{"id":17533,"date":"2021-09-22T18:11:30","date_gmt":"2021-09-23T01:11:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/gospel-express\/2021-mysteriouscode-copy\/"},"modified":"2021-09-22T18:45:46","modified_gmt":"2021-09-23T01:45:46","slug":"2021-timkeller2","status":"publish","type":"portfolio","link":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/gospel-express\/2021-timkeller2\/","title":{"rendered":"Growing My Faith in the Face of Death (part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Timothy Keller\/<\/a>21\/03\/07<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Paul brand, an orthopedic surgeon, spent the first part of his medical career in India and the last part of his career in the U.S. \u201cIn the United States \u2026 I encountered a society that seeks to avoid pain at all costs,\u201d he wrote in his recent memoir. \u201cPatients lived at a greater comfort level than any I had previously treated, but they seemed far less equipped to handle suffering and far more traumatized by it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why is it that people in prosperous, modern societies seem to struggle so much with the existence of evil, suffering, and death? In his book\u00a0A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor wrote that while humans have always struggled with the ways and justice of God, until quite recently no one had concluded that suffering made the existence of God implausible. For millennia, people held a strong belief in their own inadequacy or sinfulness, and did not hold the modern assumption that we all deserve a comfortable life. Moreover, Taylor has argued, we have become so confident in our powers of logic that if we cannot imagine any good reason that suffering exists, we assume there can\u2019t be one.<\/p>\n

But if there is a God great enough to merit your anger over the suffering you witness or endure, then there is a God great enough to have reasons for allowing it that you can\u2019t detect. It is not logical to believe in an infinite God and still be convinced that you can tally the sums of good and evil as he does, or to grow angry that he doesn\u2019t always see things your way. Taylor\u2019s point is that people say their suffering makes faith in God impossible\u2014but it is in fact their overconfidence in themselves and their abilities that sets them up for anger, fear, and confusion.<\/p>\n

When I got my cancer diagnosis, I had to look not only at my professed beliefs, which align with historical Protestant orthodoxy, but also at my actual understanding of God. Had it been shaped by my culture? Had I been slipping unconsciously into the supposition that God lived for me rather than I for him, that life\u00a0should<\/span><\/em>\u00a0go well for me, that I knew better than God does how things should go? The answer was yes\u2014to some degree. I found that to embrace God\u2019s greatness, to say \u201cThy will be done,\u201d was painful at first and then, perhaps counterintuitively, profoundly liberating. To assume that God is as small and finite as we are may feel freeing\u2014but it offers no remedy for anger.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Another area of head work for me had to do with Jesus\u2019s resurrection. Ironically, I had already begun working on a book about Easter. Before cancer, the resurrection had been a mostly theoretical issue for me\u2014but not now. I\u2019m familiar with the common charge that any belief in an afterlife is mere wish fulfillment without grounding in fact\u2014and that belief in Jesus is in the same category as faith in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But over the past 20 years, I\u2019ve been drawn to the work of the British biblical scholar N. T. Wright, who mounts a historical case for Jesus\u2019s bodily resurrection.<\/p>\n

I returned to his material now, with greater skepticism than I had previously applied. I didn\u2019t want to be taken in. But as I reread his arguments, they seemed even more formidable and fair to me than they had in the past. They gave me a place to get my footing. Still, I needed more than mental assent to believe in the resurrection.<\/p>\n

The heart work came in as I struggled to bridge the gap between an abstract belief and one that touches the imagination. As the early American philosopher Jonathan Edwards argued, it is one thing to believe with certainty that honey is sweet, perhaps through the universal testimony of trusted people, but it is another to actually taste the sweetness of honey. The sense of the honey\u2019s sweetness on the tongue brings a fuller knowledge of honey than any rational deduction. In the same way, it is one thing to believe in a God who has attributes such as love, power, and wisdom; it is another to sense the reality of that God in your heart. The Bible is filled with sensory language. We are not only to believe that God is good but also to \u201ctaste\u201d his goodness, the psalmist tells us; not just to believe that God is glorious and powerful but also to \u201csee\u201d it with \u201cthe eyes of the heart,\u201d it says in Ephesians.<\/p>\n

On December 6, 1273, Thomas Aquinas stopped writing his monumental\u00a0Summa Theologiae<\/span><\/em>. When asked why by his friend Reginald, he replied that he had had a beatific experience of God that made all his theology \u201cseem like straw\u201d by comparison. That was no repudiation of his theology, but Thomas had seen the difference between the map of God and God himself, and a very great difference it was. While I cannot claim that any of my experiences of God in the past several months have been \u201cbeatific,\u201d they have been deeper and sweeter than I have known before.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My path to this has involved three disciplines.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first was to immerse myself in the Psalms to be sure that I wasn\u2019t encountering a God I had made up myself.<\/strong> Any God I make up will be less troubling and offensive, to be sure, but then how can such a God contradict me when my heart says that there\u2019s no hope, or that I\u2019m worthless? The Psalms show me a God maddening in his complexity, but this difficult deity comes across as a real being, not one any human would have conjured. Through the Psalms, I grew in confidence that I was before \u201chim with whom we have to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second discipline was something that earlier writers like Edwards called spiritual \u201csoliloquy.\u201d<\/strong> You see it in Psalms 42 and 103, where the psalmist says, \u201cWhy are you cast down, O my soul?\u201d and \u201cBless the Lord, O my soul. And forget not all his benefits.\u201d The authors are addressing neither God nor their readers but their own souls, their\u00a0selves<\/span><\/em>. They are not so much listening to their hearts as talking to them. They are interrogating them and reminding them about God. They are taking truths about God and pressing them down deep into their hearts until they catch fire there.<\/p>\n

