Suffering, Genocide, and a Sovereign God

While my team was in Poland, we made a short trip to Kraków. It's a beautiful city. 

While we were in Kraków, we ventured to the nearby concentration camp: Auschwitz. Part of me honestly dreaded that tour, but I knew if I didn't go, I would regret it. It's a significant part of the world's history, and I am trying not to be blind toward the darkness in the world. 

That trip was two months ago. Some of you may be wondering why I would wait two months to write about it (or even write about it all).

But I am learning more about how God's timing is good. After our tour of Auschwitz, I have slowly read Tullian Tchividjian's Glorious Ruin: How Suffering Sets You Free. I am choosing to believe that the two experiences go hand-in-hand. 

Auschwitz was everything the history books and documentaries make it out to be. It is a dark and scary place. It is hard to truly understand that those horrible things could happen there. Whenever we walked into a building, my stomach churned a little, and I wanted to close my eyes or walk out. I didn't want to face the suffering that happened there. But I did because of the ideas behind this plaque in one of those buildings:

I know some people would disagree with that, but I do believe there's truth behind that phrase. "The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again." Sure, Hitler will not come back in his original form, but genocide is continuing to happen in the world, and the majority of the world's population is continuing to choose to believe that the rumors aren't true, that it can't be that bad. 

So I want to remember, and I want to fight against the injustice that still exists. I want to see preventable suffering end. 

Honestly, friends, I am still not sure what to do with those memories, those stories, and that place.

But I can tell you some things. 

Even though there was darkness inside of those buildings, there was peace and strange beauty outside. I thought it would be just as dark, but somehow it wasn't. Here's one of the views:

God is redeeming the darkness of that place. Green grass is thriving and trees are growing in a place that is a symbol of death and evil. Now, that doesn't take away the horrors that happened there, but it gives me a sense of hope. God has overcome evil. There is life.

Our tour guide kept saying, "No one knows the number of people who have died here. There are some records, but no one knows the fullness of what happened here."

 He's almost right. No human knows. Unfortunately, we will never know. But God knows. He doesn't just know the number of people; he knows each person by name. God doesn't simply know. He cares. God cares about the tragedy that happened there. He cares and he grieved. Just like Jesus grieved over the death of his friend Lazarus (John 11), God grieves over the death of his people.

While I process darkness and evil in the world, the fact that God knows, cares, and grieves gives me some peace. It doesn't change what happened, but it helps me digest it. It's still a painful process, but knowing God is sovereign helps.

Some of you or others you know may think that that's strange. Knowing God is sovereign makes it more difficult for some to process evil and tragedy. I get that. I do.

Like Tchividjian in his book Glorious Ruin: How Suffering Sets You Free, I won't make excuses for God. I won't let him "off the hook." He doesn't need me (or anyone else) to defend him.

Instead, I would like to share some of Tchividjian thoughts with you. 

