A E Wilder Smith

the
of
pal

the paradox of pain
A E Wilder Smith
Harold Shaw Publishers
Wheaton, Illinois

THE PARADOX OF PAIN.  Copyright
©1971 by A. E. Wilder Smith.
Printed in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles
or reviews. For information address
Harold Shaw Publishers, Box 567,
Wheaton, Illinois 60187
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 0-87788-667-9
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CARD NUMBER: 71-165790

chapter 1     pi 3
Thought and Action: Today and Yesterday
chapter 2    p29
The Pink Professor
chapter 3     p43
Fallacies in the Atheistic and Agnostic Positions
chapter 4     p55
The Origin of Evil
chapter 5    p77
The Problem of Rebuilding
chapter 6    p91
Suffering and Anguish-
Any Reasonable Interpretation?

The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no
God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures
are necessary.
C. S. Lewis

acknowledgements
This text has been prepared from a short presentation of the same sub-
ject which appeared several years ago under the title Warum lasst Gott es
Zu? That book was intentionally brief so that it could be placed in letters
addressed to countries behind the Iron Curtain, where it has circulated
widely for several years. The present work has been extended consider-
ably and revised to meet the needs of English-speaking people in the
Western world.
As will appear from some parts of the text, the work of extension and
revision was undertaken during the author's stay in Turkey as a visiting
professor. Dr. Julian Richardson, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engi-
neering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, has made a number of
helpful and constructive criticisms.
Finally, my wife has helped in many ways with the preparation of the
text and its contents. Without her patience while living in Turkey in
temporary quarters, the book would never have emerged.

foreword
This book is an attempt to search for meaning in the abyss of
suffering, wrong, evil, blood, sweat, tears and anguish in which
the human race finds itself. In a day when meaning is inter-
preted in terms of meaninglessness, any text involving more
than a superficial interpretation of suffering is extremely diffi-
cult to write, to say nothing of interpreting the general subject
matter.
However, in spite of the meaninglessness of life as taught
from Darwin to Camus and in modern atheistic theology, the
author believes that, in the long run, man's nature is rational,
and that he will not rest until he has asserted himself as a
rational being—even in the rationale of suffering. For, in spite
of the admitted chaos surrounding us, tempting us to likewise
disintegrate into chaos, every time a girl falls in love with a
boy, they both find they begin to have meaning for one an-
other whether they like it or not. Love is the great producer of
meaning, even in suffering. Therefore, this text is aimed at
those who have found or are finding some meaning or ratio-
nale in their life and would like to extend it to cover the
problem of suffering. After all, we are all supplied with a large
and complex organ known as the brain which is superb at
untying knots of logic and meaning and is unhappy if it has no
work to do. Presumably it was supplied us as a standard part
that is to be used.

chapter
1
Thought and Action: Today and Yesterday
Few realize how differently people today use the process of
thinking as compared to individuals of a hundred years ago.
We live in an age of unprecedented technology and, therefore,
of technological thought, so of necessity technological subject
matter must color today's thought processes more than in the
past. But this coloring of thought is not the essential factor.
The generation gap has not resulted from a mere change of
shades in thought, but by the adoption of entirely new
thought modes or processes. Radical changes in the very mech-
anism of thought have occurred.
A century ago the average thinking person considered life
and the universe to be orderly and to contain meaning. He
willingly admitted that it was often difficult to discover the
meaning and order behind things. But this fact did not disturb
him in his basis of thought, namely, that order and meaning
were there if he could only find them. Though human stupid-
ity or weakness might distort and slow down the unraveling of
meaning, the meaning was still there. The book of the universe

14
The
Paradox
of
Pain
and of life was hard to decode or read. But the average thinker
was still convinced that it was a code capable of being deci-
phered if sufficient insight and intelligence could be brought
to bear on it.
Based on such premises, huge efforts were easily justified in
the effort to decipher the mysteries of the meaning and mech-
anisms of life and the universe. The overrun from this convic-
tion can be seen today in the momentum still present in such
efforts as molecular biology and space exploration, where
laws, interpretation and meaning are being sought. However, it
is not generally recognized that large areas of today's philoso-
phy, art, music, general culture and even theology have aban-
doned the very premises which launched the huge scientific
effort which has utterly changed the whole world of technol-
ogy and science. Most practicing research scientists still work
on the premise that nature is a code, and that life is a meaning-
ful system governed by law and yielding its meaning to those
who try hard and intelligently enough. But other branches of
knowledge such as those mentioned above have more or less
arrived at the conclusion that life and the universe are, in the
last analysis, absurd and devoid of meaning. Camus is an exam-
ple of this, for he received the Nobel Prize for saying just this
in his own elegant way.
Thus, where our forefathers based their thought processes
on the premise that life and the universe were meaningful, the
generation gap in thought processes today is largely caused by
exactly the opposite premise. Sartre, Camus and other modern
thinkers have obtained the highest praise from today's intelli-
gentsia for elegantly and cleverly purveying the premise that
life, man and the universe are meaningless. It naturally follows,
therefore, that suffering is meaningless too.
Only in such a cultural atmosphere were scientific theories
such as those of Darwin able to take root and flourish both in
scientific and popular circles. For Darwin, aided by Huxley,
propagated  the view—using mountains of scientific detail as

15
Thought
and Action:
Today and
Yesterday
evidence—that all life processes arose spontaneously—without
motivation or rationale—from randomness. In the last analysis,
randomness is congruent with lack of order and, therefore,
with lack of meaning. According to this view, the mixtures of
amino acids which are supposed to have given spontaneous
birth to life showed no meaning or motivation behind them.
No volition guided them and other building blocks into the
codes of meaning which make up DNA as we know it today.
The first proteins and nucleic acids allegedly arose spontane-
ously from meaninglessness. This boils down to saying that if
there is any meaning in life or its origin at all, that meaning
must be based, in the last analysis, on sheer meaninglessness.
The same applies to life's destiny—it must be meaningless too.
And, if meaning is founded and grounded on meaninglessness,
how else can meaning be defined except as meaninglessness!
EQUATING FACT TO NON FACT
Thus, biological sciences are also mixed up in the change in
thought processes which have so radically altered the modern
world. Consider the lengths to which scientific philosophers
such as Sir Julian Huxley have gone. He teaches all who will
listen that human and social order flourish better if humans
believe in a god or support a religion of some sort, for their
belief helps them respect each other. Therefore, he advocates
the propagation of some sort of belief in a god external to
nature, even though he says that we, the enlightened ones, well
know that such a belief does not correspond to the actual facts
of nature, but is thoroughly false and deceptive. "Religion
today is imprisoned in a theistic frame of ideas," he claims,
"compelled to operate in the unrealities of the dualistic world.
In the unitary humanistic frame it acquires a new look and
new freedoms. With the aid of our new vision it has the oppor-
tunity of escaping from the theistic impasse and of playing its
proper role in the real world of unitary existence."1
Schaeffer rightly observes: "Now it may be true that it can

16
The
Paradox
of
Pain
be shown by observation that society copes better with life
through believing that there is a god. But, in that case, surely
optimistic humanism is being essentially unreasonable ... if, in
order to be optimistic, it rests upon the necessity of mankind
believing and functioning upon a lie."
In other words, human society demonstrably needs to be-
lieve in a god to function properly and optimally. "All right,"
says today's scientific philosopher, "let them carry on with
that belief if it helps them function, even though, strictly
speaking, it is a lie." Huxley has no objection to believing in
"anti-facts" (believing in. a non-existent god) if that allows
man to go on being optimistically humanist.
Consider the chaos implicit in this kind of thought pattern.
Huxley is a scientific humanist who believes in "unitary exis-
tence"—no divine existence outside human existence. This
means that there is no thought (Descartes' proof of existence)
besides human (or possibly animal) thought. Yet, the human
thought he uses is calmly allowed to be no-thought, for there
is no objection to holding a nongod to be a real god!
Surely everyone, including the rationalist, believes that man
is a rational being and that rationality is a part—an integral
part—of every man. To postulate that man, in order to func-
tion, must be nonrational is surely to destroy an integral part
of man, his rationality. This must divide and destroy his very
being, because this is believing a nonfact to be a fact just for
the sake of its usefulness. This is the position to which scien-
tific philosophy in some quarters—and they are influential
quarters—has led us. This line must destroy the very nature of
thought and rationality and, therefore, rational man himself.
Not only is this the main line in present-day intellectual
thought. The general public also thinks this way. Not only do
gifted intellectuals like Huxley, Camus and Sartre propagate
these views, but Fellini and Antonioni of Italy, Slessinger of
England and Bergman of Sweden are all actively proclaiming
the same "irrational rationalism" in their films. Thus, the view

17
Thought
and Action:
Today and
Yesterday
that life is meaningless is not merely the property of the high-
brows but is being claimed by so-called lowbrows too. Popular
mass education is seeing to this. Nobel prizes are doled out to
those who are responsible for teachings that are destroying
man, the rational one!
Former generations used as their thought basis the premise
that, if a fact is demonstrably true, then it was a suitable
starting point for further thought, belief and action. Thought
processes were rather absolute in their methodology. Today
such "naivete" is no longer permissible. In current thought, a
nonfact is allowable, without any difficulty, as a basis for
belief—if it is useful (e.g., Huxley's allowance of the divinity
concept). Thus the sharply different functions of facts and
nonfacts have been blurred in modern philosophical thought
and one will serve for the other as importunity demands. The
fact (truth) is equated with the nonfact (untruth).
HOW FAITH IS ARRIVED AT
But how can one get a man to believe in a nonfact in the same
way that our fathers believed in demonstrable facts? That is
the grand feat which modern thought has now accomplished
with Kirkegaard's aid. A new methodology was developed
especially for this one purpose—how to believe in and be con-
vinced of nonfacts and make them the basis of our faith.
The pattern is quite simple. If a man can see no rational
sense, rhyme nor reason in life and its problems, if he cannot
find any way of decoding life's mysteries, then he must no
longer seek the solutions by rational thought. He must close
his eyes, throw life's textbook into the corner, and take a
"leap of faith" based on nonfact. Thus nonfacts (blind leaps)
are now serving the purpose formerly monopolized by facts as
a foundation for thought and faith. Theology professors have
faith in faith rather than faith in a fact or a person.
It is vitally important to realize how different this method
of thought is as compared to that employed by the prophets

18
The
Paradox
of
Pain
throughout Holy Scripture. In the Acts of the Apostles Paul
the apostle is reported to have reasoned with the elders with
tears day and night about matters of faith? He was ready to
throw his faith overboard if it did not comply with the known
facts. If the body of the Lord Jesus Christ could have been
found after his death and resurrection, that one fact would
have abolished at one stroke all Christian faith and doctrine
forever. For the whole Christian position (faith) turned (and
turns) on this one outstanding fact—the Lord rose from the
dead as he had promised before his death. His body was trans-
muted from material mortality to the supramortal, to immor-
tality. The disproving of this one central fact—the pillar of
faith which was attested to by more than five hundred living
people at the time Paul wrote of the resurrection—would have
destroyed Christianity.
In those days Christians did not arrive at their faith by a
leap of faith in the dark, but by basing their thought processes
—and therefore their faith—on the fact of Christ's resurrection.
Any other way of arriving at real Christian faith stands forever
outside the testimony of Scripture as well as that of living
Christians. The methodology then, as now, remains the same if
we wish to arrive at the same assurance of faith: having
assessed the evidence for the facts, we base on them our
thought, and therefore our action and faith.
CAUSES OF THE MODERN GENERATION GAP
Much of the gap between the generations today is due to each
generation—the older and the younger—not recognizing differ-
ences in the other's basic methods of thought. Thinkers of
today, such as Camus, Sartre and Huxley, are perfectly willing
to base their beliefs and actions on nonfacts, simply because
they believe the world is absurd and devoid of rationale and
meaning. As a result, nonfacts are replacing facts in our
thought and belief processes. If the facts of history are no
longer needed as the foundation for our faith and thought, on

19
Thought
and Action:
Today and
Yesterday
what then shall we build? On nonfacts, of course! Today it is
believed that there is a logical and intellectual chasm between
faith and nonfaith and that the intellectual way across is as
pathless as an abyss. In fact, it is maintained that only a blind
leap will transport us across the chasm. Both the new theology
as well as scientific rationalism use this leap over the chasm.
Huxley arrives at his optimistic faith in humanism by allowing
his nonfactual god-belief, his believing in something or some-
one he knows not to be there, to be in fact there! Perhaps it is
here that the reason lies for older generations not under-
standing the younger!
THE EXASPERATED STUDENT
I once knew a student who disliked higher mathematics, yet
needed this knowledge to pass his examinations. After many
futile attempts to master a chapter of a rather abstruse aspect
of the subject, he threw the book into the corner of his room,
muttering that it was all bunk and nonsense—to him. But it
was not nonsense to everyone. For others had mastered the
same contents and extracted meaning from them. The diffi-
culty was that the student, being unable to comprehend the
message of the abstruse chapter, concluded that it was absurd
nonsense. His conclusion was, unfortunately for him, wrong.
Camus and others are saying, in effect, the same thing—life
is absurd and meaningless—to them. But other serious people,
although usually the first to admit that life's book is hard to
decipher, confess to having found satisfying solutions to at
least some of life's problems. And their conclusions are based
on the facts given by events of history such as the resurrection
of Christ. And more and more problems and seeming para-
doxes may be resolved into order by the careful and logical
application of thought.
THE AGE OF REASON
Our much-prized age of reason has regressed into an age of

20
The
Paradox
of
Pain
nonreason. The age of scientific philosophy has reverted to an
age of non- or anti-philosophy. What else can we conclude if
leaders of modern thought say that they're willing to believe in
the existence of a god who they really don't think exists, in
order to hold onto their optimistic humanism? Learning and
philosophy are dependent upon the communication of mean-
ing and message. Is it any wonder that communication be-
tween man and man, generation and generation, is breaking
down because the message of the communication allegedly has
been found to be meaningless? In this way philosophy today
has become, in fact, an antiphilosophy, just as the age of rea-
son has become an age of unreasonable blind leaps of faith in a
pitch-black unreasonable and absurd world—of the kind
described by Camus.
The whole situation as seen by our present world philoso-
phy can be well summed up in these lines by Hans Arp, one of
the original members of the Dada group:
The head downward
the legs upward
he tumbles into the bottomless
from whence he came
like a dish covered with hair
like a four-legged sucking chair
like a deaf echo trunk
half full half empty
the head downward
the legs upward
he tumbles into the bottomless
from whence he came
Francis Schaeffer comments: "On the basis of modern
man's methodology, whether expressed in philosophy, art,
literature or theology, there can be no other ending than
this—man tumbling into the bottomless."

