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REDEEMING SUFFERING

Joni Eareckson Tada

Greg Barshaw, an elder at the Grace Community Church in Southern California, received a phone call one day from a neighboring pastor. This pastor and Greg often studied the Bible together over coffee in the mornings. The pastor said, “Greg, a friend in my church has a little boy with multiple disabilities, and I’m wondering if your church would want to help this mom and dad and young boy.” Greg thought it was a good idea. He would be happy to reach out to this family. But then, when he pressed the pastor further, he realized that additional issues were involved. Then the pastor said, “To be honest, Greg, I’m afraid one day this father will walk into my study, slam his fist on my desk, and say, ‘Tell me why God has cursed me with a son with multiple disabilities? How is it that God has done this?’ I have no idea how I would answer him.”

Greg realized that this pastor had an issue with the theology of suffering and that he was not sure how he would address that family’s needs. One can understand that pastor’s fear. God’s sovereignty is sometimes scary. Sometimes a person wakes up in the middle of the night—even as I do right now with chronic pain that is related to my disability—and he thinks, Who is this God?

Does God say, “Into each life a little rain must fall,” and then aim a hose in earth’s general direction to see who gets the wettest? That’s what I thought when I was first injured. When I took that deep dive into shallow water, I thought that my spinal-cord injury was a flip of the coin. I thought it was a fluke of fate. I thought if God had anything to do with it, he was caught off guard. Perhaps he was off somewhere listening to the prayers of more obedient saints. Or perhaps he was in the Middle East fulfilling prophecy. Or maybe he was listening to the prayers of people with cancer.

I did not know where God was, but I assumed he was not on that raft when I took that dive. I figured that Satan probably was the one who came sneaking up behind me while God had his back turned, and Satan gave a big hard shove with his foot, and off I went. And then God turned around, saw what had happened, and responded, “Oh, my! How will I patch things up for this girl’s good and my glory?”

And then I imagined God had to go get his WD-40 and his fix-it glue and come back and scratch his head and try to figure out how he could fix my situation. I assumed God had been caught off guard when Satan threw a monkey wrench into his plans for my life. A view like that may have been the view of a seventeen-year-old girl lying on a Stryker frame, frustrated, frightened, embittered. But a view like that says that God is helpless and is held hostage by my handicap, just as I was.

I realized, though, that God was bigger than that. I had enough sense to know that the Bible probably has answers for my plight somewhere, but I had no idea where to look. I had no idea where to turn.

After I got out of the hospital, a young man knocked on my door. He was a sophomore from the local high school where I had graduated. He knew I had some tough questions about God. He did not have all the answers, but he said he was willing to help me in a Bible study, and he would assist me in tackling the tough questions about why this happened. And when he told me he would be willing to do that, the very first thing I did was ask him straight on, “How can this be God’s will?”

Just a year earlier Steve had prayed that God would draw me closer to him. So how could this be an answer to that prayer? If this is the way God treats his believers, especially young believers, he would never be trusted with another prayer again. How could any of this be God’s will? That was a good question forty years ago, when I broke my neck, and it is still a good question today.

Many are asking the same question. They may not have broken necks. But some of them have broken hearts, and others have broken homes. Some are experiencing hardships that have ripped into their sanity, leaving them numb and bleeding, and they too ask, “God, how can this be your will?”

Steve said a very wise thing to me. “Look, Joni—think of Jesus Christ. He was the most God-forsaken man who ever lived. And if we can find answers for his life, they should be able to suffice for your life. So, Joni, let me turn your question around. Do you think it was God’s will for Jesus to suffer as he did? Do you think it was his will for Jesus to go to the cross?”

“Well,” I thought, “that’s a stupid question. Of course it was God’s will for Jesus to go to the cross.”

And then he said something curious. “I want you to look at all the awful things that happened to Jesus on that cross. No doubt it was the Devil who inspired Judas Iscariot to hand over the Savior for a mere thirty pieces of silver. And no doubt Satan prodded Pontius Pilate to hand down mock justice in order to gain political popularity. And no doubt it was the Devil who inspired that mob to scream for Christ’s crucifixion. And no doubt it was the Devil who pushed those soldiers to torture Jesus. How can any of that be God’s will: treason, injustice, murder, torture?” He had me there, because I could not conceive of those things being part of God’s will.

But then Steve did an interesting thing. He turned to and read Acts 4:28. “They”—that is, Herod and Pontius Pilate, the mob in the streets, and the soldiers—“did what [God’s] power and will had decided beforehand should happen” (niv). And the world’s worst murder suddenly became the world’s only salvation.

God did not violate the will of the people who did those awful things. The sin was in their hearts. God permits all sorts of things he does not approve of. He lets out the rope so that they might fulfill their evil plans and wicked schemes. Perhaps the Devil thought, I will stop God’s Son dead in his tracks. No more of this ridiculous talk about redemption. But God’s motive was to abort that devilish scheme and throw open the floodgates of heaven so that whoever will may come to him. God always aborts devilish schemes to serve his own ends and accomplish his own purposes.

“Joni,” my friend Steve said to me, “God permits what he hates in order to accomplish what he loves.” Heaven and hell can end up participating in the exact same event but for different reasons. Ephesians 1:11 puts it plainly: God “according to [his] purpose . . . works all things according to the counsel of his will.” I found strange comfort in that thought. I believe it was Dorothy Sayers who said, “God wrenches out of evil positive good for us and glory for Himself.” In other words, he redeems it.

God redeems suffering. The God of life is the only one who can conquer death by embracing it. And so death no longer has the victory, and neither does suffering. Christ has given it meaning, not only for salvation but also for sanctification, and that is the best part. It tells us we are no longer alone in our hardships, our disabilities. Our suffering is not a flip of the coin; it is not a fluke of fate. We are not in the middle of some divine cosmic accident. No, our suffering can be redeemed. Oh, the wonder of such a thought that it is all for our sanctification, our relationship with him, and our witness to a world in need of redemption.

God will often permit suffering, just as he is allowing it in my life. After forty years of quadriplegia, with my chronic pain and now shortness of breath, I can say, God will permit that broken heart. God will permit that broken home. God will permit that broken neck. Suffering then is like a sheep dog snapping at my heels, driving me down the road to Calvary, where otherwise I might not naturally be inclined to go.

God is the one who takes suffering like a jackhammer and breaks apart the rocks of resistance. He takes the chisel of the pain and the bite of hardship and chips away at one’s pride. And then sufferers are driven to the cross by the overwhelming conviction that they have nowhere else to go. No one is naturally drawn to the cross. Human instincts do not naturally lead people there.

This may well be the most important reason every church needs a disability ministry in its congregation. People with disabilities, unlike others, are driven to the cross by the overwhelming conviction that they have no other place to go. That is eventually what happened to the father of that little boy with multiple disabilities.

The father came to realize that God allowed this in his life. God brought this child into their family so that that family might be united around the cross of Jesus Christ, that they might find help in time of need, that they might find strength in their weakness. People with disabilities may well be God’s best audiovisual aids of these powerful truths to the rest of the congregation. Disabled people are audiovisual aids on how suffering should be handled. People who are suffering always have something to say to those who are facing lesser conflicts.

Let me give you an example. If you listen to the Joni and Friends radio program or read our materials, you know that we hold retreats all across the country for families affected by disabilities. This year we will...