You don’t need me to remind you that our world, wonderful and beautiful as it is, is shot through with suffering and evil.

In a recent lecture, Don Carson spoke of six ‘pillars’ of the Christian worldview that will provide bulwarks as we seek to face up to this reality.

1. Insights from the beginning of the Bible’s storyline

God created a world of ‘breathtaking beauty and unfathomable goodness’.  But the perfection was short-lived.  We now find ourselves, from Genesis 3 onwards, in a world marked by ‘sin, suffering, death and decay’.

On Jesus’ teaching in Luke 13:1-5, Carson comments:

‘What Jesus seems to presuppose is that all the sufferings of the world—whether caused by malice [as in Luke 13:1–3] or by accident [as in Luke 13:4–5]—are not peculiar examples of judgment falling on the distinctively evil, but rather examples of the bare, stark fact that we are all under sentence of death.’

2. Insights from the end of the Bible’s storyline

Our ultimate hope is that all that is wrong in creation will one day be put right, Romans 8:18-25.

This thought helps us to be realists: we do not expect utopia now.  There is no political (or medical, or educational or economic) magic bullet that will solve the problem of suffering.

3. Insights from the place of innocent suffering

Job 42 and Revelation 21-22 teach us that justice will be done, and will be seen to be done.  Until then, however, we have been left with many ambiguities and uncertainties about why God would ‘allow’ the innocent to suffer.  As Carson says, with his eye on Job 13:15,

‘God wants our trust [even] more than he wants our understanding.’

4. Insights from the mystery of providence

Carson is well-known for taking a ‘compatibilist’ approach, where divine sovereignty and human responsibility are both affirmed, even if they must be held in tension with one another.

5. Insights from the centrality of the incarnation and the cross

At the cross, the sovereign God plunges into the depths of human suffering (Acts 2:23; 4:27–28).  God knows, understands, shares, and, ultimately, triumphs over suffering.:

‘As Edward Shillito once wrote in a poem titled “Jesus of the Scars”: “But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak / And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.”’

6. Insights from taking up our cross

Whereas we often think of suffering in terms of war, cancer or poverty, the New Testament usually frames it in terms of suffering as Christians, especially persecution (Acts 5:40–42; Rom. 8:17; Phil. 1:29; 3:10; 1 Pet. 2:20–23).

Just as in the days of the early church, persecution and mission went hand in hand, so (Carson observes):

‘There have been more Christian conversions since 1800 than in the previous 1,800 years combined, and there have been more Christain martyrs since 1800 than in the previous 1,800 years combined. And to this you have been called [1 Pet. 2:21].’

But it is not sufficient merely to have a robust theology of suffering.  We must, in addition

(a) admit our own sin and guilt before God, and cry out to him for renewal and revival (see Neh 8-9);

(b) think and speak much about the sheer goodness of God.

Let these six pillars provide a bulwark against evil days to come.  Only then will we be in a position to face suffering ‘with stability, humility, compassion, and joy.’

Based on this summary, by Matt Smethurst