#113 Why Does God Allow Suffering? A Psychologist and Cancer Survivor Answers + Dr. Liz Hall

I went in for a routine mammogram and came out with a stage two breast cancer diagnosis.

It is better for you to go through it.

It's better to allow me to go through it than to rescue me from it.

Why does he need us to suffer with him? Does that pain make us more like him?

He's never promised to keep us from hard things. That is nowhere in Scripture. What he does promise is to be with us. He promises to redeem the suffering for good. Does suffering have a purpose?

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I'm your host, Cassian Blina. I want to ask a question about suffering. What part, what is the part about Christianity that we spend most of our lives trying to go void is the very place where Paul is saying that's where we can know Jesus the most deeply.

Knowing Christ Through Participation in His Sufferings

In Philippians 3 .10, where we'll be exploring today, it says, I want to know Christ, yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. And I want to understand that resurrection power.

I understand wanting to know Jesus, but I do not understand wanting to participate in the suffering part because Jesus already suffered. He died on the cross. He rose from the dead and he said it was finished.

So why does he need us to suffer with him? Does that pain make us more like him? Does suffering have a purpose? Today I have brought in Dr. Liz Hall to help us understand the meanings behind this psychologically, theologically, and exegetically.

Dr. Liz Hall, you are a professor of psychology at Biola University, where you teach in both the Rosemead School of Psychology and the undergraduate psychology department. You earned your PhD and master's in psychology from Rosemead and your BA from Biola University.

You've also spent years studying what suffering does to our minds, bodies, identities, our relationship with God. Dr. Hall, welcome to Biblically Speaking. Thank you. It's lovely to be here. I'm really glad that we get to have this conversation.

And before we get into Paul or psychology, I want to understand why this became your work, you know, of all the things that you could study, you chose suffering.

It's, yeah, it's been quite a journey. So I got into this topic because in December of 2013, I went in for a routine mammogram and came out with a stage two breast cancer diagnosis. And one of the things that I found, lifelong Christian, taught adult Sunday school, read my Bible regularly, taught in a Christian institution.

One of the things that I realized was how underprepared I was to face that long year of suffering that followed. And you would think that of all people on earth, I would be the best prepared. Teaching in a Christian doctoral psychology program where we equip people to treat people from a Christian perspective.

But again, that's that was not my reality. And as I went through it and as I made my way through numerous books that people offered to me that I picked up to try to get me through this time, I realized that probably because of cultural pressures, our contemporary Christian church in America is woefully underprepared to face suffering.

And frankly, coming out of that year, I wanted to help people who found themselves in similar situations. I wanted other people to never have to face that situation that I was in. So it was a radical departure from my areas of research before, but I gathered some collaborators around me, a team of a couple of theologians and a philosopher and a couple of other psychologists.

And in one way or another, for the past 10 or 12 years, we have been studying how Christians face suffering and how Christians perhaps ought to face suffering. So drawing both on psychological research and also on theological research.

So what do you believe now about suffering that you didn't when you started 10, 12 years ago?

Well, I could take the entire hour just answering that question, but I'm not going to. Let me just say a few things briefly. I think first that the most important thing about our suffering is not where it came from or God's role in it, in causing it or allowing it, but that it is rather in the purpose that God has for our suffering.

So that's one of the big things that has come out of my suffering. This isn't necessarily something that I didn't believe before, but I am more profoundly convinced that the process of going through suffering is more important than the perhaps victorious side that we might arrive at at the end of the long journey.

I am convinced that the primary reason that God does allow suffering in our lives and the primary purpose for it is to enable us to perhaps more efficiently arrive at what I think is the goal of the Christian life, which is greater intimacy with God, with God and Jesus, with God the Father.

So those are some things I think here off the top of my head that I could say that have changed.

Yeah, already things that as somebody that has gone through a period of suffering, it's interesting kind of looking back and being like, I could see what you're saying there. Before we get into this, how would you warn listeners with what you're about to kind of reveal about suffering?

Well, there are some sacred cows, I think, in this literature on suffering as a Christian. I find myself kind of after this journey objecting to a lot of things that just come out of the mouths of Christians when they encounter suffering.

When God closes a door, he'll open a window.

Are you saying that's not biblical or are you saying that is?

I don't think so. Not in the sense at least that most people think about it, or things like let go and let God, you know, implying a kind of passivity in the face of suffering, or ways in which a very good Bible verse, Romans 8 .28, is kind of thrown out there to mean things that it was never intended to mean.

