How Suffering Hurts
"Why did I not die at birth?" —
Job
Suffering speaks with an eloquence all its own. After Satan launches his attack upon the person of Job, the good and great man is reduced to a living corpse. His disease is so devastating that his wife urges him to curse God and die; city officials consign him to an ashheap outside the protective gates; and his closest friends give him up for dead. With one last toss of ashes over their heads, they turn and walk away. Knowing the sign of death, Job musters enough strength to raise his head and shout after them, "Why did I not die at birth?" (Job 3:11).
Job is hurt far beyond his physical pain. When we suffer, we hurt all over. Over suffering is physical, mental, social, and spiritual. The totality of our hurt can be heard in the initial questions of suffering, "Why me? Why this? Why now?" The wholeness of our hurt can be felt in the attacks of Satan — sometimes against our body, often against our minds, usually against our pride, and always against our faith.
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The Wholeness of Suffering
The wholeness of suffering sounds like a contradiction. In medicine, "wholeness" is health; in psychology, it is maturity; in religion, it is holiness. Ideally, all this is true. Practically, we must admit that we treat the body, mind, and spirit as separate entities with limited interaction. Specialists in medicine, psychology, and theology, for instance, seldom talk together about the problems of persons they label patients, clients, or parishioners. As ironic as it may seem, the link between the mind and body in physical illness was formally introduced only forty or so years ago as "psychosomatic medicine." Even more ironically, doctors in this field found themselves suspended in limbo between medicine and psychology. A specialist in psychosomatic medicine did not fit the professional definition of either a physician or a psychologist. The issue is still not fully resolved.
Today, the connection between the spiritual aspect of personality and psychophysical health is another new frontier. Researchers are exploring the spiritual dimensions of physical and emotional health with positive results. In practice, some pioneers are venturing into the field of "holistic medicine," but not without some negative reaction from specialists in medicine, psychology, and religion. Attitudes toward the professionals in this developing field range from "wait-and-see" skepticism to outright charges of quackery.
While specialists squabble over definitions, the Bible leaves no doubt about the unity of body, mind, and spirit. Whether it is God's creative work or the redemptive mission of Christ, our physical, emotional, and spiritual being is one. When Christ makes us whole, He heals our bodies, renews our minds, and redeems our souls. Just this morning in the foyer of a church I met a man whom I hardly recognized. Each of us was thousands of miles from home and out of our familiar context. More than that, he was a trim figure with a bright look in his eyes. The man I had known weighed fifty pounds more and smiled only out of professional courtesy. A second look, however, told me that I was wrong. The trim and smiling fellow visitor was one and the same person. After we had greeted each other, I paid him the compliment, "You
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look absolutely great! How did you do it?" He then told me his doctor had given him the ultimatum to lose weight or face the consequences of high blood pressure. In the oft-repeated words of people for whom weight loss has restored their self-esteem, he beamed, "I had forgotten what it means to feel good about myself." In that sentence, he spoke a truth we easily forget. In health, maturity, and holiness, our bodies, minds, and spirits are one.
While we are still struggling with the unity of body, mind, and spirit in health, we may resist the idea of wholeness in suffering. Logic counters our resistance. If we are one in body, mind, and spirit, we are one in suffering and in health. Furthermore, we know that the effect of sin is total. No part of our person is outside its depravity. Therefore, if we can be make whole in health, we are also susceptible to wholeness in suffering. For those who suffer, such truth is experiential as well as logical. In suffering all systems of body, mind, and spirit interact. Physical pain makes it difficult to think or pray; emotional stress causes physical breakdown and spiritual despair; and alienation from God compounds physical ills and magnifies mental distress. The whole of suffering, then, is greater than the pain of its parts.
Job is our prime example. For those of us who remember him only as a man covered with boils, a deeper look into his experience shows us a person driven to the brink of blasphemy and the edge of self-destruction by the wholeness of suffering.
