Trust what you don’t understand

In the previous article of this series, we looked at several of the other threats our world has faced in the twenty-five years since 9/11. In the face of such uncertainty, it’s easy to grow discouraged. Yet, hope in the face of that uncertainty is a choice, and one that God longs to help us make.

To that end, in this article we’ll explore the first step toward experiencing the hope that God offers: learning to trust what you don’t understand. 

Doing so is essential to everything that follows. If the suffering of our lives and world persuades us to reject faith in our Father, we obviously exempt ourselves from the hope he alone can give.

If you are facing such a choice, I understand.

A deeply faithful young couple in one of the churches I pastored lost their eighteen-day-old daughter to cancer. The morning they were advised to turn off the life-support devices, the father called me, asking what they should do. His fear was that by ending medical support, they were “playing God.”

I reminded him that Jesus raised Lazarus from the grave on the fourth day and that he can do whatever he chooses without our medical assistance. If God did intend to heal their daughter, he could do so after the machines were off just as he could while they were on.

But God did not do either. The parents turned off the devices later that day, and we held their daughter’s funeral four days later.

That tragedy happened more than twenty-five years ago, but I still don’t understand why.

When what I believe is not enough

You know the dilemma as well as I do:

• God is all-loving.
• God is all-powerful.
• God is all-knowing.
• Innocent suffering exists.

Deny any of these and you “solve” the problem by creating a greater one. If God is not all we believe him to be, our faith is without foundation and we are without hope. If we deny the existence of evil and suffering, we typically make it worse. As Tennessee Williams wrote, “Not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.”

You’re also likely familiar with typical theological responses:

• God gives us freedom so we can choose to love him and others. When we misuse this freedom, the consequences are not his fault but ours.
• When humans fell, creation fell with them (Romans 8:22). As a result, we face disasters and diseases that were not present in the Garden of Eden and are not God’s fault.
• Satan causes much of the suffering in the world, not God.
• God uses some suffering to grow us spiritually and improve our lives and world.
• We will understand much in the future that we do not understand in the present (1 Corinthians 13:12).
• God walks with us through our pain and suffers at our side (cf. Isaiah 43:1–3).

In addition, I often note that God redeems all he allows. Here’s my reasoning:

• Because God is sovereign, he must allow or cause all that happens in the world.
• Because he is holy and perfect, he can never make a mistake.
• Because he is love, he can only want what is best for us.
• He must therefore redeem for greater good all that happens to us, in this world and/or the next.

I agree with every bullet point I’ve listed so far. But with some innocent suffering, they’re not enough.

The precious little girl who died after eighteen days of life could have been my granddaughter. The infant boys whose funerals I’ve conducted over the years could have been my sons or grandsons. And nothing I’ve said thus far would be enough in itself to heal my heart and give me the hope I need.

To reflect on the theological responses I listed above:

• Innocent suffering is, by definition, not the fault of misused freedom.
• While diseases and disasters are not God’s fault, he sometimes responds miraculously to them, calming stormy seas and healing diseased and dead bodies.
• Satan causes suffering, but God is more powerful than Satan and can counter his acts whenever he chooses.
• Suffering sometimes grows us, but many who suffer would trade their growth to remove their pain.
• The promise of future hope doesn’t change present suffering.
• The fact that God is present in our pain doesn’t remove it.

Even with my certainty that God redeems all he allows, this assertion is sometimes not enough.

I would not begin to suggest to the couple who lost their daughter that enough good has come from her death to outweigh or redeem their loss. One can plausibly argue that the nation of Israel would not have come into existence in 1948 but for the Holocaust, which showed that the Jews deserve and need a homeland where they can defend themselves. But I would never suggest that the existence of Israel has redeemed the murder of six million Jews, a quarter of them children.

With regard to 9/11, the same problems are obvious. The twenty-year “war on terror” that followed cost an estimated $8 trillion and killed more than nine hundred thousand people. Even if we argue that the world is safer as a result of 9/11 and all that followed (a problematic assertion, to be sure), would we therefore argue that such safety, or any other “goods” that have supposedly come from the tragedy and its aftermath, have redeemed that horrible day?

If there is no God

I have studied and contemplated the problem of innocent suffering ever since my father died when I was twenty-one years old. I have written books, chapters, website and journal essays, and countless email articles on the subject. If there is a “solution” that explains it, I have yet to find it.

And so, I believe we face a fork in the road.

One path is to deny one or more of the four assertions that form our problem. We can decide that God is not all-loving, all-powerful, and/or all-knowing. We can even deny that he exists at all. We can also deny or minimize the existence of evil and suffering.

But we must then face the consequences of our decision:

• If there is no God, we must explain the existence of creation without a creator. The Big Bang and all other theories all start from something. Making something out of nothing is the problem for physics and logic alike.
• If God is not who Christians believe him to be, we must account for the good that exists apart from his supposed agency. Acts of sacrificial service and generosity belie an evolutionary “survival of the fittest” motive. Natural beauty abounds that serves no evolutionary purpose and has no naturalistic explanation.
• We must deal with remarkable evidence for the truthfulness of Scripture and the existence and resurrection of Jesus.
• And we must abandon hope for a transcendent purpose in our pain and help beyond human agency.