You know, that God working all things for good means that somehow in your lifetime and probably in the near future, God is going to tie everything up with a neat little bow in your life. So, all kinds of things that I think float around in our Christian circles, we're so focused on triumphing over suffering that we, I think, wander into just things that our Bible never intended to communicate to us.

Oh my gosh.

Okay, well, you just said so many things that I was telling myself in my season, and to know that that's not how I should have interpreted that, really interesting. We're going to jump into Scripture and look at an example of suffering.

Paul's Imprisonment and the Context of Philippians

I read it at the head of this episode, but in Philippians 3 .10, there is a bit of personal advice, and I want us to be transported into that moment where Paul is writing it. And he's not speaking theoretically.

He's in a very specific situation in his life, which none of us would wish to be in. And I'm going to read it real quick again, but brothers and sisters, I do not, this is Philippians 3, I want to start at 13.

Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken a hold of it, but one thing I do, forgetting what is behind, straightening toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me, heavenward in Christ.

Is that the, that's not the one that I read at the beginning. Hold on. 3 .10, sorry. In 3 .10, I want to know Christ, yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participate in his sufferings, becoming like him in death.

And so somehow attaining to the resurrection from the dead. Okay. So jumping right into it, where is he? What is he doing right now? Why is, why is he in jail? What year is it? Who is he writing to? Kind of put the context around this verse.

So he's writing from Rome. It's probably around AD 60, 62, somewhere around there. He is in this two year period where he is under house arrest. This is a situation that's described in Acts 28 at the end of Acts.

And he appears to be in what we might call a kind of military custody. So he would be, he would be chained probably by the wrist to a soldier. Guards were rotating in shifts, but he was stuck there at all times, chained to somebody else.

If you can imagine that situation for two years. He would have not been in a dungeon. So, you know, I visited the Mamertine prison. Okay, that's exactly what I was imagining. Yeah, yeah. It's not, it's not the Mamertine prison where he was probably imprisoned at the end of his life.

That was a different situation. This is, he would have been in rented lodgings. He could receive visitors, he could write letters, but he couldn't leave. It was kind of like a house arrest. And one of the interesting things is it's not like the Roman government was providing for him.

So he was entirely dependent on friends for things like food and clothing and money. And so this is why the gift from the Philippians that was carried by Epaphroditus mattered so much. They were actually supporting him during that two year period, along with, one would assume, other Christians during that two year period of time.

And, you know, it was physically uncomfortable, but I think the thing that needs to be pointed out here is that it was also a very shameful situation. So, Roman culture, dishonored, you would be presumed guilty.

It's not like the American legal system, innocent until proven guilty. If he was in chains there, then it was just assumed he had done something wrong. And so there might have even been believers that had turned away from him.

Paul references that some rivals preached in a way that added afflictions to my chains. I wonder if there was kind of a sense that they pointed him out as kind of an embarrassment, perhaps, because of his situation.

No pride. Yeah, yeah. So those were his physical conditions, the physical conditions that he was in.

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So why exactly was he imprisoned?

Yeah, there was a whole chain of events that again is described near the end of the book of Acts. And so Paul in Jerusalem had been falsely accused of bringing a Gentile into the temple's inner courts, and there was kind of a mob that nearly killed him.

And so then this Roman tribune took him into custody, maybe to save his life, who knows. But he spent about two years there. Basically, with formal charges that he had stirred up unrest throughout the empire.

And then on the part of the Jews that he had profaned the temple. Not that the Romans cared about that, but they did care about the public unrest. And so Paul does something very interesting here. He claims Roman citizenship, which he was, and appeals to Caesar.

And because of that, they basically have to send him to Rome to be tried there. And so that's the situation we find him in. He's in Rome, he's awaiting his trial by the emperor. And so one might say that he is in chains basically because he is preaching, and people didn't like that preaching.

And so there were these accusations and the unrest that followed that. So his imprisonment really is for Christ's sake.

Is there a real possibility that he's going to be executed?

There's a very real possibility. Now, it turns out that probably he wasn't at this particular point, but he knows that he is in danger of actually losing his life to execution. In the book of Philippians itself, he references this.

He talks about to live is Christ, to die is gain. That's a real thing that he is facing. He speaks of the possibility of being poured out as a drink offering, again, a kind of metaphorical allusion to his death.

And so he's hoping to be released, but he doesn't know that that is going to be the outcome of what happens here.

Okay, and then the Philippians are supporting him. They're bringing him food. What was his relationship to them? It sounds like they don't think he's guilty, or they don't care that he might be guilty.

