Nielsen’s Nook

The Hope in Suffering–A Pastoral Response
Dear Mr. Wiesel has in fact rejected the very person who causes suffering to have meaning, the very medium, in the Cross, through which the Lord gives those who suffer hope, and the only one who has promised to ultimately deliver from suffering and evil. It is that Israeli of ancient time, Jesus of Nazareth, who Himself caused time to be, who is the watershed between despair and hope in the midst of agonizing suffering. Wiesel had rejected the very cornerstone of hope, the Messiah who had borne the stripes of the whip ages before him, who hung upon a cross, who died a tortuous death exiled from His own people, to die alone outside the camp.

To hold and weep with the young Wiesel is certainly a loving thing to do; however, to stop with only tears, sentiment and embrace is to empathize with a pauper-child who has not eaten for two weeks and not give him the bread that he so desperately needs. There is no counsel man can offer apart from the Cross. There is no comfort, apart from the Cross, for those who suffer. It is at the Cross that we ourselves must wrestle with the pain we do not understand; it is the God-Man Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life, which we must liberally extend from one pauper to another in times of affliction and suffering.

The Apostle John writes that it is Christ who is the exegesis of God, it is Christ who explains the most transcendent and mysterious in terms of immanence and personality. “No one has at any time seen God. The One who is in the bosom of the Father, the only begotten God, that one interpreted [the Father to us]” (Jn 1:18, writer’s translation). How can a man, perhaps a pastor, comfort anyone who has suffered as Elie Wiesel has suffered? He confesses despair which cannot be healed by human hands. At root he has made an interpretation of the Lord, borne from the depths of the darkest desolation. Only the Light of the Gospel of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, which can penetrate to those who suffer as Wiesel, it is only divine glory which is able shine in the catacombs of consternation.

The question is then, for the pastor or anyone else who would find themselves with the charge entrusted them to comfort the suffering: What interpretation of God will I offer the one writhing in pain? What sustenance will I offer to the one whose gut bellows with deafening howls of agony? Will I offer them the Christ and all that He is and promised, or shall I offer them something less?

When we pray for the suffering, the sick and the afflicted it is often the case that we pray for their healing, betterment and deliverance from their arduous situation. The Lord is concerned with our immanent needs:

6Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies ? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. 7Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. (Lk 12:6-7 NIV)

So we must pray according to the immanent concerns of God – the pain, agony, despair; however, we must also be faithful to pray according to the transcendent concerns of God – His glory, His will, His purposes in history. If we pray only according to the immanent then we run the risk of implying that God will, and intends to deliver the person from their dire straits. The problem is that this is not always the case, and in our presumption we attempt to speak authoritatively about the purpose of God. Who are we to presume upon the will of our Maker!?

From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 22And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” 23But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.” (Mt 16:21-23 ESV)

The Lord Jesus makes plain to all who will hear that there are times in which the Lord’s will and purpose is confusing and takes those involved through pain, agony, and suffering – and in the case of some torture and death. The Lord is concerned about the “things of men” but He is first concerned about His glorious purposes and plans which transcend the finite realm of humanity and confound even the wisest mortals.

So when we pray only in an immanent fashion, and it comes to pass that the husband dies of cancer or the father is sent to the gas chamber, we subject the faith of those for whom we pray to the furnace of despair which has burned belief out of many souls, shriveling their hearts, as it were, so that there is nothing left for God at all. We must pray with both the transcendence and immanence of God in mind.

Therefore, where the immanence of God is concerned with the smallest concerns of this world, the transcendence of God is concerned with God himself – his ways, his purposes, his will. These are unlike their human counterparts altogether. It is this transcendence that gives the man dying a painful death the hope that though he may not be healed, he may die well, believing, trusting that his death and suffering will glorify the Lover of his soul, with whom he will soon be face to face. And this is what we have in Christ, the one who endured more than any other person with perfect belief that his suffering and death would bring his Father the greatest glory. Indeed, this was the case.

