Suffering and Knowledge of God

When we suffer as Christians we come to know God because we are no longer reliant upon ourselves, we have no resource in ourselves, and so we are pressed deep into the ground of our life in Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul understood this well when he wrote to the Corinthian church:

⁸ For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia: that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life. ⁹ Yes, we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead, ¹⁰ who delivered us from so great a death, and does deliver us; in whom we trust that He will still deliver us, ¹¹ you also helping together in prayer for us, that thanks may be given by many persons on our behalf for the gift granted to us through many. ~II Corinthians 1:8-11

When faced with the uncertainties of daily life, when pressed against the most dire of consequences we really have nowhere else to go; it is really hard to deceive ourselves at that point, we are very vulnerable. This is the perfect scenario for God’s wisdom to reach us where we are truly at; we often do not realize how needy we are until we are needy. And this is why Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his Nazi prison cell about God’s wisdom versus the religious wisdom of the world:

Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man's religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God's powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help. To that extent we may say that the development towards the world's coming of age outlined above, which has done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by his weakness. This will probably be the starting-point for our secular interpretation.[1]

What suffering does for both the Apostle Paul and Dietrich Bonhoeffer is to tear back the un-reality, and un-truth of the human religions of the world; and instead it shows us humans, especially us Christians (who may well have imbibed the wisdom of the world), how empty everything else is a part from our God who humbled himself to the point of deep suffering and agonizing death. It is in this instance in this moment when our suffering is seen to correlate with his suffering for us at the cross the our knowledge of God increases in dependence upon his life; the life that death and suffering could not hold down.

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[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 359-61.