The other path is to accept the paradox of an all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing God who permits or even causes innocent suffering with no apparent good to fully justify it.

The couple who lost their daughter has made themselves available over the years to other couples who lose a child, making a difference with many grieving hearts and doubtless helping many turn to the Father. But while such ministry unquestionably brings good from grief, does it explain it?

Is it sufficient for them to choose it over their daughter?

Why paradox is essential to faith

Paradox is essential to our understanding of God’s nature and ways.

For example, physicists say light travels as particles and as waves, but never at the same time (Niels Bohr’s “model of complementarity”). However, to observe wave behavior destroys particle information and vice versa. As one expert notes, “The principle of complementarity reflects the conviction that seemingly contradictory perspectives are not only compatible but essential for a deeper understanding of the world” (his emphasis).

What is true of physics is also true of theology.

Christians believe that God is three and one, that he is sovereign and humans are free, that Jesus was fully God and fully man, that the Bible is divinely inspired and humanly written. In fact, it’s hard to identify a single significant theological belief that is not inherently paradoxical.

But this is exactly what we should expect if God is God and we are not.

As the supreme being speaking to finite, fallen creatures, he stated the obvious:

My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8–9).

If a mathematician cannot effectively explain trigonometry to a three-year-old, how can the infinite and omniscient God of the universe explain his nature to us? If he is unbound by time and we are not (cf. Exodus 3:14), how can explain a future we cannot see or comprehend?

Then there’s the sin problem: I often don’t want to understand the truth because I don’t like what it says. There are times when God could explain my suffering, but I would have to admit my role in it. He could explain the pain of others, but I would have to become engaged in helping to relieve it.

So, it is apparent to me that I face a choice: I can reject the biblical God because of unexplained innocent suffering, or I can believe that he is who he says he is and admit that my lack of understanding is not due to his character but my capacities.

I can also acknowledge that mysteries today may not remain mysteries tomorrow. A mathematician may not be able to explain trigonometry to a three-year-old, but a three-year-old can grow up to become a mathematician.

Paul testified, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways” (1 Corinthians 13:11). The same can be true of our spiritual knowledge: “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (v. 12). The “then” to which he refers may be in heaven, but it may come much sooner.

For example, there was a time when Paul “persecuted [Christians] to the death, binding and delivering to prison both men and women” (Acts 22:4). Then he met the risen Christ and became a global advocate for “the faith he once tried to destroy” (Galatians 1:23).

To restate: just because I don’t understand God’s ways with innocent suffering does not logically require that I am right and he is wrong. The more superior his intellect is to mine, the more likely the reverse is true.

“The terrible alternative of choosing God or self”

One last factor before we move on: we don’t have to understand God’s ways to trust him.

There is far more about the world that I do not understand than the tiny percentage I do. I don’t understand anything about the physical realities that enable me to type these words, for example. I don’t know how my brain and fingers cooperate to type what I am thinking. I don’t know how the company that made my laptop did so, how someone created or mined the materials used. Someone else designed its operations, and others executed the design.

I don’t understand the electricity that powers the machinery that is cooling the room in which I am sitting. I don’t understand how my food is produced, my clothes are manufactured, or my car is built. If I had to recreate my physical surroundings, they would be sparse, indeed.

But my inability to understand my environment does not inhibit my reliance upon it. I didn’t test the load-bearing capacities of my chair before I sat in it or the purity of the air before I breathed it.

To say nothing of relational realities. I cannot prove to you or even to myself that my wife loves me. The evidence in favor of this proposition is overwhelming, but she could be lying, acting, or otherwise deceiving me. No relational realities can be proven, in fact. Every relationship requires a commitment that transcends the evidence and becomes self-validating, from choosing to marry to having children, attending a school, taking a job, making a friend, and so on.

The same is true of my relationship with God. I believe the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of biblical truth regarding his existence and character, but I cannot prove what I believe. This is, in fact, the nature of proof and faith. But the more I act on my faith, the more I experience what I believe and my faith becomes sight.

So it is with innocent suffering: The harder it is to trust God, the more I need to do so. This is not only because difficult faith challenges are often a consequence of suffering for which I need God’s help. It is also because choosing to believe what I cannot prove makes God’s love, grace, and provision available to me in vital ways.

Such faith does not earn his favor—it positions me to receive his grace.

The pastor Paul Powell wrote:

It is possible for God to be present, moving, and at work in our world and us not be aware of it. As you read this article the earth is spinning on its axis a thousand miles an hour, but we have no sense of movement. At the same time, the earth is revolving around the sun at a speed of seventy thousand miles per hour. Yet we don’t feel that movement either. Faith is believing when there is no perceiving.

He also observed, “We do not have to know why things happen in order to be victorious over them.”

So it seems we are required to make a choice for which not choosing is choosing. We can reject faith in the God of the Bible because we don’t understand the innocent suffering he (seemingly) does not heal or resolve. Or we can trust him despite our questions because we need the help he alone can give.

Not to choose the second is effectively and practically to choose the first.

In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis wrote: “From the moment a creature becomes aware of God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the center is opened to it.”

Choose wisely.