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When life gets hard, does what we think we believe hold us up, or does it crumble under the weight of doubt? I'm your host, Dr. Lee Warren- I'm a brain surgeon, author, and a person who's seen some stuff and wondered where God is in all this mess. This is The Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast, where we'll take a hard look at what we believe, why we believe it, and the neuroscience behind how our minds and our brains can smash together with faith to help us become healthier, feel better, and be happier so we can find the hope to withstand anything life throws at us. You've got questions, and we're going to do the hard work to find the answers, but you can't change your life until you change your mind, and it's gonna take some spiritual-brain surgery to get it done. So let's get after it.
When life gets hard, does what we think we believe hold us up,
or does it crumble under the weight of doubt?
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, your host, and this is Spiritual Brain Surgery,
where we'll take a hard look at what we believe,
why we believe it, and the neuroscience behind how our minds and our brains
can work together to help us
build a bulletproof faith that will withstand anything life throws at us.
Whether you're struggling with anxiety, grief, doubt, or you just want to go
deeper into the big questions we all have,
remember, you can't change your life until you change your mind,
and sometimes it takes spiritual brain surgery to get it done. So let's get after it.
Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is spiritual brain
surgery, and I'm so grateful to have you back. Listen, we did an episode a couple
of weeks ago called A New Path Forward in which we talked about the purpose
for this podcast, why it's different than the Dr.
Lee Warren podcast, why I started a second podcast.
I just wanted you to have the vision and kind of the mission behind this show.
So go back and listen to that. If you're new around here, if you didn't hear
that episode, please go check it out.
I want you to understand what spiritual brain surgery is and what it's for,
but I also want you to see that there is some value in you listening to both
shows. So if you are listening to Spiritual Brain Surgery, but not the Dr.
Lee Warren Self-Brain Surgery Podcast, go listen to that one.
Please subscribe to both of them. It's important.
And I want to give you an opportunity to really go deep today into a topic that's close to all of us.
We're going to take a hard look at suffering. I'm going to play you one of the
very first episodes of the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast. We had planned for
a new episode of Tuesdays with Tata this week.
And this weekend, I had a crazy busy weekend at the hospital and Tata and I just didn't get it done.
So I want to make sure you get an episode this week. I'm going to bring you
an important episode, and we're going to do it as a two-parter.
We're going to do a hard look at suffering today, and then next Tuesday,
we're going to do the neurobiology of suffering, because I want you to understand
the mechanics, what's happening in your brain and in your heart and your body
and your mind when you're suffering and why it's not just a mental issue,
but it's also a biophysical one.
So I want you to understand the neurobiology and the chemistry of suffering
as well. So we're going to give you these two episodes in two weeks,
and then Tuesdays with Tata will be back after that.
And we're going to start Season 2 of Spiritual Brain Surgery pretty soon.
We'll get to Episode 75 of Season 1, and then we're going to start with Season 2.
And that's when we're going to go all in with Spiritual Brain Surgery being its own show.
All new content, lots of guests, some guest hosts.
We're going to have an incredible opportunity for you to go deep on the spiritual
side of what we believe and why we believe it and how to defend it,
share it, live it out, all that good stuff that we talk about on this show all
the time. But I would really implore you to please subscribe to the show.
If you like this work, if you are moved and helped by the podcast,
please consider sharing it with a friend and prayerfully consider joining us as a paid subscriber.
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Let's take a hard look at suffering.
I'm going to bring you back an episode from early in season one because I want
you to have this. And next week, the neurobiology of suffering.
We're going to get after it right now.
Talk about suffering here below and let's keep a love in Jesus.
Music.
Talk about suffering here below And let's keep a-following Jesus Good morning,
my friend. I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren, and we are going to talk about suffering today.
I'm so grateful to have you listening. That was Ricky Skaggs and the great,
late Tony Rice, two of my favorite all-time bluegrass artists,
and they have this old gospel song, Talk About Suffering, here below.
That's what we're going to talk about today. I've been hearing a lot of people
that are suffering in different ways, losing children, having spouses die,
finding out they have cancer. They're suffering.
And yesterday I had a conversation with a friend that I'll tell you about in
a minute, and it just made me think that we've had some episodes about suffering,
but today we're going to do a special thing. We're going to look at why we suffer.
What it means, how to answer the great question of our lives,
really, which is, if God loves me, why is there suffering?
If there's a good God who has omnipotence, why does he allow bad things to happen?
