Introduction — The Rumble of Panic Beneath Everything
When huge numbers of people die in one event, like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami or the 2010 Haiti earthquake, it makes headlines around the world. But those disasters don’t really change the suffering rate. Tens of thousands of people die every day in unexpected tragedies. Most of it makes no headlines, because pain is the norm in this world.
People like to tell themselves that tragedy happens to others, to people who don’t take precautions. But the loss of loved ones, serious illness, betrayal, money trouble, and moral failure will all come to you if you live a normal life span. No amount of money, power, or planning can keep them out. When pain comes, you finally see that you aren’t in control of your life, and that you never were.
When Keller became a minister, he found that the main reason people rejected God was suffering. But he also saw suffering draw people to God. C. S. Lewis wrote that “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.” Truths you know in your head rarely reach the heart except through loss. A man about to lose both his career and his family once told Keller, “You don’t really know Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.” Keller came to see that the great theme of the Bible is how God brings joy not just despite suffering but through it, just as Jesus brought salvation through the cross.
The Bible compares suffering to a furnace, which in its terms is closer to a forge. A forge is dangerous, but used well, it doesn’t destroy. Things put into it are shaped, purified, and even made beautiful. In the book of Daniel, three faithful men are thrown into a furnace that should kill them. But the people watching see four figures in the flames, and one looks like “the son of the gods.” The three walk through the fire and aren’t burned. Before learning how to walk through the fire, it helps to see how other cultures have made sense of suffering.
Chapter 1 — The Cultures of Suffering
Dr. Paul Brand was a surgeon who treated leprosy patients, first in India and later in the United States. He wrote, “In the United States, I encountered a society that seeks to avoid pain at all costs. Patients lived at a greater comfort level than any I had previously treated, but they seemed far less equipped to handle suffering and far more traumatized by it.”
Here’s why. In the secular view, this material world is all there is, so the point of life is the freedom to choose whatever makes you happiest. In that story, suffering is only an interruption. Almost every older culture saw it as having some purpose, as a punishment, a test, or a chance to grow. Faced wisely, it could even speed you toward the life you wanted. But in the secular view, suffering can’t take you home. It can only keep you from what you want most. In the secular view, suffering always wins.
Christianity doesn’t fit the older views either. Some taught that the wise should detach from life’s good things to find calm. But in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus said, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow even to the point of death.” He didn’t detach his heart. He said to his Father, “Not my will but thine be done.” Others taught karma, that your suffering matches your behavior. But in the book of Job, God rebukes Job’s friends for insisting his pain must come from some hidden sin. And if anyone deserved a good life, Jesus did, but he didn’t get it.
So Christianity teaches that, against fatalism, suffering is overwhelming. Against Buddhism, it’s real. Against karma, it’s often unfair. But against secularism, it’s meaningful. While other worldviews leave people sitting in the middle of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity lets you sit in the middle of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy. One sufferer said, “When I needed God’s comfort, the image in my head was me clinging to Jesus and him hugging me. My image now is me just completely collapsed, and him carrying me.” That kind of comfort is part of how Christianity won the ancient world.
Chapter 2 — The Victory of Christianity
What do people want more than anything else? To be loved, and above all, “not to die and not to have our loved ones die on us.” Suffering takes away the loves and comforts that give life meaning. The only way to keep your peace is to put your meaning in things death can’t touch.
Early Christians didn’t just argue that their faith made more sense of suffering. They said their lives proved it. The bishop Cyprian described how, during terrible plagues, Christians didn’t flee the cities as most of their neighbors did. They stayed to care for the sick and faced their own deaths calmly. Christians don’t face hard times by loving the people and things of this world less. They face them by loving God more. Only when your greatest love is God, a love you can’t lose even in death, can you face all things with peace.
Christian hope also goes further than other faiths. Religions that promise bliss for the soul after death can only offer comfort for the life you lost. Christianity offers that life back. You get your body back, the body you always wished you had, and the life you longed for but never had. It isn’t a ghostly existence. It’s one where you dance, sing, hug, work, and play.
The atheist writer Susan Jacoby once wrote that she doesn’t have to ask, as people of faith must, why a good God allows suffering. True, but she also has none of the comforts faith gives. As one believer wrote, when Jesus rose, his scars became his glory, and God will make your scars your glory too. Still, secular people have their own ways of facing pain, and they deserve a closer look.
