If you follow my blog, you know that I am devoting 2019 to RESILIENCE — our ability to recover from the stress of life.
This is the last post on my topic for February: Finding Meaning. the theme for March is “Making Lemonade out of Lemons” — in other words, learning how to be more optimistic.
But before we wrap up our time on meaning, I just wanted to let you know about a free resource I am offering.
I went through my office library this week, scanning the shelves for all the books I’ve read on meaning and suffering. Some of these books are kind of technical; you know, the neuroscience or psychological side of things.
But I have also read lots of books about ordinary people who went through extraordinary circumstances. These individuals came out on the other side stronger and wiser, partly because they learned how to find the meaning in their journey.
An Ancient Story of Suffering
The Book of Job is found in the Biblical Old Testament, right before Psalms.
At the beginning of the story, God is sitting on His heavenly throne giving audience to other celestial beings.
Satan, the one who caused humanity to rebel against God (the name literally means “adversary” or “accuser” in Hebrew) appears before him.
In the first scene, Satan is bragging to God about his success, pointing out all the rebellion happening on dirty little planet Earth.
But God says, “Have you noticed my friend Job? There’s no one quite like him—honest and true to his word, totally devoted to God and hating evil.”1
Satan snorts, “So do you think Job does all that out of the sheer goodness of his heart? Why, no one ever had it so good! You pamper him like a pet, make sure nothing bad ever happens to him or his family or his possessions, bless everything he does—he can’t lose! But what do you think would happen if you reached down and took away everything that is his? He’d curse you right to your face, that’s what.”2
“God replied, ‘We’ll see. Go ahead—do what you want with all that is his. Just don’t hurt him.’ Then Satan left the presence of God.”2
Mind you, all of this is going on behind the scenes – Job has no idea what is going on.
Shortly after this celestial conversation, Job’s house and all his earthly wealth are destroyed. Then all of his children get killed by a freak tornado.
Job bears his suffering in silence, refusing to curse God.
Then God and Satan have a second conversation:
“One day when the angels came to report to God, Satan also showed up. God singled out Satan, saying, ‘And what have you been up to?’
“Satan answered God, ‘Oh, going here and there, checking things out.’
“Then God said to Satan, ‘Have you noticed my friend Job? There’s no one quite like him, is there—honest and true to his word, totally devoted to God and hating evil? He still has a firm grip on his integrity! You tried to trick me into destroying him, but it didn’t work.’
“Satan answered, ‘A human would do anything to save his life. But what do you think would happen if you reached down and took away his health? He’d curse you to your face, that’s what.’
“God said, ‘All right. Go ahead—you can do what you like with him. But mind you, don’t kill him.’”3
So Job breaks out in deep, painful sores from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. His torment is now complete, having lost his loved ones, his livelihood, and now his health.
Job’s wife tells him to curse the God who would inflict such suffering. After all, she reasons, God can’t do anything worse to Job than strike him dead.
Then three friends show up to commiserate with Job and give him various philosophical reasons why he is suffering and what he should do about it.
Through it all, Job refuses to curse God.
God shows up at the end of the book to scold Job’s friends for their bad advice and to reward Job for his faithfulness. Then Job gets a new home, more wealth than before, and more children.
The author thus wraps the story up with what seems to be a neat little moral: Those who remain faithful through suffering will be rewarded in the end.
But is that all there is to the story?
Three Assumptions
In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner uses the story of Job to describe suffering from a believer’s perspective.
Kushner wrote the book after watching his son die of a rare genetic disorder that causes premature aging. A child with this disorder will biologically age during the first decade of life to an eighty or ninety-year old adult. No one survives past their early teens. Kushner’s son died two days after his 14th birthday.
Let me say at the outset that I cannot, in one blog post, do Kushner’s book justice. No matter your faith or creed, you will not regret buying and reading it for yourself.
I am only attempting here to distill down the essence of Kushner’s answer to the honest question of the believer, “Why, God? Why is this happening to me?”
Like Job, Kushner described himself as “a fundamentally religious man who had been hurt by life.”4 And also like Job, he dared to openly question God about the problem of suffering.
He wrote:
Over the generations, many people must have been told [Job’s] story. Some, no doubt, were comforted by it. Others were shamed into keeping their doubts and complaints to themselves after hearing Job’s example. Our anonymous author was bothered by it. What kind of God would that story have us believe in, who would kill innocent children and visit unbearable anguish on His most devoted follower in order to prove a point, in order, we almost feel, to win a bet with Satan?…In the poem, Job does complain against God, and now it is the friends who uphold the conventional theology that ‘no ills befall the righteous.’”5
Kushner says that the story contains three assumptions that the characters (and, let’s be honest, most God-believing readers) would like to believe:
- God is all-powerful. Therefore He is ultimately responsible for everything that happens in His realm.
- God is fair. Therefore He will ensure that everyone gets their just desserts: the wicked should be punished and the good should prosper.
- Job is good. Therefore he should not be punished; he should prosper. 6
The conflict between these three assumptions creates the conflict in the story. From the characters’ perspective, not all three can be true.
