More Tim Keller summary

Tim Keller wrote a book that impacted me greatly--Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering. For the past several blogs I have been summarizing this book. Here we go again:

In the last blog I mentioned two doctrines that Keller believes can help us deal with pain and suffering. The third doctrine he covers is the incarnation and atonement. The book of Job calls for complete surrender to the sovereignty of God. Then the New Testament comes in with unimaginable comfort because the sovereign God himself has come down into this world and experienced its darkness. Here, Keller says, we see the ultimate strength – a God who is strong enough to voluntarily become weak and plunge himself into vulnerability in darkness out of love for us. There is no other religion that even conceives of such a thing. Here's a comment by Keller I want to stress: Yes, we do not know the reason God allows evil and suffering to continue or why it is so random, but now at least we know what the reason is not. It cannot be that he does not love us. It cannot be that he does not care. If God didn't withhold from us his very own son, will God withhold anything we need?

 

Keller then turns to a key question--Why didn't Jesus do something about evil when he was here? But the evil and darkness of this world come from within us mostly. It would've meant there would be no human beings left. Jesus died on the cross in our place taking the punishment our sins deserve so that someday he can return to earth to end evil without destroying us all. We always want God to put a stop to evil, but we seldom think that we would be in trouble too!

The Bible says that Jesus is the light of the world. Again, Keller has a powerful thought here: If you know you are in his love, and that nothing can snatch you out of his hand, and that he is taking you to God's house and God's future – then he can be a light for you in dark places when all other lights go out. His love for you now  and this infallible hope for the future  are indeed a light in the darkness by which we can find our way.

In Chapter 6  Keller describes how the Bible's picture of suffering is nuanced. We see two foundational balances – suffering is both just and unjust; God is both a sovereign and the suffering God. Start with number one. The world is now in a cursed condition that falls short of its design. But God has not abandoned us. The Bible then says that the existence of suffering in the world is really a form of justice. But it also says that individual instances of suffering may not be the result of a particular sin. Consider the book of Job, in which Job is not at fault but still suffers greatly.

Keller then talks of something that interests me as a teacher of the Bible as literature at Palomar College. The biblical story of creation was unique among ancient accounts of the world's origin. Other accounts say the world came into existence through a battle or struggle between divine beings or other supernatural forces. The world was basically chaotic. But the Bible says that creation was the result of one God without a rival acting much as an artist. The world has a pattern to it. The fabric of the world has a moral order to it. Our world has been created by God and therefore has a foundational moral order to it. And yet something is wrong with that order now. It is crucial to understand evil as an enemy of God.

In John 11 Jesus is furious about death, evil and suffering. Evil is the enemy of God's good creation and of God himself. Evil is so deeply rooted in the human heart that if Christ had come in power to destroy it everywhere he found it, he would have had to destroy us too. He went in weakness to the cross to pay for our sins, so the someday he will return to wipe out evil without having to judge us as well.

If we forget that suffering is just, we will become drowned in self-pity. If we forget suffering is often unjust, we may be trapped in inordinate guilt in the belief that God must've abandoned us. This balance – that God is just and will bring final justice but life in the meantime is often deeply unfair – keeps us from many deadly errors.

Again, there is much to think about here. I'll stop for now. More to come from this book in the next blog.