It's the great question of theodicy.
Why, God? We're going to go deep into what the Bible has to say about suffering
and to look at suffering from a philosophical and spiritual standpoint.
And then next week, we're going to talk about the neurobiology of suffering.
What happens in your brain?
What happens in your mind? How those things are connected? What does it do to
your body? What does it do epigenetically to your offspring?
What kinds of suffering did you inherit from your parents and your grandparents and their parents?
And what does that all have to do with how we can change our minds and change our lives?
We're going to do a two-part hit at the problem of suffering.
Somebody wrote in the other day and said, hey, it's great that you talk about
trauma and tragedy and massive things all the time.
You give us these ways to reframe and reset and refocus our lives.
But what about people that have chronic pain? What about people that have chronic
illness that won't go away? What about them? How are they supposed to find hope?
How are they supposed to hold up knowing that this is never going to go away?
Let me give you a way to think about that today, friend.
Next week, we will talk about the neurobiology of suffering,
and I want you to listen to both of them.
If you're not so into the spiritual stuff, you can just go listen to that one if you want to,
but I think you'll be missing something because no matter what you believe or
say you believe, the great question of most of our lives is if there is a good God,
why does life hurt so much?
Why is everything so hard? Why do kids get cancer?
Why do we lose spouses? Why does my son get stabbed to death?
Our son, Mitch, died when he was 19.
And I'll tell you, suffering is a real and present thing in our lives all the time.
It doesn't go away. It doesn't stop. There's pain.
There's grief. Of course there is. If you've been through something hard like
that, you know that's true. It doesn't stop.
How do we then find lives full of meaning and purpose and hope and maybe even
happiness again when we suffer?
So let's talk about suffering today. I had a good conversation,
long conversation with a friend yesterday.
And he shared with me that he and his wife have been through a
couple of really hard things recently and i won't go into the
details i don't want to out him for having
this conversation with me but it just it reinforced the idea
i was already kind of batting around this concept of having
a kind of a two-part episode on suffering
and i think this is something that we'll do a lot one of the reasons that
i split the spiritual brain surgery podcast off from the main dr lee warren
podcast is because i wanted to have an opportunity to do a little deeper dive
on the science side detached from so much spiritual content on one hand for
people who are more doubters and more agnostic who want to get to these concepts
but don't want to be sort of hit in the face with it sometimes.
And also I wanted to go deeper on the spiritual side for people that are all
in for that, that want to go deeper and deeper and deeper and to see how do
our faith and how does science and faith and doubt and fear and neuroplasticity
and all these things smash together.
And I want to have two places to do that so that wherever you are in your journey,
you can have a comfortable conversation with me.
And we're going to get to the truth, okay? Because there is a truth.
But I want you to find a path there that no matter which side of this equation
you are on, that you can find the solution.
Remember, equations always work both ways, right? So we never hide from the
truth. We just start from a different place so that we can all get there together. Okay.
So my friend shared with me that his wife has recently been through two major traumatic events.
And the common theme between them was that both of them happened.
Both of these were real events where her life was legitimately threatened.
And both of them happened in places where she should have an expectation of being safe.
Okay. I don't want to say much more about it than that. But basically two different
times she encountered it within the last like two months.
So two different times this person was in a situation where they're supposed to be safe.
And something extremely dangerous and unusual happened that threatened their
not only physical safety but also emotional safety, the safety of their children.
Other people around them.
In one of those situations, she actually had to get involved and deliver care
for somebody who was injured in this place that was supposed to be safe.
You're in a place where you're supposed to be providing care for people and
instead you're having to react to an emergency situation where there's something
dangerous happen and a person is injured in that dangerous situation and your
life is in jeopardy and you still have to do the work in the midst of it.
That's a difficult situation and it kind of reminded me of being in Iraq.
You know, when we were in Iraq, obviously, we knew we were not in a safe place.
But inside the hospital, you're supposed to be safe.
And when they would shoot at us, when they would mortar us in the hospital,
like bombs landing close to or on the grounds of the hospital,
it always made me so mad but also
sort of psychologically messed me up because we're put the
red cross up there and we say hey if you get hurt on
the battlefield even if you're the bad guy we're going to try
to take care of you and yet you're trying to hurt
us and so it's not fair it doesn't seem fair it
challenged my sense of safety and security but
also sort of justice was challenged and it was a
difficult situation so so my friend shared with with me
that his wife is really struggling with this
idea that the world can be so unjust
and that suffering and danger and fear
and death and bleeding and stress and all those things can happen even in the
places where we are supposed to be safe and that creates stress it creates post-traumatic
stress it creates difficulty processing and it definitely creates big questions
on the theodicy side what's the Odyssey.