Chapter 3 — The Challenge of the Secular
An old line says the whole art of living “is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.” Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who survived three years in the Nazi death camps, watched some prisoners endure the horror while others broke. The difference, he said, was meaning.
Most people today think life is about finding happiness. You decide what will make you happy and work to bring it about. But suffering takes those conditions away, and with them your reason to keep living. To live for meaning is the reverse. You aren’t trying to get something out of life. Life expects something from you. You have meaning only when something matters more to you than your own freedom and happiness. As Frankl saw in the camps, people who make up their own meaning have nothing to die for, so when life takes their freedom, they have nothing to live for.
The Bible teaches that how you suffer is one of the main ways you grow great and become like Christ. Almost no one grows into greatness or finds God without it. Pain works like smelling salts, waking you up to truths about life and your own heart. But that raises a hard question. If suffering can be used for good, why does a good God allow evil at all?
Chapter 4 — The Problem of Evil
If God is all-powerful and also perfectly good, then evil is a problem. The old dilemma goes like this: Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he’s weak. Is he able but not willing? Then he’s cruel. Many people call this the strongest argument against God.
The classic answer is the free-will defense. God made people not as robots but as free beings who can choose, and so can love. But if you’re free to choose good, you’re also free to choose evil. That answer only goes so far. A skeptic can push back. If you saw a child walking in front of a car, you wouldn’t respect her freedom of choice. You’d grab her. So why doesn’t God?
Here’s a better way in. The argument against God hides an assumption: that God can’t have any good reason to allow evil. But people allow pain for good reasons all the time. Doctors put people through painful treatments to save their lives. Parents take away privileges so a child grows up with self-control. And if God knows everything, why couldn’t he have good reasons you can’t think of? Assuming that because you can’t think of a reason, God can’t either, is a mark of great pride in your own mind.
Scientists say even a butterfly’s flight can set off effects in the weather too complex to calculate. So how could anyone look at the “senseless” death of a young person and know what it will bring about in history? If a wise God is guiding all of it toward good, you’d understand maybe a millionth of it. Arguments help the mind. But faith needs more than an argument. It needs a hope.
Chapter 5 — The Challenge of Faith
The evil in the world wasn’t part of God’s original design. That means even a peaceful death at ninety isn’t the way things were meant to be. Telling grieving people that death is a natural part of life asks them to push down a true instinct: that love was meant to last.
The Bible’s teaching on Judgment Day, far from being gloomy, lets you live with both hope and grace. It gives you reason to work for justice, because every wrong will be made right. And it frees you to forgive. If no one gets away with anything, you don’t have to take up the sword yourself. One day every tear will be wiped away. J. R. R. Tolkien pictured a day when “everything sad is going to come untrue.”
The book of Job holds the hardest truth. Job asks God to explain his suffering. Instead, God challenges Job’s right to ask and shows him how little he could understand. But God himself suffered. Jesus knew rejection, betrayal, grief, torture, and death. No one knows why God allows evil, but you can know what the reason isn’t. It can’t be that he doesn’t love you. Someone might say, “That’s only half an answer to why.” Yes, but it’s the half you need. A three-year-old can’t understand most of her parents’ reasons. But she can know their love, and so she can trust them.
And why didn’t Jesus come with a sword to wipe out all evil? Because there would be no one left, including you. He didn’t come the first time to bring justice but to bear it. He came not with a sword in his hands but with nails through his hands. He died in your place so he can one day return to end evil without destroying everyone. But how much of what happens is really in God’s hands?
Chapter 6 — The Sovereignty of God
After Adam and Eve disobey God, he describes what the fallen world will be like. It’s almost a catalog of every kind of suffering. Humanity as a whole has earned a broken world. But suffering isn’t handed out fairly. Bad people don’t have worse lives than good people. So you shouldn’t blame suffering people for their condition.
At the tomb of his friend Lazarus, Jesus sees Mary and the others weeping, and he’s deeply stirred, even angry. That seems strange, since he’s about to raise Lazarus from the dead. The theologian B. B. Warfield explained that Mary’s grief brought home to Jesus the evil of death, its “violent tyranny.” It’s death that Jesus is angry at, and he came into the world to destroy it.
So is God in control of all this? The Bible says yes, but his plan works through people’s choices, not around them. When Moses confronts Pharaoh, the text says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart about as many times as it says Pharaoh hardened his own. So which was it? The Bible’s answer is yes. No one can explain exactly how both truths fit. But good leaders guide people without violating their free will, so why couldn’t God do it perfectly?