21
Thought
and Action:
Today and
Yesterday
PICASSO IN CHICAGO
Two years ago I was standing in front of the Civic Center in
Chicago where stands a huge abstract sculpture by Picasso, for
which the mayor of Chicago paid a large sum of money. While
I was determining from which angles it would be best to
photograph this piece of art, a well-mannered Chicagoan quiet-
ly asked why I was going to all the trouble. I said I wanted to
get the effect and meaning in real life faithfully reproduced on
film. His answer was quite interesting. He said that since in his
opinion the work carried and expressed no communicable
meaning in real life, it was a waste of time and good film to try
to reproduce it in a photo!
ATHEISTIC CLERGYMEN
Picasso again demonstrates the tendency of modern art to
detach itself from the realities and facts of life and, in doing
so, to lose meaning for many people. Theology, the proverbial
laggard in modern intellectual activity, has followed philoso-
phy, art and music, albeit at a distance of some years. I spoke
to a young German clergyman recently just before he was to
conduct a confirmation service. In all earnestness he informed
me that he, as a pastor, believed that there was no God behind
the universe, although he would not yet dare to say so openly
in his church. He believed in an atheistic theology. Theology
being the science of the study of divinity or God, we have
arrived at the position of a pastor studying the science of
no-God, which we may equate to nothingness, for a god that
does not exist is nothing. So the conclusion was that he had
spent seven years studying nothingness! I pointed out this
rather elementary fact to him. He retreated in some confusion,
saying that I had misunderstood him. He did not say, he ex-
plained that he believed in an atheistic theology, but rather, in
an a-theistic theology. This was quite different, he said, for it
meant that he could continue in his theology without God-
that is, a-theistically rather than atheisticallyl One wonders

22
The
Paradox
of
Pain
what sort of a shepherd of his flock such a young man will
make when he has to comfort the dying and lay hands on the
sick and those wracked with pain.
CONSEQUENCES
But why bother to go into all this theory and philosophy? If
there is no meaning behind the universe and life, why try to
find any? Why thresh so much straw when there is such a lot
of wheat about?
The reason is simple. Man is a rational being and cannot,
therefore, be happy without exercising his rationality. To ask
the rational being to live in and for meaninglessness or non-
rationality is to ask the rational being to destroy himself. He
goes into despair, for which, apparently, he was not designed.
For he will not rest, if he is honest with himself, until he leaves
the despair by replacing meaninglessness with meaning and
order. This applies to the meaning of suffering too.
If contemporary rational thinkers—being rational beings-
see injustice, war, suffering, violence and apparent meaning-
lessness on every side, they cannot rest until they have found a
rationale of some sort for it all. Huxley admits that he is
prepared to be an optimistic humanist on the basis of believing
in a nonexistent god—one he knows not to be there, but whose
presence and existence we must postulate to keep ourselves
happy. But the use of a nonrationality, a lie, a nonfact, to
keep a man "rational" and happy, will surely destroy the very
basis of rationality!
No, if rational man is to remain rational and not destroy the
integral part of himself called rationality, he must use fact
"like it is" to find some meaning for all the apparent chaos
and meaninglessness which surround him. How can he ration-
ally explain a beautiful young mother dying of cancer while
her child is being born? How can he avoid despair on seeing
men, women and children mutilated by war, hunger and pesti-
lence? These are realities. Camus shrugged his shoulders at

23
Thought
and Action:
Today and
Yesterday
such sights, sensitive as he was, and saw things exceedingly
clearly, and said that the world and life are meaninglessjok.es
—absurd. They represent no code, they carry no meaning.
Jesus Christ saw similar suffering and spoke of the beggar
Lazarus covered with sores and lying at the rich man's gate. He
had mercy and compassion on the beggar. But he did not leave
it at that and shrug it all off, just as if life and Lazarus were
meaningless victims of a harsh, absurd and cruel world. He
interpreted Lazarus' apparently meaningless suffering—and the
rich man's riches too—and told us in no uncertain terms in
Luke 16:20-25 what they meant.
But today's teachers of Christianity have not given con-
vincing answers to the modern "meaningless" theorists, even
though Christ's interpretation of the problem is on hand if
they care to read and believe it. The fact is, of course, that
Christ's interpretation of Lazarus' suffering, and of other prob-
lems involving suffering, is not generally accepted today. The
real reason for the unwillingness to accept his interpretation is
coupled to an unwillingness to accept the full fact and impact
of resurrection as evidenced in Christ's own body. If we really
believed in Christ's and our own resurrection as unshakable
facts, we wouldn't have the slightest difficulty in accepting
Christ's interpretation of the "mystery" or apparent "mean-
inglessness" of Lazarus' suffering. We have become so used to
equating nonfact with fact that we find it difficult to rigidly
follow the logical consequences of believing in a real fact! For,
in Lazarus' case the introduction of one overlooked fact,
namely, personal resurrection, reduced the hopelessness and
meaninglessness of his sufferings to meaningfulness. Of course,
if the "fact" of resurrection is, in reality, one of our famous
"nonfacts," then we must shrug our shoulders on seeing Laza-
rus and mutter with Camus, "Absurd!"
Christ, however, kept steadily before him as he explained
Lazarus' case the fact of personal resurrection, which he was
shortly to experience in his own body. To the humanist by-

24
The
Paradox
of
Pain
Stander, tied up in Huxley's ideas about "unitary existence,"
Lazarus as he lay there full of sores was a senseless cruelty, an
example of callous torture of innocent humanity. But if the
promise of recompense and correction—in fact, the mighty
recompense of resurrection—is a fact, then, of course, mean-
inglessness resolves itself to meaning. For surely if a short term
of suffering is the method by which eternal nonsuffering or
bliss is to be obtained, then Lazarus was in for a bargain—to
put it mildly—and reasonableness is restored to apparent un-
reasonableness.
The important thing is that by inserting an overlooked fact
into our sequence of thought, chaos is often reduced to order,
and meaninglessness to meaning. What modern philosophers
have been busy doing—indeed, philosophers of all time have
practiced the same art—is removing by unbelief certain facts
from the sad case of this suffering world, facts given us by God
himself to enable us to handle the problem intellectually, fust
as the addition of an overlooked fact (resurrection) brought
meaning into the meaningless in the case of Lazarus' suffering,
so the removal of some fact will reduce it from meaning and
rationality to meaninglessness and irrationality. We interpret
and diagnose on the basis of all the facts of a case, that is, we
appoint meaning in the light of all relevant facts. But, remove
the facts, even the revealed facts of the Bible, and meaningless-
ness and inability to diagnose the case must result because the
resulting picture is incomplete.
MAN CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT RATIONALITY
I have risked writing this book—an attempt to find meaning in
a world of chaos and pain—for one main reason. It is obviously
useless to argue reasonably with anyone who does not believe
in meaning and, therefore, in reason. Many modern theolo-
gians and philosophers are in just this position. But this is not
the case with a majority of the younger generation. For they
are increasingly discovering that they cannot live with the doc-

25
Thought
and Action:
Today and
Yesterday
trines popular in their own generation. Therefore they are
seeking something better, something more in line with their
experience. This is one of the reasons for the almost universal
rebellion against the "establishment," the "establishment"
which preaches meaninglessness today as well as that of the
"status quo" of a century ago.
One reason for this rebellion against and dissatisfaction with
the universal atmosphere of meaninglessness is quite unex-
pected. Young people, perhaps firm believers in Camus and
Sartre, are finding that they cannot help falling in love with
one another, just as their forefathers did. Girls are still pretty
and boys are still attracted to their beauty of body and
psyche. They become aware of the remarkable fact that falling
in love with each other, in spite of what they have learned
about the absurdity of everything, is not so absurd. In fact, it
is giving their lives a totally new meaning whether they like it
or not! Love is a new, hitherto neglected, fact and it trans-
forms their lives, giving them purpose where they had imag-
ined there was no purpose. The addition of one fact—human
love is a fact, not a nonfact—to their lives has resolved some of
life's meaninglessness to meaning.
The fact of love had been overlooked, but it now must be
taken into account in the formula for life, just as in the case of
the fact of resurrection which altered the equation dealing
with Lazarus' suffering. The fact of love brings new rationality
and new meaning, just as other facts—beauty in nature, order
in the biological cell, chemical laws in biochemistry, and elec-
tromagnetic laws in valency help us see order where pre-
viously, without knowledge of these facts, meaninglessness
reigned.
Because so many of the younger generation are finding their
way back to rationality against the strong current of propa-
ganda for the doctrine of absurdity (as evidenced by the giving
of Nobel Prizes to its propagators), I have written this at-
tempted apologetic on the problem of suffering, which bothers

26
The
Paradox
of
Pain
so many thinkers as being irrational and therefore meaningless.
To do this I have tried to add overlooked facts to the formula.
It is my sincere hope that the views on suffering presented
here do not turn out to be glib or facile. Anyone born during
the First World War and who has spent his young manhood in
the Second World War has certainly been confronted with the
anguish of the problem of pain, injustice and death in the
prime of life. He has had the advantage of all this experience,
in addition to having experienced the woes to which each man
is heir, regardless of the period in which he was born. The
author does not claim to be any exception. He hopes that the
trials and dreadful sights to which he and his generation have
been exposed have turned up new facts and experiences which,
when added to the equation of suffering, will help to reduce it
a little more to meaningfulness.
The following, then, is an attempt to enable us to regard the
problem of suffering and evil without losing our nature as
rational beings. For to lose our rationality is to lose our
humanity, or, as Schaeffer would say, our "mannishness."
There are, of course, gaps in any arguments of the type
presented here. There may be holes in the logic. The author
thinks he sees some of them. But the whole work is an attempt
to show that the doctrines of despair, which are the fashion
today, are intellectually untenable and that they inevitably
destroy man as a rational being, reducing him to the level of
the brute. They arise by our neglecting certain facts of the
problem. If we persist in them they will totally destroy our
humanity. If the opposite doctrines, which are set out here—
albeit imperfectly—are pursued, they will integrate our human-
ity and make us, in the words of the Bible, "whole" both in
mind as well as in body and spirit.
IS THERE A PLACE FOR "BLIND FAITH"?
Someone will be sure to object to this kind of presentation,
saying that, after all, the heavy emphasis on reason and ration-

27
Thought
and Action:
Today and
Yesterday
ality excludes the exercise of real faith as the evidence of
things not seen but hoped for.
This kind of objection would be valid if one believed that
reason is faith. But we have not said that. We have said that
evidence and facts should lead to faith and that nonfacts
should not. To build faith on a sound basis we must have
sound facts and not flabby nonfacts or meaninglessness. When
the facts of a case have been established beyond doubt, for
example, that Christ (in this case) did, as an historical fact, rise
from the dead on the third day, then we can start building
faith on that fact. For, by being resurrected after death, as he
had promised before dying, he proved that he had knowledge
which ordinary mortals do not possess about the after-death
state. In fact, the predicted and fulfilled resurrection proves
that he had divine foreknowledge, and his words bore the
weight attributable to divinity. If his words on resurrection
have thus been proved to be divine, then surely what he says
about me, my death, and my resurrection by his power will be
divine. These divine facts and words allow me sufficient basis
on which to build my faith by trusting in and acting on them.
This kind of building on divine evidence and facts, this trusting
of them and their author,is nothing less and nothing more than
biblical faith.
All that this really means is that we are objecting to "blind"
faith—leaps in the dark. I am well aware that at times I have no
facts or evidence to build upon—probably as Lazarus had no
evidence as he lay in misery. I am completely at sea in regard
to belief and faith in those difficult situations when I do not
know where I am nor what I should do or think. And I am
often in that anguished position.
But it is when I am in such deep waters that I take a new
look at the facts of divine illumination, help and guidance that
I have previously experienced. Looking back, I see how God
has kept his good hand over me, even in allowing apparent
catastrophes. Recalling past facts and evidence, I base my faith