That's right. They probably understood very well that the root cause of his imprisonment was that he had been preaching and that people objected to that. So, Philippians, Paul had a very special relationship to the church in Philippi.

In fact, scholars have pointed to Philippians as what we might call his warmest letter. He clearly cares very much about these people. One of the words he uses in that is one that we often throw around in Christian circles, koinonia, a word that means fellowship or partnership.

And he uses this repeatedly. And again, this is the church that supported him financially. And he says that they did that even when no other churches were doing that. Later on in 2 Corinthians, he refers to the Macedonian churches, which includes the church at Philippi, as giving generously out of extreme poverty.

And they send, again, Epaphroditus to him. And he's somebody who was really helpful to Paul during that imprisonment. So this is a warm, caring relationship that they have with Paul.

Fellowship with Christ in Suffering

And so when he's talking to them and he's saying things like, you know, I want to know Christ and I want to participate in the sufferings, what would they have heard that maybe totally goes over our head today?

Oh, yeah. So interesting.

Well, first of all, I think that when we, in English, hear the word know, we automatically jump to kind of an intellectual understanding. Totally. I have read my Bible, so I know things, right? But that is not what they would have heard.

There is this more kind of relational, more experiential sense of the word that is really what is in mind here. So that knowing Christ, we might think about it as just simply, you know, we know the words on the page, perhaps.

They would have understood because of the particular word that was used here, the particular verb tense, that it is this more experienced knowledge that is being talked about here. And again, I already mentioned that koinoni is a word that comes up in the book of Philippians.

It's their partnership. They have, Paul says that he has a partnership with them in the gospel that they have shared in that ministry through gifts and prayer and sending Epaphroditus to them. And then he uses that word again in this verse that we're looking at in Philippians, the fellowship of his suffering.

The koinonia of his suffering. So Paul is saying, you know, that relationship that we've been talking about, that partnership with me, now he is talking about this deeper partnership, a sharing in Christ's own suffering.

So they would have had that context already, the koinonia context that was very understandable to them.

So being in prison, being in house arrest, you know, one could fairly say he's already suffering and he just witnessed Jesus' suffering. If, you know, if it's 60 AD, then, you know, he remembers Jesus' death, what, 30 years ago.

And so is he asking for more suffering? Is he saying, I'm going to accept kind of the fate of suffering that's going to be unavoidable in the future? Or is he saying, is he finding like that koinonia with Christ?

Because he's like, this is kind of like, in some way, the same way Christ was suffering. He's trying to find that correlation in his situation compared to like how Jesus died. What is the type of suffering that he's referencing here?

So again, it's really interesting when we read this and we read it again, we realize that it can't refer to just knowing about suffering because he already knows, right? And the type of closeness that he's talking to is not just the meeting Christ because he's already met Christ, right, on the route to Damascus.

And it is striking the longing that he expresses there, the longing to know Christ in his suffering. So I have to think that he is anticipating that even in the context of the suffering that he is undergoing, that there is an opportunity to meet with Christ, to know Christ in a way that it can be increased, if that makes sense.

So there is, again, I think if we go back to the purpose of suffering, he is seeing an opportunity here that is not kind of the normal thing that we would jump to when we think of suffering ourselves.

And so I don't know that he has any particular suffering in mind, except just to think that whatever suffering comes my way is something that I'm going to see as an opportunity to know Christ more fully.

Suffering, Redemption, and Growth in Christlikeness

You know, when I think of knowing Christ, I understand that suffering is a part of this life. I think that it's very clear that Christians will suffer, but as a requirement of knowing Christ, does Jesus need us to suffer with him in order for us to know him in a way that not suffering wouldn't allow?

You know, is that the wrong understanding of what Paul is saying? That, you know, that's how we know him? Why do we need to?

Yeah. Well, I mean, let's make some careful differentiations here. So one thing we want to just kind of speak and then lay to the side is that Jesus does not need us to suffer with him in the sense of adding to his saving work.

So you already, at the beginning of our time together, quoted Jesus where he says, it is finished. I mean, clearly, this is not needing us to suffering in the sense of somehow doing some redemptive work that Jesus has left unfinished.

In fact, just before that verse we're looking at, Paul says he wants to be found in Christ, not having a righteousness of my own, but that which comes through faith in Christ. The righteousness from God that depends on faith.

So that comes immediately before. So righteousness comes first as a gift and then comes that desire to know Christ and share his suffering. So let's just lay that particular, perhaps, misunderstanding aside.