That’s a real comfort. It means you can’t ultimately ruin your life. Even your failures will be used for God’s glory and your good. That’s why the promise of Romans 8, that “all things work together for good,” means so much. And the God who rules over your pain isn’t distant from it. He has felt it himself.
Chapter 7 — The Suffering of God
The Gospels show Jesus going through the ordinary pains of human life. He got tired and thirsty. He grieved. He prayed “with loud cries and tears.” He was misunderstood by his best friends and rejected by his family. In the end, everyone he’d poured his life into abandoned him, and on the cross he was forsaken even by his Father.
He shares his people’s suffering now too. Before he became the apostle Paul, Saul hunted down Christians. When Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus, he asked, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” When his people hurt, he hurts.
Christianity never claims to explain every reason behind every instance of suffering, but it does have a final answer to it. That answer will come at the end of history, and everyone who sees it will find it completely satisfying. Until then, it’s still fair to ask what suffering is for.
Chapter 8 — The Reason for Suffering
A man named Greg, facing a painful trial, thought of the aria in the middle of many operas, the sad solo where the main character turns sorrow into something beautiful. He said, “This is my moment to sing the aria. I don’t want to, I don’t want to have this chance, but it’s here now, and what am I going to do about it?”
Suffering like Greg’s can have a purpose. Christians have always said the point of life is to glorify God. So one purpose of suffering, and maybe the hardest to grasp, is God’s glory. Your sufferings, if handled well, bring the Lord glory. In 2006, a gunman killed several young girls in an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania. The forgiveness the Amish community showed the shooter’s family became the talk of the country, and a powerful witness to their God.
Joni Eareckson Tada, paralyzed since a diving accident as a teenager, had a friend named Denise who lay paralyzed in a hospital bed for years. When Denise died, Joni struggled with what all those years had been for. Then a friend showed her where the Bible says the angels watch what happens in the church, just as they watched Job suffer. And suddenly Joni got it.
What if a camera broadcast everything you did tomorrow to a billion people? Even small moments would matter. If Christianity is true, that’s already happening. You’re already on the air, in front of billions of spiritual beings, and God sees it too. As Joni wrote about Denise, “Angels and demons stood amazed as they watched her uncomplaining and patient spirit rising as a sweet smelling savor to God.” No suffering is for nothing. But knowing why suffering matters isn’t the same as knowing how to get through it.
Chapter 9 — Learning to Walk
Jesus said, “Whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” Happiness is a by-product of wanting something more than happiness. If you seek God as the one thing you can’t do without, you’ll get happiness thrown in. If you aim mainly at your own happiness, you’ll get neither.
The same goes for suffering. You shouldn’t see it mainly as a way to improve yourself, but as a way to know God better. When times are good, how do you know if you love God or just the things he gives you? You don’t, really. In suffering, God asks, “Were you loving me before, or only loving the things I was giving you?”
But suffering doesn’t lead to growth automatically, so you have to prepare before it comes. “Why is there so much evil?” and “How will I get through this?” are worlds apart. So you need to prepare the heart, not just the mind, and that means building a deep prayer life. The goal is to find a path through suffering, so you come out wiser and stronger instead of bitter and broken. And that path doesn’t look the same for everyone.
Chapter 10 — The Varieties of Suffering
An old saying goes, “The same sun that melts wax hardens clay.” The same trauma can ruin one person and make another stronger. So don’t assume every sufferer needs the same medicine.
Some suffering comes from your own failures. King David had an affair with Bathsheba and arranged for her husband to be killed. Then their newborn son died, and David realized God was telling him to change his ways. God wasn’t punishing him, since for believers Jesus has already taken the punishment. But God often lets some of the world’s brokenness into your life to wake you up. Other suffering comes from doing what’s right. Paul was beaten, stoned, and shipwrecked for carrying the message of Jesus. Some comes from loss, and Paul tells believers not to “grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope.” And some, like Job’s, comes with no clear reason at all. That kind calls for honest prayer, hard trust, and what Augustine called a reordering of your loves.
The French philosopher Simone Weil described what deep affliction does. It isolates you, because friends who haven’t been through it can’t understand, and some pull away because they don’t know what to say. It makes you so absorbed in your pain that you can’t think of anything else. It makes God seem “more absent than a dead man.” It brings a sense of doom, and often anger. And it tempts you to get comfortable with your discomfort.
