- Tue, Mar 02, 2010
- Suffering and Evil
Giving Comfort to Hurting People
People need to feel loved. A hurting child needs to feel his father’s arms around him. When the father is away, he may leave written words of love, as God has in his Word. But he may also call on the child’s older brothers and sisters to express his love to his child.
To ignore someone’s pain is to add to that pain. Instead of fearing we’ll say the wrong thing, we should reach out to hurting people. Many times it’s better just to put our arms around someone and cry with them; people almost ...
I’ve been attending and speaking at the C.S. Lewis Summer Institute at Oxbridge. Yesterday afternoon at one of the seminars, I talked about the problem of evil and suffering. We discussed how EVERY worldview must address this problem and the problem of GOOD as well. And no worldview does this as well as the biblical one.
Benjamin B. Warfield, world-renowned theologian, taught at Princeton Seminary for thirty-four years until his death in 1921. Students still read his books today. But most of them don’t know that in 1876, at age twenty-five, he married Annie Kinkead. They traveled to Germany for their honeymoon. In an intense thunderstorm, lightning struck Annie and permanently paralyzed her.
My friend Doug Nichols, pictured above with his wonderful wife Margaret, is the founder of 
The apostle John says we know what God’s love is because of the unthinkable price Jesus paid for us, to turn us into God’s own children, fully acceptable in his sight. God’s love abounds. It proliferates. It’s overflowing, even excessive—something all sufferers need to hear.
The stronger our concept of God and Heaven, the more we understand how Heaven resolves the problem of evil and suffering. The weaker our concept of God and Heaven, the stronger our doubt that Heaven will more than compensate for our present sufferings.
God tells us that suffering isn’t pointless. We are to rejoice in our sufferings because of the outcomes they will produce: perseverance, character, hope, and the certain expectation that God will make all things right and work all things for our good and his glory.