28
The
Paradox
of
Pain
for the future and the present on them and so reestablish trust
(or faith in him) for the present where I cannot yet see the
needed evidence. But I cannot base trust on nothing, nothing-
ness or meaninglessness. I cannot leap in the dark. I trusted
him in the past; he helped. Is that not fact and evidence that
the same will be true of the present and the future, even in
ultimate catastrophe? These facts strengthen me to trust him,
the great personal Fact, now where I see no evidence. Such
faith is by no means blind. It is based on a hindsight experi-
ence of him, on facts and on reason. But it is not based on
nothing or nonfacts and therefore unaccountableness. Even in
the dark of tribulation and the unknown my wavering faith is
held steady by being founded upon him and his accomplished
work on the cross, plus my past personal experience of his
keeping faith with me. This is the basis for a trust founded
upon solid fact. On this basis we treat the problem of suffer-
ing.

chapter
2
The Pink Professor
When I was a student of natural sciences in England, some of
our lectures were given by a professor who had marked leftist
tendencies. His lectures at the university were the poorest we
ever endured. He'd bring a load of scientific journals into the
lecture hall, open them, apparently at random, and then,
equally at random, just talk. But he was a gentleman and was
kind, in his reserved way, to all of us.
A complete transformation took place in the evenings when
he went into town and stood on a soapbox to harangue the
masses with the verve and skill of the convinced revolutionary.
He was nobly rewarded by his leftist political friends when
they gained control of the country, for he soon became a peer,
with the title of "lord," and was appointed an important
administrator of a big university.
This professor was, in common with many Marxist theorists,
a convinced and militant atheist. One day he came into the
laboratory, unnoticed by me, as I was talking to another stu-
dent about things other than purely materialistic science. I

30
The
Paradox
of
Pain
remarked that, not surprisingly, the study of matter would
probably yield only information about matter. Transmaterial
matters might exist, but they would be overlooked by such
methods. One could not expect to pick up ultraviolet light
with a film sensitive only to infrared light. But even if infrared
paper showed nothing that would not prove that no ultraviolet
wavelengths existed. I saw no reason not to believe in God
merely because our instruments had not detected him. Perhaps
they were not on the same wavelength.
Overhearing these remarks, our professor exploded. "It
really is a mystery to me," he said, "how otherwise intelligent
people can say they believe in any god, let alone in a good and
wise one, whom they call a person. We can explain the whole
universe and all of life without resorting to the outdated and
unnecessary postulate of a god behind it all. Chance and long
time spans will do all that your theologians imagine he did
without ever appealing to such nonsense as the 'Old Man in the
Skies.' "
He continued: "It really is beyond my comprehension that
intelligent people today could be still taken in by the same old
drivel. I can understand cannibals in the jungle talking as you
do. But not a student of the natural sciences in the twentieth
century. It is bad enough to have people believing theoretically
in a god behind things. But you people are much worse. You
believe you have a personal sort of friendship with this god of
yours and think you will therefore get preferential treatment
from him. I can understand, perhaps, some old people saying
they believe in some sort of mysterious spirit when they see a
sunrise, a beautiful face, a rose or an orchid. But it is proof
positive of lack in intelligence on the part of those same peo-
ple when they do not take the time to see the other side of the
coin. They have not the courage to see the other side and
boldly throw out their mythical gods—the cowards!"
Having switched into his soapbox mood, our professor was
in dead earnest—and angry. "People must be lacking in IQ if

31
The
Pink
Professor
they do not see the other side of the picture which wipes out
all the sunset and beauty stuff." He continued by talking
about the cat stalking the mouse and playing with it, letting it
totter away half dead, and then grabbing it again at the last
minute in its horrible claws. Then, when the poor mouse did
not have the strength to provide any more fun for the cat, it
squeezed the life out of its tattered body, biting its head off
with a juicy crunch, and purring with delight at the evening's
entertainment. "It is marvelous that your intelligent, almighty,
all-loving and kind god prepared both the mouse in its helpless-
ness and the cat with its talon strength and cruel mentality.
That is a beautiful proof of the goodness of your god," he
said, with a look of profound scorn in my direction.
I shrank into my corner of the laboratory, but he had not
finished with me. "What about the young mother dying of
cancer, her body stinking with decay before they take the
baby from her and put her in her coffin? Is that your proof of
the great Creator who made all things well—all things bright
and beautiful? The Lord God made them all," he hissed. "And
what about your capitalists who have worn down the working
masses for centuries and built your churches to help you do it?
We are going to alter all that—and quickly, believe me!
"What disgusts me," he said, "is the rank hypocrisy of it
all." After a pause to regain his poise, he added, "What about
all the agony—the agony of the father and children left behind
when they bury the mother? What about the lifetimes of
hunger suffered by the poor in India and Russia? Did your
good god create all that as well as the sunrises and the laughing
faces?" Looking grimly at me, he leaned across the table and
said slowly, "Because, if he did—if he did make the disgusting,
the cruel and the nauseating, as well as the beautiful—then I,
for one, would believe him to be a devil and not a god. Only a
devil could make the apparently beautiful and then mock us
all with the anguish of the disgusting. But, as I am not so
medieval as to believe either in devils, or gods, for that matter,

32
The
Paradox
of
Pain
I regard the whole argument as a pure wanton waste of time,
not worthy of mention in a scientific laboratory."
Having unburdened his soul, he regained some of his pro-
fessorial aplomb and smilingly looked around for any answers
that might be forthcoming. I mumbled something to the effect
that his was only one side of the question. Other great people
had no difficulty in maintaining an entirely opposite view.
"Let us leave out the question of wars and suffering caused
by man himself," he said. "We might explain problems caused
by man directly as due to his not being evolved far enough
away from his animal ancestors. If we wait long enough, he
will evolve higher and get better. Let us leave that and look at
another field to which no one has ever honestly turned with a
reply that was satisfactory to me. What about the refinement
of torture we see all around us which has nothing whatever to
do with man's nature? Take the designed torture we can all see
in the transmission of the malarial parasite. It shows signs of
what looks like careful, thoughtful planning with the single
purpose of plaguing and torturing the host animal—or man. To
me the whole system looks like a remarkable sort of planning,
if a good god worked it all out. As I said before, if you want
plan behind the universe and life, this sort of setup and plan-
ning seems to show a good and a bad, a kindly and a vindictive
planner all in one—a god who is a devil."
Musing, he continued, "No, I just cannot believe this reli-
gious stuff myself. It really is just too ridiculous. My intelli-
gence and my common sense force me to reject the whole bag
of nonsense. I am near enough to being a nihilist, you tell me.
But I should become an absolute nihilist if I were to force
myself to believe in a god who is a devil. An almighty god,
such as you believe in, and a good god, just could not show so
many evidences of what appear to be thoughtful, planned
goodnesses, such as sunrises and other beauties, and at the
same time so many signs of cold, calculated, intelligent sadism.
If you were able to develop sufficient logic," he said, scorn-

33
The
Pink
Professor
fully addressing himself directly to me, "you would have
recognized long ago that your views lead directly to nihilism.
Can you imagine any supreme, almighty, personal being, who
was at the same time all-wise and all-good and yet frightfully
vindictive and bad, planning all sorts of plagues and diseases as
well as the beauty of the rising sun and healthy body? It just
does not make sense. It is plain bunk." He turned from me in
contempt.
There was quiet for a short while. Then he began once
more: "Of course, you people can always try to get around the
difficulty by actually assuming a devil, who surprised the all-
knowing and the all-powerful, almighty one by upsetting his
applecart when he was not looking. I suppose you people attri-
bute the disease, cancer, war, exploitation of the workers, and
all the rest of this world's woes to a devil, do you not? But do
you not realize that if god were almighty and good, wishing
us—the so-called creatures of his hand—well, he must have neu-
tralized the machinations of your devil before he got to work
with his hosts of wicked angels in which you, no doubt, be-
lieve? Then the devil could not have been a source of devilry,
could he? Of course, if your god is not almighty with respect
to the devil, then there is only one thing to say about him: he
is not god at all any more. So you destroy him this way if you
do not destroy him the other way. If god cannot get even with
the devil, then the devil must be a god too; and we are once
more reduced to the primitive ideas of warring gods and devils
in heaven and hell. You are not suggesting that we revert to
ideas like that, are you? They held up intellectual progress and
emancipation for centuries. I shall consider you an enemy of
all true progress if you have the effrontery to inform me in a
scientific laboratory that you believe in that sort of trash," he
said, looking hard at me.
I am afraid most of us were rather like the proverbial rabbit
when confronted by the snake—transfixed. No answers seemed
to be able to formulate themselves in our brains. After all, our

34
The
Paradox
of
Pain
professor was a learned man. He was not just repeating slogans
learned in Marxist circles. Obviously he was thoroughly con-
vinced of his views. His extreme seriousness made him willing
to stand up on a soapbox and confront the mob—an act which
must have been rather humiliating for a professor of his stand-
ing. Although he was almost useless as a lecturer and professor
in the classroom and experimental laboratory, we all respected
him as a man, even though not all of us liked his convictions
on political or religious matters.
While we were thinking about these things, he quietly
started again. "I used to say," he continued, "that I was an
agnostic and therefore could say nothing for certain about
religious matters. But now that I am getting more mature and
experienced, I have come to the conclusion that I am in reality
a total atheist. I have been forced to the point where I do not
believe in any god, either good or bad. That is, I believe nei-
ther in a good god nor in a bad devil. Such beliefs raise more
difficulties than they remove. They just complicate matters.
So, today, I just leave religious subjects outside my realm of
thought—like alchemy. And I do not like people raising them
in the classroom either. They only confuse, being highly unsci-
entific and subjective. I do not need to blur my intellectual
horizon with such primitive methods of thought any longer.
The Marxists are not altogether wrong when they call religion
'opium for the people.' It is just that; it muddles their
thoughts, blurs their vision and, because they then can see
clearly no more, renders them an easy prey for the capitalists
who are just waiting to exploit them for their own benefit."
THE SPOKESMAN OF MANY THINKING PEOPLE
I have never forgotten that afternoon in the laboratory. Cer-
tainly our professor had thought more about these matters
than we students had. Moreover, he understood the problems
of the ordinary thinking men and, when he wished, could be
an  excellent  spokesman  for  them.  Because  he understood

35
The
Pink
Professor
them, he could sway them when he spoke. He never spoke
with such conviction on cold, matter-of-fact chemical matters,
but no one could get across ideas like he when revolution and
Marxism came up.
The subject raised that afternoon in the laboratory is the
very question occupying the minds of many thinking people.
It looms large in the life of the person who, though satiated
with life's material goods and apparently concerned only with
pleasure and prosperity, is brought face to face with life's
cruelties and suffering every day in his newspaper and on radio
and television news, and is jolted by what is happening around
him in his own life. If God is almighty—and if he is God, he
must be almighty—why doesn't he stop all this chaos, all these
wars, all the unrighteousnesses, injustice, misery and suffering
in this world? Why did he ever let them start? Mere men
everywhere are bending all their efforts to do what they can to
stop it all. But, fortunately or unfortunately, men are not
almighty and therefore cannot reach their goal.
Years ago a student friend crippled with polio told me, "If
you want me to believe in your God, I shall expect him first of
all to make a better job of the world we live in—and of me." I
spent a good deal of time with him and he was apparently glad
to listen to me. In my student enthusiasm I explained not only
the Christian way of salvation by Christ's works, but also the
intricacies of prophecy and the end of the age. Afterward he
turned to me and said that now that he knew the way, he
didn't need to do anything about it. For, when he saw the end
coming, he would quickly accept God's way and be all right
forever! A year or two later he was stricken with a stroke one
Sunday morning while shaving. He died in seconds, without a
sound. His wife found him an hour or so later.
If God loves us men and women, as the Bible assumes he
does, why doesn't he end all misery and immediately set up a
workable, orderly system such as most men of good will would
like and for which they are striving? Doesn't he care for us any