People also carry pain differently. A father may tie his identity more to his career, while his wife ties hers more to the children. If he loses his job, he may be crushed, but if a child gets badly hurt, she may be the one who can’t be consoled. Same trouble, different response. So there’s more than one path through the valley of the shadow of death, and the Lord will help you find the best way through.
Chapter 11 — Walking
One of the Bible’s main pictures for facing hard times is walking, through a dark valley, through deep waters, or along a slippery mountain path. Walking means you don’t let suffering sweep you away, and you don’t pretend you can avoid it either.
God says in Isaiah 43, “When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned. Do not be afraid, for I am with you.” He doesn’t say “if” but “when.” The promise isn’t that he’ll keep you out of suffering. It’s that he’ll walk beside you in it. You’ll be in the heat, but the heat won’t get into you. It won’t poison your soul or harden your heart.
That promise came literally true for the three men in the furnace from the book of Daniel. Their names were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, Jewish exiles in Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar ordered everyone to bow to a golden statue, and they refused. When he threatened to throw them into a blazing furnace, they said, “Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods.” Their confidence was in God, not in their guess about what he’d do. They didn’t defy the king because they were sure they’d live. They defied him because their God is God.
Many people trust differently. As a pastor, Keller heard countless people say, “I prayed so hard, and God let me down!” But their deepest hope was set on a plan they’d made for their lives, and God was just a way to get there. They were trusting in “God plus my plan.”
There’s no way to know who you really are until you’re tested, and no way to learn to trust God until you’re drowning. So how do you grow instead of being destroyed? You walk with God. You pour out your heart to him, and above all, you see how Jesus plunged into the fire for you on the cross. Walking isn’t dramatic. It’s steady, day in and day out. The chapters ahead look at the rest of what the Bible calls sufferers to do: weep, trust, pray, think, thank, love, and hope. None can be skipped, and the first is to weep.
Chapter 12 — Weeping
Many of the Psalms are laments, raw cries of grief. Some even complain to God: “Why do you sleep, O Lord?” When Job hears that his children are dead, he tears his robe and falls to the ground. But the Bible says, “In all this Job sinned not.” By the middle of the book, Job is cursing the day he was born. And yet God’s final verdict on him is surprisingly positive.
Isaiah says of the coming Servant, “A bruised reed he will not break.” A bruised reed is a stalk of grain bent at an angle. It isn’t snapped in two, but it will never produce grain again. Yet this Servant can heal it, and the church has always understood him to be Jesus. Jesus is drawn to hopeless cases. He loves people who look fine outside but are dying inside.
The prophet Elijah is a great man of God, but he’s cracking under pressure. He goes into the wilderness, says, “Take away my life,” and falls asleep under a bush. So God sends an angel, and the first thing the angel does is cook him a meal. “Get up and eat,” the angel says. Elijah eats, sleeps, and eats again. Later, God talks with him and shows him things aren’t as hopeless as he thinks. But Elijah needs food, rest, and a gentle touch before he needs a talk.
Suffering people need to be able to weep, not be told right away what to do. Joseph Bayly, who lost three of his sons, wrote: “I was sitting, torn by grief. Someone came and talked to me of God’s dealings, of why it happened, of hope beyond the grave. He said things I knew were true. I was unmoved, except to wish he’d go away. Another came and sat beside me. He didn’t talk. He just sat beside me for an hour or more, listened when I said something, answered briefly, prayed simply, left. I was moved. I was comforted. I hated to see him go.”
Most psalms of lament end with some hope. Psalm 88 ends with none at all. And God didn’t censor it out of the Bible. Even Jesus, on the cross, cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Honest grief is the first step. But at some point, weeping has to be joined by trusting.
Chapter 13 — Trusting
As the saying goes, “If God were small enough to be understood, he wouldn’t be big enough to be worshipped.” Think of Joseph. His brothers sold him into slavery, and he spent years as a slave and a prisoner. But in the end, God used it to put him in a place to save many lives, including his family’s. God often doesn’t give you exactly what you ask for. He gives you what you would have asked for if you knew everything he knows.
You get to read Joseph’s whole story, but not your own. Even though you can’t know the reasons behind your crosses, you can look at Jesus’ cross and know God is working things out. And trusting him when you don’t understand is something you do in prayer.