The Dimensions of Suffering
Satan chose physical disease as his point of entry into the personality of Job. A rather simple diagnosis informs us that boils covered him from head to foot (Job 2:7). For a person who remembers having one boil as a teenager, I cringe at the thought of having my skin turned into one swollen, oozing mass of boils coming to a head. Medically, boils might be fatal. But even the thought of the excruciating pain and the distortion of face and figure is enough to make one wish for death. It is doubtful, however, that boils were diagnosed as a
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contagious disease which required quarantine on an ashheap outside the city with the expectation of imminent death. Other physical symptoms which we discover in Job's case are clues to a more dreadful and disfiguring disease. Job's medical chart also shows:
. . . itching, open sores (2:7-8)
. . . insomnia (7:4)
. . . cracking and blistering of the skin (7:5)
. . . maggots bred in ulcers (7:5)
. . . total exhaustion (16:7)
. . . putrid breath (19:17)
. . . rotting teeth (19:20)
. . . loss of weight (19:20)
. . . weakening of bones (30:17)
. . . diarrhea (30:27)
. . . blackening of the skin (30:30)
. . . high fever (30:30)
Two other diagnostic possibilities need to be considered from this syndrome of symptoms. One is elephantiasis: a rare disease characterized by gross and distorted enlargement of body extremities along with the blackening and blistering of the skin. For those who remember the provocative, prize-winning film, "Elephant Man," we can understand why Job appeared to face early death in the crude isolation ward of an ashheap. If elephantiasis is a disease that modern medicine still cannot cure and modern society cannot accept, certainly we can sympathize with the dilemmas of ancient medicine and society in Job's day. To understand Job's suffering, we must think of him as the leper of Jesus' day or the AIDS victim of our day.
An alternative diagnosis is a disease peculiar to Job's time and region. It may be called the "3-D Disease" because its symptoms are dermatitis, diarrhea, and dementia. Blackened, leathered, blistered, and cracked skin is symptomatic of dermatitis. Job's embarrassed complaint about his uncontrolled bowels leaves no doubt about diarrhea. All this combined with hallucinations, the sad sign of dementia in the
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mind of a man who had once been a leader of thought in the Wisdom School of the East.
Whatever the disease with which Satan plagued Job, the symptoms tell us something about his point of vulnerability. As the greatest man in the East, Job may well have been a person with a face and physique complementing his wealth and power so that his presence dominated any setting. A presidential reception at the White House comes to mind. Leaders who are movers and shakers in their own right cluster in cliques waiting for the host to appear. Then there is a hush. The door opens and the President of the United States walks in. He looks taller than expected and bears an aura of dignity that is unmatched in the room. No flaws of face or figure are tolerated. Image is essential to his position, power, and presence.
Job must have brought this same kind of image to any setting in which he appeared. In his reflections of the days of his glory, he remembers that young men hid from him, old men stood in his honor, princes stopped talking, and nobles became tongue-tied in his presence (Job 29:8-10). Imagine, then, Job's face twisted and his physique emaciated by the ravages of disease. Who can blame him as he pleaded for the relief of death even though he knew it meant personal obliteration in the land of shadows without the hope of eternal life in the presence of God? Satan's attack upon Job's appearance may have brought him close to his point of vulnerability.
Even though the pain of Job's physical disease pushed him to the edge of death, his psychological suffering hurt even more. Closely connected with the pain of his bodily illness are the horrors of his dementia:
. . . a wish to die (3:11)
. . . a haunting fear (3:25)
. . . no taste for life (6:6)
. . . utter futility (7:8-9)
. . . terror by night (7:14)
. . . delusions by day (7:14)
. . . depression (7:16)
. . . bitter anger (10:59)
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. . . a broken spirit (17:1)
. . . hallucinations (30:15)
Only one who has been through such emotional suffering can fully empathize with Job's plight. Anton Boisen wrote an unforgettable book entitled The Exploration of the Inner World. It is an autobiographical account of Boisen's torturous journey from mental health to a severe form of psychosis which required institutionalization. Like a psychological Lazarus, Boisen came back from emotional death to tell about his experience. Because of that he could write:
To be plunged as a patient into a hospital for the insane may be a tragedy or it may be an opportunity. For me it has been an opportunity. It has introduced me to a new world of absorbing interest and profound significance; it has shown me that world throughout its entire range, from the bottommost depths of the nether regions to the heights of religious experience at its best; it has made me aware of certain relationships between two important fields of human experience, which thus far have been held strictly apart; and has given me a task in which I find the meaning and purpose of my life.1
The pain of a tortured mind is often worse than death. As a hospital chaplain, I ministered to many patients whose fatal disease caused pain not even drugs could dull. A Methodist minister, for instance, came to my ward for treatment of lung cancer in its advanced stage. His gentle spirit, ready smile, and pastoral prayers transformed the gloomy ward into a sanctuary for the presence of God. He ministered to me. But within days his pain became so acute that surgeons performed a prefrontal lobotomy to alter the intolerable sense of pain. After the brain surgery, his personality underwent a complete change — raging anger, vulgar language, and brute strength. Still the pain persisted. When I visited him for the last time, I prayed for the mercy of a quick death while he swore at me. Within hours, God answered my prayer.
