On Preparing for Suffering and Evil from D. A. Carson

You still have some tedious spring chores begging for your attention, don’t you? See, I knew it, and that’s why I’m providing notes for yet another of Don Carson’s lectures. These notes are for the first half of his two-lecture series On Being Prepared for Suffering and Evil. Download it to your iPod and away you go! Listen as you work, and before you know it you will be a little wiser and your house or yard will be a little tidier. It’s a win-win deal, right?

 

If you’ve been reading here long, you know how important I think developing your theology of suffering and evil is. Why? So that when tragedy strikes you—and it will—you don’t suffer a crisis of faith along with all your other suffering. You don’t want your first bit of deep suffering to cause you to develop a suborthodox view of God or give up on God altogether, do you? [I’ve written a little more on why having a theology of suffering is important here: Getting Your Theology on Track.]

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If you live long enough, you will suffer. How do we think about these things?

Questions about suffering and evil are asked by the Bible itself. It’s important not to enter this topic thinking we have all the tough questions and the Bible is simplistic. Examples of tough questions about suffering and evil in the Bible: Habakkuk, Job, Psalms, Elijah, etc.

There are five pillars from Biblical theology on which any serious Christian thinking in this domain must be built. 

1. Insights from the beginning of the Bible’s story line: Creation and fall.
   
   This is God’s world, and when he made it he made the world good. Everything evil, dark, repulsive in it comes from Genesis 3. The Fall is revolt against the God who made us, sustains us, and who will be our judge. It is important to think through the significance of this.  
   
   The sin most offensive to God is idolatry—the degodding of God, the vertical dimension of sin. All the horizontal dimensions of sin come from the anarchy that results from the degodding of God—from us wanting to be God.
   
   In the Bible, in all sin, God is always the most offended party. For example, when David sinned, he confessed, “Against thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in your sight.” What makes sin so vile is that it is against God.
   
   All the entailments of disaster, suffering, etc., spring from God’s pronouncement, “Thus far shall you go, and no more.” Unless you see this, you have not even begun to think in a Christian way about suffering and evil. When we face death, from a Christian perspective, it is the inevitable result of our rebellion. We are all under the sentence of perishing; we are all guilty.
   
   Summary: It’s a damned world, and justly so.
   

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Sunday's Hymn: William Cowper

I’ll feature hymns by William Cowper for at least a couple more weeks, since the words of the hymns mean so much more while the circumstances of his life are fresh in my mind.  If you’ve missed the pieces about his life that I’ve posted here, you’ll find them at the references link below this post.

My Song Shall Bless the Lord of All

My song shall bless the Lord of all,
My praise shall climb to His abode;
Thee, Savior, by that name I call,
The great Supreme, the mighty God.

Without beginning, or decline,
Object of faith, and not of sense;
Eternal ages saw Him shine,
He shines eternal ages hence.

As much, when in the manger laid,
Almighty Ruler of the sky;
As when the six days’ works He made,
Filled all the morning-stars with joy.

Of all the crowns Jehovah bears,
Salvation is His dearest claim;
That gracious sound well-pleased He hears,
And owns Emmanuel for His name.

A cheerful confidence I feel,
My well-placed hopes with joy I see;
My bosom glows with heav’nly zeal
To worship Him Who died for me.

As man, He pities my complaint,
His pow’r and truth are all divine;
He will not fail, He cannot faint,
Salvation’s sure, and must be mine.

——Listen 

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Other hymns, worship songs, etc. posted today:

• Wonderful Grace of Jesus at Above the Clouds
• Lord’s Day at Hiraeth
• Arise, My Soul, Arise at TulipGirl
• Hymn 10, S. M. from The Psalms & Hymns of Isaac Watts at The Thirsty Theologian. (Welcome back, David.)
• Safely Through Another Week at Challies.com
  
• I Would Be True at IMD 2.0.
• At Thy Feet, O Christ We Lay at John Dekker’s Journal
• Like A River Glorious at The Happy Wonderer
• Give Me A New, A Perfect Heart at Seasonings of the Heart
• Jesus, Thy Blood and Righteousness at joythruChrist
• The Collect for the Fourth Sunday after Easter at Magic Statistics

Have you posted a hymn this Sunday and I missed it? Let me know by leaving a link in the comments or by emailing me at the address in the sidebar, and I’ll add your post to the list.

Saturday's Old Photo

These are Carl and Avas Carlson, relatives of my father, who ran a little Brethren in Christ Mission on the southside of Chicago. This photo is from the the early 1960s, and it’s one of those little photo cards that missionaries give out.

 

On the back of the photo this is stamped in red ink:

 

BRETHREN IN CHRIST MISSION
6033 S. Halsted St. - Went. 7122
CHICAGO 1, ILLINOIS
CARL J. CARLSON, Pastor 
SUNDAY SERVICES 9:45, 11, 7, AND 8
WEDNESDAY SERVICE 8:00 P.M
YOU ARE WELCOME !  

 
I remember Avas as a pale, quiet, unenergetic woman. That’s how she was during the three years that my family lived in the Chicago area and we attended church at the mission. According to my mother, there were quite a few days that Avas couldn’t get out of bed because she wasn’t feeling well. 

A few years after this photo was taken, Carl died. What did Avas do? She started her second life. She began playing her harp again and went all over giving concerts until she was well into her eighties and maybe her nineties. No more days in bed for her.

You might think from those details that was unhappy with Carl, but I don’t think so. I think she was unhappy with life in a dark and dingy flat above a storefront mission in a very rough area of Chicago.

Avas didn’t die until 2001 when she was 107 years old.