Suffering is Not for Nothing: The Terrible Truth

when i was told that my first husband jim was missing in alca indian country the lord brought to my mind some words from the prophet isaiah when thou passest through the waters i will be with thee and through the rivers they shall not overflow thee i prayed silently lord let not the waters overflow and he heard me and he answered me two years later i went in to live with the indians who had killed jim 16 years after that after i had come back to the states i married a theologian named addison leach he died of cancer three and a half years later there have been some hard things in my life of course as there have been in yours and i cannot say to you i know exactly what you're going through but i can say that i know the one who knows and i've come to see that it's through the deepest suffering that god has taught me the deepest lessons and if we'll trust him for it we can come to the unshakable assurance that he's in charge he has a loving purpose and he can transform something terrible into something wonderful suffering is never for nothing elizabeth is my wife and i would like to pray for her and for you before she comes to speak to us father it is with grateful hearts that we come together we come from different walks of life and we all come with needs that many times you alone know about we're amazed that the word spoken can be applied in different areas and different circumstances but all according to your way in working the best out for us so we pray for this evening for elizabeth as she speaks you've prepared her and given her words to give to us we pray for your spirit over it all that we might gain from this the understanding and knowledge we need through every circumstance of life in christ's name we pray amen my husband's name is lars gren g-r-e-n sometimes there's a little confusion about my name and various husbands as i will be talking i will be mentioning at least numbers one and two so i would like you to know number three as well this series is entitled suffering is not for nothing when c s lewis was asked to write a book on the problem of pain he asked permission to write it anonymously permission was denied as not being in keeping with that particular series and this is what he wrote in his introduction if i were to say what i really thought about pain i should be forced to make statements of such apparent fortitude that they would become ridiculous if anyone knew who made them and i would echo those sentiments when i hear other people's stories about their own sufferings i feel as though i know practically nothing about the subject myself i'm in kindergarten as it were compared to for example my friend jan who is quadriplegic and lies on one side or the other 24 hours a day in a nursing home in connecticut or my friend judy squires in california who was born with no legs or my friend joe bailey my late friend joe bailey who lost three children but if all i knew about suffering was by observation alone it would still be sufficient to tell me that we're up against a tremendous mystery suffering is a mystery that none of us is really capable of plumbing and it's a mystery about which i'm sure everyone at some time or other here has asked why and if we try to put together the mystery of suffering with the christian idea of a god who loves us we know if we think about it for as much as five minutes that the notion of a loving god cannot possibly be deduced from the evidence that we see around us let alone from human experience i'd like to go back to some of my own home training i grew up in a very strong christian home in philadelphia where both of my parents were what i call seven day a week kind of christians we had a little brass plate over the front doorbell that said christ is the head of this home the unseen guest at every meal the silent listener to every conversation we were taught that god is love i suppose one of the earliest hymns that we were taught it was that little gospel song jesus loves me this i know for the bible tells me so when i was nine years old my one and only girlfriend almost my one and only i lived in a neighborhood of 42 boys but i had a friend who lived about six blocks away whose name was essie and essie and i were both nine years old when she died when i was probably three or four years old we had a guest in our home who was on her way to china as a missionary her name was betty scott and she went to china married her fiance john stam and a few years later i'm not sure just how old i was maybe six or seven my father came home one evening with a newspaper telling that john and betty stam had been captured by chinese communists marched almost naked through the streets of a chinese village and had then been beheaded you can imagine the impression this made on the mind of a young child in view of the fact that betty scott stam had sat at our supper table and had given us her testimony as she was on her way to china i also remember very vividly the newspaper stories of the kidnapping of charles lindbergh's baby and i would go to sleep at night imagining that i saw a ladder coming up by my window my parents not knowing that i was concerned in this way didn't think to tell me that there really wasn't a whole lot of danger that anybody was going to be interested in kidnapping a child like me because we were not really what you might call rich nevertheless i did have some experience of death as a small child and just a few weeks ago to bring it more up to date some friends of my husbands and mine called to say that their little four-year-old child who was born with spina bifida was doing very well but the mother was pregnant and for various reasons