So I think the better way to frame Paul's meaning is that it's not something that Jesus needs from us, but it is something that we share with him because we belong to him. Going back to that koinonia, going back to that partnership.

So you asked the word, you said require. One thing that strikes me is that one of the ways in which one of the identity markers of Jesus is his suffering. Suffering is not something incidental to who Jesus was.

Jesus is the suffering servant. There's a sense in which suffering is part of who Christ is, if that makes sense. Do we need to suffer? I don't know if we even get to answer or ask that question because suffering is just unavoidable.

I mean, living in the particular historical moment that we do, between the fall and glorification, suffering just is part of our context. Now, I do think that the amazing thing about the way that God acts in the world is that he can take something that is so intrinsically bad as suffering and actually redeem it and turn it for our good.

So I do think that one of the really interesting things is that people do seem to, Christians do seem to be able to grow in ways that they don't outside of suffering when they do face hard things. So suffering does present an opportunity to draw closer to Christ, to grow, to become more Christ-like in ways that in contexts where we're not suffering simply don't come as easily.

I don't know that I want to put the word, we have to, to that. I mean, I think God's Holy Spirit in our lives can cause us to grow in all seasons of our life, the easy ones as well as the ones of intense suffering.

But certainly it seems to be the case, and this has been acknowledged kind of throughout the ages in Christian writers, that this might be a crass way of putting it, but that suffering is almost kind of a shortcut to growth and to intimacy with God.

So maybe that's how I want to respond to that question.

Yeah, immediately what kind of comes up is I think of, you know, people like Mother Teresa or Gandhi, you know, the people where it's like they gave their life and like what a holy person or somebody that opts in for a life of hardship, like how much closer or holier they might even be perceived compared to someone that is avoiding sacrifice and avoiding suffering and avoiding hardship.

You know, I know it's not a race, but it's like who's closer to heaven, you know, you know what I mean? Like I'm not, it's, it seems like that person, it almost feels like a requirement to have like, if I opt in for the hard, hard life, then I'm somehow a martyr to the life that like I could have opted into.

And therefore I'm more selfless and more like Christ. But it sounds like it's, it's more like, well, when it happens, we should see it as an opportunity versus like something that we should actively choose over if we had two options.

That's exactly right. So again, it's not when it's just because of the nature of reality. You know, one of the things that surprised me as I've gotten into this area of study, as I've gone to different places speaking or even just sharing with people what I research, I often have people say something to the extent of, you know, I've never told anyone this before, but I never felt closer to God than when I was in the midst of this situation.

I felt like it was me and God and, you know, so people describe very sweet times of, of closeness, of intimacy with God. And in fact, it's kind of interesting, people sometimes express kind of a sense of, of loss.

You know, they don't want to go, they don't want to revisit the suffering necessarily, but they do miss that sense of intense closeness with God that they experienced during that time. And I think that's, when we are identifying with Christ's suffering, I think that's part of what brings that closeness about.

It is, you know, I always think of Daniel and when he was destined for the lion's den, what he did immediately after was go praise God. And I spoke with a scholar in the middle of my suffering, and I was like, how could you possibly go praise God?

You know, because I was in the middle of that. I felt like I was headed to the lion's den and, you know, whatever, in my own way. And I genuinely couldn't imagine praising God in that moment. I had nothing to be grateful for.

I was really hurting. And yet here was Daniel on a way to a very painful death. And, you know, this is just, you're framing, you know, the sweetness, this closeness, I think very similar to what Daniel was feeling.

And this is what the scholar said, it was an opportunity for God to show up. And he was praising God that like now, because things seem so dire, what a great chance for God to show how great he is. And he did, obviously.

But I think what you're saying is another just reframe of like, thank God I'm suffering. You know, I call it a masochist faith where, you know, we're like, yay, I love it. God gets to show up. We get to praise God because it's so bad in my life.

But, you know, but I think you're right. There is a closeness and an intimacy that is irreplaceable when things are good. And you don't depend on God. Your cries for help are not as desperate when things are going well.

Yeah, you know, it's, I don't have the particular verse in Philippians here in front of me, but somewhere in the book, Paul tells the church of Philippi that it has been granted to them. It has been gifted to them to suffer.

And so it's, you know, it's that same I bet they love getting that letter. Yeah, it's that same root word as grace. It's a grace to them that they are allowed to suffer. So, you know, I don't know that we are required to force praise or to automatically think of every suffering as a gift.

