Suffering and the sovereignty of God

A review of John Piper and Justin Taylor (eds.), Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (Crossway, 2006)

This is a book people will either love or hate. I love it. I love its uncompromising affirmation that God is sovereign over suffering. Indeed, that God wills suffering for his glory and for the good of his people. Piper says: ‘the ultimate reason that suffering exists in the universe is so that Christ might display the greatness of the glory of the grace of God by suffering in himself to overcome our suffering.’ (p. 82) Christ was slain before the creation of the world – not as some hastily concocted plan to cope with the unexpected intrusion of sin into God’s world.

It enters into some of the philosophical debates to show this affirmation is intellectually robust (especially Mark Talbot’s chapter ‘“All the Good That Is Ours in Christ”: Seeing God’s Gracious Hand in the Hurts Others Do to Us’ and John Piper’s ‘The Suffering of Christ and the Sovereignty of God’).

But it is never mere abstract reasoning. All the contributors are sufferers in some way and the theology outlined is pastorally liberating. This is especially the case with Piper’s chapter ‘Why God Appoints Suffering for His Servants’ and David Powlison’s contribution, ‘God’s Grace and Your Sufferings’. Powlison’s chapter is a model not only of pastoral theology, but pastoral writing. He enters into the experience of suffering with empathy and love, bringing the robust, life-giving comfort of the gospel. He says: ‘No matter how many times you’ve heard it, no matter how long you’ve known it, no matter how well you can say it, God’s answer will come to mean something better than you could ever imagine.’ (p. 146) How true that is. We rarely find comfort in ‘new’ truths (truth we did not know before), but through God’s grace we find comfort in old truths that take on new significant for us. Piper and Powlison were diagnosed with prostate cancer within two months of each others. In an appendix they reflect on their experience, offering ten principles for responding to cancer (and other forms of suffering) so that we do not ‘waste’ the experience.

Stephen Saint’s axiom that ‘sufferers want to be ministered to by people who have suffered’ seems so obvious (‘Sovereignty, Suffering, and the Work of Missions’). But think about it a bit and you realise what a profound and far reaching statement it is. It enables us to view suffering not as a grief to be held tightly, but a gift to be used for God’s glory (2 Corinthians 1).

It was Saint’s chapter that made me cry as he told the story of his daughter’s death. With them at the time was ‘Grandfather Mincaye’, an Waodani Indian convert who had become part of the family.

Now he saw her at the hospital, lying on a gurney with a tube down her throat and needles in her arm, and he grabbed me and said, “Who did this to her?” And I saw a look on his face that I’d seen before, and I knew that he’d be willing to kill again to save this granddaughter whom he loved.

I didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know, Mincaye. Nobody is doing this.”

And just like that, this savage from the jungles grabbed me again and said, “Babae, don’t you see?”

No, I didn’t see. My heart was absolutely tearing apart; I didn’t know what was going on.

He said, “Babae, Babae, now I see it well. Don’t you see? God himself is doing this.”

And I thought, what are you saying?

Mincaye started reaching out to all the people in the emergency room, saying, “People, people, don’t you see? God, loving Star, he’s taking her to live with him.” And he said, “Look at me, I’m an old man; pretty soon I’m going to die too, and I’m going there.” Then he said, with a pleading look on his face, “Please, please, won’t you follow God’s trail, too? Coming to God’s place, Star and I will be waiting there to welcome you.”

One more quote, this time from Joni Eareckson Tada in her chapter, ‘Hope … the Best of Things’:

Do you know who the truly handicapped people are? They are the ones – and many of them are Christians – who hear the alarm clock go off at 7.30 in the morning, throw back the covers, jump out of bed, take a quick shower, choke down breakfast, and zoom out the front door. They do all this on automatic pilot without stopping once to acknowledge their Creator, their great God who gives them life and strength each day. Christian, if you live that way, do you know that James 4:6 says God opposes you? “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” And who are the humble? They are people who are humiliated by their weaknesses. Catheterized people whose leg bags spring leaks on somebody else’s brand-new carpet. Immobilized people who must be fed, cleansed, dressed, and taken care of like infants. Once-active people crippled by chronic aches and pains. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, so then submit yourselves to God. (pp. 195-196)