I had to look hard at my deepest trusts, my strongest loves and fears, and bring them into contact with God. Sometimes\u2014not always, or even usually\u2014this leads, as the poet George Herbert wrote, to \u201ca kind of tune \u2026 softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, exalted manna \u2026 heaven in the ordinary.\u201d But even though most days\u2019 hour of Bible reading, meditation, soliloquy, and prayer doesn\u2019t yield this kind of music, the reality of God and his promises grew on me. My imagination became more able to visualize the resurrection and rest my heart in it.<\/p>\n

Most particularly for me as a Christian, Jesus\u2019s costly love, death, and resurrection had become not just something I believed and filed away, but a hope that sustained me all day. I pray this prayer daily. Occasionally it electrifies, but ultimately it always calms:<\/p>\n

And as I lay down in sleep and rose this morning only by your grace, keep me in the joyful, lively remembrance that whatever happens, I will someday know my final rising, because Jesus Christ lay down in death for me, and rose for my justification.<\/p>\n

As this spiritual reality grows, what are the effects on how I live? One of the most difficult results to explain is what happened to my joys and fears. Since my diagnosis, Kathy and I have come to see that the more we tried to make a heaven out of this world\u2014the more we grounded our comfort and security in it\u2014the less we were able to enjoy it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Kathy finds deep consolation and rest in the familiar, comforting places where we vacation. Some of them are shacks with bare light bulbs on wires, but they are her Sehnsucht<\/em>\u00a0 locations\u2014the spaces for which she longs. My pseudo-salvations are professional goals and accomplishments\u2014another book, a new ministry project, another milestone at the church. For these reasons we found that when we got to the end of a vacation at the beach, our responses were both opposite and yet strangely the same.<\/p>\n

Kathy would begin to mourn the need to depart almost as soon as she arrived, which made it impossible for her to fully enjoy herself. She would fantasize about handcuffing herself to the porch railing and refusing to budge. I, however, would always chafe and be eager to get back to work. I spent much of the time at the beach brainstorming and writing out plans. Neither of us learned to savor the moment, and so we never came home refreshed.<\/p>\n

\"\"A short, green Jedi Master\u2019s words applied to me perfectly: \u201cAll his life has he looked away to the future, the horizon. Never his mind on\u00a0where he was.\u201d Kathy and I should have known better. We\u00a0did\u00a0know better. When we turn good things into ultimate things, when we make them our greatest consolations and loves, they will necessarily disappoint us bitterly. \u201cThou hast made us for thyself,\u201d Augustine said in his most famous sentence, \u201cand our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.\u201d The 18th-century hymn writer John Newton depicted God as saying to the human soul, \u201cThese inward trials I employ from pride and self to set thee free, and break thy schemes of earthly joy that thou would find thine all in me<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n

To our surprise\u00a0and encouragement, Kathy and I have discovered that the less we attempt to make this world into a heaven, the more we are able to enjoy it.<\/p>\n

No longer are we burdening it with demands impossible for it to fulfill.<\/strong> We have found that the simplest things\u2014from sun on the water and flowers in the vase to our own embraces, sex, and conversation\u2014bring more joy than ever. This has taken us by surprise.<\/p>\n

This change was not an overnight revolution. As God\u2019s reality dawns more on my heart, slowly and painfully and through many tears, the simplest pleasures of this world have become sources of daily happiness. It is only as I have become, for lack of a better term, more\u00a0heavenly minded\u00a0that I can see the material world for the astonishingly good divine gift that it is.<\/p>\n

I can sincerely say, without any sentimentality or exaggeration, that I\u2019ve never been happier in my life, that I\u2019ve never had more days filled with comfort. But it is equally true that I\u2019ve never had so many days of grief. One of our dearest friends lost her husband to cancer six years ago. Even now, she says, she might seem fine, and then out of nowhere some reminder or thought will sideswipe her and cripple her with sorrow.<\/p>\n

Yes. But I have come to be grateful for those sideswipes, because they remind me to reorient myself to the convictions of my head and the processes of my heart. When I take time to remember how to deal with my fears and savor my joys, the consolations are stronger and sweeter than ever.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Timothy Keller is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, chairman of Redeemer City to City, and author of the forthcoming book Hope in Times of Fear<\/strong>: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter
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