New Songs and Ultimate Mouth-Stoppers

From a literary perspective, I find the resolution of the book of Job perfectly satisfying. Sure, it’s a whole other world culturally, it’s translated from another language, and it’s incredibly ancient, which means the uncertainty of the Hebrew text for this word or that figure of speech is footnoted more often than in other scriptures. That said, it’s a tremendous piece of writing, and God’s four-chapter response to Job’s perplexity and distress is its epic and poetic climax.

From a theological perspective, however, modern Christian readers may walk away from the book’s conclusion feeling something significant about the problem of human suffering still needs addressing.

Tears in Your Bottle

“You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?”

— From Psalm 56, a Miktam of David

Scholars debate when various scribes added the superscriptions over some of the Psalms, and whether we can trust them all to the same degree. They note, for example, that the translators of the Septuagint a few centuries before Christ both edited and freely supplemented existing Hebrew superscriptions.

When Life Really Hurts

There’s a woman in my church — a lovely woman, a mother and a wife, and selfless servant of the Lord’s people, one most highly esteemed. She has been a grief and addiction counselor, and has spent her whole life ministering to others in their moments of darkest sorrow. Her husband is also a wonderful person, and his career for several decades has been as chaplain to the elderly, caring for fragile souls on the doorstep of eternity.

This woman has just been diagnosed with aggressive, metastasizing liver cancer. The fatal kind.

Bearing Up

“Suffering produces endurance.”

The doctor’s diagnosis was wrong, and the steroids he prescribed have puffed your face up like a chipmunk for two weeks and accomplished nothing. The car had to go to the mechanic again, and you’re pretty sure it’s for the same thing you just got “fixed” three months ago. You spent more time stuck on the highway in heavy traffic today listening to the clatter from your wheel well than you spent on the job.

You are somewhat less than amused.

Three Metaphors

The book of Acts ends with Paul’s first Roman imprisonment, from which he was eventually released and which was a comparative walk in the park.

Acts is the final historical book of the New Testament, so we must infer anything further about Paul’s life and ministry from his later letters. Without an independent witness to Paul’s travels, trials and tribulations, we only know what went on by reading between the lines of the apostle’s subsequent correspondence with local churches, friends and associates.

Everything we know about the circumstances of his second imprisonment comes from 2 Timothy.

A Profound Apology

So I was supervising some young Christians, along with at least one unbeliever. They were viewing an apologetics video. It was one that had been professionally produced — you know, the kind that had enough money put into it to reasonably approximate Hollywood or TED Talk production values. Their local church had made it available, off that Christian video-streaming service that some churches seem to like.

The topic was “Why Does God Allow Suffering and Tragedy?”

What a great topic, I thought. Whether you’re a Christian or an unbeliever, that’s got to be something you’ve asked yourself, because you don’t live long in this world without running into some kind of suffering. If you’re fortunate, it’s small; but it’s astonishing how huge the things some children face can be.

Suffering and Sincerity

“Some were tortured … Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment … They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated — of whom the world was not worthy — wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.”

One of the most compelling arguments for the sincerity of the many witnesses to the resurrection of Christ, on which the Christian faith depends, is that first century believers continued to claim Jesus was alive in the face of decades of the most intense Jewish hostility, and later widespread Gentile opposition. Not all gave their lives for their faith, but most or all risked martyrdom along the way.

Rational men, it is argued, will not die for something they know to be a lie. It’s a point not easily disproved.

The Impossible Problem

When Jarred Cinman wrote an opinion piece for his blog in 2015 entitled “The five best reasons not to believe in God”, I doubt he imagined he was breaking new ground in the ongoing debate over whether the world would be better off without religion. He couldn’t have. After all, he quoted Stephen Fry, whose own swipes at God have prompted the occasional comment in this space.

Unbelief is hardly a novel concept.

Dear Dinesh: On Evil and Suffering

[Dinesh D’Souza is a writer, scholar, filmmaker and Christian apologist.]

Dear Dinesh:

Thank you very, very much for your 2007 book, What’s So Great About Christianity? I regret having not gotten around to reading it earlier. What a fine piece of writing!

It seems to me it fills a very necessary gap in our growing corpus of apologetics literature: rather than merely defeating atheist reasoning (yet again), it rightly points to the need for a more positive take on Christian achievements. It is an apology without an “apologetic” tone, if you take my meaning; a confident treatise on the goods of faith, rather than a defensive reaction to the current round of atheist hate literature. More of this is what we need.

In the spirit of supporting that, I wonder if I could offer a thought that might further strengthen the case you are so courageously putting forward?

