Letter to Bonnie Lu on suffering


                                                                                                February 28, 1986

Dear Bonnie Lu,

            Thank you for your letter.  We truly appreciate your prayers for us and especially for your gifts knowing as we do your difficult financial situation.  Your letter contained so many different items that it is difficult to know how to respond to it exactly though I will try to respond coherently.

            First let me say that the first thing we did after reading your letter was to pray for you and your family as well as the other people you mentioned.  We truly empathize with you in your struggles.  I hope it does not sound blasphemous to say that sometimes God seems to us like either an ogre or a cosmic prankster.  This is especially true if we have bought into the current trend to view God as a “cosmic Santa Claus” as the article you sent so aptly put it.  Abraham faced this sort of feeling when God announced that He was going to destroy Sodom and Gomorra.  I don’t want to sermonize, but you can imagine how you would feel if God told you He was going to destroy New York and Chicago.  Abraham knew the people that lived in Sodom and Gomorra.  His nephew, Lot, lived there so Abraham must have known those people pretty well.  Often life seems to bring us face-to-face with contradictions and perplexities with which we cannot cope.

            I wanted to weep when I read your letter because I could feel your frustration:  Why doesn’t God do something?  Why can’t we move?  Why can’t Joe find a job?  Why are my children struggling?  Why does Kiki have leukemia?  I must honestly, even sadly admit I cannot answer these questions, but I want you to know I hurt with you and I will plead with my God to be consistent with His benevolent nature.  We do not serve a whimsical pagan deity who delights in “playing with us.”  Sometimes it is true that it seems that way to us, but Scripture assures us that He “causes all things to work together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.”  [Rom. 8:28]  We are also told that nothing can separate us from the love of God.  [Rom. 8:35-38]

            I spent a lot of time at Trinity studying Philosophy of Religion to try to answer the sort of questions that I’ve listed above.  Now I conclude that though that study was helpful it doesn’t comfort my heart.  Only the Lord through His Holy Spirit can comfort our hurts and heal our hearts.  Sometimes we all sit as Job did wondering why we don’t just curse God and die.  I have an answer for the existence of evil and why God allows suffering and death:  He cannot get rid of evil without destroying all of us and if He destroyed all of us no one would be saved.  We are all evil and deserving of judgment.  If we have been forgiven through accepting Christ as our Savior we are assured of being spared when God executes His righteous judgment on all men who are evil by nature and choice.  I don’t want to go too far with this, but suffice it to say that while I feel that that answer to the “problem of evil” is both logically correct and personally cogent, that is convincing, it doesn’t satisfy “the problem of suffering”, that is in the existential or experiential, personal sense of suffering.  When you hurt clever arguments and reasoning aren’t very comforting even if they are correct and true.

            My Mother’s Father died of leukemia shortly before I entered college.  His wife, my grandmother, had died only two years before, but she died in the space of two weeks and was relatively comfortable, sedated, and I was kept from seeing her a lot so that I really don’t remember her suffering.  My grandfather, however, suffered for nearly a year and a half with leukemia.  At first it seemed to be merely some lymph problem.  Then it was diagnosed as lymphatic leukemia.  He had a “remission” which seemed encouraging, but was only temporary.  He had contracted hepatitis somehow during his illness and eventually it killed him.  The doctors knew it would, but they did not want to tell us or him that in such a bald way.  He spent his last few days with us living at my parents’ house.  I came home from a date one night to find everyone gone and knew what it must be.  He died within a day or two, a pale shadow of the robust man I had known as my “Pappap.”

            My grandfather’s death really hurt.  It just about drove me insane.  I was confused and hurt.  My family had really been revitalized by the charismatic movement and for all its problems the Holy Spirit used it [the movement] to bring me to Christ and to renew my family as true followers of Jesus.  Unfortunately my Mom was hoping, perhaps, knowing that it was hopeless that Oral Roberts was right, but I think she knew that God was no “cosmic Santa Claus.”  What hurt her most was that my grandfather had been a devout Christian man.  He was a “pillar” in the church that he attended and when he died it literally shut its doors and was no more.  Why would God allow a godly man to suffer and die at a relatively young age, 67?

            I used to go out for long walks at Penn State when the grief would grip me or weep uncontrollably until my roommate thought I was losing my mind.  When a friend’s grandfather died I cried more than he did in sympathetic, empathetic pain knowing that I still hurt even three years later.  When I came to Chicago there were still times when I would struggle with his death and/or melancholia in general and I would walk down to the Morse beach and walk out onto the lighthouse walkway and stare at the stars.  Even as I write this my throat tightens and I am fighting tears.  I loved my grandfather.  He was one of the godliest people I have ever known.  He was not a great intellect or a profound saint of supernatural experience.  He was just a simple man, a common laborer who knew the Savior and loved Him and served Him.  I am here today where I am because, thanks be to God, all my forebears were God-fearing, godly people.