It's this study of suffering and why suffering can occur in a world where we
supposedly have an omniscient and omnipotent and all-loving and all-caring, good God.
If we have that, why can there be suffering?
And I was reminded of a book that I read, Is God Real?
Lee Strobel, who was on the podcast recently. And if you haven't heard that
episode, go back and listen to a tremendous talk with Lee Strobel,
where he took a journalistic look at the question, the big question, is God real?
And of course, if you're going to ask that question, you're going to come around
to the question of suffering at some point.
And he did an interview at the end of the book with Peter Kreeft,
who's a philosopher and writer, and has written some incredible books about suffering.
In fact, my all-time favorite book about suffering, I think, was from Peter Kreeft.
And Kreeft weaves sort of philosophy and religion and science and all these
things, has a great grasp of history from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,
Augustine, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, just writes beautifully about the problem of suffering.
So it was a fascinating interview between Lee Strobel and Peter Kreeft,
And one of the things Kreeft talked about was this metaphor,
this analogy of comparing our relationship to God with our relationship to some
of the higher animals, like bears, for example.
And Kreeft would say, think about this for a minute. Like when people say things
like, you know, this child died in Africa because there wasn't enough rain and
the crops failed and the child starved to death.
And how can there be a God who loves people and is a good God if something like
that could happen? Like all this kid needed was some rain.
How is it possible that that person, that there's a God out there who cares
about us, if something like that could happen?
God controls the rain. Surely he could send some rain and that wouldn't happen, right?
Well, it's a good question. Of course it is. And that was a famous,
by the way, a famous statement by an atheist named Templeton who wrote about
this kid that died in Africa, a woman who died in Africa because of a lack of rain.
Billy Graham talked about her and talked about him. And apparently late in his
life, Templeton actually had an experience and came back to faith.
But Kreeft uses that story as a way to say, to take a hard look at what happens
when we actually ask those questions about where is God in our suffering.
And this is a little bit raw, but the truth is, if you look closely at what
we all say when we're going through hard things, we all say very clearly things
like, I don't understand.
I don't think that's fair. I wouldn't do it that way.
And so we start when we question God and we question if there is God and we
question the nature of God and we question God's goodness.
It's always based out of our perspective of what we think is right or fair or good, isn't it?
Just be real honest with yourself. I can tell you, my son was stabbed to death
11 birthdays ago in August of 2013, and this tomorrow is his 30th birthday.
My son, who's 19, who would now be a grown man, I'd spend part of every day wondering.
What he would have looked like now if he would have gotten married,
what she would have looked like, what their kids would have looked like.
Sometimes we'll be out and we'll see a little kid somewhere and I'll say to
Lisa, he looks a little bit like Mitch did when he was a boy.
I bet Mitch's son would look a little bit like that.
And it just never stops, right? You have this constant sort of reorientation
back to the day or to the thing or to the phone call or to the memory of what you've lost.
It's just natural. But when I think about it, when I go down the staircase,
down into that hole, and for some reason in my mind, when I revisit Mitch,
I always see this mental staircase.
And I wrote about it in Hope is the First Door. It's my newest book.
And I always see this door at the bottom of the staircase.
And somehow I know that if I go down there and get to that door,
then on the other side of it is my son who's bleeding after he's been stabbed.
And I just have this strong mental urge to go down there and go through that door and find him.
And maybe I can save him or maybe I can hold his hand while he's dying.
And I see that. And it's easy for me if I get quiet and close my eyes and allow
myself to have my mind wandered.
It's easy for me to go down into that place.
And inevitably when I do, I start asking those why questions.
Why, God, did this happen? How could you let this occur? Mitch was a good kid. He was coming home.
We were reconnecting. He was going back to school. Everything was getting right.
You were answering our prayers, and then he was gone. Why?
And I just have to tell you, J.I. Packer's right. J.I. Packer said,
if you ask why, God, you don't ever get an answer, almost never get an answer.
So the real question is, what am I supposed to do now?
How am I to glorify you now? How am I to live my life now that this has happened?
And when you ask that question, Packer says, you start to get answers.
