Give Me Understanding That I May Live (eBook)

Prologue

Picking Up the Thread

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith,

we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand,

and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings,

knowing that suffering produces endurance,

and endurance produces character,

and character produces hope,

and hope does not put us to shame,

because God’s love has been poured into our hearts

through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Romans 5:1–5

A central claim of When the Stars Disappear: Help and Hope from Stories of Suffering in Scripture, the first volume in this series, is that we understand our lives as stories. Stories help us orient ourselves in life by placing us somewhere on a trajectory that has a beginning, middle, and end. Moreover, we need two different kinds of stories to give our lives their full meaning: a particular (or personal) story and a general one. The particular story is about what our individual lives mean. Each of us needs to be able to tell a story that orients us to the particular people, places, and things around us, describing where we have come from, where we are, and where we think we can go so that we can project ourselves into hopeful futures where we can get what we want and need. The general story answers questions about what human life as such means. For instance, are we just chance products of blind, meaningless cosmic forces, or have we been created by God to fulfill some specific purpose? Is human life about nothing but making money and pursuing our own personal happiness, or is it about believing and obeying God and caring for others? Metaphorically, these two kinds of stories set the stars that must guide us in place, enabling us to navigate life’s otherwise uncharted seas. These “stars” are the deep and firm convictions we rely on to tell us who we are and what sort of world we live in. They include convictions about who our parents are, what we take to be deeply meaningful, what we take to be worth doing, whether there is a God, and whether Jesus Christ is God’s Son who redeems us from our slavery to sin.1

Suffering tends to challenge our stories, prompting us to question whether the stories we accept are true. Even a mild headache can make me doubt a small part of my personal story—the part that assumes that in a few hours I will be relatively pain-free. Profound suffering may threaten to blot out completely the light of the stars that are guiding us by making us doubt the general story we have accepted about what human life means.

When the Stars Disappear examined the personal stories of Naomi, Job, Jeremiah, and some of the psalmists in order to help those of us who are suffering not lose hope that God is with us and working in and through our suffering for our good. Give Me Understanding That I May Live: Situating Our Suffering within God’s Redemptive Plan steps back to look at the general Christian story that explains why there is any suffering, why there is so much of it, and what will finally, gloriously, be true for those who confess with their mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in their hearts that God raised him from the dead (see Rom. 10:9).

When suffering overwhelms us, it is hard to focus on anything else. Yet often our focus needs to shift. As we saw in When the Stars Disappear, when God finally spoke to Job, he did not commiserate with him. He didn’t answer Job’s questions or address his complaints. Instead, he shifted Job’s focus to the world’s creation, accusing Job of obscuring his plans “by words without knowledge” (Job 38:2). He then battered Job with questions, exposing Job’s ignorance and impotence while celebrating his own knowledge, power, and dominion over all things, including his dominion over wicked human beings and the world’s most terrifying creatures.2

By shifting Job’s focus, God enabled Job to gain some perspective on his suffering. What had seemed to Job in his suffering to be life’s full story was not in fact the full story. Job came to see that the full story involved much more than his suffering. This led him to confess that he had spoken of things that were, in fact, too wonderful for him to understand (see Job 40:1–5; 42:1–6).

This volume tells the full Christian story, “the true story of the whole world.”1 That story has four parts: creation, rebellion, redemption, and consummation. Scripture considers each part, and our coming to understand the main features of each is crucial if we are to live the lives for which God has made us and to which he calls us.

Just as our high schooler in When the Stars Disappear made sense of her life by embracing a storyline that aimed at her becoming a primary-care physician,3 so all of us make sense of our lives by the stories we tell. And none of us cook up these stories by ourselves. We learn to tell stories by others telling us stories that help us make sense of our lives.2

Even very young children understand that their personal stories are anchored in the past. They ask questions like, “Who made me?” “Who was your daddy, Grandma?” and “What did you do when you were a little girl, Mommy?” The answers they are given set some of the metaphorical stars that guide them in place. It is the same for us all. In particular, having an answer to the question, “How have human beings come to be?” is essential to answering other questions like, “Why are we here?” and “What does life mean?”

Whether we believe that God has created us to fulfill a specific role in creation or that we have evolved entirely by chance should make all the difference in how we think about ourselves now. A little girl’s “Who made me?” expanded to “How have we”—meaning all of us—“come to be?” is one of life’s most crucial questions. Moreover, knowing whether our ancestors made good or bad choices and whether their lives went well or poorly can be crucial for understanding ourselves. Learning that my grandfather was an alcoholic who left my grandmother very early in my father’s life tells me something important about my father’s history that inevitably has shaped his relationship with me.

In Scripture, God answers life’s most fundamental questions, helping us get our stories straight. As Luther recognized, the opening chapters of Genesis are “certainly the foundation of the whole of Scripture,” providing a true account of our beginnings.3 He found nothing more fascinating than the Bible’s first book. Of course, “curiosity about our beginnings,” as Henri Blocher notes, “continues to haunt the human race.”4 It accounts for the current flood of books about human beginnings, especially from those who deny divine creation.5

The question, “How have we come to be?” is answered by the story of creation in Genesis 1–2. The question, “Did our first parents make good or bad choices?” is answered in Genesis 3 where we are told that they chose to rebel against God’s command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The consequences of that most disastrous of all choices started to become clear immediately. They became horrifyingly apparent in Genesis 4.

Even Christians may find themselves doubting God’s goodness or power when they become aware of some kinds or degrees of suffering. They can find themselves asking, How is suffering like this possible if there is a perfectly good, all-powerful God? Wouldn’t such a God prevent such suffering?4 Those doubts require us to consider the first two parts of the Christian story. We have to understand creation and rebellion in order to understand that while nothing that happens falls out of God’s hands, he is at the same time not to be blamed for the world’s suffering, either for its first appearance or for its persistence.

My first chapter considers creation, emphasizing the world’s perfection as God created it. Chapter 2 considers rebellion, telling how suffering entered the world. Chapter 3 explains what suffering is and how it affects us. And then chapter 4 begins considering redemption and consummation, the story’s third and fourth parts. Our redemption and creation’s ultimately complete restoration at the consummation of all things are the great gifts that suffering should lead us to seek. The epilogue returns to stressing how crucial it is for us to keep in mind all four parts of “the true story of the whole world”—and especially its first and final parts. If in your reading of my first two chapters you find yourself wondering why I am not immediately engaging the topic of suffering, reading the epilogue may help you see that we need to be concerned about much more than our suffering if we are to live the lives to which God is calling us.