            I wish I knew why Joe’s friend, Kiki, is suffering,  I wish I knew why Sandi Lee is suffering.  We will know in eternity, but I doubt we will care then because it won’t matter.  We will be too busy enjoying the presence of the Lord and all the tears and dying will be no more.

            In a more immediate way I have been struggling with the problem of suffering in the sense of living with unfulfilled desires.  In my case that means not being able to find the support I need to go overseas.  Why won’t God open His treasury and let me go?  Hasn’t He called me?  Surely He has, so why can’t I get going?

            I know why:  God is not in a hurry.  His goal for me is that Christ be formed in me.  Though I know that God is greatly concerned for the salvation of Eastern Europeans and for the training of Eastern European pastors and lay-leaders He is concerned also that I be formed so that I can do the job which He has called me to do and ultimately that I be conformed to Christ’s image for all eternity.

            I have struggled with the suffering of Christians in Eastern Europe and the relative indolence and affluence of Christians in the West.  My conclusion is that we must return to a Biblical view of suffering and of God’s overall goal for His saints.  Suffering is a divine tool, if not the divine tool, to conform us to Christ’s image, that is to make us usable and acceptable in His presence.  Paul says in Philippians 3:10 that he wants “to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death,...”  We are not fond of this teaching and if we use this verse at all we truncate it cutting it off at “to know Christ and the power of His resurrection...”  Few of us really want to know “the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death,...”  Another passage that mystifies me is Paul’s statement in Colossians 1:24 that “I fill up in my flesh what is lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of His body, which is the church.”  I understand Paul to be saying that he was sharing in Christ’s suffering by bearing persecution for the sake of other Christians, that is that he was physically suffering imprisonment and ultimately was beheaded for the sake of the church’s growth and expansion.

            The writer of Hebrews mystifies me even more when he says that Jesus was “made perfect through suffering.”  [Heb. 2:10]  He also say, “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.  [Consider Gethsemene:  though God heard Jesus, He still suffered and died,  God may hear us, but take us through suffering anyway.]  Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered and once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him...”  [Heb.  5:7-9]  I understand the writer of Hebrews to mean that Jesus became a man to suffer the vagaries of this life as we mere mortal men do so that He could empathize with us in our suffering.  [Heb. 2:18]  But in a very real sense even God’s own Son suffered “to be made perfect.”  I truly believe that suffering is the only way to be perfected, “made complete.”

            Paul also says in II Corinthians 1:3-7,  “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of all compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.  For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.  If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer.  And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.”

            Paul also says in Romans 5:2-5, “And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.  Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; character, hope; And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.”

            Peter takes up Paul’s theme here and says in I Peter 1:6,7 “In this [your salvation] you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.  These have come so that your faith - of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire - may prove to be genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”  Peter also says later in I Peter 4:12,13, “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful [literally, “fiery”] trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you.  But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.”  [And this to those who were being beheaded by Nero and thrown to the wild beasts!]

            Well, I see that I have produced a compendium of Scriptures which speak of suffering.  I think they speak for themselves and need little interpretation.  Take them literally; too few do.  I might add that we ought to read Job in this same light.  Job stands as a sort of figure for the righteous man who is perplexed by the suffering of this world.  Job stood to the Jews in exile in Babylon as a symbol of the righteous sufferer who also endured God’s judgment on the people of Israel.  I don’t know why God asks Satan to consider his servant, Job.  That perplexes me, but I do know that God rewarded Job when he survived the test.  I don’t think we can expect material reward for our suffering and surviving.  We are assured, however, that “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him...”  [II Cor. 2:9]  Paul also says that, “we do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”  [II Cor. 4:16-18]

            I guess I have gone on too long, but I have thought a lot about this issue and I hope the fruit of my pondering helps you deal with your pain.  I might add that some pain is self-inflicted.  We are at times rebellious and resist God’s will.  At other times we sin flagrantly and suffer justly for our sin.  I am not speaking about such suffering.  Such suffering is not going to produce a reward.  [I Peter 2:19,20; 4:15]  One of the greatest compliments God gave man, according to CS Lewis, was the ability to damn himself, to send himself to hell, to choose freely to bear just condemnation for his sin.

            I will pray for Joseph and John, as well as Joe and Kiki.  I have been praying for Sandi and the Lees, as well as Northwest as you all seek a new pastor.  I was very sorry to hear of your brother’s death.  Please accept our deepest sympathy.  We will pray for the Lord to comfort you in your sorrow.

            Thank you for the articles.  I enjoyed reading them.  Write again if you are able.  We truly do enjoy hearing from you and being able to share your joys and your sorrows.

                                                                                    Love in Christ,


                                                                                    Phil Gottschalk
                                                                                    II Cor. 4:5-7