Pain You Can Endure, Shock You Cannot

As I have mentioned, I have been listening to Tim Keller's messages on Job and have gleaned some incredible insight into this life, in general, but most especially on how we should view and handle suffering.

In his fourth message, he focused entirely on wisdom, or why it is vital that, when suffering comes, we rely on wisdom and on God who grants us that wisdom. One part of his sermon stuck out (what follows is a summary and expansion of his teaching). Keller said that he has seen a lot of suffering in his life as a pastor. Many hospital visits, many funerals. Suffering people, he says, go one of two ways. They either get hard or they get soft. People will either lose faith in God and become worse people, or they will grow in faith and become better people. And which path you end up following has everything to do with pain and shock.

Pain, he says, is inevitable. Grief over a lost loved one, a friend who gossips about you, a struggling marriage, the loss of a job, getting stricken with cancer. You simply can't avoid physical and/or emotional pain in this life. Shock, on the other hand, is avoidable. If you understand the world, and especially the revealed word of God, the hard things in life that are inevitable will not be shocking. And it is these sorts of people who grow as a result of their pain. But those who are shocked by pain will almost always grow hard and cold. And Keller would say that two types of 'fools' are shocked by tragedy:

The Moralist lives life in such a way that they expect certain things. Religion to them is a way to get things, and usually this means God's gifts and approval. But the problem with this is that when pain comes, their only category--that God must be good to me because I am good to him--fails them. Because they believe they have done enough to please the deity, when pain comes, they are shocked.

The Relativist says that there is no right and wrong and that what you do in this life is entirely up to you, not anyone else (especially God). But even here, when pain comes, they are baffled. What they had determined they were actually free from (physical laws, moral laws) can't be avoided just because they are not believed. So not unlike the moralist, the only category they had set up--that the world (and God) must work in accordance with their beliefs--fails them. Because they had believed that they were not subject to the same systems the rest of the world was subject to, when pain comes, they are shocked.

And shocked people are unbelievers. They can't accept the pain that has been handed to them. And denial, as we all know, produces not joy but despair. However, when one accepts in wisdom that suffering and pain is inevitable, but also that God in his infinite wisdom and love uses it for our gain, we will, as Keller says, 'become soft.'