So Kreef says, look hard at the words that you say in response to suffering,
and they will teach you something about yourself.
Are you focusing on God's perspective on what's happening in the world?
Are you focusing on your opinion of what should be happening in the world?
And Kreef tells this incredible story, this analogy between,
I mean, do you think you're, are there more differences between you and God or say you and a bear?
So if there is a God who's omnipotent, timeless, eternal, sinless,
perfect, knows everything, can speak and worlds are created,
can snap his fingers and say, let there be light.
And it happens. If there is really that God, okay, is he more different than
you, than you are say a bear, right? Right.
Certainly, I'm probably closer to a bear than I am to God because I can't snap
my fingers and make light.
I can't create the universe with my word. I can't part the waters.
I can't walk on water. I can't turn water into wine. I can't raise the dead.
I certainly am closer to a bear than I am to God. Now, that sounds silly,
but think through this analogy.
Kreeft wrote this beautiful analogy. Think about it.
There's a bear caught in a trap in the woods, and a hiker goes by who happens
to be a veterinarian. Okay, I'm embellishing the story a little bit.
Let's say the veterinarian, our Dr. Susan, that used to take good care of Harvey
and Lewis before they died, she's walking through the woods and she sees this
bear caught in a trap and she's going to try to help the bear.
Well, the bear's enraged, right, because he's stuck in the trap and he's angry
and his leg hurts and he's afraid and he won't calm down, even though Susan
approaches him carefully and she says, hey, calm down, I'm here to help you.
The bear is so confused and so enraged and so limited by the lack of massive
prefrontal cortex that has language
and symbols like we do that he can't understand what she's saying.
And he naturally assumes that she's going to try to hurt him more.
So she ends up having to reach into her backpack and pull out some sedatives and sedate the bear.
She didn't have enough to knock him all the way out. But now he's subdued.
He's aware that she's there. He just can't fight back now. And now she's going to try to save him.
And he thinks that her drugging him is further evidence that she's against him.
So he's now really mad and really hurt and really scared. He's stuck in this
trap, and now this woman has drugged him, and he can't fight back.
And boy, now everything's really even worse.
And now she can't spring the trap. She's not strong enough to spring the trap
and pull his leg out by herself.
So she realizes that she's got to push his
leg farther in to release the tension on
the spring and then she'll be able to step on it and and
release it and get his leg out but when she pushes the the
bear's leg further into the trap it hurts him even more and
even though he's partially sedated and he can't fight back
he feels more pain and now he's really convinced
that she's trying to hurt him and he's
100 convinced that susan is his enemy who
wants him to suffer and he is she's there to
cause him pain and he doesn't understand and maybe she even set the trap in
his mind maybe she's the one that put it there in the first place and she's
really after him and he's going to end up for sure dead and stuffed and mounted
on her wall and he's just furious but he can't do anything about it he's just suffering.
Well, you would recognize that the bear has drawn a series of incorrect conclusions
about Susan's intentions.
Dr. Susan's there to help him. She didn't set the trap.
Somebody else did that. A person did that who was trying to trap a bear.
But she was just hiking through the woods. She's there benevolently trying to help him.
But to do so she's got to do some things that are counterintuitive to him that
are above his ability to understand that are beyond his ability to reason and
noodle that out that she's there to help him because he's not capable intellectually
built to understand and nor does he have the,
insight to see the big plan that she
has for him that actually is in his best
interest so the bear can't understand what's
happening because he lacks the tools and the
perspective and the cognitive ability
because he's fundamentally different than she
is with a different kind of brain and a different kind of
thought process than she has and you
can see that right that analogy actually starts to to make sense when we apply
it to suffering and the difference between the bear and the person is vastly
closer than the difference between us and god so sometimes maybe God has a different
perspective on this than we do.
God has a different perspective on our suffering. Now, you would say,
well, if he's really God, then he wouldn't allow suffering.
But I would submit to you that if you're going to give God credit for all the
suffering, then you should also have to give him credit for all the good in the world.
And then you would have to start to see, wait a minute, if God is all good and
he created us with free will so that we could choose whether we wanted to follow him or not.
Because if he didn't give us free will and we didn't have the opportunity to
choose whether we wanted to love him and be in relationship with him,
then we would be robots or slaves and that's not loving.
So a loving God could not have created us without free will.
And the problem with free will is it opens up the opportunity for us to choose
things that are not good.