God cannot be fair and still punish a good man.
Job cannot be a good man if an all-powerful and fair God chooses to punish him.
In order for two assumptions to make sense, the third has to go.
Job’s friends decide to throw out assumption #3: Job must not be all that good. Maybe he didn’t mean to be bad, though, so they spend considerable time in the story trying to convince Job to repent and make things right with God again.
This ticks Job off, because the one assumption he is not willing to budge on is #3. He is adamant in his innocence.
Instead, Job is wavering on assumption #2. The fair God he believes in would not allow unfair suffering. God is all-powerful, sure, but maybe He has His facts garbled. So Job spends considerable time demanding that God grant him a fair hearing to get everything straightened out again.
The back-and-forth between Job and his friends demonstrates an ageless debate about the why of suffering.
Believers, particularly those who have never been touched by suffering, are quick to rush to God’s defense in this debate. In their fervor to save God’s good reputation, they are sometimes all too willing to throw the sufferer under the bus, blaming him or her for their own suffering.
But when suffering becomes personal, it is entirely a different matter. Then the knee-jerk reaction of the believer is to cry out, “Why, God? If You are as good and fair as You say You are, why do You allow injustice in the world?”
Kushner believes that the anonymous author of the Book of Job takes an unorthodox and unprecedented approach to the debate.
Unlike Job’s friends, the author believes that Job is good. The author also believes God is good. So the author accepts the second and third assumptions.
The assumption the author decides to throw out is the first.
Maybe there are limits to God’s power.
What God can’t do about suffering
Rabbi Kushner wrote:
Bad things do happen to good people in this world, but it is not God who wills it. God would like people to get what they deserve in life, but He cannot always arrange it. Forced to choose between a good God who is not totally powerful, or a powerful God who is not totally good, the author of the Book of Job chooses to believe in God’s goodness.”7
Near the end of the Book of Job, the author has God speak:
“Do you presume to tell me what I’m doing wrong?
Are you calling me a sinner so you can be a saint?
Do you have an arm like my arm?
Can you shout in thunder the way I can?
Go ahead, show your stuff.
Let’s see what you’re made of, what you can do.
Unleash your outrage.
Target the arrogant and lay them flat.
Target the arrogant and bring them to their knees.
Stop the wicked in their tracks—make mincemeat of them!…
I’ll gladly step aside and hand things over to you—
you can surely save yourself with no help from me!”8
Kushner interprets this as God challenging Job: “Hey Job, buddy, if you think you can do better, you try it.”
I chewed on this for a long time. I wasn’t sure if I agreed with Kushner or not.
Then I realized there is one thing that even God, in all His power, cannot do.
God cannot break His own rules.
The main rule underlying all others seems to be this: separation from God, the source of goodness and life; will inevitably result in suffering and death.
In listing the reasons why God cannot always relieve suffering, Christian author Philip Yancy wrote: “Some, but not all, unanswered prayers trace back to a fault in the one who prays.”9
That sounds a lot like one of Job’s friends, scapegoating the sufferer in order to save God’s good reputation. But then Yancy continued:
Some, but not all, trace back to God’s mysterious respect for human freedom and refusal to coerce. Some, but not all, trace back to dark powers contending against God’s rule. Some, but not all trace back to a planet marred with disease, violence, and the potential for tragic accident.”9
Christians see the world as an aberration in God’s universe, a dark spot of rebellion currently (but only temporarily) in alliance with the “dark forces” Yancy spoke of.
This was God’s doing only in the sense that He created the planet’s inhabitants with free will, including the freedom to rebel if they chose to.
Some might then ask, Why create free will? It’s a good question, and no one but God knows the real answer. Here I offer the only answer that makes sense to me: true love, true relationship, can only exist when both sides are capable of choosing it. So a loving God created free will so that his creation could choose – or not – to freely love Him back.
This would make Him a good God rather than a universal dictator.
The Bible espouses God’s fairness at the beginning and end of the story of humanity. In the beginning, God made provision to take the worst of human suffering on Himself.
Christians believe that Jesus took on man’s suffering as predicted by the Old Testament prophet Isaiah:
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.10
At the end of the story of humanity (you can read it for yourself in the last book of the Bible), God has promised to make a new world, clean of suffering.
The rub for you and for me is this: we live in the middle. Here in the middle, the consequences of rebellion are playing themselves out.
Dark forces inflict wounds on the world not because God wishes it, but precisely because He wishes the opposite: a world unscathed and whole.
Everyone suffers in a wounded world. Everyone.
Some, like Job, may be directly targeted for suffering by their enemies. Others suffer simply because their world is “marred with disease, violence, and the potential for tragic accident.”
In trying to make sense of his son’s illness and death, Kushner chose to believe that God could not stop it. He chose to believe the dark forces had – temporarily – won.
