A Faith Observed: God’s Goodness in the Face of Suffering

“After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you. So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac. And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. ”

— Genesis 22: 1-3

If I’m honest, I’ve never much cared for the account of Genesis 22 when God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. It’s left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. Let me clarify—I’ve found God asking Abraham to do something so expressly against His character to be unsettling. It’s wholly unlike Him and just plain… confusing. I appreciate the passage’s rich typology, and I promise that I do understand that our God is not a tame God, but Abraham was a real man who actually almost killed his own son in faithful obedience to the Lord’s command. And I don’t like that scenario. I don’t like that God told Abraham to do something that God Himself hates, because it leaves me with all sorts of questions about how we are to discern God’s guidance and will in our lives. This past month, however, as I’ve studied Genesis and reread C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, I’ve been taking another look at Abraham’s faithful response to God’s unsavory demand and coming away with a different view of this familiar account.

When God spoke to Abraham and first told him what He would require of him, did Abraham think, “Oh yes, definitely. I can see why You would ask me to murder the son you told me would be my heir and the child through whom all the nations would be blessed, the very same child you miraculously allowed Sarah and I to conceive? That makes perfect sense. No problem. Can’t wait.” The text doesn’t say, but surely he must have been as flabbergasted and alarmed as we would have been.

The writer of Hebrews lets us know that Abraham reasoned God would keep His promises by performing a miracle. “He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead. (Hebrews 11:19)” This means that when he went up onto that mountain, bound his son, and raised his knife to do the slaying, he fully intended to kill him. How could Abraham do such a thing? He knew two things: he and Isaac would return together from the altar of sacrifice, and God himself would provide the necessary lamb for the burnt offering (Gen 22:5,8). And he was exactly right. He and Isaac did go and worship on that mountain and did return. God did provide the sacrifice for the burnt offering, and that ram took Isaac’s place on the altar. Despite many other prior moments in the account of Abraham’s life, moments when he questioned God and took matters into his own hands, here, in this moment, Abraham exhibits remarkable, supernatural faith. Abraham trusts God’s goodness despite the circumstantial evidence to the contrary, despite the anguish he will have to endure as he plays his part and submits. He trusts that it is his own understanding that is imperfect, not God’s character and not God’s will. He knows the Lord is Holy and entirely unlike him. It is his role to obey and God’s to accomplish His will for Abraham and for the whole world, and he doesn’t expect the execution of this plan to fit his expectations. He knows he can’t predict what God will do. He knows who is the creation and who is the Creator. To put it in scriptural terms, Abraham does not lean on his own understanding but entrusts all his ways to Him, and God does indeed make his path straight (Proverbs 3:5-6).

This is the sort of relationship with God I long to have, a personal theology I aspire to—a theology that encompasses and embraces the terrible rather than cowers in the corner—a theology in which my belief in God’s goodness is not tarnished by shock, confusion, and mistrust when the worst occurs. I want a faith that allows me to say a confident and submissive ‘yes’ to the cup of suffering and sorrow I drink because I believe that the One who pours it out works all things for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28). I know and worship the God who has appointed me to this hour of sunlight-failure and ground-shaking. I love Him. He is faithful. Always. I trust Him implicitly.

If I turn from Him in anger and doubt, where else, pray-tell, do I have to turn? If my hope and help doesn’t come from Him, if He isn’t my refuge, then who else has the power to save me? When God calls me to hard and heartbreaking things, how do I respond? With faith or doubt? With the spirit or the flesh? With hope or despair?

Abraham’s unswerving obedience to God’s impossible call demonstrates absolute trust in His character and power, but a view of God that is muddied by circumstance is a weak view, riddled with holes—a thin trust, a flimsy faith that will topple. It’s a feckless faith that waivers and does not act, that is tossed to and fro. We need belief that does not quake in fear or surrender to despair, that doesn’t shake a fist in anger at God when our lives collapse—when our marriages disintegrate, when we give into our addictions, our health is destroyed, we are assaulted, our children die, our wealth is lost. Even seeing such tragic possibilities written out on the page is shocking to our American Christian sensibilities. Despite reading of so many examples in the Bible to the contrary, many of us still believe in a hidden crevice of our souls that God will always protect us from these fearful scenarios, and that as His children, we should and will be spared this kind of suffering. I’m afraid, however, that most of us can attest to the fact that such things do very much happen to people who love the Lord their God with all their hearts and minds and soul and strength. They’ve happened to us. They’ve happened to our friends, mothers, siblings, fathers. And when they have, when the unspeakable has been uttered aloud, what has happened to our faith? Has it stood firm, or have the cracks in the foundation deepened and spread? What can our reactions to tragedy teach us about our relationship with God?