It is the Lord who demonstrates His love for His people through pain. Certainly the Divine One is impassable, incapable of suffering, being wholly removed from the mess of sin and death that constitutes this world; yet, He came down and in all of the finitude of His humanity, He felt every piece of bone that ripped the flesh from off His back. He felt every nick in the cold metal of each of the spikes that impaled His lovely limbs. And when he gasped for his last breath, piked upon the Tree, He alone experienced the Father abandon him to torturous death, receiving the infinite wrath of the Almighty.

It is this Christ that we proclaim to those in dire straits. It is this interpretation of the Father that we must give to those who suffer, both in word and in deed. Anything else we might offer in His place is mere trite counterfeit, a mockery of unbelief erupting from our own hearts. Adolphe Monod, a French pastor who was well acquainted with suffering himself, writes:

Yet in order for us to understand God’s love in all of its fullness and reality, it was necessary for God to present himself to us in such a way as to prove his love to us through pain. Mankind could never have been persuaded – or rather won – in any other way. Therefore Jesus Christ, the Son of God and God himself, became the Son of man that he might suffer and thus show God’s love through acts capable of breaking the hardest hearts…¹

It is therefore imperative that all who would counsel the bereaved would point them to the interpretation of the Father, which is given by God in Christ. “It is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.”² To rightly understand their own suffering the bereaved must have the right interpretation and must contemplate the mysterious depths of their very real pain from the face of God down to themselves, to possess the hope which transcends all understanding, being alone the incomprehensible Lord who still comes down today.

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¹ Adolphe Monod. Living in the Hope of Glory. (Ed. and trans. by Constance K. Walker. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2002), 113-114.
² John Calvin. Institutes of the Christian Religion. (Ed. by John T. McNeill. Trans. by Ford Lewis Battles. 2 vol. LCC. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 37.

Resolution in The Cross of Christ

In the introduction to Wiesel’s Night, François Mauriac contemplates the day in which the young Wiesel had questioned him about God and evil. He writes:

What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled him – the Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and that the conformity between the Cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished?…This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping.¹

I do not know that I would have had the wherewithal to know how to pastorally apply the truth of Mauriac’s affirmation had I been in his place. No doubt the necessity to apply the truth of scripture to those crushed and struck down by this world is paramount. The immensity of immanent evil that Wiesel had suffered is in itself overwhelming. However, there is no peace in the face of any amount of suffering apart from the Cross of Christ. It is through the Cross that the transcendence of Eternal God of heaven and earth, comes down through suffering to apprehend our hearts for hope, giving meaning to all suffering and pain.

Calvary is judo. The enemy’s own power is used to defeat him. Satan’s craftily orchestrated plot, rolled along according to plan by his agents Judas, Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, culminated in the [torturous] death of God. And this very event, Satan’s conclusion, was God’s premise. Satan’s end was God’s means. It saved the world.²

Our hope as Christian people, which is universally offered to all people, is that the transcendent God of all Heaven and Earth has come down and bound himself by way of covenant to His people. He has proven ever faithful, decreeing the immutable and infallible means to securing His covenant with us. It is Christ who is the Man of Sorrows, who is familiar with suffering, despised and rejected by men. It is Christ who was crushed for our transgressions, a spotless lamb led to slaughter. It was He who came and made his dwelling in the ghettoes of humanity. It was He who was assigned with the wicked, though He Himself was purer innocence than the gentlest of babes. Yet it was the Lord’s purposed-will to crush Him, to cause Him to suffer, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous to bring us to the Lord (c.f., Acts 2:23).

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¹ François Mauriac, introduction to “Night”, in The Night Trilogy, by Elie Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 11.
² Peter Kreeft. Making Sense out of Suffering. (Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1986), 132-33.

