Jesus was clear about the part of our mission that is the highest priority: our relationship with Him! The greatest commandment is, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Matt. 22:37.
In my own life, one of the biggest obstacles to such thorough allegiance to my Lord, besides my love of sin, is the suffering that He allows. It might be just the simple pain of frustration—obstacles to completing my to do list like traffic jams, incompetent coworkers, down wi-fi, or someone not returning my call or text. It could be the severe suffering of losing loved ones to cancer, plane crashes, terrorist attacks, flooding. Or it could be something in between—the pain of unanswered prayer, friends who betray us, or a new supervisor who single-handedly destroys our enjoyment of our job. In every case, bubbling to the surface is doubt about God’s goodness. After all, when I love someone, I try to protect that person from pain. If God is good, why does he allow so much suffering, including mine and those I most love?
The biblical answer to this question has enormous capacity to increase your delight in the character of God. To see that answer, we must consider the biblical teaching about the future and quote heavily the words of Tim Keller from The Reason for God, pa. 31-34.
“The Bible teaches that the future is not an immaterial “paradise” but a new heaven and a new earth. In Revelation 21 we do not see human beings being taken out of this world into heaven, but rather heaven coming down and cleansing, renewing, and perfecting this material world. The secular view of things, of course, sees no future restoration after death or history. And Eastern religions believe we lose our individuality and return to the great All-soul, so our material lives in this word are gone forever.
The Biblical view of things is resurrection…a restoration of the life you always wanted. This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired but will in some way make the eventual glory of joy even greater.
Just after the climax of the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee discovers that his friend, Gandalf was not dead (as he thought) but alive. He cries, “I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself! Is everything sad going to come untrue?” The answer of Christianity to that question is—yes. Everything sad is going to come untrue and it will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost.”
Consider Joni Eareckson Tada who was paralyzed when she dove off a dock at age 17 and broke her neck. Joni will know the joy of running in her new, resurrection body more than any unparalyzed person ever could. Or think of the loneliness that a single woman experiences because she has no spouse to love her in this world. Keller’s argument is that such a woman will know the joy of being united to Jesus, her true bridegroom (for which human marriage is an inferior type), at a deeper level than she ever could have known had she not known the pain of remaining single her whole life. “Everything sad is going to come untrue and it will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost.”
C. S. Lewis wrote, “They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained will work backwards and turn even that into a glory.” The present suffering that Satan, whispers, “proves God is NOT good,” will in the end, become a source of eternal joy. To quote Keller once more,
“This is the ultimate defeat of evil and suffering. It will not only be ended but so radically vanquished that what has happened will only serve to make our future life and joy infinitely greater.”
What a god we get to love!
