A Thought on Suffering and Hebrews 12
Last night, I read an article in which the author asserted the notion that all suffering in the world has a divine purpose. This is not in the sense that God works good in all things (Rom. 8:28), but that God specifically plans and ordains all evil events as good, so far as to say that God is “behind Satan.” The Scripture used to validate this idea was Hebrews 12:7 (plus the surrounding verses): “You must endure [your trials] as [divine] discipline, God is treating you as sons.1 The first interesting thing I noticed, as William Lane’s exhaustive commentary on Hebrews brought out, is that the words “trials” and “divine” are not actually in the Greek text of the Bible, but are added into the translations to help make sense of the passage. This is neither here nor there.
The underlying assumption in the author’s article was that this verse speaks to all forms of evil and suffering in the world and that these sufferings are meant by God to correct, discipline and punish us towards greater sanctification. Does the passage however speak universally? The commentary I read on the passage seemed also to be unclear. At one point he says, “Adversity and hardships are to be understood as firm correction attesting God’s love for his child.”2 Does this however, mean that since suffering is correction it is always in response to sin, or that only Christians who are in sin are persecuted? Further on the same page, he says “In this context, ‘discipline’ signifies the suffering that may have to be endured because of fidelity to God.”3 So are these sufferings correction for sin or are they because of faithfulness? It seems in context, that this passage is specifically about people who are enduring persecution for their faithful witness to the Gospel. Their being persecuted and their enduring in it confirms their standing that they are true children of God. Let’s say for argument’s sake (although it is questionable whether even this can be legitimately drawn from the text) that God specifically and intentionally ordains persecution against Christians to train them in righteousness. We can chart out the reasoning of the article’s conclusion by making a diagram.4
Even if we are willing to grant the evidence as expressed (although that in itself is possibly an oversimplified understanding of Hebrews 12), it still stands that Hebrews 12 cannot maintain an argument for a universal explanation of evil. There is no warrant for universalizing the evidence in the Scripture passage to support the claim that all suffering and evil has a divine reason. There is no justification for making the logical leap in the chart above that is necessary to come to the above mentioned author’s conclusion.
Hebrews 12 may give a divine explanation for Christian persecution and the suffering that is entailed in living a life faithful to the gospel. It does not however, give a universal explanation for evil. It does not speak to a multitude of events. In effect, it leaves unanswered the very circumstances that this type of thought attempts to give divine reason to:
- Natural disasters
- Physical illness
- Poverty
- War
- Human trafficking
- Child slavery
- The inability of millions around the world to access clean water
- Domestic violence
- When a two-month-old child contracts a painful, incurable bone cancer
- The rape and dismemberment of a young girl
- Accidents that cause the sudden death of a loved one
Hebrews 12 does not teach that all of these events have a divine reason and are ordained by God to teach the sufferers to grow in holiness. Instead we are still left wondering about why there is so much evil, so much pain. We are left without an ability to escape the gruesome realities of life to a heavenly bliss of “God’s perfect will.” We are left to grieve deeply over our own pain and the pain of others. In grieving deeply, we begin to shake off our apathy towards resisting evil and the denials of life. We get up and begin to unreservedly affirm what God has declared as good and boldly declare God’s hatred of all that is wrong. If this is where we find ourselves in response to suffering, we are in good company with the Psalmists of Israel, the apostolic company and the crucified Lord, who did not spend so much time explaining evil as they did mourning over it and resisting it.
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1 Translation from William Lane, Hebrews 9-13, Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word, 1991), 397.
2 Ibid, 421.
3 Ibid.
4 Adapted from Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: University Press, 2003) and David Zarefsky, Argumentation (The Teaching Company, 2002).
