6 Luke 6:21;James 4:10.
7 1 Timothy 5:23; Philippians 2:27; 2 Timothy 4:20; Galatians 4:13.
8 Acts 16:7; 2 Corinthians 12:9;James 4:15.
9 For more about early Christian poverty see Acts 6:1; 11:28-29; 1 Corinthians 1:26; 4:11; 2 Corinthians 8:2. James and Peter—Acts 12:2-3. Stephen—Acts 6:12-7:60. John—Revelation 1:9. Jerusalem Christians—Acts 8:l. Acquila and Priscilla—Acts 18:1. John Mark—Acts 13:13. Christians of Asia Minor—1 Peter 1:6 (see the whole epistle). Slaves—1 Corinthians 7:22; Ephesians 6:5–8; Titus 2:9. Women with unbelieving husbands—1 Corinthians 7:13-14; 1 Peter 3:1–6. Singles—1 Corinthians 7:8-9, 25-27. Insults, persecution, property taken—Hebrews 10:32-34. Sickness—1 Timothy 5:23; Philippians 2:27; 2Timothy 4:20; Galatians 4:13. Temptation, sin, conscience—Luke 22:62; 1 Corinthians 5:1, cf. 2 Corinthians 2:7 and 10:8–11; Galatians 1:11–13; plus passages describing the believer’s soul conflict in Romans 7:14–25; Galatians 5:16–17; and Ephesians 6:10–18. Churches with problems; the need for encouragement—read any NT epistle! Paul’s “diary”—2 Corinthians 11:23–27.
Chapter Five: All Trials Great and Small
1 Our account doesn’t say the event occurred in our day, only that the Middle East is associated with terrorism in our day. The Sanhedrin’s court proceedings were illegal. The soldiers’ delight in their work shows they were thugs. Crucifixion victims were stretched/positioned so as to make breathing excruciating. Please forgive us this device for the sake of our point.
2 The words rendered “spreading mildew” by the NIV have been understood by commentators to mean any number of growths, fungi, dry rot, etc.—possibly even a type of lichen.
Chapter Six: Heaven’s Dirty Laundry?
1 Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Avon, 1983), pp. 43, 81.
2 John Boykin, Circumstances and the Role of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), p. 42.
3 Phrase adapted from Charles Swindoll. We can’t recall the reference.
4 Israelites were forbidden to marry any inhabitants of Canaan, although they could marry women from outside Israel’s borders who were captured in war (Deuteronomy 7:1–4; 21:10–11). The forbidden peoples listed by God were “the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites”—Philistines are not mentioned. However, the Philistines lived in Canaan when Israel entered it (Exodus 13:17), were well-established there by Joshua’s old age (Joshua 13:2–3), and were Israel’s overlords in the very land God had promised to the Jews. Thus, by Samson’s day, marrying a Philistine was apparently considered a violation of the spirit of God’s law at the very least.
5 Of the many examples of this principle, here are a few: God promised to “raise up for himself” an Israelite king to wipe out the dynasty of Jeroboam (1 Kings 14:14-16),yet destroyed Baasha for fulfilling this decree (1 Kings 16:1–3, 7). God sent lying prophets with a false message of “peace in our times” to rebellious Israel (Jeremiah 4:10), then claimed, “I did not send them” and promises to judge them (Jeremiah 14:13–16). God vows to punish Assyria for overrunning Israel, after having clearly “sent” and “dispatched” it (Isaiah 10:5–19). In each case, the punished party had no intention of serving God.
6 The KJV’s rendering “with them that met with him” doesn’t seem to do justice to the Greek paratunchano, which means “to chance to be by, to happen to be present, to meet by chance” (Thayer’s lexicon and others).
7 C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 64.
Chapter Eight: The Best Answer We Have
1 J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1972), p. 478.
2 “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” The Hymnal for Worship & Celebration (Waco: Word Music, 1986), p. 423.
3 For more reading on this theme, we recommend Dr. Peter Kreeft’s book Making Sense Out of Suffering (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Servant Books, 1986).