The Purpose/Place of Suffering
There is mystery and incomprehensibility as to why God allowed evil and suffering to be even a possibility in this world; however, the sovereignty of God is the great hope in the midst of suffering. Evil sets its foot no further than the Omnipotent Lord allows it. Evil does not befall upon anyone by chance, but according to the very counsel of Holy God. In light of all that God has revealed about Himself, His goodness, love, and mercy for example, we are forced to conclude that there must be some ultimately good and holy purpose within the counsel of God for evil and suffering in the world. One such reason appears to be that it shuts the creature up to confine the hermeneutic of his life to his relation to his Creator. Ultimately, however, no creature can presume to know the mind of his Maker.

The fact of the matter is that we are all shut up to believe or to not believe – that is the question all must wrestle with in times of prosperity and in times of bitter pain. Consider Joseph, a faithful Hebrew, who was probably about the same age as Wiesel when he was struck down into the cistern by his own brothers and then sold into slavery to the Ishmaelites out of sheer hatred. He served Potiphar faithfully, only to be slammed into prison on account of the lustful desires of Potiphar’s own wife. Yet the Lord tells us that He was with Joseph in all of His suffering (Gen 39:20-21). Joseph notably navigated this evil and injustice by way of belief.

It is also clear from the biblical account that this was not an easy feat. It is apparent from the biblical account that Joseph dealt with significant emotional pain (Gen 43:30, 45:1-2). In Joseph’s case, quite unlike that of Wiesel, the purpose his suffering is clear:

7And God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. 8So it was not you who sent me here, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. … 19But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? 20As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. (Gen 45:7-8; 50:19-20 ESV)

Joseph looked upon a tremendously painful experience and embrace the fact that it was not by accident but by the very hand of God Himself that those things happened to him. His reassurance is on the basis of God’s character and decree. It is in the humility of submission to a plan for his own life, which transcended all comprehension that Joseph is exalted to a place of peace and blessing equally as transcendent.

God and Suffering, Pain, and Evil
The pastor who wishes to comfort the afflicted, that they be not crushed; the perplexed, that they be not driven to despair; the persecuted, that they be not forsaken; those who are struck down, that they be not destroyed; must have clear in his own mind the pure goodness of God and the place of suffering in the divine economy to the degree to which the Lord has revealed this mystery. For Wiesel and many others, an all-good God, who is also all-powerful could not exist and at the same time have allowed such horror to occur as Wiesel describes from his own experience.

However, this way of thinking appears to affirm the Lord God, Almighty rather than argue for his non-existence. When a cat kills a canary we have no moral qualm with God. People overwhelmed with great suffering, tragedy which has come lacerating their lives, the indignation one may feel against God, itself presupposes Him. “A cat cannot sin, even though it may swallow the canary, for a cat does not know the difference. But a man knows evil, and therefore knows—God. Pain and death come from sinful failure” (emphasis added).¹ Wiesel, in agony few will every know in their lifetime, seems to turn his back on Judeo-Theism and embraces some form of agnosticism or atheism. Yet, neither of these worldviews can comfort the tormented soul. They can offer Wiesel no more hope than a theism without a Crucifixion. To view the Holocaust a vile evil and then conclude that this historical event proves that God does not exist, is to presuppose the Lord God Almighty in all the purity of His goodness, as the moral standard. To turn the back in unbelief against the Lord God on account of His choice to allow heinous suffering, does in no way address for Wiesel the vile evil that tormented him. It is painful autobiography of his own rejection of his Creator on the basis of the performance he feels God should have done for him. Indeed, this is Wiesel’s frustration when he writes, “I did not deny God’s existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.”² This is not submitted to minimize the torment that someone like Wiesel endured but to ask the question from where does the one who rejects God on a moral basis derive his morality? It is a pastoral call to counsel people at the root of their pain, to proclaim to them the Holy One in all His power, who alone can heal and comfort them.