• "So what would a God who was present in suffering look like? First and foremost, He would be a God who suffers Himself. Maybe even dies. A God who meets people in their suffering, rather than on the other side of it. Pain might even be one of His primary avenues for reaching people. C. S. Lewis memorably captured this reality when he described pain as God's 'megaphone to rouse a deaf world'" (page 7).
• "God intends to free us from more than our idolatry; He intends to free us from ourselves. He even wants to liberate us from our need to find a silver lining in suffering" (10).
• "The question I would like emphasize instead [of Where, Why, and How]--and the only one that will ultimately point us toward the truth--is the Who amid our suffering. Which is fortunate, since it is the only question that God has seen fit to answer, concretely, in the person and work of Jesus Christ" (11).
• "But we don't need answers as much as we need God's presence in and through the suffering itself. For the life of the believer, one thing is beautifully and abundantly true: God's chief concern in your suffering is to be with you and be Himself for you" (12).
• "...the gospel is not ultimately a defense from pain and suffering; rather, it is the message of God's rescue through pain.... In fact, it allows us to drop our defenses, to escape not from pain but the prison of How and Why to the freedom of Who. We are not responsible for finding the right formula to combat or unlock our suffering" (24). 
• "Pain and suffering do not surprise God; we do not need to deny them (74).
• "The appropriate response to life in this world is grief and pain. In fact, nowhere in the Bible do we find God sanctioning a 'suck it up and deal with it' posture toward pain" (74).
• "God wants to free us from ourselves, and there's nothing like suffering to show us that we need something bigger than our abilities and our strength and our explanations. There's nothing like suffering to remind us how not in control we actually are, how little power we ultimately have, and how much we ultimately need God. In other words, suffering reveals to us the things that ultimately matter, which also happen to be the warp and woof of Christianity: who we are and who God is" (129).
• "But what I didn't realize at the time is that explanations are ultimately a substitute for trust. All that I deeply longed for, what I really needed from God, I already had in Christ in what He accomplished on the cross two thousand years ago.... What God pressed deeply into me is that there is no true, lasting hope outside of Him. Specifically, there is no true, lasting hope outside of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ" (136).
• "But imagine for a moment that God had given Job the explanation he desired. Let's say God came to Job and said, This is what you're going to experience; this is how it will happen to you; but just hold tight. It won't last forever, and in the end you will be sanctified; I will be glorified, and the Devil will be defeated. Just know for thousands of years, My people will be talking about you, Job, so a little bit of pain is worth generations of pleasure. What would Job have ultimately been putting his faith and trust in? What would have been helping him endure? Certainly not God alone.... This is the key to God's silence. God wanted Job to trust Him, come what might. He knew that it was the only way Job would ever survive his hours of darkness. Explanations, as we said earlier, are a substitute for trust, a red herring at best. God is interested in something much more powerful than anything information could ever produce. He is interested in faith" (136-137).
• "The Lord mercifully put to death Job's final idol--the idol of explanation. God liberated Job from the prison of Why. He liberated Job from himself. It was a glorious ruin. Only when we come to the end of ourselves do we come to the beginning of God. This is a common theme in the Bible--desperation precedes deliverance. Grief precedes glory. The cross precedes the crown. Powerlessness is the beginning of freedom. This is not to say that every cloud has a silver lining, or some such nonsense. That would be minimization. It is only to say that if the past five years have taught me anything, it is this: I would not have received any clarity about the beauty of the gospel if I hadn't first been forced to face the ugliness of my sin and idolatry at the foot of the cross.  As the apostle Paul exclaimed in 1 Corinthians, 'For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God' (1:18 ESV)" (138).
• "God is more concerned with our knowing Him than He is our half-hearted pleasures of comfort, ambition, and success. So much so that He often allows pain and suffering into our lives to clear the clutter of mute, deaf, and unworthy idols that can never deliver on their promises, even when they're ostensibly good things like health, family, career, success, and status" (147).
• "Rather than run from the inevitability of life's tragedies, we are invited to face them, head-on, with hope. We can even begin to call things what they are--rather than what we wish them to be" (156).
• "Pain and suffering loosen our grip on this temporal life. Deeper suffering can lead to deeper surrender" (163).
• "Perhaps the only solace you can draw from suffering is that you begin to see that we were truly made for another world. You are right not to be satisfied until you are feasting with the rest of the saints, with King Jesus residing at the head of the table. This, dear Christian, is what you were made for. And all the ruin of the world cannot compare to the glory of that great day" (175).
• "Jesus plus nothing equals everything. Our hope is not Jesus plus an explanation as to why suffering happens or Jesus plus and explanation as to why your child or spouse is so difficult, why the cancer hasn't gone into remission, why finances continue to be tight" (Conclusion).
• "Suffering is not final. Death is not the end. It wasn't for Jesus, and it's not for you. No amount of hurt or misfortune or ugliness can change that. This is why the apostle Paul was able to make such a gloriously absurd statement as 'To live is Christ and to die is gain.' In the light of the cross, suffering and death are more than inevitable; they are good" (Conclusion).

There are so many other good points in the book. But I didn't want to make this post too long, so really, you should just buy the book and read it. Really. 

Suffering is hard. It stinks. Death is terrible. It is not what God ultimately desires for us; we are waiting for a New Creation. We are invited to experience new life in Jesus. We are invited to confidently hope for more than this broken world with its suffering and genocide. 

We are even invited to bring hope into that broken world!

And in all of it, we are invited to be real with God about the difficulties of understanding suffering. We are invited to ask questions like The Brilliance does in their song "Does Your Heart Break?"

Remembering Jesus and the cross and the resurrection, we can confidently trust that His heart breaks, that He hears, and that He can empower us to see the truth in that. 

God is near in suffering, pain, and even genocide. And his heart breaks. And as our hearts break, we can continue to hope in the restoration to come.