Good News Quote #45

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

There are many enemies of the virtue of patience, including our own unwillingness to suffer and our egocentric desires to be the kind of person who makes a difference in people's lives. There is also a kind of intellectual impatience, and unwillingness to wait for understanding. We can be tempted to think we must already have a solution to what philosophers call the "problem of evil," the problem of why God allows such suffering in the world. Like Job's friends, we can make the terrible mistake of thinking it's our job to defend God and explain his ways.


The Bible in its wisdom offers us no solution to the problem of evil. [...] We live without a solution but not without hope. No matter how little we know of the meaning of our suffering, we know that it is a story with a happy ending. This may not make us feel any better -- and it is a terrible mistake to demand that the afflicted feel better because of it -- but it is nonetheless the truth.

Good News Quote #44

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

[Job's three friends] did better when they did nothing. That's a hard lesson to learn, but it's indispensable for anyone who really wants to comfort the afflicted. Sometimes there is nothing we can do to comfort them, and this itself is a form of suffering that is hard for us to bear. But it is also a way that we enter into their suffering and share it. It is essential to the work of sympathy and compassion -- both of which are old words meaning to suffer with someone. And it is hard work to sit in silence and listen to someone we love groan and cry and say dreadful things about God. Sometimes the most we can do to relieve their suffering is just hear their awful words and bear with them patiently. This is the cross of listening, a cross Job's friends were unwilling to bear. They thought they had to do something about his awful words.

Good News Quote #43

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

One temptation we have is to blame the afflicted for upsetting our worldview. The very existence of their undeserved suffering raises questions about our theology and our faith that are hard to face. [...]


There is a whole book of the Bible that deals with the temptation to blame the afflicted for upsetting our worldview. I'm talking of course about the book of Job. [...]


Job's speeches hardly mention the literal or physical aspects of his suffering, his foul skin disease and the death of his children. Job makes it clear that his real problem is with God. [...]


But he wishes things were different: there ought to be someone in heaven who could speak up for him!


And it turns out, Job has his wish and things are as they ought to be. For the whole story began with God speaking up for Job in heaven, and that in fact is why Job is suffering -- so that God may be proved right when he speaks up for Job. But Job is in no position to know that, which is why he suffers so badly.

Good News Quote #42

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

What also happens is that the biblical exhortations, such as the apostle's words, "Rejoice in the Lord always!" (Phil. 4:4) are turned into a kind of command, even a kind of condemnation. Instead of inviting us into joy, they demand that we be joyful, or else.


In this case, it's our individualism that turns invitation into condemnation. Like the passage about being filled with the Spirit discussed in chapter 1 (Eph. 5:18), this exhortation is addressed to the church in the plural. In the Greek, it's more like, "You guys! Be celebrating the Lord Jesus all the time!" It is not about how each individual is supposed to feel every hour of the day, but about how the life of the church is always to be a kind of advance celebration of the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Good News Quote #41

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

It goes something like this. The Christian life is supposed to be an abundant life, a life of victory -- so you can't go around telling people that it really hurts inside. People at church may not understand if you start talking as if your life was a failure. You're not really allowed to be sad at heart, because everybody says Christians are supposed to have an inner joy deep in their hearts, which is always there beneath all the troubles of life. So it can't be that at the center of your feelings is a great ball of hurt and suffering. Not if you're a Christian! [...]


Now it's true that God has many ways of comforting us with joy in the midst of sorrow and pain. These are some of his most precious gifts, for which believers throughout the ages have raised songs of thanksgiving. But it is also true that sometimes the cross we bear means suffering without joy, without any kind of emotional consolation. For our feelings, like our bodies, remain human through and through, capable of agony and emptiness, vulnerable to crosses that can deprive them of all comfort.