Chapter Nine: Making Sense of Suffering
1 The idea in this paragraph came from Tim Stafford, Knowing the Face of God (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1996), p. 16.
2 Robert K. Brown and Mark R. Norton, The One Year Book of Hymns (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 1995),April 11.
3 Thomas Merton, “No Man Is An Island,” The Word of the Cross (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1955), p. 84.
4 Dr. Peter Kreeft, Making Sense Out of Suffering (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Servant Books, 1986), p. 153.
Chapter Ten: Cry of the Soul
1 The ideas on the following pages have been gleaned from Dr. Dan Allender & Dr. Tremper Longman III, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions About God (Colorado Springs: 1994), p. 150.We highly recommend this excellent book for understanding how the Psalms expose the nature of our emotional responses as they relate to God. Dr. Allender and Dr. Longman have written this exhaustive text from their combined studies in Theology and Psychology. There’s not a better book around on the subject.
2 Ibid., p. 150.
3 Ibid., p. 25.
4 Ibid., p. 74.
5 Ibid., p. 72.
6 Fanny J. Crosby, “He Hideth My Soul,” (public domain).
7 Glenda Revell, Glenda’s Story (Lincoln: Gateway to Joy Publishers, 1994). The story on these pages, only half-told here, is shockingly true. The adversary will try to discredit the goodness of God as well as weaken the faith of believers with stories of abuse and torture; yet Glenda Revell’s testimony stands as evidence of God’s power to redeem an almost unbelievably painful situation. We highly recommend her book.
8 Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1955), p. 94.
Chapter Eleven: Gaining Contentment
1 Quote by George Herbert, Edythe Draper, Edythe Draper’s Book of Quotations for the Christian World (Wheaton, Ill.:Tyndale House, 1992), p. 101.
2 The idea for this story came from Carol Turkington in the Washinton State School for the Deaf Newsletter.
3 Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment (Carlisle, Penn.: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1992), p. 46.
4 Ibid., pp. 42-43.
5 Dr. John Piper, The Pleasures of God (Portland: Multnomah Press).
6 Burroughs, The Rare Jewel, p. 57.
Chapter Twelve: Suffering Gone Malignant
1 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 118.
2 Dr. Maurice Rawlings, a cardiologist, became a Christian largely because of interviews with such people—some of whom he personally revived from heart attacks suffered while undergoing stress tests in his office. He has written of these experiences in several books, most recently in To Hell and Back (Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1993).
3 Literally, “Topheth has long been prepared; etc.” Topheth was the shrine outside Jerusalem in the valley of Hinnom where child sacrifices were offered to the idol Molech. The city’s refuse was also burned there, the fires going continuously. Thus Topheth and the Valley of Hinnom (Greek: “Gehenna”) became symbols for eternal torment.
4 The NIV gives another possible translation: “outside, into the darkness.”
5 Theologically liberal scholars have traditionally questioned hell’s very existence, or at least its eternal nature. But in recent years, even some evangelical scholars have published similar misgivings about the classic, orthodox view of hell as expressed in this chapter. Their views are well catalogued and answered in John Blanchard’s excellent Whatever Happened to Hell?—published by Crossway Books in the United States and by Evangelical Press in Great Britain.
6 Lest anyone misunderstand, John 9:1–3 and the Book of Job make clear that our sufferings don’t bear a one-to-one correspondence to our sins. In other words, just because I am diagnosed with cancer today doesn’t mean that I recently sinned worse than my neighbor who is healthy. But we are all sinners by both birth and choice, and so experience the sentence of suffering pronounced upon our race by God in Eden. God’s reasoni
ng in deciding how to distribute suffering is often a mystery.