had had some tests which had revealed that the child she's now carrying is also spina bifida and so they were calling just to say we're hurting please pray for us and when i hear stories like that it's what makes me think that my own experience of suffering is really very little at all but the question is unavoidable for thinking person where is god in all of this can you look at the data and believe and it's the question that was put to alyosha by ivan karamazov in dostoyevsky's famous novel about the brothers karamazov recounting the story of a little girl of five ivan said to his brother she was subjected to every possible torture by her cultivated parents they beat her thrashed her kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruised then they went to greater refinements of cruelty shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night as though a child of five sleeping its angelic sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement and it was her mother her mother who did this and that mother could sleep hearing the poor child's groans can you understand why a little girl who can't even understand what's done to her should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear kind god to protect her do you understand that friend and brother you pious and humble novice do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted and so i hasten to give back my entrance ticket ivan says it's not god that i don't accept alyosha only i most respectfully return my ticket tell me yourself i challenge you answer imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end giving them peace and rest at last but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature that baby beating its breast with its little fist for instance and who found that edifice on its unavenged tears would you consent to be the architect on those conditions tell me tell me the truth and what i want to share with you is what i see to be the straight truth with no evasions and no clear flat platitudes it's very fresh in my mind just this week a picture that i saw in time magazine of an inconsolable newborn baby whose mother was on crack cocaine just to look at that picture brought down on my own head as it were everything that i was planning to say to you in this series i happened to be sitting on the plane yesterday next to a woman who was reading a book called master of life manual which according to the cover was about metaphysics brain mind awareness human potential principles and this stunning statement create your own reality now and i thought i would hate to be down to such an extreme that i was having to create my own reality in the face of the data of human experience and so i would ask the question is there a reason to believe that suffering is not for nothing is there an eternal and perfectly loving exp perfectly loving purpose behind it all if there is it's not obvious it doesn't exactly meet the eye and yet if for thousands of years in the face of these stunning realities this terrible truth if for thousands of years people have believed that there is a loving god and that that god is looking down on the realities around us and still loves us and these people have still continued to insist that god knows what he's doing that he's got the whole world in his hands then i repeat the reason cannot possibly be obvious it can't be because those thousands of people were all deaf dumb blind or stupid and incapable of looking clearly and steadily at the data that you and i are constantly having to look at what is the answer f w h myers in his poem saint paul wrote these words is there not wrong too bitter for atoning what are these desperate and hidden years hast thou not heard thy whole creation groaning size of the bondsman and a woman's tears the answer is not obvious there must be an explanation somewhere and it's my purpose in this series to try to get at the explanation and then to see if there's something that you and i can do about this question of suffering i'm convinced that there are good many things in this life that we really can't do anything about but that god wants us to do something with and i hope that by the time i'm finished i will have made myself clear now the word suffering may seem very high flown and perhaps much too dignified for your particular set of troubles today and i can look around this audience and i don't know a person here i have no idea who might be watching the videos later on but if i knew you and if i knew your stories then i would know that i can't possibly speak personally to every need that's here to every kind of suffering and i'm fairly sure that there would be some people here tonight who would be saying well i really don't know any such thing as suffering i've never been through anything like johnny erickson or joe bailey or even elizabeth elliott and of course that's true and i could say the very same thing if i knew your story i could say well i've never been through anything like that so i want to give you a definition of suffering which will cover the whole gamut from when the washing machine overflows or when the roast burns and you're having the boss for dinner that night all those things about which our immediate human reaction is oh no from that kind of triviality relatively speaking to your husband has cancer your child is spina bifida or you yourself have just lost everything i think you will find that the definition that i'm going to give you will cover that gamut and i think that the things that i'm going to try to say to you will apply to the small things those sometimes ridiculously small things that if you're anything like me you get all upset about and all bent out of shape