My internship in a mental hospital left me with another impression of suffering — the sights and sounds of tormented minds. Half-naked bodies, people clawing at walls, curled into permanent fetal positions, or a person spending twenty hours a day pounding an imaginary typewriter with a click of
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fingers to sound the bell for the carriage return — these scenes will never leave me. Most of these people are still there suffering in their own private hell year after year. There is a pain worse than death.
Most of us know only fleeting moments of extreme emotional suffering. What would it be like to go night after night into terror-filled dreams which awaken you dripping with sweat and shaking with chills? Just the other night, our son dreamed of an airliner smashing into a skyscraper and killing all the passengers. The nightmare was so real that he awakened with the compulsion to call across the country and tell us to take a different flight from a western city the next day.
What would it be like to prolong the anxiety that grinds up our stomachs in tension-filled times for a lifetime? Or to make a permanent mental state out of those occasions when life is as flat and tasteless as the white of an egg? Or when our self-worth is like a cipher with the rim knocked off? Or when the thought of tomorrow seems as futile as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? All these emotions, from the extremes of borderline psychosis to the extension of crippling anxiety, crashed at once on the psyche of Job. He knew the experience of emotional suffering that is far worse than death.
Relational Suffering
Job's psychological suffering extended to his interpersonal relationships. We first met him as an immensely attractive social creature and as a family man who loved a celebration. Consequently, his disgraceful disease caused another extreme form of suffering — estrangement from those who he loved and on whom he counted. Attention is usually focused upon his wife who urged him to curse God and die rather than fight intolerable pain. Because of her urging, she is often condemned as the devil's handmaiden. More generously, Job's wife is cited for her lack of faith. Job preferred to call her "foolish," which charges her only with the inability to see the larger picture through eyes of faith. The lesson applies to all who suffer. If we lose sight of the big
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picture which can only be seen through the eyes of faith, we give up and die. Faith is essentially a viewpoint with the big picture in mind. Is this not what the apostle Paul means when he writes that our suffering, whatever it may be, is always temporary?
Job's wife has my sympathy. In fact, her urging for Job to curse God and die may be proof of her love for her husband which Satan turned into his own tool. Until we have stood at the bedside and prayed for God to take the life of a family member experiencing insufferable pain from a terminal illness, we should be slow to condemn Job's wife. In her love for her husband, Satan found the point of her vulnerability. As any husband or wife, father or mother knows, it is easier to suffer ourselves than it is to stand by helplessly while those whom we love writhe in anguish.
Assuming that Job's wife and children occupied the center of his network of human relationships, we see that network break down from the inside out until Job is totally alone, without any kind of human support. After his children are dead and his wife urges him to curse God and die, we learn later that all his brothers, sisters, and acquaintances withdraw from him as well (Job 42:11). According to his own words, Job is faced with the disgrace of being taunted by young men whose fathers Job would not even trust with the dogs of his flocks (Job 30:1). The rabble spits upon him and use his name as a byword (Job 30:9). His social rejection is almost complete. Not only is he isolated from the community, but he is ostracized by the lowest of its people.
Job still has his three closest friends who come to comfort him — Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. In the long run, they turn out to be the kind of friends that no suffering person needs. But not enough can be said about the quality of their friendship with Job that brought them from distant cities to the side of their friend. According to the Scriptures, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar lived in three separate cities (Job 2:11). When the news of Job's plight reached them, they corresponded with each other and agreed to meet at a common point from which they would travel to Job's home. At the first sight of Job on the ashheap, they did not recognize him (Job 3:12). A closer look convinced them that his death was
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imminent. Without a word, they went into the rite of mourning, shredding their robes and throwing ashes into the air. The depth of their friendship is indicated by their presence, their grief, and their silence. They and they alone stayed with Job in his disgrace (Job 2:13).
Even their friendship had limits, however. After they fulfilled their obligation for seven days of mourning, the three friends walked away and left their friend for dead. They forgot a fundamental fact about persons who are on the edge of death. Their sensitivities are sharpened by pain their reactions are aggravated. So, when Job saw his last human support walking away, he cried out after them,
Why did I not die at birth?
Why did I not perish when I came from the womb? (Job 3:11)
Why? . . . Why? . . . Why?
(Job 3:12-23)
His friends repudiated Job's cry because they heard it as an attack on the integrity of God. They failed to hear his cry for help. Because they missed the meaning of his cry, Job likened them to streams in the desert upon which weary caravan travelers depend to quench their thirst. To come to the streams and find them dry is to dash the hopes of the travelers. Like the dry streams, Job says, "My brothers have dealt deceitfully" (Job 6:15).
