Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 1-125 (Apologetics)

The Cry for a Reason in Suffering (Part 7)

by Ravi Zacharias

——————– A COUNTERPERSPECTIVE ——————–

Having reached that point, a new discovery came into focus for Job. He had earlier asked, “If a man dies, will he live again?” He was now able to answer his own question with firm assurance:

I know that my Redeemer lives, And that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, Yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him With my own eyes–I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me! (Job 19:25-27)

All suffering has to be dealt with personally but also with a real understanding that there is life beyond the grave. Just think of Job’s confidence: “After my skin has been destroyed, yet in flesh I will see God.” There is a perspective from God’s side that those of us locked in a temporal frame of reference can never see. Death was not going to break Job’s communion with God. The songwriter said it: “Let me see this world, dear Lord, as though I were looking through Your eyes.”

When the prophet Habakkuk was struggling with all the violence he saw around him, he asked God to explain it to him. He ended by saying, “He makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights.” For the first time he saw human suffering from a vantage point he had never seen before, from God’s perspective (Hab. 3:17-19).

Having suffered much in his own life, the eminent and afflicted poet William Cowper expressed it beautifully:

Blind unbelief is sure to err, And scan his works in vain; God is His own interpreter, And He will make it plain.

Job was being taken one step at a time–from recognizing the Creator and Designer to meeting Him as Revealer and Comforter and finally to knowing Him as Mediator and Savior. This beautiful truth could only be understood by Job in a very limited fashion. Those of us who look back to the cross have a much fuller understanding of the grand connotation the word Savior has. Little would Job know that a day would come when the purest one of all, in whom there was no sin, would suffer and die that we who lived in sin might find His rest and purity.

A very moving story is told about a renowned preacher who lost his young wife. In the confusion of her fresh grief, his little daughter came to him and asked why it was that if Jesus has died for our sins we still have to die. He waited for the appropriate illustration with which to help her young mind understand what God has done for us. On the way to the funeral, their car was behind a big truck. Drawing her attention to the truck, he looked at his daughter and asked if she had to be run over, would she rather be run over by a truck or by its shadow on the side of the road.

“Why of course,” she said, “the shadow would be better, because it would not hurt as much.”

He paused and answered her gently, “That is what Jesus has done for you. On His death upon the cross, He let the truck of God’s judgment pass over Him. Only the shadow of death goes over us now.”

By taking our place upon the cross and bridging the chasm between God, who offered life, and humanity, which deserved death, Christ spanned the greatest gulf. Our thirst for a mediator before God is a very genuine cry that has been expressed in virtually every theistic religion. But for most, the God who is out there is treated as still being out there. For others, the quest to bring God near without humanizing Him has been a particular struggle. Thus in Greek mythology, heroes and the personification of ideals proliferate. In pantheism, avatars, or incarnations, form the bulk of revelation. But in the Christian faith, the fact that God comes close while remaining transcendent is very unique. To what degree Job understood this will always remain moot, but that he cried out even in his primitive understanding of redemption that a Savior would understand his suffering, plead His cause, and vindicate him is remarkable.

In short, this discovery affirmed one of Job’s convictions but shattered one aspect of his theology. Job had repeatedly said that as far as he knew he had lived an honorable life. But he had assumed all along that if one walked the straight and narrow and lived a life of purity, prosperity and freedom from pain would naturally follow. This was a false conclusion.

Over the years of history we have seen this unfortunate deduction made time and time again. We may even recall that when John the Baptist was put into prison he wondered if Jesus was indeed who He claimed to be. The implication was, “If He is the Messiah, then why am I in prison?” The apostle Peter could not for a moment conceive of the Son of God going to a cross. As hard as it is to accept, suffering is not always because of one’s personal sin, but suffering will always have to be dealt with personally. Our Lord Himself bore the pain of that which was not His own doing, but the Captain of our salvation was made perfect, that is, complete, through suffering. Life must never be viewed from the isolated instances of one’s personal struggle. There is a big picture and a complete picture into which our personal struggle fits. That picture is in the mind of God. The closer we draw to Him, the clearer that picture becomes. And part of that picture is pain and desolation.

But if Job had his theology shattered and if the picture told him that even the righteous could suffer pain and hurt, what was the one thing he would need to know more than anything else? That is where we find the answer that Job needed most, as much as we do when walking through deep waters. I can best answer this by an illustration.

Some years ago when I had the privilege of speaking at Moody Bible Institute, we had the extraordinary blessing of listening to a talk by Professor Charles Cooper, who taught there. He sat in a chair as he told his story that was still so fresh in his memory and in the memory of those who knew him. He spoke of the thrill he’d felt of being newly married and of the delight of a young love. Yet only four months into his marriage, tragedy struck.

His wife was returning from a trip, and he and his mother-in-law went to the airport to pick her up. As the plane pulled up to the jetway, they saw ambulances and police cars closing in on the back of the aircraft and personnel from those vehicles running up the back stairway. But Charles’s focus was on the front of the plane from where his wife would disembark. All of a sudden, his mother- in-law clasped his arm and pointed to a stretcher that was being removed from the back door of the airplane. On the stretcher was obviously a body, covered by a white sheet. But that was not all. Hanging from the stretcher was a purse that they recognized as his wife’s.

A few moments later their names were called over the loud speaker and in shock, they were informed that shortly before landing, without any previous history of such a condition, his young wife had suffered a fatal heart attack. How does one respond to news so debilitating? Charles Cooper walked us through his own journey of pain. His closing comment will forever ring in my ears. He said that the cards, the letters, the phone calls, the embraces, and the love of friends all helped him to survive. “But what kept me going more than anything else was my confidence in the character of God.” That was the bottom line.

This is the adjustment Job needed. Constantly focusing on his own character and purity, he had lost sight of the character of God Himself. Those who have walked this path hold on to that truth with all the strength they have. God is not only all-powerful. He is perfect in goodness. We must trust Him even when the times are grim.

At the end, that this God who was his Creator and Designer, his Revealer and Comforter, his Mediator and Savior, was also his Strengthener and Restorer.

To be concluded in Part 8 – The Triumphal Moment

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(“The Cry for a Reason in Suffering” is Chapter 3 of _Cries of the Heart_ by Ravi Zacharias. Copyright 1999 Word Publishers. pp63-90. Used with permission.)