36
The
Paradox
of
Pain
longer? If he doesn't care and has forgotten us, why should we
care about him? Because he has allowed evil to exist along
with good, thus apparently compromising himself in his omni-
potence, many thinking people despair of an answer, or be-
come atheists, just as my professor had done.
THE PROBLEM IS NOT NEW
Before further consideration of this question, we must remind
ourselves that it is by no means new. Some have the mistaken
idea that they are very modern if they handle the question as
my professor did. They think that it stamps them as being
advanced thinkers in having recognized that mankind is facing
a new problem—and that they have solved it in a particularly
new way.
Of course, this is not the case. When thistles and the thorns
sprang up after mankind's first couple had fallen from the
paradise of God by disobedience, they probably asked the
same sort of question. Why indeed did God allow all this?
Does he no longer love us and care for us? It looks as if he
does not, for the very ground we cultivate does not bring forth
its harvest any more. The birth of Cain was probably accom-
panied by pain, which was capped when he became his
brother's murderer. How can that grisly history coincide with
God's goodness and omnipotence?
Job could have asked the same kind of questions when the
messengers came to him, one after another, each reporting a
worse catastrophe to his family. It got so bad that Job cursed
the day he had been born. He lost everything, including his
health. Even his wife deserted him, telling him to curse God
and die. How could Job believe in a holy, perfect, omnipotent
God, concerned about him and his family, when all the catas-
trophes about him pointed in the opposite direction? He is
God. He could have stopped it if he had wanted to. Did he
want to find a way out for Job? and if not, was he a sadist?
Did he still care about Job in allowing all this happen to the

37
The
Pink
Professor
poor innocent man? The testimony of God and man was that
Job was perfect—and innocent. Yet it all happened, and no
explanation was forthcoming—until right at the end of the
book of Job. If God did not care about poor, innocent, perfect
Job, why should Job love God?
It is true of course, that there was still a great deal in Job
and Adam's worlds which pointed to God's care in spite of
thorns and thistles and catastrophes. But it is also true that
there is just as much in our world. At the beginning of Adam's
career the picture pointing to God's care and love was clear. In
that earlier world everything indicated only God's care and
omnipotence. But now Adam was outside paradise in a world
of murderous and slain sons, thistles and thorns. Job had lost
his family and fortune as well as the heart of his wife. The
picture had become mixed and was full of chaos, full of cir-
cumstances which made it hard for the actors in those plays to
believe in God's care and omnipotence. Many things now
pointed away from this direction, and the area of God's order
had retreated into quite a minute spot on the stage of life. So
the same sort of contradictions arose in Adam and Job's times
as they do now. Thus, the problem is by no means new. It is as
old as mankind.
Accordingly, the question presents itself as follows: "Why
should we be asked to believe and trust in a good God, thereby
flying in the face of all—or at least a good deal of—the con-
temporary evidence?" One physicist put it as follows: "Why
does God value faith in him so much as to make it the very
condition, according to the Christian way of life, of entry into
his kingdom? It seems most unfair to me. For faith means
believing right in the face of contradictory evidence. Faith, to
me, is merely the result of forcing myself to believe and trust
in God's goodness and care when a goodly part of the evidence
on hand leads me to reject such trust. Most preachers seem to
preach faith as though it were the faculty of believing some-
thing which is not true—forcing oneself to believe and act in

38
The
Paradox
of
Pain
spite of evidence to the contrary. Why should God value a
faith which acts against all common sense and evidence? Such
action short circuits one of our highest faculties: the ability to
weigh evidence and then act on it. Faith believes what is can-
not see; it accepts evidence it cannot weigh. Why should God
make as a condition of entering his presence and kingdom our
ability to short circuit, abuse, and render null and void the
very logic and evidence-weighing faculty with which the Bible
says he endowed us? God gave us logical ability. Why does he
demand that we act and think illogically in faith as a condition
of entering his kingdom?"
To return to our first line of approach to this problem, then
the question is: If the same Being planned both the good and
the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the sadistic and the loving,
then all serious, logical, reasoning thought about him becomes
impossible with our thinking faculties.
ANOTHER APPROACH
What does the Bible teach about this apparent state of illogic?
Remarkably enough, neither the New nor the Old Testament
sees any illogic in the situation! For example, in Romans 1,
which deals with this question in detail, Paul the apostle
teaches in a clear and uncompromising manner that creation
doesn't show the slightest sign of contradiction in these
matters. It gives only one plain line of thought: that the whole
creation reveals that God is a glorious, omnipotent Creator—
and nothing else. Paul says, "Because that which may be
known of God is manifest in them; for God have shewed it
unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of
the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that
are made [nature], even his eternal power and Godhead; so
that they are without excuse."1
Thus, the Bible teaches, as do many ancient sources, that
when a man regards nature, he is seeing, as in a mirror, the
Creator. The Bible doesn't ignore the apparent problems of

39
The
Pink
Professor
war, disease, poverty, pain and chaos. It says quite a lot about
these subjects and even suggests cures for some of them. But it
does not see them in the light in which my professor saw
them. The Bible does not think that these things cloud the
issue about the Creator, as do many thinking people. Rather, it
teaches that the man who regards nature as it is today and
does not see the power of a glorious, invisible Godhead in
nature—with no clouding of the issue by the mixture of good
and evil we all see—that man is "without excuse" for not
believing! This is surely a rather strong pill to the modern
intellectual who pleads intellectual difficulties for his disbelief
in God.
Adding insult to injury, the Bible goes one step further in
teaching that not only should a man see the Godhead, the
glorious Creator, when he sees mixed nature, but, seeing it, he
should be filled with thanks to God, glorifying him for reveal-
ing his wisdom and power in the creation. So, apparently I
should have told my professor that he was not only "without
excuse" but also a "thankless" person—if I had been ready to
give him a biblical view of himself. Somehow, I don't think he
would have appreciated that! Certainly at that time I did not
have the necessary maturity to say such a thing without
causing a major incident—and a lot of misunderstanding.
Paul continues the argument by maintaining that a sense of
wonder and reverence should fill every observer of the present
confused creation. Offsetting this wonder should be a sense of
our own vanity and foolishness, pervading us and all who do
not see the creation in this light. Finally, all these feelings on
observing God's handiwork should make the observer a "wor-
shiper" (glorifying him as God). If I had told my professor
that he had all the evidence necessary to make him fall on his
knees (or face) and worship God, undoubtedly he would have
thought me a lunatic.
But Paul insists that if those reactions to the creation don't
take place in us, we are abusing our reasoning power. As a

40
The
Paradox
of
Pain
consequence of this abuse we shall become totally unable, in
the course of time, to use our higher reasoning faculties and
logical powers. Paul expresses this thought by saying our
"heart" will become "darkened" and our "imagination" will
become "vain." Also, he maintains that, under such circum-
stances, even sexual morality will die in us. Men will begin to
sexually abuse their own bodies—homosexuality will arise, and
normal sex relations will be stifled. Certainly my professor
would not have appreciated this step of the argument in the
least, for he appeared to be a moral man.
In summary, at least parts of Holy Scripture do not appear
to sympathize greatly with the intellectual difficulties dis-
cussed here. The Bible says a look at nature as it is should be
enough to make man a convinced, thankful, worshiping be-
liever. The question remains: why does the Bible take this
stand, seeing that at least some thoughtful modern people in
the Western world today have found that the observation of
the universe has by no means made them worshipers or be-
lievers. (Here I am not thinking of Taoists, etc.) On the con-
trary, those who have studied the universe in the natural sci-
ences and other disciplines have often felt the most difficulties
with respect to worshiping and believing. Indeed, quite a
majority have simply turned away from any thought of God.
Investigation of "that which is seen" has not revealed to
them "the unseen" but has often turned them from believing
in anything divine and unseen. In no way has it made them
worshipers of some unseen Being. For what they've seen shows
so many paradoxes and apparent contradictions that, judging
the unseen by what they see, it becomes either ridiculous or
superfluous for further serious thought.
Since intellectuals conclude that if the seen can give no
credible picture of the unseen—if there is an unseen—being a
Christian is synonymous with being a third-rate intellectual.
They assume that the Christian is intellectually incapable of
comprehending the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in

41
The
Pink
Professor
the allegedly rather naïve and intellectually impossible Chris-
tian faith.
Clearly, the basic difficulty confronting both the Christian
and the intellectual in aligning matters of belief with matters
of the intellect is intimately tied up with the question of the
origin of evil. If we could account for the origin of evil with-
out impugning God's omnipotence, love and holiness, then we
would be able to go a long way toward solving these difficul-
ties. A future chapter deals with this basic problem of the
origin of evil.

chapter
3
Fallacies in the Atheistic and Agnostic Positions
Are there any really irreconcilable intellectual difficulties in-
volved in believing in God, or are they only imaginary when
carefully examined? I don't believe the ancients were on a
lower intellectual plane than we moderns. Even though we
have excelled them in technology, we see no evidence of intel-
lectual lethargy on their part. Yet, perhaps a considerable per-
centage of them believed that the universe showed God's
handiwork, whereas most moderns do not.
This difference in approach is not in any way a reflection on
the total intellectual capacity of either the moderns or the
ancients. Rather, it is a reflection of the increasing mass of
knowledge with which every human being in every succeeding
generation has to contend. An ancient could have been a
master of all that was then known in the combined fields of
physics, chemistry, mathematics, geometry, medicine, biology
and algebra. Today the mass of knowledge is so great that no
human brain can possibly cope with even a fraction of it.
Therefore, a fragmentation of knowledge has occurred. But

44
The
Paradox
of
Pain
this massive increase has tended to take place in the watertight
compartments of the various disciplines into which knowledge
has become divided in order to fit the capacity of single brains.
The result is that a synthesis of all modern knowledge is rapid-
ly becoming less and less possible. This perfectly natural ten-
dency has had some far-reaching consequences which must be
examined before one considers the question of the origin of
evil, since the two problems belong together.
Just over a century ago Darwin, Wallace and Huxley pro-
pounded the view that long time spans and chance reactions,
coupled with natural selection, would account for all visible
living nature without the necessity of involving the volition of
any divinity. Huxley thought he could prove this with his
appeal to probability laws and his famous six monkeys typing
at random for millions of years on six typewriters. The mathe-
matical formulae for the possibility of this view were bandied
around and the principle was accepted as true. The natural and
logical consequence of the view was that the postulate of
divinity behind nature was rendered superfluous. Immense
time spans plus chance and natural selection would do the
work hitherto attributed to God. Thus the world of science
became a world depending on chance as a direct result of the
views of these men (though Darwin himself did not see that
far).
The patient work of scientists simultaneously competent in
several disciplines—biology, mathematics and chemistry—has
been required to show that Darwin's basic assumptions were
chemically, mathematically and biologically untenable.1 The
vastness of today's scientific knowledge makes it obvious that
it is a rare scientist who is able to do original work in all these
fields simultaneously. As a result, until recently no synthesis
between the various fields had been achieved. Instead, water-
tight compartmentalization had developed. Biologists were un-
able to test the mathematics of the problem in hand, and the
chemists could not critically assess the biologists' work.

45
Fallacies
in the Atheistic
and Agnostic
Positions
The biologists announced with all due thunder that they
could replace God with chance and long time spans plus
natural selection. But no mathematicians sufficiently versed in
chemistry and biology were forthcoming to assess mathe-
matically and thermodynamically what the biologists were
shouting about. As a result, one discipline, in this case biology,
has been building on false chemical, thermodynamic and
mathematical premises. There was no one to check them. The
author has written elsewhere of the catastrophic development
of this kind of compartmentalization of science.2
Thus, in ancient times learned men possessed a good,
synthetic, overall view on life and the then-known universe.
Although there were certainly errors, grave errors sometimes,
in what they believed, yet, viewing the universe as a whole,
they saw it as the product of an omnipotent divinity with a
creative will. They knew that certain forms of order could
only be attributed to personality and intelligence, and they
proceeded to apply this general principle to the ordered uni-
verse.
In modern times, however, things have been drastically
different in the realm of scientific and intellectual matters. It
has become so difficult to synthesize knowledge to form a
coherent whole that very few biologists studying Darwinism
(or any other specialized subject) could check his mathe-
matical or chemical assumptions. Thus, when Darwin and
Huxley announced that living nature showed nothing of the
divine in it or its origin, allegedly demonstrating their
announcement with quite simple and apparently sound mathe-
matical formulae, men who were being raised in compart-
mentalized knowledge simply believed them. Darwin's actual
doctrine was very simple, and highly comfortable to those who
considered the idea of a God to be primitive.
Therefore, ancient intellectuals with their simple but rela-
tively synthesized knowledge attained a total view of the uni-
verse and its problems within their limited scientific knowl-

46
The
Paradox
of
Pain
edge. As a result, they could believe what the apostle Paul said
about the universe demonstrating the nature of the Godhead.
It was reasonable, simple, all-embracing and clear. It agreed
with what they knew about mathematics and biology—even
though the idea of spontaneous generation, then widely be-
lieved, might have offered difficulties on the question of crea-
tion.
What is not generally realized is that modern man could
believe, as did the ancients, that the universe shows God's
nature and still remain within the limits of all the scientific
knowledge gained since ancient times—if his knowledge had
not become so great that it had to be wrongly compart-
mentalized. For when the various compartments are carefully
examined, the fact emerges that each still speaks one language
today, as it did thousands of years ago: that "the heavens
declare the glory of God," in spite of the mixture of good and
bad.3
In spite of this surrounding evil and the mixed picture show-
ing both evil and good, we can believe in a good loving, per-
sonal, holy and compassionate God behind it all. There never
was any difficulty about believing he made the good. But what
about the evil? Is he the author of that? The Koran teaches
that God made "the mischief of creation" too.4 Is God the
author of the mixed picture? Is such a synthesis of knowledge
possible?
THE GOTHIC CATHEDRAL
Before the Second World War, I often visited the huge and
beautiful Gothic cathedral at Cologne on the Rhine in Western
Germany. I used to admire this fine example of the architec-
ture of many hundreds of years ago, with its graceful flying
buttresses, a superb high-domed roof, its famous two towers,
and the medieval stained-glass windows. Hearing the thunder-
ous peals of organ music filling the huge edifice transported
me in thought to passages such as Isaiah 6.