But I do wonder if, you know, like some of these people I've talked to, where at the tail end of it, even if it hasn't resolved, they're able to look back at it and say that it was a gift because, not because of the suffering itself.

You know, we don't want to call something that is bad, good. But because of what God was able to bring out of it, that it is a gift. And so, I think, yeah, I don't know that I am quite there yet, where instantly when something bad happens, I'm like, oh, yay, what a gift!

But I do think that there can be kind of that transformation in our lives, where we look back and we say that was a gift. That was a grace that God gave me.

Absolutely. Well, since you are a psychologist, I can't, I'd be remiss not to talk about the psychology of suffering. So, what happens psychologically and physically when we suffer? And it's destroying the sense of safety, of trust, of security, of identity.

When I was going through, I went through a year of suffering in my small way, you know, compared to the realm of the world, you know, it's very small. But it felt like I could not be myself. Like I had no, I was actively just knowing that I am a diluted, dampened version of myself.

And it hurt because people had to experience that. I knew they were experiencing that. There's nothing I could do.

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How Suffering Disrupts Meaning and Identity

So the theory that I find very helpful in understanding experiences like yours, experiences like mine, is psychologist Crystal Park's meaning-making theory. And so here's kind of the big idea of it. You know, we don't just experience life as it is.

We experience life by making meaning of it. We understand it in certain ways. So Dr. Park distinguishes between two kinds of meaning. A global meaning and situational meaning. Global meaning is what often in our contemporary Christian circles we call our worldview.

So it includes kind of our big beliefs about the world. What kind of world is it? Is there a spiritual reality? Is there a God? What is God like? Also, what's my place in the world? Who am I and what is my place in the world?

So it includes beliefs. It also includes our big purposes in life. So not just our immediate goals, but kind of the kind of person we want to be. What we want to accomplish in life. The values that we want to pursue in life.

And that it also includes our subjective sense that life has meaning and purpose. So that's global meaning and it informs our everyday life. We wake up in the morning and we act according to kind of this way of interpreting the world around us.

Then comes some difficult event in our life, right? A diagnosis, a loss, whatever it might be that shakes us up. And here's where the theory gets really interesting. Again, as meaning-making creatures, the first thing we do is we try to wrap our brains around what happened.

We interpret the meaning. We create a kind of situational meaning. Is it a threat? Do I have the resources to cope with it? What are the implications for my future, etc., etc. Now, the key insight to this is that to the extent that the situational meaning conflicts with our global meaning, the more there is a discrepancy between those two, the more distress we're going to feel.

Because there's a sense in which that our appraisal of the event has shaken up our world. You actually described it beautifully. There's a sense that we feel lost in the world. Who we were, the important goals that we were pursuing, all of that is disrupted.

So as if the difficult thing that we're facing wasn't bad enough, there's this sense that our world has shifted and it no longer makes sense. The way that we just understood the world now seems inadequate.

It doesn't seem to fit or be able to contain what we are going through. And so what follows from that is a kind of coping process in which we try to rebuild meaning, the meaning-making process. And what we are trying to do in that process is to bring those two sides together so that they will fit, and so that we can regain a sense that life is meaningful and that it has purpose.

And we can do that either by changing our global meaning, our big beliefs about the world, or we can see our own situation in different ways, or probably in most cases some kind of mix of the two, right?

That's in order to help to resolve that discrepancy between the two and kind of regain our footing so that the world isn't laying in pieces at our feet and we have a sense again of who we are in the world.

So that's, I think, a very helpful way for understanding generally what happens and why some of the meanings that we find in our Bible are so helpful to us as we're going through our times of suffering.

Would you say that people that don't find a way to fill that discrepancy are the ones that remain bitter?

I would say that it can go wrong in two ways. It can go wrong either because there is a continued discrepancy and they just cannot make the pieces fit together, or it can go wrong when, I mean, the meaning-making process is not infallible.

So what if they resolve the discrepancy by discarding true beliefs about the world? So I remember a long time ago working with a woman who had suffered a very painful loss early on. I saw her years later.

She was very depressed and bitter. And her way of resolving the discrepancy of why God had allowed this to happen was to simply stop believing in God. So she resolved the discrepancy, but it was not a helpful way to resolve it because she gave up a true belief, a belief that would have made her life much more meaningful than the way that she actually lived her life.

So it became like she had to deny a sense of who she was before this horrible thing happened and something that probably brought her a lot of film at her faith walk and believing in God. But in order to close that discrepancy, she had to have a sense of self-denial.