What if the psalmist’s fear is coming true, “Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me” (Ps 51:11)?
To have the Spirit is to have God’s eyes within, helping us see beyond the darkness to the dawn that God’s grace might yet make possible. Notice the word might. What if there is no Spirit apparently present? To lose the Spirit is to grow skeptical about faith, empty without hope, spiritually blind, desperate because pain and loss are smothering life itself, leaving an aching blank where the pulsating Spirit once was. The Bible records much despair and also shines with much more hope. Is suffering the occasion for the ending or the deepening of faith? It’s our choice.
We act variously and the Bible speaks variously. The book of Proverbs tends to emphasize the justice of suffering and how suffering often is directly related to wrongdoing. On the other hand, Job and Ecclesiastes insist that much suffering is unjust and irrational. Proverbs maintains that righteousness is rewarded and sin punished (e.g., Prov 1:29–33). But Job’s experience is a frontal assault on such a simplistic assessment of things.
Since the Bible, when taken as a whole, presents the full picture of things, we must be careful not to isolate one biblical passage or even verse from many others on the same subject. For instance, Jeremiah 29:10 by itself leads to believing that God has planned in advance and detail all things that happen in this world. Reading Ezekiel 34 and many passages like it, however, would convince us that God’s interventions in this world are not pre-planned but responses to negative circumstances we have created.
Life in this world is hardly a lovely fairy tale of predictable patterns of experience. Sometimes the just suffer and the unjust prosper. Sometimes God intervenes and sometimes God remains silent and inactive so far as we can tell. So, why not take the advice of Job’s wife—curse God and die? Because the jagged path of faith, even while meandering through valleys of dark shadows, occasionally bursts with sunlight, suggesting a way out, a way upward to the shining heights of eternal joy.
Progress on this path of faith doesn’t come quickly or easily. Patience, discipline, selfless service, and enduring the jagged journey are required. The goal is earned, not given cheaply. Four unwelcome things are interwoven into the very pattern of our human existence. Closing our eyes to them changes nothing except our ability to face them well. They are suffering, evil, injustice, and a keen awareness of how brief are our years.
Two great pieces of music are sharply contrasting and so revealing when experienced together. They represent two basic options for viewing God, suffering, and the life of faith. Tchaikovsky’s great B Minor Symphony is full of marching rhythms that move inexorably toward the end of tragic desolation. The composer described this music’s theme as “the haunting of life by death.” On the other hand, Brahms’ great Requiem, while still having death as a theme, lacks the pessimism. Its somber mood eventually merges into the great climaxes of peace and victory.
Fatalism is always an option, a sad giving in to the awful abyss. Faith also is an option, a daring reach upward that allows the poor pilgrim to find God as guide, resource, and eternal home. These pages choose Brahms, faith, and the reach upward. This doesn’t make suffering and death evaporate, not in this world at least. But it does what we really need. It allows us to survive, even thrive in the midst of whatever. When things are falling apart, we can believe even before seeing positive results. God already is putting the broken pieces together into some new and yet unfinished masterpiece.
God’s Sovereignty and Reasons for Suffering
There’s a big theological divide not easy to navigate. Christians across the centuries have stood on both sides. The Bible doesn’t help us as much as it might. Again, it seems to give mixed messages, or at least allows two contrasting streams of its own interpretation by equally honest and careful readers. It comes down to a definition of God’s sovereignty.
Divine “sovereignty” is a central subject of Christian believing, with two contrasting streams of biblical interpretation. The complicating fact is that, conscious of it or not, we tend to bring to our Bible reading preconceived notions that color what we read and how we understand. We bring our theology to the biblical text and read through our preset theological eyes.
I experienced strong exposure to both streams of interpretation early in life. I studied Bible at Geneva College, a fine institution rooted in the Scottish Presbyterian tradition strongly influenced by the theologian John Calvin. Then I attended Anderson University School of Theology and Asbury Theological Seminary, graduate schools rooted more in the English tradition strongly influenced by John Wesley. These two outstanding Protestant thinkers and reformers had much in common theologically, with at least one significant exception. It centers in Wesley’s resistance to Calvin’s conclusion that God determined in advance that some persons would be saved and others not.
Both of these Protestant leaders agreed that “nothing in heaven or earth is understood properly except in light of the divine Parent who brought it into being, who is its ground and goal, who is sovereign, fully able, fully faithful, full of justice and mercy.”17 Calvin’s logic concluded that God’s sovereignty must mean that God is always in full control of all things, including our daily affairs and future destinies. Wesley found this an unacceptable outcome of biblical logic, a picturing of God as other than seen in the coming of Jesus, the one who said that God deeply desires that all be saved.
The core question is this. Does divine sovereignty, with unlimited capacities, imply that God retains and exercises full control of all earthly events? Are we “predestined”?
Wesley and Calvin agreed on two things, but not a third. They agreed that fallen humanity is incapable of doing anything to merit salvation, and thus all salvation is by God’s grace alone. They disagreed, however, on one key point. Wesley insisted that God wants all to be saved and has provided the “prevenient” grace that enables all to choose salvation. Each person is enabled to respond and therefore responsible for the choice made. Any who do not choose salvation face damnation by their own choice and not by God’s advance decree.18
The provision of such free choice, Wesley insisted, does not undercut divine sovereignty but defines it, dramatizing the preeminence of God’s love (see below the section “Love Trumps Power”). Such a preeminence of love is critical for how people should understand the source of their sufferings and their opportunity for salvation in spite of them.
I have pictured this Calvin-Wesley divide as the clash of flowers. Calvin’s TULIP includes the “L” of “limited atonement.” Wesley’s contrasting ROSE sees the biblically revealed God as Relational, Open, Suffering, and Everywhere Active. His flower model is more relational, experiential, and loving in tone and manner, and it highlights the central role of suffering—ours, the world’s, and even God’s. Yes, even the sovereign God suffers.
I was privileged to author the biography of prominent Canadian theologian Clark H. Pinnock, who traveled the jagged journey of first championing Calvin’s view of divine sovereignty and later being a prominent exponent of Wesley’s view.19 On this key subject, I am a Wesleyan along with Pinnock and many others. That influences my biblical understanding and these present pages.
God willingly, out of the love that is God’s very nature, chooses to relate interactively and redemptively with this fallen creation. God is open to freely made human decisions and suffers along with the creation when the wrong decisions are made. God risks this awkward process by choice because the preeminent perfection of God’s sovereignty is love. God, being sovereign, is capable of acting only in ways consistent with his own nature and intentions. God’s nature is love and the loving intention is that all be saved.
We fallen people are struggling in this failing world. We are on jagged journeys. We are enabled by God’s grace to choose for or against God, including choices that bring suffering to ourselves and others, and even our own damnation. God enables and allows, loves