47
Fallacies
in the Atheistic
and Agnostic
Positions
The more I admired the cathedral, the more I found myself
admiring the architects and masons who had originated the
whole structure. Over the centuries they had patiently planned
and built. All the graceful lines and sturdy foundations had
obviously been carefully planned by experts possessing sound
knowledge of building mathematics and mechanics as well as a
keen appreciation of how to combine both to produce a beau-
tiful total edifice.
That it had so well withstood the ravages of the centuries
showed that the workmen and designers not only understood
the principles behind beauty, but also those of ensuring endur-
ance. Their craftsmanship was first class in every way. Thus I
found myself admiring our forefathers as I admired their work-
manship. Considering that they had few mechanical devices
such as a modern architect would consider essential for con-
structing such a masterpiece, the masons and architects of that
day certainly did work wonders.
The structure of that cathedral, centuries after it had been
built, showed without the slightest doubt something of the
mind or minds behind it. Its very compact and organized de-
sign made one wonder what sort of drawing offices the builders
had at their disposal and how they made their blueprints. To
imagine that such a well-conceived edifice simply arose with-
out enormous planning effort would be to invite the just
derision of anyone remotely familiar with the construction
industry. Even calculations of the strengths of the various con-
struction materials had to be made with old-fashioned arith-
metic, and not just handed over to a computer. Thus, an
almost flawless work showed sharply the minds and hands of
its creators. But the picture did not always remain as clear.
COMPLICATING THE ISSUE
During the war, Cologne suffered perhaps the most intensive
air bombardment of any city in Western Europe. Reportedly,
bombs fell on about every two square yards of the entire inner

48
The
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city. Now, the cathedral stands almost directly in the railroad
station yard. Cologne is a very important rail center where
many lines meet, particularly those connected with the huge
and concentrated Ruhr industrial area. Naturally the Allies
bombed the railroad yards on many occasions and, not sur-
prisingly, many bombs missed their mark and destroyed near-
by housing and property. A number of heavy bombs hit the
cathedral, doing immense damage.
In the fall of 1946 when I returned to Germany for the first
time after the war, I was greatly dismayed at the sight of the
cathedral. It seemed symbolic of the rest of Europe and her
spirit. Almost irreparable damage had been done in five years
of combat. However, as I approached, the two famous towers
were still visible through the morning mist.
Practically every building in the vicinity was razed to the
ground; the cathedral alone stood majestically in the midst of
the carnage. Coming nearer, however, I could see huge, gaping
holes in the sides of the two towers. The holes revealed the
massiveness of the masonry, for any other building receiving
glancing blows from such high-explosive bombs would have
collapsed entirely. But the cathedral, though, badly damaged,
was not destroyed. Hundred of tons of concrete and bricks
had been used to plug a huge hole high up in one tower,
partially replacing the ancient masonry which had been blasted
away by an aerial bomb.
The ancient roof was indescribably damaged. Huge rafters
and beams, once its glory, hung perilously down over the
bomb-pocked floor. As the wind blew through the wreckage,
small bits and pieces fell to the ground, building up the piles of
rubble. A hole marked the place where the organ had once
pealed out its accompaniment to worship.
This miserable picture of chaos made a deep impression on
me as I stood in the same place where I had once admired the
order and beauty of the original edifice. As those memories of
former beauty passed through my mind, one idea never even

49
Fallacies
in the Atheistic
and Agnostic
Positions
occurred to me. Never did I connect the chaos of the formerly
beautiful cathedral with any inefficiency or designed purpose
on the part of the constructing architects or masons! They had
not constructed it for such maltreatment.
Similarly, I never began to doubt the existence of the men
who designed and constructed the cathedral simply because I
could now see so many contradictions in their handiwork. The
place was a ruin. But in its ruination it still bore the marks of
design. In fact, its design and original beauty were even more
emphasized in some respects. For the huge gaping holes in the
walls revealed the excellent construction even better than did
the remaining undamaged walls. There was no fill or rubbish
behind false walls, such as if found in many modern buildings.
It was all solid handiwork built to last for centuries. The
mighty flying buttresses were still there; the graceful Gothic
arches were still standing. But the solid design which was built
into the parts of the construction normally hidden from view,
was now laid bare for all to see how well those craftsmen had
done their job.
In summary, even the general ruin and chaos showed (1) the
existence of and (2) the excellent work of both architects and
craftsmen. Furthermore, the ruined structure itself showed in
some ways even better than the intact one the existence and
skill of the originators. In fact, the whole picture reminded me
of the purpose of dissection in learning the anatomy of ani-
mals, man and plants. In order to see the order—and beauty—
of some aspects of biology, the destroyed or dissected animal
or plant serves better than the intact one. The cathedral had
certainly been dissected, and its entrails laid bare.
INEFFICIENT ARCHITECTS?
Obviously no one was going to accuse the architects and
craftsmen of designing and producing a ruin. The cathedral
had been constructed to last—almost forever. Something had
happened to it which had not been planned or even conceived

50
The
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of. And yet, even in its ruination, it was generally quite easy to
distinguish between the unplanned ruin and the actual archi-
tecture. Although the cathedral at the same time displayed
both perfection and ruination, certainly a mixed picture, this
fact would never allow either of these conclusions: (1) that,
because the cathedral was a ruin, a mixture of chaos and order,
there could therefore be no mind, no volition, no architect,
behind it; and, (2) that, because the edifice was a mixture of
ruin and order, one could therefore no longer hope to recog-
nize any characteristics of a mind behind it. It would not
occur, surely, to anyone that one mind had planned and
carried out both the construction and destruction of the edi-
fice. That would be sheer nihilism!
The ruined cathedral presents a mixed picture—chaos and
order mixed up inextricably with one another, just as the
world around us presents a picture full of good and evil,
beauty and ugliness, order and chaos, love and hate. No one in
his right mind ought to deny that life as we see it is a hopeless
hodgepodge of such ingredients. However, we should remem-
ber that it would be just as illogical to say that the mixed
picture of the cathedral proves there was no architect behind it
as to say that the ruined, mixed picture we see of life about us
proves that there is no God behind it. My professor, rightly
seeing the hodgepodge before him, concluded that therefore:
 1.	The edifice of creation has no mind or architect behind
it. This is the position of all atheists who hold the same views.
For the atheist maintains that because he sees nothing but
contradictions in nature, therefore there is no mind or God
behind it. The Germans call this a Denkfehler, a short circuit
in the logic of thinking. And so it is. But it is one seldom seen
through today.
 2.	No characteristics of a mind behind nature can be dis-
tinguished because the picture is so mixed. This again is a
Denkfehler because, as we have already pointed out in the case
of the ruined cathedral, as long as any signs of order have

51
Fallacies
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and Agnostic
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escaped complete destruction in the general ruin, these
"broken bits and pieces remaining of the flying buttresses and
Gothic arches" will still show what sort of men planned them.
Thus, even widely separated little pools of beauty, love, joy,
order, healthy bodies, and virtue which are remaining in the
general hate, war, destruction, chaos and ugliness of the world
of nature in which we live, still point unflinchingly to the
architect who designed and produced it before ruination set in.
In fact, as seen in the cathedral, when chaos replaces order,
it can often dissect and lay bare the original order even better
than could the intact orderliness of an organism, or unruined
nature itself. The study of cancer cells—a good example of the
"ruination" to which living entities can easily come—has laid
bare many secrets of the healthy intact cell which would never
have been even suspected had we had only normal healthy
cells under our microscopes.
SUMMARY
Therefore, we can maintain that even though the creation
around us is certainly a hodgepodge of good and bad, ugly and
beautiful, love and hate, and even though life certainly does
present a badly mixed picture, it is still untenable to conclude
with my professor that this means no architect is behind it,
and that it was all due to chance and long time spans and
would therefore be expected to be a hopeless mess. Any little
pool of love, order, kindness, beauty or design in the general
rubble heap of nature must lead us to a mind or designer
behind that pool, no matter how small and smothered in
rubble it may be. For that pool will still unswervingly reflect
its designer's character, even though representing one-
thousandth of a percent of the amount of rubble. Thus, a
synthesis is possible.
And yet, it is the position of atheists and agnostics the
world over that nothing can be known about whether a creator
exists, or what sort of character he might have, simply because

52
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the nature of the creation he made is now a mixed-up hodge-
podge of good and bad. But any little tidbit of beauty or
order—no matter how great the surrounding rubble—reveals
the fallacy of this view. One would have thought that the
illogical nature of the whole atheistic and agnostic position
would have become clear long ago. The only refuge it can
really try to hide behind is the modern one which Kirkegaard
and the new theology have already taken, namely, that there is
no such thing as a logical thought process which might be valid
in such arguments. But, taking that position, we are imme-
diately led straight to absolute nihilism in thought, so we
might as well start dissecting all the gray matter from our
brains so that thought itself will no longer be necessary to
arrive at any conclusions!
Surely this is one reason why Romans 1 is so dogmatic. The
creation, even though it is undoubtedly mixed now, being full
of the rubble of hate, sin, ugliness and violence, still does show
some pools of love, kindness, beauty and virtue, thereby pro-
claiming (1) that there is an architect behind these pools, and
(2) that his very character is shown by these pools, small
though they be. In fact, the Bible teaches from cover to cover
that illness, death, hate and ugliness are all signs and outward
manifestations of a state of "ruin" which overtook a once-
better world. It also teaches that the signs of "ruin" are easily
distinguished from the "pools" of order, love and virtue which
still bear testimony to the state of the original edifice.
Thus, even today, the teaching of Romans 1 that the uni-
verse—even the fallen, damaged or ruined universe—when
inspected reveals enough of its Maker to bring any honest-
thinking, logical person to his knees in thankfulness and
worship, still holds true. The surprising thing is that our fore-
fathers, until the middle of the last century, recognized this
mode of thought. Only the advent of a concept of origins of
creation, which ascribed the order we see to a spontaneous
origin in chaos, unseated the earlier views. But take away the

53
Fallacies
in the Atheistic
and Agnostic
Positions
view that order can arise spontaneously from chaos, as Dar-
winians and others have taught with impunity for over a
hundred years and which is utterly untenable in the light of
modern mathematics, physics, thermodynamics, as well as
chemistry, and the older views become immediately tenable
again, and indeed, unavoidable, even today. For if order—no
matter how minute—did not arise spontaneously from chaos—
which physics, mathematics as well as chemistry will not
allow—it must have arisen in a mind. Thus we can still main-
tain that Romans 1 represents a true statement of fact, and
that inspection of nature must lead to recognition of its Maker
and his character. Atheists and agnostics are still "without
excuse."
Obviously, some difficulties remain in illustrations of this
type. Some of these are examined in the following chapter as
we pursue our synthesis.

chapter
4
The Origin of Evil
Difficulties of the type discussed in chapter 2 led Baudelaire,
the French art historian and poet, to exclaim, "If there is a
God, he is the devil!" As F. Schaeffer rightly points out, such
a statement is the direct result of believing that man has
always been as he is, that he was so designed originally. In that
case, the architect (if there is one) designed the mixed picture
andvis therefore responsible for designing the bad as well as the
good. This is the Muslim position.
Theistic evolutionists cannot avoid the same difficulty when
they maintain that God used evolutionary processes to pro-
duce the world of nature as we see it today. If he did, then his
methods made the bad with the good, as Baudelaire maintains,
and he therefore must be the devil as well as God. Everything
pivots on whether we believe nature was once "good" and
then subsequently ruined. That is, whether we believe in the
fall of man as laid down in Genesis. By tampering with the
structural details of Genesis, we are likely to garble the whole
reason for the present state of man—and the whole plan of his

56
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Pain
salvation which will take him out of the present disastrous
mess. Genesis presents an integral whole on which the total
plan of Scripture is firmly founded. This includes the fact of
man's fall, bringing with it the ruination of all nature with his
ruin. Baudelaire's tremendous conclusion throws light not only
on what art historians like himself must believe if they are
logical, but also on what theistic evolutionists conclude.
Let us return to the cathedral illustration of chapter 2. It is
superfluous to point out that all illustrations and analogies are
imperfect and have their weaknesses if pressed too far. Our
illustration of the cathedral is no exception. One of its imper-
fections lies in the fact that the architects who designed and
built the cathedral are long-since dead and therefore could not
prevent the bombing of their masterpiece. Then is God dead,
too? Was he dead when his masterpiece, nature, was
"bombed" into ruin?
Today many assume God to be, in fact, dead and resolve the
question that way. But this is an escape exit for several rea-
sons. Although it might explain God's creative work in the
past and its subsequent ruination, it would never explain the
present maintenance of nature and creation. Such maintenance
demands, in current jargon, a full-time living maintenance ser-
vice! No dead God could take care of that. Christians rightly
believe that he is not only the living Creator but also the living
Maintainer of nature—and of us. By very definition, the "God
is dead" theory will not fit in here. For maintenance implies
activity and life.
So the question now becomes: Why didn't an almighty God
who made, maintains, and presumably loves his masterpiece,
the creation, prevent its "bombing"? Here the parable of the
cathedral can do us no more service.
People who continually ask the question, "Why doesn't God
stop it?" are often those who don't bother to ask what
"stopping it" would entail. Some specific details must be
examined  before  attempting  to  solve  the  larger  principles

