“Faith and Suffering”

I have walked with God for nearly my entire life, and still I routinely fail to understand the nature of faith. It is a subject that is widely misunderstood in the American church today. Whether by neglect, apathy, or the endless materialistic gluttony that now pervades our society, the truth remains: we no longer remember what it means to have faith. I do not speak as a critic or a judge on this matter—except, that is, as one who has experienced this phenomenon firsthand.

Throughout my life I have found myself, as all have, in moments of suffering, crying out to God for respite. In these moments, I inevitably ask, "Where are You, God?" Less of a genuine question and more of an accusation, truly. Perhaps you can relate. It is interesting how God always seems to vanish the second our circumstances cease to yield to our will. In one moment, God is beside us, protecting us from harm and endowing us with blessings, and in the next, He is gone like the wind. When our jobs are secure, our health is in good order, and the president we voted for sits in Washington, God seems to be all around us, working on our behalf. But what happens when this is not the case? Where is God when our bank accounts are empty, sickness wrecks our bodies, and those we despise take the reins of government?

It would seem that it is in these times that the Christian ought to take hold of his faith—but what does that mean? Until recently, I believed that this meant to believe that, no matter the situation, God would make my situation "good" again, and that if I believed hard enough, it would happen. This is one of the most destructive lies permeating the Christian world in our time, and it is the reason we lose connection to our greatest advocate in the moments we most desperately need Him.

There is a story in the Bible that never made sense to me until I changed my thinking on the subject of faith. In Luke 18, we see a young ruler come to meet Jesus, and he asks Him a very interesting question: “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” It is tempting to pass over this verse and get to Jesus' response, but there is something here. Upon further examination, I said to myself, "Well, you don't do anything to gain an inheritance, do you?" An inheritance is a right of birth. There isn't anything you can do to earn an inheritance because it has nothing to do with the heir.

Here we have a man, blessed with youth, authority, and wealth, running after Jesus that he may learn the secret to eternal life—and his first words to Jesus are, "Good Teacher." Jesus responds somewhat oddly to the man, saying, "Why do you call Me good?" What an excellent question. To us it may seem here that Jesus is engaging in a bit of false humility, but He always does everything for a reason. This was not meant to be a portrayal of His own morality, but a critique of the young ruler's motives.

So why did he call Jesus good? Perhaps it was because he had a fundamental misunderstanding about who Jesus was. Perhaps when he looked at Jesus, he saw a vessel by which his greatest desire could finally be reached—eternal life. Maybe what he truly wanted was the inheritance of the kingdom of God while remaining a citizen of the kingdom of man.

The young ruler's faith, like many of ours today, resided in his circumstances, and everything he wanted he called good. The reason this is important is because, fundamentally, to call something good is to call all which opposes it evil. If that job is what is good in your life, then everything which stands between it and you is evil—even if what stands in between is God.

I have found myself many times at odds with God—not because I wanted to be, but because I named what I wanted "good," and God said "no." It is much better that we should simply say God is good, and whatever opportunities lay ahead of us we shall explore—but not with a rigid, unyielding mindset which refuses to be led. We must hold our fates with open hands, trusting that everything taken or given is for a reason and that the Lord will guide us in every season. If God should require of us a sacrifice of what we greatly desire, then the only appropriate response for the Christian is to call that sacrifice good, and thereby, all those forces which oppose us in our humility and obedience to God evil—particularly those opposing forces which reside within ourselves.

Jesus said only God is good. Yet we sit in judgment of the Almighty for the loss of those things which we, in our profound ignorance and blinding arrogance, deem of our own accord to be good. If even our Lord dared not to declare Himself good, then perhaps we ought to reevaluate our own certainty on the matter of good and evil. I dare not concede to the relativists that good and evil cannot be known, but simply because we desire something does not make it good—even if such things are not explicitly evil. We should all take the humble approach of Jesus, because in rebellion man gained the knowledge of good, but not authority over it. It lies solely with the Lord—that great and ancient power present at the beginning of creation—to call a thing good or evil.

Faith is not a thing easily gained: to experience tragedy, failure, and constant disappointment, and to appear humbly before the Lord and to worship Him all the same. On the day that Job lost all he had—when the Sabeans stole away his livestock, when the Chaldeans put his servants to the sword, and when a great wind tore down his children's house with them inside it—the Bible says that, "In all this Job did not sin nor charge God with wrong."

The reason Job could endure such great loss is because his faith was not in what he lost. His faith endured because, when everything was stripped from him, God endured. Now, at the end of the story, it says that God restored unto Job even more than what he had before—but this is where we get it wrong, because that is not the point. We take this to mean that if we believe God is good even when it seems that He isn’t, then He will reward us by acting in our interest.

There is nothing wrong with praying for our lives to improve, but if it is the only subject of our prayers, our faith is hollow. If what is good is what is in our interest, then God is only good when He gives it to us. One of the most difficult and transformational lessons for the Christian comes when we mature enough to move beyond our circumstances and recognize that God is good—even in our suffering.

In this life there will be times when it takes very little effort to find joy, and there will be times when it takes everything we have. But for all of us, the truest test of our faith remains not whether we believe that God can or will answer our prayers, but whether we will continue to serve Him when He doesn’t.