Wiesel also records that many of the atrocities against the Jews were committed one to another. In the twilight of starvation, son would murder father for bread. May we rail against the Lord, for not helping us while killing one another? In the midst of his unbelief, Wiesel erupts into prayer, “My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou’s son had done.”³ (Rabbi Eliahou’s son had abandoned his father to his death during a forced march). Ironically, the one prayer that Wiesel cries out in desperation is the very thing that came to pass. He stayed true to his own father until his death.

Man’s concept of goodness is derivative of God as the archetype of goodness. Apart from the Triune God there is no basis for determining good and evil. Consequentially, statements of what is good or that the Holocaust was evil reduce to meaninglessness. “…He is himself the absolutely good, the perfect one, he cannot and may not love anything else except with a view to himself. He cannot and may not be satisfied with anything less than absolute perfection.”⁴ Scripture instructs us in this way, that goodness is understood with God himself as both its source and goal:

6 Many are asking, “Who can show us any good?”Let the light of your face shine upon us, O LORD. 7 You have filled my heart with greater joy than when their grain and new wine abound. 8 I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety. (Psalm 4:6-8, emphasis added)

The child of God may rejoice in the wonder of the revelation of this passage. In these few lines of Hebrew verse the Lord teaches us that there is absolute good, and that this good is an ontological facet in the blinding spectrum of the diadem of His own being. It is the Lord who fills the heart with joy. The basis for peace and rest is that God causes one to dwell in safety (Hiphil imperfect – ynIbeyvi/T).

With the sovereignty of God in His decrees there is always the other side which is not as easily stomached. There are those such as Wiesel who have indeed not found themselves dwelling in safety nor sleeping in peace. Nowhere does God promise His people ease and prosperity, on the contrary, from cover to cover, God’s own testimony in the Scripture is that the world is fallen, and He is working throughout history, even by way of sin, suffering and pain, to redeem a people for Himself. We may, therefore, understand the Bible’s testimony that pain and evil may come our way, resulting from the sinfulness of fallen man, actively permitted by a sovereign God. Bavinck succinctly points out with regard to election and reprobation a principle which transcends “in a sense”⁵ to the problem of pain and evil when he writes, “If God foreknows and permits something, he does this either ‘willingly’ or ‘unwillingly.’ The latter is impossible. Accordingly, only the former remains: God’s permission is an ‘efficacious permission,’ an act of his will.”⁶

Do I have the reason for why God, in the purest light of his goodness, allowed the Holocaust to occur? Indeed, this is not the case; however, the Word of God makes graciously plain to man that war, sin and atrocity serves a purpose in the divine economy. The scriptures soberly remind all who would read that God is not the author of evil but that he does use evil to glorify himself. “God predestined the Fall, and though, as supreme ruler, as Supreme Ruler, he executes his plan even by means of sin; nevertheless, he remains holy and righteous; of his own accord man falls and sins: the guilt is his alone.”⁷

In summary, God in his sovereignty does actively permit pain, suffering, and evil, and that active permission is nothing short of ordaining these things to happen. How is it then that God is not guilty of Auschwitz or any other evil in this world? Much of the answer to this question lies beyond mankind’s ability or privilege to understand. The Apostle Paul gives us the most direct, and arguably the only direct answer, in the ninth chapter of Romans when he writes by way of divine inspiration:

19You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” 20On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? 21Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? (Ro 9:19-21 NASB95)

In Job’s case the Lord responded to Job’s inquiry by informing him (in the last three chapters of the book) of the nature of Creation, that he was largely ignorant of the nature of the world and the evil in it. John Frame comments with a view towards this question via analogy⁸ between Shakespeare, Macbeth, and Duncan, whom Macbeth murdered. No one would charge Shakespeare as guilty for the murder of Duncan even though Shakespeare is ultimately responsible for his death.⁹ Essentially, what the Reformed tradition argues is that there are two kinds of causalities; i.e., first and second causes. The Westminster Confession of Faith seeks to articulate this same concept when it states:

God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.¹⁰

Although, in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first Cause, all things come to pass immutably, and infallibly; yet, by the same providence, He ordereth them to fall out, according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.¹¹

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¹ George Arthur Buttrick. God, Pain and Evil (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1966), 77.