57
The
Origin
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Evil
involved if God were to "stop it."
Consider any virture of which a person is capable. Love,
kindness, honesty, faithfulness, chastity, or any of the virtues
named in Galatians 5 will do. Select a virtue which pleases us
all—love—and ask the following question: "What is the nature
of love in particular, and virtue in general?"
NATURE OF LOVE AND VIRTUE
This subject of the nature of love and virtue is vitally impor-
tant because the Christian way of life maintains that God him-
self is love. Christians in the Western world often do not real-
ize the tremendous import of this statement. I have given
other religions, including Islam, some thought, and have
studied Islam's holy book, the Koran, which designates Allah
as the compassionate, forgiving one. As far as I know, nowhere
in the Koran does Allah figure specifically as an embodiment
of love. He may threaten, he may be merciful, omnipotent,
compassionate and omnipresent. He may offer the faithful a
place in the gardens of paradise with as many dark-eyed houris
as they wish.2 But love never figures in the Koranic "revela-
tions" of Allah's nature. A designation of God as "love" stands
unique in the Bible.
Right in the center, then, of the Christian position is this
virtue vve call love. It must be of vital importance for that very
reason. Nevertheless, I find myself at an extreme loss when I
am asked to rationally explain anything at all about God's
love. I know that "God so loved the world that he gave his
only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but
have eternal life,"3 and I am profoundly grateful for this. But
God, even though loving, is also infinite. Therefore, he exceeds
anything my thinking apparatus can handle. So I do not pre-
tend to be able to plumb the depths of either his love or
character. To think rationally about that love is far beyond
me.
I suspect it is for this reason that when the Scriptures speak

58
The
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of
Pain
of God and his love, usually man's love—particularly man's
love to a woman and vice versa—is used to drive home the
point at an anthropomorphic level. It is like using real-life
illustrations to clarify abstract and abstruse points of chem-
istry to unscientific people. Thus-, God provides us information
on himself and his love in a human setting of human love in
order to really communicate with us. The example we all
understand best in human relationships—the love of a young
man for his bride—can illustrate something about love in gen-
eral. The information we thus obtain by "cutting down the
high voltage of God's love" to the "low voltage of human
love" we will then apply to our main problem.
The first question in analyzing human love is: "How did this
love between bride and bridegroom originate?" The history of
most such relationships provides the answer. The young man
one day met the girl and sooner or later began to feel attracted
to her. The attraction is better experienced than described.
Very often the girl feels attracted to him at the same time,
although she would at this stage probably be more hesitant to
display her feelings. Normally, any open expression of this
almost noncommunicable relationship springing up between
the pair comes from his side, not hers. He begins the action
side of the relationship by looking for suitable ways to court
or woo her. But, until he begins that courting, the whole love
affair is one-sided, or lopsided. A one-sided relationship in
which attentions are not returned can be extremely painful.
Certainly it is neither happy nor satisfying to either party.
At this stage there is one burning question which every
prospective bridegroom would like answered as soon as possi-
ble: Does she love me? Is my attraction to her reciprocated?
Does she feel toward me as I do toward her? One purpose of
courtship is to give the girl a chance to settle the question in
her own mind. For, once she notices the man's attentions and,
therefore, attraction toward her, she has to make a momen-
tous decision: Do I and can I return his affection? If she is

59
The
Origin
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Evil
wise, she may turn for advice to a trusted girl friend, or per-
haps to her parents, who have already traveled this road and
are therefore more experienced than she. If she finally thinks
she may return the affection, then she must decide if she can
love him. Here she must rely on her own heart, as well as on
her common sense and the principles of life to which she
adheres. After due consideration, then, she may decide she
does and can return his attraction toward herself. An under-
standing is reached between the two. A radiant couple
emerges, and great are the happiness and joy of two hearts that
have entrusted themselves in mutual love and faithfulness.
In order to answer the question of why a God of love just
doesn't "stop it" we must analyze the process of falling in love
in order to draw some reason out of what often appears to be
an entirely unreasonable happening.
First, the young man must court the girl of his choice. She
will be unhappy if he doesn't, and he will be unmanly if he
doesn't know how! Now, courtship is a very fine art, besides
being a very necessary one. Some of our finest poetry, music
and art have arisen as by-products of this art! Most important,
perhaps, is that it is a so-called gentle art, which brings us to a
cardinal point in our analysis.
The moment force takes the place of wooing, both love and
the joy of love cease. They are often replaced by hate, recrimi-
nations and misery. For the whole structure of love is built on
absolute mutual consent and respect for the sovereignty of the
person and character of the loved one. In other words, the
structure on which human love between a bride and bride-
groom is squarely based is freedom to love—mutual consent or
absolute free will on the part of both partners to give one
another their entire and exclusive affection.
Most civilized societies recognize precisely this structure in
their marriage services. The two persons intending marriage are
both given the public opportunity of making a free-will con-
sent in saying "I will" before the assembled congregation. Old

60
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Testament cultures stand for exactly the same principle, as the
following well-known history emphasizes.
REBEKAH
When Eliezer, Abraham's servant, asked Rebekah to become
Isaac's wife (Gen. 24), he became so assured that he had found
God's choice for his master's son that he was ready to cut
corners in the process of taking the bride home. The evidence
that Rebekah was God's choice was so overwhelming that he
wanted to speed things up so he could take her home trium-
phantly. He just wanted to take off immediately with the girl
and forget about all the formalities or ceremonies.
However, Rebekah's relatives saw immediately that this was
no basis for marriage, even though the Lord might be in it.
What a good thing it would be if young couples saw this point
too, instead of just starting to live together with no ado and
ceremonies. It is to emphasize the necessity of mutual public
consent before love and lifelong married joy, the greatest rela-
tionship in our earthly life, that Rebekah's relatives got to-
gether and said that even though God might be in it all,
Rebekah must first be publicly questioned on the matter. She
had to give her own opinion and decision before they would
let her go to Isaac. So they called her in before the family and
their friends to ask her whether she wanted Isaac. Only after
she had given her public consent, based on her own free-will
decision, did they agree to the marriage. They knew that no
other basis was good enough, even though it was obviously
God's will even without such public decision-making.
THE AMNON AND TAMAR AFFAIR
Thus, the first point arising out of this analysis of the basis of
bride-bridegroom relationships and love is that such a partner-
ship is based firmly on public mutual consent or free will.
The second point deals with the consequences of neglecting
the above point. The shocking "love affair" between Amnon

61
The
Origin
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Evil
and Tamar (2 Sam. 13) illustrates this danger in a crass way.
Amnon fell madly in love with the king's beautiful daughter
Tamar. He was so infatuated with the fair girl that he just
could not wait to woo her and win her consent. As a result,
what could have made an excellent love story became a scan-
dal to the whole royal court.
By guile Amnon arranged to be alone with the girl. Feigning
sickness, he received the king's permission for Tamar to come
and cook for him in his apartment. Having gotten rid of every-
one else, he proceeded to force the poor girl because he was so
madly "in love" with her. "Love" that cannot wait to woo is
abnormal. It often metamorphoses before our eyes into what
we call "lust."
The consequence of this haste and trickery was that
Amnon's "love" turned in a twinkling into hate for her. He
brutally threw the weeping and brokenhearted Tamar out of
his room, bolting the door behind her. The eventual result was
murder, for her relatives had Amnon murdered later for his
brutality and treachery. Of course, Tamar suffered terribly
under the shame and heartbreak, and she "remained desolate
in her brother Absalom's house" (2 Sam. 13:20).
FREE CHOICE
Therefore, in order to love in this sense—not merely physical
union, which can result from mere lust—we must experience
the mutual attraction and union of body, soul and spirit in an
exclusive personal relationship. Mere physical union, if not
accompanied by the corresponding union of that whole
trinity, plus the personality, of which man and woman consist,
brings a travesty of the laws of nature governing the relation-
ships between a bride and her bridegroom. The practice of the
union of the female body with the male, with nothing else
involved, reduces man to a beast. Whoredom sears his whole
psyche and causes many problems of the mind. A large per-
centage  of mental  illness  can be traced to such practices.

62
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Pain
Today, because the physical consequences are easily dispensed
with since no children need result, intercourse on this basis is
perhaps more widely practiced than ever before—with ever
increasing psychic illness.
If the basis of mutual consent in the love relationship is
removed, if there is no freedom to love, if freedom is replaced
by force, then all possibility of loving is removed. Love can be
replaced then by its opposite—hate. In other words, to be able
to really love there must be genuine freedom to love. This
implies, of course, the further step of logic: where there is true
freedom to love, there is also true freedom not to love. For, if
this freedom to say no were not really present, there would
ipso facto be no freedom to say yes and to love. The "no" or
the ability to say no, must be just as genuine as the ability to
say yes if true mutual consent is to be achieved, which is the
basis of the whole structure of the love of a man for his bride.
As we have seen, the Bible teaches that God himself is love,
and his love is often likened to the bride-bridegroom relation-
ship. Our third conclusion is that if his love to us is to be
compared in some way with our human nuptial love, then the
principles governing the two loves can be expected to be com-
parable in some ways. We should expect God, on this basis, to
be the grand wooer. That being the case, we should expect him
to be looking for our response to his wooing. To receive and
experience his love we should expect the mutual-consent basis
to decide everything—my consent to him in answer to his
"attraction to and love for" me.
Thus, we conclude that if God is love in this sense of the
word, he will be looking for answering love from me. Love is
only satisfied if it is answered or returned. He woos us by
many means, mainly by having sent his Son, the second Person
of the Trinity, to justify us by dying and being resurrected for
us.
Being love, we would not expect him to demand or attempt
to force love. That would be a contradiction. The very attempt

63
The
Origin
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Evil
to do so would destroy the very basis of all love. As our true
lover he does everything to show the genuine nature of his
love—even to becoming a fellowman, heir to our lot as well as
bearing our sin. In keeping with his character of love, Jesus, of
his own free will went to the cross to demonstrate that his love
to fallen man was no flash in the pan. He was serious about
it—serious even to death. Greater love has no man than that he
lay down his life for his friend. In his efforts at wooing man-
kind, Jesus Christ went further than that, for he lay down his
life for the very people who demonstrated themselves to be his
enemies by crucifying him. This all fits in with his character
when it is described as being that of love.
THE CASE OF THE ROBOT
Consider one more vital point. What would have happened
if God had so constructed man that he could not make a true
free-will decision himself, but was capable only of automat-
ically doing God's will, just as a lock opens when one turns the
correct key in it? Or just as an automatic vending machine
delivers the bar of chocolate when one inserts the correct coin.
If man had been so constructed that, when a certain "button"
in his mind was depressed he delivered "love" just as auto-
matically as when the coin sets off the mechanism of the
vending machine and delivers the cup of coffee, would love-
real love—be in fact delivered? If we were constructed like
marionettes, complete with strings, the pulling of certain
strings would make us go through definite motions which
might resemble the outward "motions" of love. But could a
marionette love? Is it capable of love? Of course the answer is
negative, simply because a marionette is not a person with all a
person's dignity of free will. The fact that it is not endowed
with the qualities belonging to a person, such as free will,
make it incapable, "congenitally" incapable, of love. This is
simply because it cannot say or mean either "yes" or "no" in
any real sense of the word. It has no will, no personality, and

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therefore is not capable of any virtues, least of all the virtue
called love.
None of us would be interested in "loving" the outward
forrh of a partner who, every time we touched a certain
"button," put chocolate in its mouth or stroked its hair, and
automatically intoned the sentence, "I love you." In fact,
could any system be so constructed as to deliver any "virtue"
on command? If such a system were conceived or constructed,
it would have to be subhuman or machine by nature. For to
try to construct it so that it delivered "virtue" or "love" on
command would of necessity mean that it be devoid of
humanity, and therefore personality, and as a result it could
deliver nothing of the kind. Assume that God, in order to be
sure of our love and to make sure that we were "virtuous" in
every way, made us like marionettes. He would have taken
from us the possibility of really exercising our free will in
order that we could not exercise it wrongly. Wanting to be so
sure that we loved him and our fellowmen, he would have
made us so that we could not do otherwise. Whenever he
presses the button, we would "deliver the goods" just like a
vending machine. Could such a setup involve real love in any
way?
THE GRAND RISK
This brings us right up to the great principle. If God wanted
creatures that really loved him and their fellow creatures, he
was, by the very intrinsic nature of love, obliged to recognize
the truth (though it sounds strange to use such phraseology
and maintain that God was forced to do anything—his own
moral nature brings with it the consequence that he will or
must act according to that nature) that love and virtue demand
freedom, absolute freedom, to love and exercise virtue. Other-
wise there could be neither love nor freedom. Such a necessity
lies in the very structure of love and, indeed, of any other true
virtue.  Thus, to create the possibility of love, God had to