When the Chickens Come Home to Roost

In his classic The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis wrote a scene I loved as a child, and have never been able to forget as an adult. The lion Aslan (Lewis’s Christ analog) is speaking to Aravis, the Calormene girl who has fled her family and home country to avoid a forced marriage, and is currently recovering from a fairly serious injury inflicted on the way to Narnia by a previously unrecognized lion.

So Aslan tells her the real reason for her injuries.

Sympathy and Solipsism

Much of scripture is historical. No surprise there. We learn that in Sunday School.

History is just the words and doings of men recorded by other men, but Bible history is a little different in that the Bible’s historians recorded what they did not just to provide an accurate account of what happened, but with spiritual ends in view. Sometimes the conversations and speeches the Bible’s historians documented for us were essentially truthful; other times they were not.

Grace in the Wilderness

It is essential to our well being that how we think about ourselves and our circumstances (our philosophy) be governed by what we know about God from scripture (our theology). This is especially true when we are experiencing physical pain, mental distress or unwanted and unexplained trials over an extended period.

If our theology does not take charge, we find ourselves in a state of guilt or self-pity. Neither helps.

When Life Really Hurts

There’s a woman in my church — a lovely woman, a mother and a wife, and selfless servant of the Lord’s people, one most highly esteemed. She has been a grief and addiction counselor, and has spent her whole life ministering to others in their moments of darkest sorrow. Her husband is also a wonderful person, and his career for several decades has been as chaplain to the elderly, caring for fragile souls on the doorstep of eternity.

This woman has just been diagnosed with aggressive, metastasizing liver cancer. The fatal kind.

Intended Meanings and Frivolous Applications

Disclaimer time: our loving Father is not indifferent to the details of his children’s lives. He cares about our strained relationships, our problems at work, our finances and our trips to the doctor’s office. It matters to him when we grieve over a lost pet. If you are not grateful for that level of divine attention today, you certainly will be at some point down the road.

The bone of contention in what follows, then, is not whether God cares, but how his care is normally expressed to us. After all, we can’t appreciate the Lord’s love if we can’t recognize it. If we are expecting it to manifest one way and it manifests in a different way, we may feel God doesn’t love us at all.

More importantly, we really don’t want to lead other Christians to expect from the Lord things they are most unlikely to receive.

Provided We Suffer

“The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs — heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.”

Simon Peter didn’t want to suffer with Jesus.

Oh, he said he did. He thought he did. When he made his promises of loyalty, he wasn’t virtue signaling to the other disciples or pretending to love his Lord more than he really did. At least, it doesn’t read that way to me in the gospels. “Lord, I am ready to go with you both to prison and to death.” “Even if I must die with you, I will not deny you!” “Even though they all fall away, I will not.” Emphatic statements made from the heart, and quite ingenuous.

Then, to his horror, Peter found he wasn’t up to the job. His aspirations exceeded his execution. Put to the test, he discovered he wasn’t really ready to suffer with the Lord Jesus after all.

A Profound Apology

The most recent version of this post is available here.

COVID-19 and the Will of God

“It was God’s will.”

Ah, the magic phrase. You hear it said by devout people at funerals, usually with palpable resignation. “He was taken before we were ready, and we’re all hurting, but somehow we know — though we can’t quite see how it might be since he was such a great guy and will be so profoundly missed — that his untimely and painful death was God’s will.”

So that’s all right then. Even if it isn’t, really.

The Point of Faith

“I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.”

Imagine for a second that at the time you came to Christ you had been told that your life from this day forward was to be characterized by people throwing rocks at you, telling lies about you, betraying you and letting you down, calling you names, hitting you, throwing you in jail and trying to kill you. Moreover, in addition to all the abuse you could expect as a matter of course from your fellow man for the sake of your testimony to Christ, you could also expect more than your fair share of all the nasty, apparently random things that happen to people the world over: getting mugged, having to work hard, getting no sleep, getting sick, suffering chronic pain from old injuries, lacking food and having your transportation fail regularly in spectacular and dangerous ways.

Would that have changed anything? Might a bout of frantic back-peddling have ensued?

In some cases, maybe.

Time and Chance (14)

There is a certain apparent randomness to hurricanes, cancer and car accidents. There is nothing at all random about oppression. Oppression is something one human being deliberately inflicts on another, and for which the oppressor will one day give an account.

A hurricane does not have to explain itself, or pay some future price for the havoc and misery it has produced. An oppressor certainly will.

Dear Dinesh: On Evil and Suffering

The most recent version of this post is available here.