Spiritual Suffering
Abandonment by family and betrayal by friends border on the most severe suffering we can know. Still, a person can survive suffering without a human network if he or she feels there is a spiritual connection with God and God's people. Physical pain, emotional despair and relational loss would seem to be enough to make a person give up. But as long as spiritual supports remain, people of faith can still be strong in suffering. A common testimony is for a person who has come through suffering to say, "Except for the prayers of
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God's people, I would not have made it." Anyone who is a member of a Christian congregation knows what it means to be lifted by love and help from brothers and sisters in Christ.
The man whose home burned to the ground told me that he and his wife were still in transition between churches when the tragedy occurred. They thought that all the real love remained in the congregation from which they had to move in a career change. But when fire left them homeless, they found out that Christian love is not confined to a given location. They wept in gratitude as their new church friends opened their homes, gave them clothes, and even furnished their new home.
Job's experience is just the opposite. In one of the saddest notes of scripture, he remembers standing up in the congregation of the righteous and crying out for help (Job 30:28). He might as well have shouted to the barren desert. At least, he would have heard the echo of his own voice. Instead, the pain of silence from the congregation is spoken in the heartrending words,
I am a brother of jackals,
And a companion of ostriches.
(Job 30:29)
On this mournful note, we are informed that every last web in Job's network of human relationships has broken down (19:13-20). Still, as a man of faith, his despair is not complete. Job has a lifetime of communion and friendship with God who confirms that relationship in His commendation to Satan, "Have you considered My servant Job, that there is none him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil?" (Job 1:8).
To understand the wholeness of Job's suffering, we must realize that Job does not break communion or fellowship with God. His suffering, however, leads him to believe that God has abandoned him (23:8-9), refuses to answer him (9:16), and even attacks him like a vicious animal which tears at his flesh and shakes him in his teeth (Job 16:9-12).
Every honest person who suffers will admit to moments of doubt when he or she feels abandoned by God and moments of despair when it seems as if God has become a vicious
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adversary. In those moments, we are teetering on the edge of hopelessness. If Satan can convince us that we have been abandoned by God, life will lose its meaning. Short of death itself, that is Satan's vicious aim for our suffering. If he can use suffering to destroy the meaning of life, he has created the despair that causes us to curse God and die.
In his book The Sickness Unto Death Kierkegaard uses a fable to describe the spiritual suffering of despair.2 A knight is pursuing a rare bird with the hope of catching it. But each time he feels sure of seizing it, the bird flies just beyond his reach. The frustrating quest goes on until darkness falls and the knight suddenly realizes he has lost his way and does not know where he is. In Job's most bitter cry against God, we hear the same loss of hope:
Leave me alone,
That I may take a little comfort
Before I go to the place from which
I shall not return,
To the land of darkness
and the shadow of death, . . .
Where even the light is like darkness
(Job 10:20-22)
Remember that Job lived in a time before the reality of heaven had been revealed. Therefore, his spiritual suffering went even deeper than ours. Without the promise of life after death, his only hope depended upon staying alive.
The Ultimate Suffering
In the wholeness of Job's physical, mental, relational, and spiritual suffering, we catch a glimpse of the suffering of Jesus Christ. Described by Isaiah as "the Suffering Servant," Jesus experienced a thousand scorpions' teeth in physical pain, mind-breaking mental anguish, back-stabbing betrayal, the social disgrace of a criminal's death, and the abandonment of His Father. Like Job, Jesus suffered wholly; like Job, Jesus struggled to retain hope against mounting despair. Unlike Job, however, Jesus' suffering was ultimate as well as whole. He and He alone knows the finality of physical
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death, psychological despair, social disgrace, personal betrayal, and spiritual abandonment. Yet, in His suffering is our hope. To paraphrase the well-known promise, "There is no suffering known to man which He has not experienced."
For all who suffer or minister to those who suffer, the story of Job reminds us that our pain does not come in pieces. While at one time or another the focus of our pain may be magnified, because we are created as beings of interlocking mind, body, and spirit, our suffering is whole. Like ripples on a pond, wherever the pebble of suffering strikes us, the waves of pain roll through our total personality and wash over our whole being. When we are engulfed by suffering, the temptation is to give up hope, lose the meaning of life, curse God, and die. If we do, Satan trumpets his victory.
No matter how complete our suffering or how deep our despair, we must not forget that Jesus went through and beyond our suffering for us. He and He alone experienced ultimate and total suffering. Because of Him, however, we have this assurance: we suffer nothing that He has not known. Far more than that, Jesus met the ultimate attack of Satan in death and rose triumphant. Thus, our response to suffering is more than "toughing it out." Tough we must be, but triumphant we will be. As Jesus holds the keys to death and hell, He also holds the keys to our suffering. In health or sickness, life or death, we have His assurance, "My grace is sufficient for you."