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create free personalities just like himself, for he is love and
made us to love.
For God to plan at all for true love involved the built-in risk
of the proposed free partner in love not loving at all. To have
built the love partner so that he would be "congenitally"
obliged to respond would have been to destroy the whole
purpose of designing a creation where love could reign. God
wished—and still wishes—to set up a kingdom of love on earth
and in heaven. But to do so involves the above-outlined risk of
the free partners choosing not to love, but to do the opposite,
of their own free will—and not respond to love by being
indifferent to the divine wooing—or even hating. The practical
result of being indifferent to or hating is the same from the
divine partner's point of view. For there is no positive response
to his love in either case. And love aims at a response of love.
Thus, love either grows by responding, or it dies.
The risk involved in planning a creation where love could
reign is a built-in risk. It is the risk of wooing not being
responded to, the risk of the proposed partner not loving back
in response. It is usually that class of person who does not
consider implications of this kind who is always so keen on
having God play the role of the "dictator" and use brute force
to "make things better." Of course, he could if he wanted to.
He is omnipotent; he is Lord. "Allah" tends to be this type of
lord. But, although the Christian God is just and sees the
wrongs to be righted, they will always be righted in the light of
the fact that he is love—right up until the day of judgment
dawns.
ALMSGIVING AND THE SOCIALIST STATE
Exactly the same risk is involved in planning every and any
virtue. Take, for example, the virtue of almsgiving. In Turkey
one sees hundreds of needy beggars. There are the blind hold-
ing their certified photographs of their suffering wives and
children who need support. There are those lying in the gutters,

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with their misshapen bodies uncovered so that all who pass by
can see they are not counterfeiting. There is the poor man who
has feet where his knees should be, loudly and slowly repeating
selected passages from the Koran. There is the old man suffer-
ing from Parkinsonianism, whose saliva continually runs over
his poor old dirty face as he holds out an empty trembling
hand all day long. Seeing this misery causes one to exercise
compassion and give a coin so that they can eat a slice of good
Turkish bread. Naturally one is convinced that something
much more fundamental should be done for these thousands
of people so representative of suffering humanity. But a coin
will at least guarantee that the immediate plague of gnawing
hunger will be assuaged.
So one gives something to the young mother sitting in rags
underneath the mailbox at the post office, with her week-old
unwashed baby on her ragged lap. In so doing one exercises a
virtue—that of almsgiving. The immediate reward is an extra-
fervent prayer to Allah for the giver's salvation. The joy on the
recipient's face would be reward enough. To exercise any vir-
tue is a free-will operation which brings joy to the giver and to
the receiver.
If, however, beggars are cared for by taxes, and if the city
authorities send me a tax bill to help support the poor and
needy, then I must pay. It is my duty. It may be a good thing
to organize matters in this way. Many maintain that this
method is less degrading for the poor, and that the burden is
more equally distributed. I agree with them, as far as they go.
But let us be clear about one of the overlooked consequences.
In paying my taxes which are used to support the poor and
needy, I no longer exercise the virtue I did when I gave the
alms to the poor young mother. I might have paid about $10
in taxes for the poor, or I might have given the poor young
woman $10 to buy her baby something better than dirty rags.
The sum of money actually involved makes little difference. In
one case I exercise the virtue of almsgiving (and reap a bless-

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ing) while in the other case I pay my taxes and do my duty,
grumbling perhaps about the waste perpetrated by the bureau-
crasy of the tax office, with no consequent blessing, even
though I may be perfectly right.
In one case I exercise no virtue, even though the poor man
or woman may receive exactly the same sum of money from
me by way of the city authorities. In the other case, where I
give of my own free will in almsgiving, I may give exactly the
same sum of money, but I exercise a virtue—simply because I
do not have to act. Therein lies the difference: in the one case,
having to do one's duty and pay taxes; and in the other, not
being obliged to do anything, and therefore being able to exer-
cise a virtue. What it means is simply that forced "chanty" is
no charity—and forced "love" is no love. Love and virtue melt
in the grip of force just as ice melts under the pressure of a
vice.
If I force my children to be "good" when we are out
visiting, they may be outwardly exemplary—sometimes they
are! I am thankful for this, but I recognize the fact that most
fathers will be familiar with—that this "goodness" may not be
even skin-deep. Force itself, unaided, can make no one good.
It cannot make anyone exercise a virtue. This is not saying
anything at all against the use of force as a punishment in
education or wrongdoing. Here force may be the only solution
and the only corrective. But in itself it does not make anyone
good, and virtues tend to melt away in its presence.
These considerations disclose one of the fatal weaknesses of
our increasingly socialized world. All "charity" and "works of
love" tend to become organized by the state, which rightly
wishes to eliminate the humiliation to which the poor are
subjected in accepting certain kinds of "charity." Some unfor-
tunate people do give, either to build up a mythical bank
balance in heaven, or even to humiliate those who receive their
money. But, no matter what ends are in view, acts of pure
charity are abolished, to be replaced by the compulsion of

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taxes and state "relief." The joy and virtue of true charity and
love disappear immediately when the forced tax replaces the
free-will offering. The Lord Jesus Christ himself remarked that
it was more blessed to give than to receive, thus emphasizing
the "blessedness" or happiness accompanying the free act of
giving.
The exercise of any virtue ennobles and enriches the char-
acter, giving real joy and radiance to him who exercises it,
whereas the mere unwilling taxpayer may pay his taxes be-
cause he must. He often does so begrudgingly because he
knows a large amount is wasted in bureaucracy, which fact and
state of mind exclude the élan of the "freeman" who in his
freedom nourishes his character and mind on the happiness
accompanying the exercise of love. Thus the socialized state
often robs its citizens of the flights of exuberance to which
free exercisers of love and charity are heir.
GEORGE MULLER'S ORPHANAGES
Over a century ago in Bristol, England, George Müller set up
his orphan homes which were run and staffed entirely by the
free-will offerings and services of Christians in sympathy with
his aims. Witnesses of Muller's work said that those homes full
of the victims of suffering were real havens of love, joy and
rest to thousands of orphans. Today many such orphanages
(not Müller's) have been taken over by the state. The state
institute is often merely a matter of rates and taxes, and the
person in charge is sometimes a career person who makes no
attempt to be a "mother" or "father" to the children. Often
the atmosphere of such an institution is as cold and devoid of
love as the concrete bricks of which it is constructed. Scien-
tists have shown that children in such institutions die from
lack of love as often as they die from disease.4
The welfare state, in taking over everything to remove a few
real abuses, too often kills love and the other virtues which
make up the atmosphere of a home. Removing the freedom of

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service, the voluntary basis, causes love to evaporate. Not only
do the children or other inmates of such institutions suffer.
The ennobling of character which the staff members would
themselves receive by free-will service is lost by their too be-
coming merely career people. The more the world loses this
right to freely exercise true charity, the harder, colder and
more bitter it must get. Too few people will be in the process
of receiving ennoblement of character by exercise of their free-
dom to do good.
This disastrous effect on the character of modern nations is
nowhere more clearly seen than in the most socialized and
organized nations. The motive behind the socialization was,
without a doubt, entirely good. It was that of organizing
poverty out of this world. As such, we must recognize the
motivation to have been thoroughly good. But its mode of
operation is robbing our civilization of warmhearted personal
care and love. In fact, it is producing everywhere just what
Hitler produced in Germany by the same means: depersonali-
zation—people who may do their duty but who will not raise a
finger to help close a concentration camp if it involves per-
sonal risk. Their characters have not experienced the en-
nobling, strengthening effect which results from the exercise
of freedom. Hitler was a living example of a man who was
naïve enough to attempt to demand and command the love
and affection of his people. He may have realized at the end
that love evaporates under just such a pressure. The strength of
character necessary to withstand any tyrant is not likely to be
built in any generation without the ennoblement of character
resulting from long exercise of the various human virtues we
have discussed. Such strength will also overcome the various
vicissitudes of life which often complicate the career of any-
one strong enough in will to be ready to suffer for his own
conscience's sake.
The tendency today in most modern socialized states is to
take away any private opportunity or initiative for the exercise

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of private virtue, and to push everything onto the community.
This results in private character impoverishment. We all know
the person who "doesn't want to get involved." The second
tendency, contingent partly on the first, is to bring up every
child to conformity so that only the will of the community
and majority counts. Unfortunately, the majority is not always
right. Thus the steel of a private conscience, independent of
conformity to the mass, does not develop. In Hitler's Germany
this was seen at its extreme development. People saw corpses
drop out of vans coming from a concentration camp as they
passed through a big city. But fear had so eroded characters
that no one did anything—it was too dangerous to get in-
volved!
In Chicago two years ago as I was walking from the Chicago
and North Western Railway Station I saw a man in a car liter-
ally plow his way through a group of old ladies as they crossed
the street on a pedestrian crossing with the green light. He
knocked one old lady down, injuring her. I took the license
number of the car, which did not stop, and asked for wit-
nesses. Many young men and women going to work in a neigh-
boring shoe factory had seen the incident. But all backed
away, muttering something about not getting involved. I didn't
get a single witness.
The idea of the community providing for everyone's need
"from the cradle to the grave" may be excellent from purely a
humanitarian point of view. But, insofar as it takes away per-
sonal initiative, the realization of the scheme will never pro-
vide sterling characters ready and willing to suffer for con-
science's sake and to stand alone, if necessary. For the whole
scheme erodes character.
THE CREATION, SEEN AND UNSEEN
The Bible reports that when God contemplated the creation of
the worlds seen and unseen he wished to construct them so
that they reflected his very own nature and character. To do

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this, he had to build on freedom of action. He is free, so he
made man and angels free too. Man was made "in his image"—
that is, as a free personality, just as God himself is. For even
"his service is perfect freedom" and therefore founded and
maintained in love. Accordingly, the angels who serve him,
including their chief, Lucifer, the light-bearer, were given
natures capable of genuine love to their Creator and toward
their fellows. They were capable of wooing his love and being
wooed by him so that the perfect joy of love could reign in
that kingdom. But this very possibility of a perfect, joyous,
loving kingdom had to include the possibility of the rejection
of both. There were no puppets.
The Bible reports, quite as a matter of fact, that a large
proportion of that unseen host showed that it really was capa-
ble of the joy of that kingdom of love and—by a very real
proof—by rejection! Therefore, Lucifer did, in fact, show that
he could love, in that he began, for reasons of pride, to reject
the one perfect lover, his Creator. Turning his back on him
who is the sole good, he became the epitome of the bad. So
arose the cursed, loveless and hateful ones who, in the exercise
of their characters, now turned away from the good toward
the bad, and proceeded to "bomb" and destroy the good
earth, the good creation. Men become "devils" by exactly the
same process. Obviously God, his nature being love, did not
immediately take away all freedom of action and choice from
his creatures, thus removing the possibility of a return to love.
He allowed them still further freedom of choice, which meant,
in their case, still further "bombing" activities being per-
mitted. If he had taken away this possibility of freedom of
choice at the first sign of rejection of love, he would have
destroyed any further possibility of a return to love. So he has
given us all a long time of freedom of action, that is, freedom
to love, so that the kingdom of love can still begin again to
rule, if man and angel want it. To "have stopped it all" at once
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ically destroyed the very purpose for which the Creator had
created his universe—in order to set up a kingdom of love in
the seen and the unseen.
Therefore, this very existence of evil in a world created by
an almighty but also a loving God actually illustrates that the
good and the virtue within it really are genuine, bona-fide
good. Love in such a kingdom really is love and not anything
else. Sometimes it is taught that love is a covert form of
egoism, etc. The state of our fallen world really shows this to
be impossible—the love of God in a world of blood is genuine
enough!
Destroyers and haters usually want company in their activi-
ties. So when the chief, Lucifer the light-bearer, had become
the destroyer and the hater, he immediately approached Eve
to make her and her husband become a part of his company of
destroyers. The pair was also capable of true love. They
possessed true freedom of choice, as is shown by the actual
choice they made. They too turned their backs on the good,
the only good, automatically becoming polarized to the bad,
the chronically bad. So the whole seen and unseen creation of
love became a creation of the wrong choice—the choice which
turned its back on the source of all ultimate good. In leaving
open a chance for seen and unseen creation to return to the
ultimate good, God did not "stop the bad." The free choice
was still left open, leaving the ruination and its cause still
intact. And that is the reason why God allows it—to give a
genuine chance for the return of love in general.
THE DIGNITY OF MAIM
But does not all this lead to one main conclusion? Does it not
all go to show the truly high esteem in which God holds his
creatures, man included? It means that God really takes our
decisions, our thoughts, and ourselves seriously. He even goes
to the length of wooing us to make our decisions ourselves. He
does not so construct us that we are puppets who have all