Chapter 14 — Praying
When disaster first hits, Job grieves, but he also worships: “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. May the name of the Lord be praised.” Then his friends arrive with true but careless advice. As the scholar Francis Andersen says, “True words can be thin medicine for a man in the depths.”
When God finally answers Job, he comes in a storm, the most terrifying force ancient people knew. Yet he speaks to Job personally, as a gracious God and an overwhelming force at the same time. Job never sees the big picture. He sees only God. But that’s what you really need.
Here’s the crucial thing. Through it all, Job never stopped praying. He complained and doubted, but he did it to God. And in the end, God said Job had triumphed. Not because Job’s heart was always right, but because his suffering drove him toward God instead of away.
So read the Scriptures even if it hurts. And don’t only listen to your heart. Talk to it. When it says, “It’s hopeless,” argue back: “Well, that depends on what you were hoping in.” The preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones asked, “Have you realized that so much of the unhappiness in your life is due to the fact you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?” Remind yourself who God is and what he’s promised to do. Paul shows how in a letter he wrote from prison.
Chapter 15 — Thinking, Thanking, Loving
Writing to the Philippians, Paul says, “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation.” He promises that “the peace of God will guard your hearts and your minds.” The Greek word for “guard” means to surround a city with an army. If an army is all around you, you can sleep well. Most advice on anxiety tells you to push out negative thoughts. But God’s peace isn’t the absence of negative thoughts. It’s the presence of God himself. Paul points to three habits that help you find it: thinking, thanking, and loving.
First, thinking. Paul says, “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, think about such things.” He means the Bible’s teaching about God, sin, Christ, and salvation. Secular advice for stress says to stop thinking so hard and relax. Christian peace comes from thinking more, and harder, about the big questions. It’s like climbing a mountain and turning around to see all the ground you’ve covered. From up there, you can see how it all fits.
Second, thanking. Paul says, “Don’t be anxious, but make requests to God with thanksgiving.” He doesn’t say to thank God after you get what you asked for. He says to thank him as you ask, before you know his answer.
Third, loving. The Stoics taught that people aren’t content because they love things too much. Augustine disagreed. He said, “Only love of the immutable can bring tranquility.” Immutable means something that can’t change. Your career and family can be taken away. God’s love can’t. So your problem isn’t that you love your family too much. It’s that you love God too little compared to them. If you rest deeply in God’s love, suffering can sting, but it can’t uproot you.
How can you love God more? Don’t try to work on your feelings directly. Look at Jesus, at who he is and what he did for you. That’s how God becomes irresistibly beautiful. And that love points you toward what’s still ahead.
Chapter 16 — Hoping
Human beings are shaped by hope. How you live now is controlled by what you believe about your future.
When the pastor Donald Barnhouse’s wife died, he was driving his children to her funeral when a large truck passed them and its shadow swept over the car. He asked his daughter, “Would you rather be run over by a truck, or by its shadow?” She said, “By the shadow, of course. That can’t hurt us at all.” He said, “Right. It was only the shadow of death that went over your mother. She’s actually alive, more alive than we are. Two thousand years ago, the real truck of death hit Jesus. And because we believe in him, the only thing that can come over us is the shadow of death.”
With that hope, suffering doesn’t get the last word. As one old writer cried out, “Come on, crosses, the lower you lay me, the higher you will raise me!”
Epilogue
Keller sums it all up this way. If you know what the Bible teaches about suffering, you won’t be surprised when grief and loss come. Here are ten things to do.
First, recognize the kinds of suffering. Some comes from your own wrong choices, some from betrayal, some from loss that comes to everyone, and some is simply horrendous. Second, recognize that people are different. Don’t assume God will lead you the same way he led someone else. Third, weep. Be brutally honest with God about your pain. Fourth, trust. Like Jesus, who first asked, “Let this cup pass from me,” wrestle until you can say, “Thy will be done.” Fifth, pray. Keep praying and worshipping, even when it’s dry.
Sixth, be disciplined in your thinking. Remember all God has done and will do, and talk to your heart. Seventh, ask what this hard time shows you about where you need to grow. Eighth, reorder your loves. Your suffering is often doubled because you turned good things into ultimate things. Ninth, don’t pull away from community. Find a church where sufferers are loved. And tenth, learn to receive and give forgiveness. When suffering exposes your failures, repent. When it comes from betrayal, forgive from the heart and set aside revenge.