In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis’ profoundly honest account of the grief he experienced when his wife passed, C.S. Lewis writes, “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all.’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’ ” In our pain, in my pain, have we come to believe “such dreadful things about our God?”

More mature Christians know that the Lord’s goodness is not contingent upon their ease, happiness, or safety, but when life is at its darkest, we often need that simple reminder. If we are not alert, the enemy of our souls takes such opportunities to cast shadows of doubt and fear over our frail hearts. Our spirits turn over inside us and cry out that everything is wrong, wrong, wrong! And we are right. Everything is wrong. It is broken. It is fallen. It is not as God intended or will one day make it. But I want a faith and relationship with the Lord such that when the enemy whispers in my heart, “Where is your God? You can’t trust Him—look at what He’s done. Look at what He’s allowed to happen, look at all you are enduring,” I answer unflinchingly, “Why, what a silly question! Of course, my Good God is here, with me—always, and now, too.” I want a faith like Abraham’s that trusts God over my own plans, desires, and comprehension every time.

My suffering must not catch me off guard or be my litmus test for God’s goodness and care. This is the natural reaction to suffering, not the supernatural. God knows far better than I do how sin-sick this world is, how sin-sick His creation has become. If God is Sovereign, and He is, then there is at least some sense in which I have been appointed to this desperate hour, this hour of devastation and anguish. I don’t see anyway around that. He’s either ordained it or permitted it. God’s divine hand is in it, whether I like it or not, and if I will allow it to, this truth can be the sweetest truth. It can make all the difference in my turnings—toward or away from Jesus. Either he is my Loving Father, pushing me toward glory, or He is a cruel and petulant deity—a God to worship and cling to or a God to rebuke.

Is our tragedy a divine test as was Abraham’s? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Is our nightmare the result of our own sin? It could be, or not at all. Is our pain caused, at least in part, by living in a fallen world? Always. Are we being disciplined? It is possible, but how can we say for certain? What we can do, regardless of our pain’s root cause, is to ask God to squeeze every drop of good out of this rotten fruit—to instruct, guide, sanctify, comfort, strengthen, and use us to bless others.

Lewis’ realized that, “God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.” We can fake our faith until the hard things of this fallen world test it, and then our weak foundations are laid bare and exposed for what they truly are.

When we are tested, perhaps we find that our faith is also house of cards. Like Lewis, we discover that it falters and falls, that we trusted God only as long as He protected us and we were happy, as long as our children were safe, our relationships solid, our health robust, our dreams fulfilled—as long as what happened in our lives seemed right and made sense. As long as our plans were a possibility, even if not yet a reality, we believed Him to be good. We were like Jacob (Abraham’s grandson and Isaac’s son) who saw God’s ladder stretching between earth and heaven and struck a bargain: “If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God. (Genesis 28:20-21)” Here, Jacob does not exhibit the surrender that His grandfather did. His devotion to God is very much contingent. The presumption and half-heartedness is hard to stomach, and yet we are often no different. We, too, have contingent faith, and God knows it.

It can be difficult to see where I am doubting God until my foundations are laid bare in the violent shaking He allows, and the facets of my faithlessness are revealed. Jesus prayed for Peter that his faith would not fail, and that after he turned away from Him in fear, he would turn back, be strengthened, and strengthen others. Like Peter, ours faith-falls don’t have to ultimately end in failure. In place of the house of cards we’ve unwittingly constructed, we can rebuild a stone house, a “new build” on the Rock that provides nourishment and shelter to those in our lives.