Now, understand some suffering is because of physical illness,
and some suffering is because of birth defects, and some suffering is because
of things that people do to other people.
So there are certainly some things that happen that seem completely inexplicable.
Why does the two-year-old get glioblastoma?
We have to zoom out and look at the entire story and understand that human illness
and human death and human aging and human interaction that involves sin against
one another all came out of that original sin in the garden.
Okay, that all sin and all death and all physical malady and all physical illness
and disease came from the fact that our bodies now have the ability to age and
die and develop disease.
So you have to zoom out to the entire story to agree that the existence of evil,
even in physical maladies that aren't willful choices, still is part of that
original problem, this long narrative arc of the story that we're in.
Okay, so the bottom line is if you are going to allow for their objective,
the objective presence of good in the universe and the objective presence of
evil in the universe, then you can't blame God for the evil.
If you also understand that there is good and that he has a long redemptive
plan in place to deliver us from all of this.
Okay, back to that in just a minute. but I want to share with you.
A couple of ideas from Kreeft, again,
that as he addresses this problem of what suffering is all about,
it comes down to the fact that criticizing God for what we think he ought to
be doing right now is very much akin to looking at a,
say, look at a long novel like War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov or Crime
and Punishment, say 800-page novel, right?
If you picked up that book and you opened it to the middle page and you started
reading from the middle and all the characters were in disarray and there was
all kinds of mayhem and all kinds of trouble and you couldn't figure out what was happening.
If you stopped reading that book and you threw it in the fire and you said,
that's the worst author I've ever seen. I hate that story.
I don't understand why he would write it that way. That's a terrible author and a terrible story.
And I'm never going to read anything else he writes again. Well,
people would say, well, you're crazy.
You can't start in the middle of a novel and then blame the author for not understanding
the plot, not understanding where it's going. You've got to read the whole thing.
You've got to get to the end and see what it's about. You've got to let the
author write the story out so that you can ultimately understand what happened, right? Right?
You'd think it was nuts if I condemned the novel after only reading a few pages
in the middle or I criticized the author.
You have to understand that you're in the middle of a long story. Right?
So if you then say, all right, well, God, if you actually read Scripture and
see what God says about the story that we're in, then what God actually says
about the story that we're in is this.
I'm not done yet. I have relieved your pain. I have redeemed your suffering.
I have forgiven your sins. I am going to redeem your body.
I am going to fix all those people that were stuck with bad bodies or broken
bodies or accidents that paralyzed them like Johnny Erickson taught.
I have a plan to fix all of that. You're just in the middle of the story right now.
If you could start seeing it that way, start seeing that we're in the middle
of a long narrative arc, then we could start perhaps to see that pain and suffering
might have a purpose after all.
C.S. Lewis said, God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience,
and shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Well, what does he mean about that, rousing a deaf world?
I would challenge you, friend, I would challenge you to look back over your life to this point.
And answer a question honestly. What periods of your life have led to the most growth?
What periods of your life have led to the most improvement in your ability to
think and carry out your life in a reasonable way, to develop character,
to understand that you're tougher than you thought you were,
to lead your family when they're going through hard things?
What periods of your life have been the most ultimately beneficial to you in
the development of who you are?
And I would bet that most of the answers that I would get if everybody listening
to this today all around the world answered that question, I would bet just
about any amount of money that most of the answers would be, you know what?
When I went through that hard thing, when I had that cancer scare,
when I lost my daughter, the way that my life played out after that turned out
to be an intense period of personal growth. And I'm different than I was before I went through that.
I'm stronger than I was before I went through that. I know more about myself
now than I did before I went through that.
Think about every movie and every play and every novel you've ever read. Think about it.
What makes those stories stick out in your mind? The best ones,
the good ones, the ones you want to watch again, or the ones that you
talk about when you discuss things in your workplace when
you talk about your favorite novels what are the ones that stick with you the
most aren't they the ones where the characters went through something intense
and difficult and they changed and grew and evolved and overcame isn't it the
difficulties they went through that ultimately made the story more compelling
that made you learn from them isn't it.
If Saving Private Ryan started on the beach and the Nazis just threw all their
weapons down and surrendered and the good guys won and there was no stress and
Private Ryan was right there on the beach waiting for him, it wouldn't be a
very interesting movie, right?
It would be boring because nobody had a challenge.
Nobody learned. Nobody grew. Nobody overcame anything.
