we must be using different dictionaries to define love. A God who actually decrees rape, murder, earthquakes, and heart disease is not the God I worship. To say that he in any way causes such things paints him as a monster. It makes me afraid of him. It makes me feel like a pawn—as if some decision-making Machine in the sky has already slated me for broken bones and nasty lawsuits whether I’m careful or not, and whether I pray or not. The way I see it, God’s holiness forbids him from urging anyone to sin against us. He doesn’t make anyone do anything—we’re not robots. He doesn’t plan mishaps—they just happen, or perhaps Satan causes them. In his mercy and because we pray, God sometimes prevents tragedies and sorrows, but when they hit he didn’t send them. Rather, he usually lets happen what will happen, then after the fact turns bad things into good for those who love him.
There’s certainly a lot of hay in that bale. Who could argue against much of it? We should be repulsed at any suggestion that we’re pawns. The universe is not a grand marionette show. God does despise suffering. He never sins and never tempts anyone else to sin. How blasphemous for anyone to portray him as a monster! How absurd to imagine our prayers as futile and our actions as meaningless!
But how sad that we deny God’s own words about himself in our efforts to defend him against such nonsense. For God clearly claims to run the world—not “could” run it if he wanted to or “can” step in when he has to but does run it—all the time. Even when it sins. Even when we suffer. He claims that nothing touches us without first receiving his nod and that “All the days ordained for me were written in [his] book before one of them came to be” (Psalm 139:16). He says without blushing, “Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both calamities and good things come?” (Lamentations 3:3
8).
Yet here’s the wonder. He claims to do all this without forcing our hands, bypassing our wills, or making us less than human. When it comes to the physical world, his working is so discreet, so regular that normally we can’t tell he’s involved. In fact, the so-called “laws of nature” are merely our descriptions of his usual dealings.
Thus according to the Bible, when people sin against us they alone bear the responsibility, and God will one day judge them. When hurricanes strike, it’s not irreligious for the National Hurricane Center to give a scientific explanation. When disease stalks, there’s a traceable medical reason. When animals cause problems, they’re acting on instinct. When accidents happen, it’s okay to call them accidents—even the Bible does. When babies die and whole populations starve and cocaine junkies blow away frightened convenience-store clerks, God weeps for his world. All these things are true. But the Bible insists on another truth simultaneously. All during these sins, typhoons, illnesses, mishaps, snake bites, crib deaths, famines, and gas-station robberies—God hasn’t taken his hand off the wheel for thirty seconds. His plans are being accomplished despite, yes, even through, these tragedies. They are tragedies. He considers them so. He loathes the wickedness and misery and destruction itself—but he has determined to steer what he hates to accomplish what he loves.
“How can this possibly be?” someone asks.
Welcome to the world of finite humans pondering an infinite God.
But to keep from becoming too theoretical, let’s consider all this through the lenses of a pair of true stories.
GOOD PEOPLE IN PAIN
Story Number 1
Travel in your mind to an area of the world that for many has become virtually synonymous with terrorism—the Middle East. Below is a sketchy but accurate account of one man’s private horror there.
He was a public figure in his country, although not well-known internationally. Due to his wide-ranging charitable work spurred by his religious convictions, he became a hero among the lower class and many sophisticates. But in certain political quarters he was viewed as a threat. The group that took responsibility for his seizure acted at night. As with many desperate organizations, they sought to paint their actions with a veneer of legality. A kangaroo court was convened, the charges stated, the defendant declared guilty. He was taken down a hall and thrown to thugs who beat him skillfully to a pulp. Then they attached him to a crude torture instrument where he was stretched unmercifully and had various body parts skewered. As intended, the widely loved man did not survive the procedure. Outraged and grief-stricken friends remembered him as a humble, helpful person who always had time for others. His murderers were never brought to justice.
Story Number 2
August 6, 1978. Determined to talk that husband of hers out of going through with the divorce, she hopped in the car and headed south from Georgia. The dog came along for company—the vodka, for courage. By mid-Florida the yellow road lines didn’t seem straight anymore. In a misty rain on Highway 441 just north of Ft. Lauderdale she drifted into oncoming traffic and plowed into a green sport-utility vehicle carrying five young people. The boy in the back middle seat got the worst of it.
Seventy-seven days later the doctors decided that the young man would live. Paul Ruffner (not his real name), age nineteen, left the Intensive Care Unit to return home and begin learning how a person gets along without feeling or motion below the neck.
Waiting for him was a natural-wood addition to the house, complete with ramps, built by his dad and brothers. There he basked in the same family closeness he had always known. There he grew skillful with his chin-controlled power wheelchair—went fishing with dad, attended a year’s college with his brother as his hands. There he deepened the faith he had shown since age five when he poked his head under the newspaper Mommy was reading and asked how to become a Christian. During those early recovery years, tears and laughter often visited on the same day. Yet friends mentioned how easy it was to drop by because of the pleasant atmosphere.