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decisions preprogramed—even though many physical processes
in the body are preprogramed.5 True love is, in this respect,
always the same—it always esteems and respects its partner. It
takes the partner seriously.
The same thought also expresses why God bothers to woo
men by "the foolishness of preaching"6 and not by sending, as
he could, mighty angels or superintelligent creatures from
other regions with his message. Perhaps they would only
succeed in terrifying poor humanity if they appeared in their
supernal splendor. God's purpose is to win man's simple trust
and confidence, to win our devotion and genuine love. There-
fore, he uses the natural methods available to win our decision
for him. If he overawed us in any way, that might make craven
slaves of us rather than wholehearted sons. If he were to brow-
beat us into submission, he would only gain what Hitler did—
the abject, groveling fear (if not secret hatred) of his would-be
partners.
Thus a God of love avoids like the plague the dictator's
methods in dealing with man, the object of his love, and uses
the lover's better method. It is very fundamental to see that
one cannot terrorize people into love. Consider the miracles
Jesus performed in this light. He never used a show of divine
power in healing to frighten people into belief. In most cases
after doing some mighty healing deed which gave sight to the
blind or life to the dead, he admonished those who had seen
the deed or experienced it to keep very quiet about it. Jesus'
warning "tell no man" is almost proverbial in this respect. The
fact is, God does not wish to force our intelligence or our will
to bend us to the state of cringing slaves. He wants redeemed
sons who, of their own free will, love, respect and gladly serve
him.
THE DEGREE OF MAN'S FREEDOM
Thus we conclude that man must be free indeed if he is ever to
be able to love indeed. There is a consequence to all this which

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the reader will have surely noted already. It is this: Is man so
free that God has abrogated all authority over him? Can man
do exactly and precisely as he likes as long as he likes so that
he can be said to possess a totally unfettered freedom in all
directions as far as he himself choses? Need he never fear that
his Creator will intervene and fetter him—all in the interests of
man's ability to love and exercise virtue?
Although the Bible teaches that man has a bona-fide free
will and can certainly say no to his Creator's will and plan (the
very state of our poor world shows that this is de facto the
case), yet it teaches too that there are limits to that freedom
just as there are limits to God's wooing activities of man.
These wooing limits, it will be remembered, were founded in
God's counsel from his side and, in time, from man's side. In
the first place, God in his inscrutability sets a time limit for his
wooing of our free will. Thus it cannot be said that we have
perfect free will to accept or reject his wooing at any time.
Our free will interacts with his free will to woo us; and if he
chooses to stop the courting process, our free will can do
precisely nothing about the new situation. Here it is no longer
unfettered. Second, the repeated rejection of the goodness of
God's courting sears the psyche of man and makes it less and
less receptive. This, too, is a process we cannot alter; it is like
the second law of thermodynamics at work in our inward man,
and our free will cannot alter it.
The same principle applies throughout man's kingdom in its
relationship to man's Creator. Man can say no to his Creator
for a certain time by expressing free will. But this process of
our saying no of our own free will to God interacts with God's
free will and may produce a no from his side. For us depen-
dent creatures this is the same thing as judgment supervening
after grace. We all can turn our back on him and run away
from him and his goodness—until we reach what may be
looked upon as the end of our tether. The tether represents
the change in God from grace of judgment. How long that may

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take in each individual case of God's dealings is unknown to
his creatures. This state of affairs is well seen in the case of the
apostle Paul when he was on the Damascus road and filled
with hatred toward Christ and his followers. Paul had enjoyed
perfect unfettered free will to rebel against Christ, and had
done so very successfully, until even he reached the end of the
tether God had allowed him. Then God intervened severely,
blinded him, and reduced him to the dependence of a child in
his helplessness. But even in a drastic intervention of this type,
the judgment of God was mixed with great mercy and it led to
Paul's seeing the grace of God in restricting his field of un-
fettered free will. But perhaps his free will in the strictest sense
of the term was not touched. Perhaps his knowledge was in-
creased.
If we do not recognize some definite limits to our freedom,
we risk abrogating God's ultimate authority and, indeed, sov-
ereignty. Yet these limits in no way alter the conclusions we
have drawn about the vital nature of freedom if we are to be
able to love—or to rebel. One reason for this fact is that we
ourselves do not know where the limits we are talking about
lie. Since we have no idea at all where they lie, we are, to all
intents and purposes, unlimited ourselves in our freedom
viewed from our own perspective. From our own point of view
we are free to act, wander, decide, rebel or love as under-sov-
ereigns within a small area of God's sovereign kingdom. And it
is just within this area of real unrestricted freedom that real
love and virtue can and do rule in us. For, not knowing any
limits that have been secretly set for us, we are free in the total
areas of life known to us. Outside these unseen limits are areas
of judgment and no-freedom. But since they are unknown to
us, they are, for practical purposes, fictitious for us and thus
of no concern in our decisions to rebel or to love. The fact
that God knows these limits does not impair our freedom
within the area known to and experienced by us. Thus the fact
of these divine limits does not in any way mar true human

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freedom to exercise the right to respond or reject the divine
courtship. Man's freedom is all he knows until he suddenly
(and mostly unexpectedly) stumbles up against the divine wall
which limits us and establishes the divine sovereignty in its
totality.
The very fact that man has never succeeded in devising a
formal proof of God's existence, shows how completely God
can and does hide himself and his limits from our eyes. This
being the case, most men act within the area of their own lives
as completely free agents as far as their intelligence is con-
cerned. This makes their decisions in that frame of mind com-
pletely free will and therefore valid from the point of view
exercising true virtue. We conclude, then, that the limits God
has set for all mankind, do not alter our decisive free will and
its accompanying power of love or rebellion. And these very
limits maintain God's sovereignty while allowing man free
agency in the area of his own conscious life as a mortal.
One thing more deserves mention at this point. The
"tether" we have referred to as God's restricting hand on our
free will should not be regarded as something fixed or static. It
is not of a set permanent "length." It is my belief that the
more devoted a man is to God's will for him, the longer the
"tether" will become. That is, the greater will be the radius of
freedom of action. To stick to our analogy of a tether, we
might say that its elasticity depends upon our will being con-
gruent with his divine will. To use the words of the apostle
Paul, to "win Christ" and to attain to his confidence in us is
the same thing as saying that the more we attain to the width,
depth and breadth of God's will, the more we attain to his
sovereign freedom too. As one prayer book has it, "His service
is perfect freedom. "

chapter
5
The Problem of Rebuilding
Just what would we expect a God of love to do after his
creatures had taken the wrong road—turning their backs on the
only good? Once the "bombing" of his creation had occurred,
what steps would we expect him to take?
The Scriptures say that even before the wrong choice had
been taken either by man or angels, God, because he is omni-
scient, knew all about it. He had even drawn up careful plans
in advance to cope with the situation that would arise, even
though he was in no sense responsible for it, nor did he cause
it (cf. Rev. 13:8;Eph. l:4;Heb. 4:3; 1 Pet. 1:19-20).
This last fact—that God, if he is God, must obviously have
been omniscient with respect to the fall long before it
happened—has been a stumbling block to many. Actually, few
real intellectual difficulties are involved in this matter if it is
considered carefully.
If I observe a person very carefully during a period of time,
I may notice some of his little idiosyncrasies. He may say
"Ah," for example, as a prelude to every difficult word he has

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to pronounce. Or he may twitch his eyebrows (or his ears)
before relating a good joke. Gradually I learn to predict just
what he is going to do before he actually does it. My previous
observations allow me to do this with a fair amount of
accuracy.
However, my ability to foretell his actions in no way makes
me responsible for them when he acts. Similarly, the fact that
God was able to foresee what Adam and Eve, the angels and
mankind in general, would do, does not necessarily implicate
him in the sense that it makes him responsible for initiating
their actions and choices. The only implication is that involved
in his having given them a gloriously free choice of action in
order to have the possibility of their love. So God certainly
foresaw the fall of both angels and man. He foresaw it so well
that he made careful preparations for it, even before the very
foundation of the world (Rev. 13:2). Yet, many imagine that
this foreknowledge, the result of his very omniscience, must of
necessity implicate God in the guilt of the fall. Quite the con-
trary, the genuine possibility of free choice which he conferred
upon us in order to construct us in his image (he is the great,
free superperson) so that we would be persons too, capable of
really loving and exercising genuine virtue, decides forever the
creatures' guilt and Creator's love and righteousness.
THE PROBLEM OF THE CONSEQUENCES
At this point many will maintain that, if God saw in advance
the chaos, misery and suffering which would certainly follow
the gift of the possibility of love (involving free choice) why
did he proceed with his plans to create if they would result in
the creation of such a miserable universe? Was he not rather
sadistic to have persisted in those plans, knowing the conse-
quences in advance? Would it not have been better to have
ditched the plan if it was all going to work out as it has?
In principle the same type of questioning arises every day in
our own lives, but seemingly we don't recognize the fact. Con-

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sider, for example, the decision we must make on whether to
marry. Even the marriage ceremony emphasizes rather dras-
tically that the same question is involved, for the clergyman
says our marriage vows are binding us until death do us part.
Surely there is scarcely greater grief than that experienced by a
really devoted couple when separated by death. We could, of
course, avoid this terrible grief by the simple expedient of not
creating a marriage relationship at all! Avoid marriage and its
love relationship and no grief of parting by death will ever
overtake you.
Yet, we rightly go into marriage with our eyes open. We
know that, in normal circumstances, death and all its sorrows
will overtake us and will separate us. Most of us fear this more
than we could ever say. In spite of all this, we marry because
we believe that the joy of love and the ennoblement of giving
ourselves to another in the abandon of devotion even for a day
(and forty or fifty years pass like a day) is better than no love
at all. It is written of Jesus Christ that he endured the sorrows
of the death on the cross for the sake of the joys which would
result from that sorrow. * The same principle is involved here.
The joy of love, even "short" love, because it stems from a
God of love, compensates for even the sorrow of a cruel death
such as that which Jesus suffered for all mankind, and the
death which will separate all lovers.
The enrichment and the ennoblement of the human char-
acter brought about by the experience of even the brief joy of
love, as God intended it to be, compensate for the certain
future death, separation, and present trials. It is a question of
balance. Those who know the love of God in Christ and those
who have experienced just a faint taste of that same quality of
love in God-given marriage will confess that it is worth the
certain severe suffering which it brings with it. The principle is
that even a little, short-lived love is better than none at all. A
few days of love—even at the price of the disaster of separation
and ceasing of mortal love—is worth more than none at all.

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The reason is that even mortal love changes the eternal human
psyche. A man takes the psyche changed by love with him
when this life is over and keeps it forever.
Evidently the Creator, being love personified, thinks this
way too, for he did indeed create us and the rest of the fallen
creation, in spite of the foreseen mess and separation. Al-
though we experience many trials and tribulations, he obvious-
ly knew that the love which we can and do experience—even
for a short time—more than balances the scales. Love even for
a day imprints itself eternally on our psyche and is, obviously,
in his eyes worth more than no love at all, which would have
resulted if he had desisted from creating us free, for fear of the
consequences of the foreseen fall. We will leave our trials and
sufferings behind us at death, but we will forever possess the
richness of love in our character. So, whichever way we look at
the question of the decision to create, we must decide that,
from the standpoint of love or no love, it was worth it. After
all, we cannot really blame God for having created and risked
the chaos, suffering and anguish in which the world finds it-
self, when we, in essence, make the same decision when we
marry. It is the same type of decision when we have children.
All the same, many people—sometimes including ourselves
—feel tempted to say "God, forgive God"2 when contem-
plating the dire mess in which the world finds itself. Yet, if it
is true, as the Scriptures assure us,3 that temporal sufferings
can and do bring eternal recompense, if it is true that suffering
and anguish are not necessarily punitive but can be remedial as
well, then, relying on the Scriptures, we are able to accept the
anguish, just as God did when he crucified God to remedy the
fall of man. This question is examined further in chapter 5.
The next question is: What would we expect God to do to
pull us out of the mire?
THE PROBLEM OF GOD'S ANSWER
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the world, what would we expect God's answer to be? The
answer we give will depend entirely on our conception of
God's character. Remembering that our premise is that God is
love, let us ask ourselves what we would expect such a God to
do about the mess in which creation finds itself.
If God is a God of love, then he is our loved one. What
would we expect a true loved one to do who had been mis-
understood and rejected? Perhaps the scriptural answer is the
best one here: Love "suffereth long, and is kind ... is not
easily provoked, thinketh no evil . . . beareth all things . . . en-
dureth all things . . . [love] never faileth."4
Surely that is the reaction we'd expect of someone who
truly loves us. Love is long-suffering, it is kind, it is not easily
provoked, it endures all things in the hope of ultimate success
in the wooing process of love. God saw man's wrong choice,
and all of its consequences which would lead to chaos and
anguish, long before the wrong choice was made. When it did
come, however, we would not expect a real God of love to
impatiently and disgustedly dismiss and destroy the object of
his love. