Terminal cancer, a chronic illness, rape victims, sexual abuse, a strained marriage, an autistic child, a relative's suicide, dementia, deep doubt—the list of suffering seems endless. Week after week pastors and preachers have a unique opportunity to speak into the vast array of human suffering. How do pastors preach about suffering, and how do we preach to the suffering? How can we instruct our people to "suffer hardship … as a good soldier of Christ Jesus" (2 Tim. 2:3)?

In my work as a Christian philosopher and apologist and one who served on the pastoral staff of churches, I have personally encountered how people in our culture struggle with the problem of suffering. So based on my study of Scripture, reflection, and personal experience, here are seven things to consider as preachers who wrestle with the biblical text concerning this issue.

Suffering should not come as a surprise but as an expectation.

All human beings experience loss and hardship, and we should expect this in our broken world. This is not "suffering for Christ," but is part of the common lot of humanity. However, we Christians have additional reason to expect suffering: affliction will come because we follow in the footsteps of a suffering Messiah. If the world hated Jesus, it will hate us (John 15:18). We have been called not just to believe in Jesus, but also to suffer for his name (Phil. 1:29). We must experience many tribulations before entering into the fully realized kingdom of God (Acts 14:22). Thus, we must be realistic about suffering.

Moreover, we live in an already/not yet world. A new creation has already begun in the resurrection of the Second Adam, the archetypal human. We are declared righteous through him, and we have redemption and forgiveness (Rom. 5:1-2; Eph. 1:7). But we are not yet freed from the effects of the Fall, nor do we possess immortal resurrection bodies. Within a few short verses in 2 Corinthians 12, we see that God's glory is manifested both in signs and wonders (12:12) as well as in weakness and affliction (12:7-10). Even if God's people are sometimes delivered from disease or death, they can expect suffering. By faith, some will receive back their dead while others will be tortured to death (Heb. 11:35).

The Scriptures affirm the appropriateness of bringing our pain and honest complaints to God.

The prophet Jeremiah exclaimed: "O LORD, You have deceived me and I was deceived; You have overcome me and prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me" (Jer. 20:7). The psalms are filled with laments like "How long, O LORD?" and "Why have you forsaken me?" God doesn't chide us for bringing the honest expressions of our suffering souls to God: "Pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us" (Ps. 62:8). We are in the best of company as we express our suffering and heartache to God.

We must teach our congregations to ask the right questions.

The problem of suffering often prompts people to ask, Why? "Why was I the only one to survive an auto accident?" "Why was my young child's life suddenly taken?" "Why do I have this physical disability?" "Why was I sexually molested as a child?" True, we can be confident that God will work out his purposes and that he can act redemptively in the face of perplexing and even horrendous evils. But this does not mean that we have a right to know, let alone comprehend, what those purposes are. Insisting that our why questions be answered from on high is both unhelpful and misguided, leading only to frustration.

When Jesus responded to the question of why Galilean worshipers were killed in the temple or why a tower fell on Israelites (Luke 13:1-5), in the first place, he didn't present an answer, and, secondly, he insisted that it wasn't due to sin. (Consider all of the "Christian" pontifications about why Katrina struck New Orleans or an earthquake devastated Haiti.) Jesus twice gave a simple warning instead: "Repent, or you will likewise perish." Like nothing else, suffering reminds us of our need for outside assistance—grace—and it presents an opportunity to draw nearer to God, to examine ourselves, to persevere, to be transformed in character. Of course, when people commit adultery or lie to each other, disastrous consequences predictably come. But we should take our cues from Jesus and not try to figure out why this or that particular round of suffering has come to us.

Intellectual answers have a part to play—up to a point.

C.S. Lewis wrote two books on evil and suffering. His Problem of Pain addressed the intellectual or philosophical integrity of the Christian faith—that God and evil are not contradictory, that God can use evil redemptively, that a theistic world makes better sense of evil. However, after his wife, Joy Davidman, died of cancer, Lewis wrote A Grief Observed, which speaks to the emotional and pastoral side of suffering.

For those who have intellectual questions, many astute and carefully-reasoned intellectual responses are available. But for those who suffer, various intellectual answers may be helpful up to a point, but the primary response should be pastoral care and personal presence from the Christian community—a hug, a listening ear, a hot casserole delivered to a grieving family. Lewis wisely wrote in The Problem of Pain: "[T]he only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering; for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all."

To give up on God is to cut us off from an anchor in the midst of suffering.

We've heard stories about how people have abandoned the Christian faith because they have undergone severe suffering. But to what can they turn? To an impersonal naturalism? How does evil even make sense in a world of non-rational, deterministically-driven molecular motions? Atheist Richard Dawkins says that in a world of selfish genes and electrons, there is no good or evil—"nothing but blind pitiless indifference."[1] And how does the Buddhist respond to suffering—that it all comes from desire that must be extinguished? This worldview assumes that everything is transitory and that nothing is permanent. But the existence of an eternal God changes the picture entirely—a loving Sovereign who involves himself with fallen humanity and who is worthy of our trust. We could add other worldviews for our consideration.

Just as we can't make sense of counterfeit money without the existence of real currency, so we can't even understand evil—a departure from the way things ought to be—without a standard of goodness. Evil is a deviation, which assumes a kind of design plan. Now, every worldview must address the problem of evil—not just the Christian faith. And, unlike the theist, atheists have two problems—the problem of evil and the problem of goodness. After all, if nature is all that exists, there is no way things ought to be.

A Christian philosopher friend of mine recounted how a professing believing friend became an atheist because he couldn't square God and so much evil. My friend asked: "So does your atheism offer you better resolution to the problem of evil?" "Actually," the atheist confessed, "the problem gets worse without God." He's right. Getting rid of God leaves us wondering why things ought to be different than what they are. Further, expunging God from reality removes all hope for cosmic justice; after all, God is the guarantor that all unpunished vice and unrewarded virtue will be addressed; he will "repay according to everyone's work" (Rev. 22:12; cp. Rom. 14:12). When it comes to the problem of evil—and so much more—Peter aptly expressed it to Jesus, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life" (Jn. 6:68).

God shows his trustworthiness by entering our world of suffering.

N.T. Wright has said that, rather than remaining aloof, God steps into a world of evil, getting his feet dirty and hands bloody. By facing evil and injustice in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, this God demonstrates that he is worthy of our trust. As philosopher Alvin Plantinga observes, "Some theologians claim that God cannot suffer. I believe they are wrong. God's capacity for suffering, I believe, is proportional to his greatness."[2] The God who himself suffers is credible in the minds of those who suffer: "For since he himself was tempted in that which he has suffered, he is able to come to the aid of those who are tempted" (Heb. 2:18).

Author and pastor Tim Keller puts it this way: "If your fundamental is a man dying on the cross for his enemies, if the very heart of your self-image and your religion is a man praying for his enemies as he died for them, sacrificing for them, loving them—if that sinks into your heart of hearts, it's going to produce the kind of life that the early Christians produced. The most inclusive possible life out of the most exclusive possible claim—and that is that this is the truth. But what is the truth? The truth is a God become weak, loving, and dying for the people who opposed him, dying forgiving them."[3] Unlike the gods of this age, our God bears scars on his body.

Jesus' resurrection inspires confidence that evil, death, and suffering will not have the final word.

The theologian Irenaeus said that the first Easter is the eighth day of creation. With Jesus' bodily resurrection, the new creation has come. And the fact that God has raised Jesus from the dead—a historical event supported by weighty and wide-ranging evidences—fills us with hope that a final, permanent, suffering-free creation will become a reality. We can now live lives with confidence because God, in Christ, has secured the victory over sin, death, and other dehumanizing powers of this age: "Therefore … be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord" (1 Cor. 15:58).

Though much more could be said concerning preaching about suffering, these are some important, though preliminary, considerations for our preaching and teaching about suffering in this broken world.

1. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books/Harper Collins, 1995), 132-33.

2. Alvin Plantinga, "A Christian Life Partly Lived," in Philosophers Who Believe, ed. Kelly James Clark (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1993), 71.

3. Tim Keller, "Reason for God," The Explorer (Veritas Forum), (Fall 2008). URL: http://www.veritas.org/reason-god-belief-age-skepticism/.

Paul Copan is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is the author of Is God a Moral Monster? and (with Matthew Flannagan) Did God Really Command Genocide?