A related issue is the question of why suffering comes to small children who are too young to have deliberately sinned. Romans 5:12-19 addresses this. God chose Adam to be mankind’s representative in the garden of Eden. When Adam sinned, we sinned “in” him and are thus all guilty of his transgression from birth (Psalm 51:5). This concept may seem less foreign when we consider that our nation’s leaders routinely make huge decisions in our stead that affect us greatly, including making treaties and declaring war. Children need the blood of Christ to cover their inherited sin just as much as adults need it to cover their deliberate sins. An excellent treatment of this doctrine, known as “original sin,” is found in Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s Romans: An Exposition of Chapter 5:1–21, published by Zondervan.
7 Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Avon, 1983), pp. 4, 7, 44.
Chapter Thirteen: Suffering Gone
1 Tim Stafford, Knowing the Face of God (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1996), 221. A few of the ideas in this chapter find a broader discussion in Tim’s book. We recommend it.
2 I wrote more on this subject in Heaven…Your Real Home (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996).
3 C. S. Lewis, The Inspirational Writings of C. S. Lewis (New York: Inspirational Press, 1991), p. 361.
4 Dr. John H. Gerstner, The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Orlando: Berea Publications, Ligonier Ministries, 1993), p. 543.
5 Lewis, The Inspirational Writings of C. S. Lewis, p. 363.
6 Gerstner, The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, p. 544.
7 C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), p. 14.
8 Gerstner, The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, pp. 556-57.
9 Jonathan Edwards, Heaven: A World of Love (Amityville, N.Y.: Calvary Press, 1992), p. 26.
Appendices
1 Turned off by appendices that are too technical? Then skip directly to Appendix C and read point number 6.
2 The King James Version uses the word “repent” of God. Newer versions, following contemporary English usage, tend to say explicitly what kind of repentance is meant in each context—such as grief, or an apparent change of mind.
3 A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology (reprint ed.,Edinburgh:The Banner of Truth Trust, 1983), p. 132.
4 John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries, 22 vols, (reprint ed., Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979), 1:1:249.
5 1 Samuel 15 presents an interesting question. In verse 11 we read that God repents (NIV: is “grieved”) over making Saul king. Yet in verse 29 we learn that “God does not repent.” Could verse 29 mean that God does not grieve, and thus that God’s grief in verse 11 must be taken figuratively? No, for the two verses carry different nuances. In verse 11, “repent” seems clearly to mean “to grieve.” In verse 29, it means “to change one’s mind”—this is clear from the fact that in verse 29 God’s not “repenting” is expressed in parallel with his not lying.
6 “Like passions” is a translation of homoiopathes—a combination of homoios (“like, similar, same”) and either pathos (“passion”) or pathema (“suffering, misfortune”).
7 M. R. Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament, 2nd ed. (reprint ed., Wilmington, Del.: Associated Publishers and Authors, 1972), p. 364.
8 James Montgomery Boice, Foundations of the Christian Faith: A Comprehensive and Readable Theology (Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1986), p. 250, citing Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), pp. 162–63. Dr. Boice’s book first brought the distinction between these two words to our attention, even as it admitted that they sometimes are used interchangeably. Trench’s Synonyms of the New Testament also argues that their occasional ability to be interchanged does not erase their distinctives. The word for “rage” is thumos—the less passionate word is orge.
9 Of course, even when God pours out rage it is not a knee-jerk reaction.
OTHER BOOKS BY JONI EARECKSON TADA
Joni
Heaven: Your Real Home
Diamonds in the Dust: 365 Sparkling Devotions
Barrier-Free Friendships
The Life and Death Dilemma
Copyright
ZONDERVAN
When God Weeps
Copyright © 1997 by Joni Eareckson Tada and Steven Estes
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tada, Joni Eareckson.
When God weeps: why our sufferings matter to the Almighty / Joni Eareckson Tada and Steven Estes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Suffering—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Theodicy. I. Estes, Steven. II. Title. BT732.7.T33 1997
2448.’8-dc 21
97-25826
CIP
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In this book, the authors have placed certain words from Scriptural quotations in italics without individually marking each instance with such words as “italics mine.” The reader should be aware, however, that these italics are not found in the original texts but are added by the authors for reasons of emphasis and clarity.
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version®. NTV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
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