Five years after his injury Paul became an overnight multi-millionaire through a settlement with the auto company whose faulty design had contributed to his paralysis. It was time to broach an issue with his folks. “My brothers have each grown up and left home—please, let me do the same. I want to have my own place and carry my own weight.” This was his first real request since the accident. Dad and Mom agreed, and Paul moved to North Carolina next door to the Ruffners’ summer home. The family would still be a part of his life.
Who could see inside the mind of the girl who answered Paul’s want ad for a nurse-attendant? A friend had recommended her, assuring him, “She’s a Christian.” But the nurse brought with her a small and secret problem for which Paul was the solution. Soon she had Paul’s heart as tightly wrapped around her as hers was around his checkbook. The other attendants always went home after their shifts, but Janet (not her real name) moved in. Her sweet tooth for marijuana could now begin getting the attention it craved. Paul had a weakness here. During rehab an intern had recommended grass as a muscle relaxant. Now, the first young woman in Paul’s life since the accident was urging him back to it—and to more serious candy.
A cold Smoky Mountain winter drove the couple back south to Florida. They settled a three-hour drive from Paul’s folks, where Paul bought a waterfront home and the two soon married. “Sure, we’d love a visit,” his new wife cooed to the Ruffhers. But at the last minute it never suited. Paul would call and say, “I know we planned this, but Janet can’t handle seeing anyone today—PMS, you know. Could we get together some other time?” Or Janet would crack the front door open without loosening the chain lock, sorry that Paul wasn’t feeling well, and suggest they call him from the boat-house phone in the backyard before starting the trip back. In five years Paul’s folks saw the couple only three times. Phone conversations always had the hollow sound of a speaker phone—Janet was monitoring everything. Should they do something? But what? Independence from his parents had been his only request.
Several years into his marriage Paul called his parents. “Mom and Dad, I’ve been running from God. From now on I’m making decisions in line with Scripture and in a right relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. My lifestyle’s going to change.” It did change—the family sensed it. Paul again began talking freely about bis faith to workers who came to the house; several became Christians through his influence. Janet changed too, for a time. But the pulling away soon returned. Paul was pleasant when he rang (his family had learned to wait until he did the dialing)—he was clearly off drugs and his folks could tell he wanted to see them—but the calls came less and less. Getting together was never convenient for Janet. Rottweilers in the yard greeted anyone trying to visit. Parcel-delivery vans must honk from outside the fence. Yet all this while a small, white seafood truck bearing more than mere fish filets continued to stop regularly.
Where was Paul? The elder Ruffiiers assumed that Janet’s mother, who lived near the young couple, checked in at least occasionally. But she too was unwelcome. Janet’s prescription of emotional control and isolation from family was succeeding only too well with her patient.
On September 9, 1990, Janet uncharacteristically called for her mom’s help. “Paul’s having chest pains and is having trouble breathing.” The mother raced over, took one look, and said, “You don’t need me—you need 911.”
Rescue workers to this day don’t relish describing what they found: the nauseating smell everywhere in the house except Janet’s room. Filth-covered mattress. The young man’s gangrenous and bloated body. Matted, uncut hair. Curled fingernails. Bones showing through skin. Sickness. And hours later, death.
During the investigation leading to the neglect trial, which ended in a fifteen year prison sentence, prosecutors questioned Janet. “Ms. Ruffiier, how many dollars worth of cocaine would you say you personally went through while married?”
The former $15,000-a-year attendant had to think for a moment. She cleared her thr
oat. “Somewhere around a million.”
WAS GOD AT THE PLANNING MEETINGS?
Two true yet unthinkable stories. A tender philanthropist tortured to death for political reasons. A teenager paralyzed by a drunken driver and slowly milked to death for his money.
Did God intend these incidents? Obviously he allowed them. But were they decreed? Were they “part of the plan”? Was the philanthropist’s murder on a divine blueprint? Could the Ruffiiers accurately say, “Our family was meant to endure this”? Or in God’s mind could another boy just as easily have been sitting in the back middle seat—could a different husband have been homicidally neglected? In the Ruffiiers’ case we have no direct answers from God—the family isn’t mentioned in the Bible. But the philanthropist is.
The philanthropist is Jesus.1
The New Testament doesn’t blink in answering our questions about the Philanthropist’s slaying. It strikingly puts the murder of Jesus and the decree of God on the same page. Hear the apostle Peter preaching to a Jerusalem crowd: “Jesus of Nazareth…was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross…Repent…” (Acts 2:22-23, 38).
“Repent”—their guilt is real and judgment is threatening. “By God’s foreknowledge”—God saw the crucifixion coming. “By God’s set purpose”—God saw it coming because he had decreed it. The phrase literally reads “by God’s having-been-decided counsel.” Hard as it is to grasp, God willed, ordained, yes, determined history’s best-known and most heinous torture-murder. This point is made even clearer just two chapters later where the early Christians are praying: “Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen” (Acts 4:27-28).
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