about that matter not at all by comparison with the big things and here it is my definition suffering is having what you don't want or wanting what you don't have now if you can think of something that does not come under one of those two headings please see me later because i do want to hear about it i think that covers everything now can you imagine a world for example in which nobody had anything that he didn't want no toothaches no taxes no touchy relatives no traffic jams or by contrast can you imagine a world in which everybody had everything they wanted perfect weather perfect wife perfect husband perfect health perfect score perfect happiness muggeridge said malcolm muggridge said supposing you eliminated suffering what a dreadful place the world would be because everything that corrects the tendency of man to feel over important and over pleased with himself would disappear he's bad enough now but he would be absolutely intolerable if he never suffered muggridge gets at the heart of what i want to say it's not for nothing now how do i know that the deepest things that i have learned in my own life have come from the deepest suffering and out of the deepest waters and the hottest fires have come the deepest things that i know about god and i imagine that most of you would say exactly the same and i would add this that the greatest gifts of my life have also entailed the greatest suffering the greatest gifts of my life for example have been marriage and motherhood and let's never forget that if we don't ever want to suffer we must be very careful never to love anything or anybody the gifts of love have been the gifts of suffering those two things are inseparable now i come to you tonight not like r.c sproul who is a theologian and a scholar i come to you not merely as one who has stood on the sidelines and pondered these things but as one in whose life god has seen to it that there has been a certain measure of suffering a certain measure of pain and it has been out of that very measure of pain that has come the unshakable conviction that god is love now when my little girl valerie was two years old her father had been dead for more than a year and i was beginning to teach her things like psalm 23 the lord is my shepherd i shall not want he maketh me to lie down in green pastures he leadeth me beside the still waters he restoreth my soul and i can still hear that tiny little baby voice saying he leadeth me beside the still waters and i realized when i heard her say that again and i still have a tape of her saying that i thought where did she get that weird intonation and i realized that she got it from her mother who was coaching her word by word she'd say he leadeth me and i would say beside and she would say beside anyway she learned it and things like psalm 91 one of my favorite psalms you that live in the shelter of the most high and lodge under the shadow of the almighty who say the lord is my safe retreat my god the fastness or the refuge in which i trust he will cover you with his pinions and you shall find safety beneath his wings you shall not fear the hunter's trap by night or the arrow that flies by day a thousand may fall at your side ten thousand close at hand but you it shall not touch now i want you to think of how a mother who is a widow tries to teach her little daughter whose father was killed by a group of savage indians who thought that he was a cannibal what this psalm means what the words of scripture mean she learned jesus loves me this i know not because her daddy was killed she didn't know it that way but jesus loves me this i know for the bible tells me so she learned to sing god will take care of me and what how was i to explain a thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand but it shall not come nigh thee i tell you this because maybe it'll help you to see that i've been forced from the circumstances of my own life to try to get down to the very bedrock of faith the things which are infrangible and unshakable god is my refuge was he jim's refuge was he his fortress on the night before those five men who were killed by the alkas went into alka territory they sang we rest on thee our shield and our defender what does your faith do with the irony of those words there will be no intellectual satisfaction on this side of heaven to that age-old question why but i have not found although i have not found intellectual satisfaction i have found peace and the answer i say to you is not an explanation but a person jesus christ my lord and my god and when i came to the realization that my husband was missing not knowing for another five days that he was dead the words that god brought to me then were from isaiah the 43rd chapter when thou passes through the waters i will be with thee and through the rivers they shall not overflow thee when thou walkest through the fire thou shalt not be burned neither shall the flame kindle upon thee for i am the lord thy god and i realized then that god was not telling me that everything was going to be fine humanly speaking that he was going to preserve my husband physically and bring him back to me but he was giving me one unmistakable promise i will be with thee for i am the lord thy god he is the one who loved me and gave himself for me and that challenge that ivan karamazov gave to his brother alyosha echoed a challenge that was given thousands of years earlier the challenge flung at jesus when he hung on the cross you who would destroy the temple and build it in three days save yourself if you're the son of god come down and then you remember how the religious elite in derision yelled he saved others himself he could not save he trusts in god let god