Or perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps, like Abraham, when we are tested, our faith is forged and refined but proven golden and pure. According to the Bible, this proven genuineness of our faith is of greater worth than gold (1 Peter 1:7). Yes, God is indeed a very present help in trouble. Yes, He is near. Yes, He is Good. Yes, He is loving. Yes, He is Almighty. He is nearer, better, stronger, more loving than we ever knew. We come to see how tenuously these ropes we continuously lash to the temporary blessings of this world secure us only to rusted anchors and cracked foundations. They will not hold, no matter how lovely, good, or sweet. We are like Jacob twenty years after seeing the heavenly ladder, with two decades of Laban’s manipulation and tricks under our belts. We have come to see that God’s blessing, His presence and work in our lives, is priceless. Without Him, we are lost. We hold on for that blessing. We strive with God. We see Him face to face as did Jacob when he wrestled through the night with the mysterious figure who put his hip out of socket and gave him a new name. We are transformed.

These are the turbulent waters we all must cross as we exercise a living faith in a fallen world, and we need our Christ with us, the real Son of God—guiding and feeding us, warning us, breathing life into our parched throats. No false Christ, no other Savior, and no false faith will do. Lewis writes, “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood become a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?” And this is what happens when we suffer. We discover how much we really trust the One we claim to love.

You may be asking, “But what good does God’s goodness do me if I still have to suffer? What does it really matter? Does God’s love make my pain any less or my suffering any shorter? Because heaven is real and my sin is forgiven, do I not cry out when I am betrayed or forsaken?” Of course, sin, sickness, suffering—they continue to hurt and, at times, unbearably so. The suffering and pain are real, and there is no way around them. Commenting on his own journals, Lewis writes, “Aren’t all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.”

The drill may drill on, and suffering must be suffered, but God’s goodness and His presence are two-fold blessings in the midst of our difficulties. They do make a difference. First, we walk through whatever we are walking through with the very creator of worlds and stars, atoms and oceans. His is with us and for us. The One who gave His beloved Son on our behalf loves us and encamps around those of us who fear Him. We are not alone.

Second, there is meaning in our pain because God will not let it be otherwise. If we love Him, if we are His, then He promises to use our heartbreak and disease for good. Like Abraham, we can expect the miraculous but not know how God will do it. We trust He’s working beyond what we can understand or see. He may do something we hate or something we would never in a million years choose, but because He is good, we know it will be for our ultimate good and His ultimate glory—whether he carries us unsinged through the fire or delivers us home to be with Him.

Add to all of this the hope of heaven and the consolation that, although our suffering may be intense and seem endless, it is—truthfully—only fleeting. We have the promise that although our marriages, husbands, children, reputations, health and wealth can all be taken from us, our Good Portion, our one necessary thing—our inheritance as Christ’s heirs and our eternal relationship with God—can not. Either Jesus is everything to us, or He is nothing. “Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him” (James 1:12).

Our Heavenly Father has already addressed the wrongness and tragedy we see everywhere and provided us the most precious answer to our spiritual trembling. He has sacrificed His Son—opening a way back to Him, a path paved with forgiveness, healing, mercy, meaning and truth. He tested Abraham and asked him to make this same sacrifice—to give his son, his one and only son, whom he loved. And Abraham was willing. Through his testing, the forefather of our faith discovered that his faith was real, that His God did indeed keep His promises, that (in the words of C.S. Lewis) the rope was woven tightly and could be trusted. This is the spiritual reality we all inhabit as followers of Jesus. We are spiritual heirs of Abraham and of Issac—the righteous by faith and the rescued.

Lord, give us spiritual spines of iron that we would stand and not crumble when life sucker-punches us in the gut. Help us to lean with all the weight of our grief and pain onto You, the One who is always faithful and always good. May we trust You even when nothing makes sense, when our worst fears are realized—when we are penniless, sick, drowning in grief, betrayed. May we see you face to face and walk away transformed.

“My hope is built on nothing less
than Jesus’ blood and righteousness;
I dare not trust the sweetest frame,
but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.
On Christ the Solid Rock I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand
All other ground is sinking sand.
When darkness veils his lovely face,
I rest on his unchanging grace;
In every high and stormy gale,
my anchor holds within the veil.
On Christ the Solid Rock I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand
All other ground is sinking sand.
His oath, his covenant, his blood,
support me in the whelming flood;
When all around my soul gives way,
he then is all my hope and stay.
On Christ the Solid Rock I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand
All other ground is sinking sand.
When he shall come with trumpet sound,
O may I then in him be found:
Dressed in his righteousness alone,
Faultless to stand before the throne.
On Christ the Solid Rock I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand
All other ground is sinking sand.”

— Edward Mote