So the stories that matter the most are the ones where you go through something
hard and you come out of it on the other side having learned or grown or changed
in some way. So what does that mean?
God uses our suffering as an opportunity to help us grow.
He doesn't cause it, but when it happens, he comes into it. But the story of
Christianity is the story of the incarnation, of God coming down and being with us in this world.
He doesn't sit up in heaven and say, I hope you guys figure this out.
And I'm watching. I'm judging you.
You better hold on. You better not mess up. I'm watching this happen,
and you better get through it. No.
God came down here. He was born of a virgin. He was born, and He walked around
this world, and He lived, and He bore our sins, and He stood up against the
suffering that we inflicted upon Him.
And He came down here to answer the question of suffering for us.
Because what the Bible clearly says is that since Jesus laid His life down for
us, that since He became the perfect sacrifice, that He then became the answer to our suffering.
And that answer is hope, and it's hope not for something, but in someone.
That the answer is right there in the Lord's Prayer.
The Lord's Prayer, he says, Jesus said, you need to pray, deliver me from evil.
Yes, pray to God, deliver me from evil.
Get me through this, help me overcome this, help me survive this,
give me the tools to deal with this. But you know what?
Deliver me from evil is not the last word in the Lord's Prayer.
The last words in the Lord's Prayer are yours is the kingdom and the power and
the glory forever, okay?
So we're not in a story that ends and the lights go out. That's atheism,
and there's no hope there.
There's no hope there. And atheists fight about why life is so hard because
there's no meaning or purpose beyond it. So they need to try to perfect it while they're here.
And we have a different answer. We have a kingdom and power and glory forever.
We have the hope of the resurrection. I know I get to meet my son again someday.
And no mature Christian, Kreef says, will look back on their life and identify
some moment of intense suffering that didn't help them in some way,
get closer to God and believe more powerfully in the resurrection and hope more
fully in what's coming next.
We come through these hard things. Every study that's ever looked at cancer
survivors shows that most cancer survivors say that they ended up more grateful,
more thankful, less anxious, and better off on the other side of it after they
survived their cancer scare.
Or even if they didn't, as they're dying, many people report personal growth
through the suffering that they've gone through.
So what's the purpose of suffering? To understand that we're not alone in it,
to understand that God came down and walked with us in it, that the purpose
of suffering is that we're supposed to be willing to help other people in their suffering,
that we're the plan to show the world that there's a way to go through suffering
and hold on and still find hope.
Viktor Frankl said, mankind's brain can invent the horrors of the gas chamber
at Auschwitz, but man can also walk into those gas chambers with the Shema Yisrael
or the Lord's Prayer on their lips.
Man can choose to stand up under intense suffering and find purpose and meaning in it.
There's an old saying that pain is mandatory.
Everybody's going to go through pain. We're going to talk about that in the
Neurobiology of Pain episode in a little bit.
Everybody has pain, but suffering is optional.
Suffering is a mindset that we
choose how we're going to respond and react to the hard things that we go through
and what makes it better god's presence the book of job job shakes his fist
at god and he demands answers and you know what he never gets them what he gets
in the end is god comes and experiences him and gives him presence.
And that's what you really want when you're hurting, right? You want your friend
to come and sit at your bedside.
You want people to be around you. You want people to come alongside you in it.
Even though you know they can't fix it, that's the answer to suffering. It's not explanations.
It's presence. And the incarnation answers that.
God came down here to be with us in it. The Holy Spirit lives inside you to be with you in it.
The purpose of suffering is not to find an answer. It's to find the answerer. It's to find Jesus.
It's not words. It's the word.
It's not a tightly woven philosophical argument, Kreef says. It's a person.
It's the person. The answering to suffering, my friend, here on Theology Thursday,
when we talk about suffering here below, the answer to suffering isn't an abstract
idea because suffering isn't an abstract issue.
It's personal, and it requires a personal response. And the answer has to be
somebody, not just something, because the issue is where is God in the suffering?
And the answer is, I'm right here.
That's the answer to suffering, my friend.
God hasn't left you alone in it. You're in the middle of a long narrative arc
of a very long story that ends with your redemption, ends with the tears being
dried, ends with the problem being solved.
Pete Gregg tells a story in his incredible book, How to Pray,
A Simple Guide for Normal People.
About in June of 2018, 12 members of a junior soccer team in northern Thailand
got trapped in a cave when a monsoon flooded the entrance.
And they were stuck, flooded miles inside this cave system.
