Where is God when it Hurts? – Agony and Ecstasy

Geroge Wald said, as quoted by Philip Yancey,

We somehow hope to live full emotional lives when we have carefully expunged the sources of the deepest human emotions. When you have no experience of pain, it is rather hard to experience joy.

What were those sources of deepest human emotion? Birth and death.

Far too often, we hide death in back rooms, and we keep father’s out of the room where their own children are being born. The weight of life and death seldom hits us. The weight of both needs to, though.

I often wonder how people at funerals can be so insensitive and oblivious to how their words are perceived. Empty platitudes are often flung around without hesitation. Why is this? I think that perhaps the greatest reason is that those people do not feel the weight of death. Maybe the experience has never touched them. Maybe they’ve forgotten it, or dulled it. Maybe they haven’t processed their own sorrows over death in healthy ways. This last one is what we should assume in the moment, yet the suspicion of the others should drive conversation. We want to be comforters who comfort like our Comforter has comforted us.

We seek, says Yancey, to diminish and dismiss anything unpleasant in our modern lives. As a side effect of this, or the cause itself, all other sources of entertainment or pleasure are turned way up. Pleasure and pain are turned into transactional commodities rather than realities experienced through relationship and activity – moderns “don’t see pleasure as something to reach out for and actively attain after struggle. Pleasure is something done to you; merely strap yourself in the amusement-park ride.”

For more on this point of our modern predicament, see Simulacra | The Causes of Things, Ep. 30, by Michael O’Fallon.

Treating sorrow and “joy” like this leads to swampy souls. Affections are meant to be the wind to the sea of our souls. We are meant to experience sorrows and joy, and that both should lead us steadily towards God. How beautiful is it when, after some great sorrow, the Christian so clearly trust and draws closer to God? How can we do this? Because Jesus promised to be with us, and to put an end to our sorrow once and for all.

You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.

John 16:20a-22

For more on this, see Emotional Health, a sermon by Peter Mead from April, 2020.

I would like to critique Philip Yancey in a section of this chapter, namely, the section Befriending Enemies. Is pain something we view as an enemy but really isn’t? An “apparent enemy?” Should we befriend pain? I don’t think so.

Now, let me just say that I think Yancey has his position misplaced in two ways.

First, if he wrote that we have a friend we can trust and go to in the midst of pain, that would be perfectly fine. Jesus is our greatest Friend, Mediator, Advocate in all our sins and sorrows. This, however, doesn’t make pain itself our friend. Just as death isn’t our friend because through it we get to go to Jesus – Jesus is our friend for bringing us through death, so pain isn’t our friend just because Jesus brings us through it.

Second, if Yancey had used language of pain and sorrow being destroyed and overcome finally by Jesus, rather than pain being absorbed by joy, it would have served his readers better. This wording would have struck a more Biblical tone. Pain will be absorbed by joy in eternity, but (as we will see) it will be destroyed.

Pain is an enemy, because pain exists (as it does) because of death. Death is an enemy – the last enemy to be destroyed. Consider Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians 15:26: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” Paul goes on in the chapter to talk about the redemption of our bodies, and to what it is to be raised imperishable. Note, though, that death is going to be destroyed, and destroyed by God Himself.

This destruction of death includes the destruction of pain, as He promises in Revelation 21:4,

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.

That doesn’t mean we don’t trust God in pain right now. For the Christian, it even means that we do not need to fear death, and can have full assurance stepping into eternity with Jesus. Furthermore, beyond trusting God’s character, we trust that God has a plan in pain for His own. He is preparing an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison (2 Corinthians 4:7).

Yancey tries backing up his position by appealing to fear and guilt. Fear and guilt, in a fallen world where death and sin are often the drivers of both experiences, can serve good purposes. The thing is, God takes away both fear and guilt. We will live forever without fear, and without guilt.

The fear that kept us enslaved will be no more (Hebrews 2:15). Again, Revelation 21 begins with the destruction of all evil fear (there is a healthy fear that we will enjoy forever; read of that here). Also, guilt, will be gone forever. Again, Revelation 21 is probably clear on this hope, too.

Both fear and guilt serve a purpose in a fallen world, even a good purpose. However, they too, like pain, will be destroyed forever.

My opinion of Yancey in this section is that he focuses too strongly on why God allows pain in a fallen world. There needs to be more room given to God’s providential care in allowing His special creation to undergo pain.

One last critique. Yancey says the following at one point:

Or, I think of a world without another pain, the pain of loneliness. Would friendship and even love exist apart from our inbuilt sense of need, the prod that keeps us all from being hermits?

One must only look at the Trinity to understand the flaw in the argument. God, forever, un-alone, in fullness of love. Now, for sinners, there is some truth in what Yancey has said. For fundamentally selfish creatures, our inbuilt senses of our needs prod us to community and non-destructive acts. Pure love, however, is not built on lack. It springs from the all-sufficient and transforming love of God.