He wrote:
There may be a sense of loss at coming to this conclusion. In a way, it was comforting to believe in an all-wise, all-powerful God who guaranteed fair treatment and happy endings, who reassured us that everything happened for a reason…But it was comforting the way the religion of Job’s friends was comforting: it worked only as long as we did not take the problems of innocent victims seriously. When we have met Job, when we have been Job, we cannot believe in that sort of God any longer without giving up or own right to feel angry, to feel that we have been treated badly by life. From that perspective, there ought to be a sense of relief in coming to the conclusion that God is not doing this to us. If God is a God of justice and not of power, then He can still be on our side when bad things happen to us. He can know that we are good and honest people who deserve better. Our misfortunes are none of His doing, and so we can turn to Him for help. Our questions will not be Job’s question, “God, why are you doing this to me?” but rather “God, see what is happening to me. Can you help me?” We will turn to God, not to be judged or forgiven, not to be rewarded or punished, but to be strengthened and comforted.”11
And here Kushner has touched on the last point I want to cover in this post:
What God can do about suffering
The Bible gives both a short-term and long-term answer to this question.
The long-term answer has not happened yet. But writers of both the Old and New Testament predict the same ending to Earth’s history: Satan may win innumerable battles, but in the end, God wins.
The short-term solution is what God does in the middle of the story.
Rabbi Kushner suggests that reaching out to God in prayer accomplishes two things. In his words:
The first thing prayer does for us is to put us in touch with other people, people who share the same concerns, values, dreams, and pain that we do…Prayer…redeems people from isolation. It assures them that they need not feel alone and abandoned. It lets them know that they are part of a greater reality, with more depth, more hope, more courage, and more of a future than any individual could have by himself. One goes to a religious service, one recites the traditional prayers, not in order to find God (there are plenty of other places where He can be found), but to find a congregation, to find people with whom you can share that which means the most to you. From that point of view, just being able to pray helps, whether your prayer changes the world outside you or not.”12
Beyond putting us in touch with other people, prayer puts us in touch with God….The God I believe in does not send us the problem; He gives us the strength to cope with the problem… We don’t have to beg or bribe God to give us strength or hope or patience. We need only turn to Him, admit that we can’t do this on our own, and understand that bravely bearing up [under suffering] is one of the most human, and one of the most godly, things we can ever do. One of the things that constantly reassures me that God is real and not just an idea that religious leaders made up, is the fact that people who pray for strength, hope, and courage so often find resources of strength, hope, and courage that they did not have before they prayed.”13
Near the end of his book, Kushner shared a story of a young Jewish woman whose husband had recently died of cancer. She and her family had prayed through his illness, even enlisting the prayers of their Protestant and Catholic neighbors. Still he died, leaving her and their children bereft of both husband and father.
After all that, she said to me, how can anyone be expected to take prayer seriously? Is it really true, I asked her, that your prayers were not answered?…You faced a situation that could easily have broken your spirit, a situation that could have left you a bitter, withdrawn woman, jealous of the intact families around you, incapable of responding to the promise of being alive. Somehow that did not happen…In your desperation, you opened your heart in prayer, and what happened? You didn’t get a miracle to avert a tragedy. But you discovered people around you, and God beside you, and strength within you to help survive the tragedy. I offer that as an example of a prayer being answered.”14
1 Job 1:8 (The Message).
2 Job 1:9-11 (The Message).
3 Job 2:1-6 (The Message).
4 Kushner, H. (1983). When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Avon Books. p.5.
5 Kushner, H. (1983). When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Avon Books. p.33
6 Kushner, H. (1983). When Bad Things Happen to Good People.New York: Avon Books. p.37
7 Kushner, H. (1983). When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Avon Books. pp.42-43.
8 Job 40:8-14 (The Message).
9 Yancy, P. (2006). Prayer: Does it Make Any Difference? Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing. p.232.
10 Isaiah 53:4-5 (New International Version)
11 Kushner, H. (1983). When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Avon Books. pp.44.
12 Kushner, H. (1983). When Bad Things Happen to Good People.New York: Avon Books. p.119, 121-122.
13 Kushner, H. (1983). When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Avon Books. pp.122, 127-128.
14 Kushner, H. (1983). When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Avon Books. p.130-131.
Dr. Pamela Coburn-Litvak has published research articles on exercise and stress in Neuroscience and Neurobiology of Learning and Behavior. Her latest book, Leaving the Shadowland of Stress, Anxiety, and Depression, was published in 2020.
After receiving a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, she served as both Assistant Professor of Physiology & Pharmacology and Special Assistant to the Vice President for Research Affairs at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California. She then joined the Biology department at Andrews University and developed courses in human physiology as well as the neurobiology of mental illness. She also founded Rock @ Science LLC, a company that specializes in health and science education and web development. She co-developed the brain and body physiology segment of the Stress: Beyond Coping seminar with its creator, Dr. William “Skip” MacCarty, DMin.
Dr. Coburn-Litvak currently lives in California with her husband. Their two daughters are mostly grown and attending school elsewhere.
When she’s not studying or teaching about stress, she enjoys stress-relieving activities like puttering around the garden, taking nature walks with her family, knitting, cooking, and reading.
[…] This is not saying that everything that happens to us has meaning. Many of the things that happen in life do not make sense. But even though there is often not a good explanation for things that happen to us, we can derive our own meaning and purpose from suffering. […]