And once people figured out that they were missing, these boys,
these 12 boys and their coaches, or their one coach, were discovered to be there
by rescuers who couldn't get to them.
And eventually, the media found out about it, and more than 900 police officers,
100 divers, and 2,000 soldiers gathered with media at the mouth of the cave.
And it took nine days for them to find these boys.
The world was watching. I don't know if you remember this or not,
but for nine days, divers searched for them.
And on July 2nd, so it happened on June 23rd, on July 2nd, a diving team found them.
One of them died. One of the divers drowned trying to rescue these boys.
They found these boys. They were alive. They were huddled together on a shelf
in a cavern inside miles of these flooded caves and tunnels.
And the divers found them on July 2nd. The news got out that the boys were alive.
And it took eight more days to get them all out.
They had to sedate them and put them scuba masks on them and swim them out of there one at a time.
And it took days and days and days and they got all these boys out.
They got them out after two weeks on July the 10th. They got the last ones out.
So here's the thing. The Bible teaches this story in a slightly different way.
But basically, the boys were lost on June 23rd.
They were found on July the 2nd, but they weren't delivered until July the 10th.
The Bible teaches that we live in the dark days of hope, Pete Gregg says,
between July 2nd and July 10th. we're found, but we're not delivered.
The rescue is underway, but we have not yet been rescued all the way.
Our salvation process, the redemption of our suffering, the answer to our questions
has undoubtedly begun because he came.
And when he came, that's when the cave divers found the boys.
That's when Jesus showed up. We were found. We just haven't yet been delivered.
But our days of darkness are ending. There is an end date.
There's a time when we're going to come out of that cave because the rescue is underway.
It's already underway, friend. We just have to realize that we're in the middle
of that story that the divers have found us and the rescue is underway and the
delivery is coming and it's not going to be easy,
but there is an end to this suffering and the end is a person.
It's not a thing. I'm going to give you a couple of scriptures before we go.
James 1, 2, 3, 4 sounds a little crazy on its surface.
Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many
kinds because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.
Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
What do you need when you're going through something hard? You need perseverance.
You need the ability to dig in. You know your anterior cingulate gets stronger
when you go through hard things, and that makes it easier for you to go through
a hard thing the next time.
And Jesus promised us that the enemy is here to steal and kill and destroy,
but he came that we might have abundant life.
And what happens is we already know that the enemy has been vanquished,
right? The Bible tells it plainly.
The story's already been written. The enemy's already defeated,
but he's not dead yet. And have you ever seen a wounded snake?
They've been struck a mortal blow and they're dying, but they're still very dangerous.
The snake's throbbing around, thrashing around in their dying throes. They can still bite you.
And that's what's happening with Satan. He's wounded. He's cornered. His days are numbered.
And he is super mad about it. and he wants to do as much damage to the kingdom
and to you and your life as he can before the end.
And he is still very dangerous. But you, my friend, have been delivered.
Romans 5, 3 through 5 says it this way. Not only that, we rejoice in our sufferings
knowing that suffering produces character.
I'm sorry, suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and
character produces hope.
And hope doesn't put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our
hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
So my friend, I'll leave you with one more thought.
Proverbs 24, 10 says, if you falter in times of trouble,
How small is your strength? Listen, you can be strong because you know that
God has come alongside you in your suffering.
Does that make it easier? No. Does it make it more hopeful?
Yes, because we know that this story that we're in was written by a God who
loves us, who cares about us, has already made provision to rescue and deliver
us, and that process is underway.
And it's underway in your life, and it's underway in my life.
So the answer to the question of why is there suffering?
It's not a philosophical meandering. It's not some grand equation.
And it's certainly not to believe that there's no God at all.
It's to know that the answer is answered by a person.
It's Jesus. And you have him. If you want him to come alongside you in this
story and help you talk about suffering in a way that helps you grow and change and learn.
And as a bereaved father, I can tell you, it doesn't really get easier,
but it gets more clear over time exactly why I'm here.
I'm here to do this, to talk to you, to deliver people from suffering with my
surgery, with my medicine, with my words, with my ability to help my family.
Hold on a little bit tighter when it seems impossible because he did come and
he does give us hope. and there is an opportunity for me to see my son again
because this story is not over yet.
Even when I ask, why God? Spend a minute asking, why?
And see if you don't get the answer because I am. I'm here. I'm here.
I'm with you. Friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And I hope that you'll remember the good news that you can start today.