² Elie Wiesel. The Night Trilogy (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 53.

³ ibid., 97.

⁴ Herman Bavinck. The Doctrine of God. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1997), 204.

⁵ Bavinck makes certain, as do I, that the reader understand that we do not advocate that God is the author of sin and evil, but that these are instruments, actively and efficaciously permitted, by which he purposes to manifest the excellencies of His glory (see discussion of God’s glory at the top of p. 390 in Doct. of God).

⁶ Herman Bavinck. The Doctrine of God. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1997), 388.

⁷ ibid., 385.

⁸ Analogies are tools for understanding in derivative fashion and not 1:1 in their correspondence.

⁹ John Frame. The Doctrine of God. (Phillipsburg: P & R, 2002), 179-81.

¹⁰ Westminster Confession of Faith III.1.

¹¹ ibid., V.2.

Prescript: One of the most difficult and fecund projects I had during my time at Westminster Seminary was to write read Elie Wiesel’s Night and then write a pastoral response to him, as if he had come into my pastor’s study and laid out his story (that of a Jewish youth in concentration camps in Nazi Europe), desiring counsel and direction. In continuing with recent themes of Christ and suffering, I share this with you here and invite your reflection and comment. This is the first of five posts.

There are few eras of history that embody brutality and suffering more readily to a twenty-first century Western mind than that of Nazi Germany during World War II. Even more, there are fewer particulars that epitomize the basest form of suffering than Auschwitz or Buna, jagged cogs of Nazi annihilation machinery. Today, it would appear that the West in general, and America specifically, understands little of suffering. Having grown fat, we mark out hunger as enduring an hour longer to eat; pain, by the backache caused by our own obesity (for which we have an encapsulated solution). Consequentially gross proportions of the church have grown anemic, glossing over the decreed place of suffering in the world, minimizing the resolute hope, that the One who bled the ground purest red at Calvary offers to any who are struck down, suffering today.

The Fact of Suffering

Some may say that the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered, should not be compared to other instances of suffering, fearing that by doing so it is some how trivialized. However, if we do not recognize the Holocaust as one horror among many, it is then that we trivialize it. Stalin is reported to have slaughtered some 20 million of his own people, while Hitler slaughtered over a million Russians in the battle for Stalingrad alone. Millions of people die of AIDS in central Africa in our present day. In one day the English slaughtered more than ten thousand at the battle of Agincourt; and indeed the cry of the slaughtered was, “Disorder, that hath spoil’d us, friend us now! Let us on heaps offer up our lives.”¹ The Holocaust, in its unforgettable terror, is one rap in the iteration of suffering on this planet, being a commentary on the degree of the presence of evil in the race of men, which all must face.

Most of the suffering today is never voiced. It is the silent scream of piercing amplification that races through the air on a frequency that no one can hear. The Holocaust has been an exception in which people have talked, their scream has been heard, and even still, many do not know how to resolve such heinous cruelty with the orthodox teaching of God’s goodness. I believe this is the case not only for those who hear the wailing of a suffering soul but also for the soul itself that wails. Failure to find definitive resolution of these two facts will result in an impotence to counsel the bereaved and may result in the incineration of the faith of those who suffer.

After arriving at Birkenau, reception center for Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel wrote these words; the soot and fire from the crematorium having seared his depths:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.²

For Wiesel life had become a dying dirge, a condemnation that beats out its doom-drum rhythm, leaving him alone in a deafening darkness in which he had no answers, no faith, and no hope.

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¹ William Shakespeare, “Henry V,” in The Riverside Shakespeare (ed. G. Blakemore Evans: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974),962 [IV.v.6-23].
² Elie Wiesel. The Night Trilogy (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 43.