deliver him now he's a miracle worker let him prove it to us now because he said i am the son of god and so we come back again to the terrible truths that there is suffering the question is god paying attention and thirdly why doesn't he do something the title i've given to this talk is the terrible truths and in answer to that third question why doesn't he do something i would say he has he did he is doing something and he will do something the subject can only be approached via the cross that old rugged cross so despised by the world the very worst thing that ever happened in human history turns out to be the very best thing because it saved me it saves the world and so god's love which was represented demonstrated to us in his giving his son jesus to die on the cross is brought together into harmony with suffering you see this is the crux of the question and those of you who've studied latin remember that the word crux is the latin word crooks for cross it's only in the cross that we can begin to harmonize this seeming contradiction between suffering and love and we will never understand suffering unless we understand the love of god we're talking about two different levels on which things are to be understood and again and again in the scriptures we have what seem to be complete paradoxes because we're talking about two different kingdoms we're talking about this visible world and an invisible kingdom on which the facts of this world are interpreted take for example the beatitudes those wonderful statements of paradox that jesus gave to the multitudes when he was preaching to them on the mountain and he said things like this very strange things how happy are those who know what sorrow means happy are those who claim nothing happy are those who have suffered persecution what happiness will be yours when people blame you and he'll treat you and say all kinds of slanderous things against you be glad then yes be tremendously glad does it make any sense at all not unless you see that there are two kingdoms the kingdom of this world the kingdom of an invisible world and the apostle paul understood the difference when he made this stunning declaration he said it is now my happiness to suffer for you my happiness to suffer it sounds like nonsense doesn't it and yet this is the word of god janet erskine stewart said joy is not the absence of suffering but the presence of god it's what the psalmist found in the valley of the shadow of death you remember he said i will fear no evil now the psalmist was not naive enough to say i will fear no evil because there isn't any there is we live in an evil broken twisted fallen distorted world what did he say i will fear no evil for thou art with me thy rod and thy staff they comfort me and when i stood by my shortwave radio in the jungle of ecuador in 1956 and heard that my husband was missing and god brought to my mind the words of the prophet isaiah when thou passes through the waters i will be with thee you can imagine that my response was not terribly spiritual i was saying but lord you're with me all the time what i want is jim i want my husband we had been married 27 months after waiting five and a half years five days later i knew that jim was dead and god's presence with me did was not jim's presence that was a terrible fact god's presence did not change the terrible fact that i was a widow and i expected to be a widow until i died because i thought it was a miracle i got married the first time i couldn't imagine that i would ever get married a second let alone a third god's presence did not change the fact of my widowhood jim's absence thrust me forced me hurried me to god my hope and my only refuge and i learned in that experience who god is who he is in a way that i could never have known otherwise and so i can say to you that suffering is is an irreplaceable medium through which i learned an indispensable truth i am i am the lord in other words that god is god well i still want to go back and say but lord what about those babies what about that little spina bifida child what about that those babies born terribly handicapped with terrible suffering because their mothers were on cocaine or heroin or alcohol what about my little scottie dog mcduff who died of cancer at the age of six what about the lindbergh baby and the stems who were beheaded what about all that and i can't answer your questions or even my own except in the words of scripture these words from the apostle paul who knew the power of the cross of jesus and this is what he wrote i reckon that the sufferings we now endure bear no comparison with the splendor as yet unrevealed which is in store for us for the created universe waits with eager expectation for god's sons to be revealed it was made the victim of frustration all those animals all those babies who have no guilt whatsoever the victim of frustration not by its own choice but because of him who made it so yet always there was hope and this is the part that brings me immeasurable comfort because the universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and enter upon the liberty and splendor of the children of god where does this idea of a loving god come from it is not a deduction it is not man so desperately wanting a god that he manufactures him in his mind it's he who was the word before the foundation of the world suffering as a lamb slain and he has a lot up his sleeve that you and i have the slightest idea about now he's told us enough so we know that suffering is not for nothing you

Channel: The Elisabeth Elliot Foundation

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Length: 32min 40sec (1960 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020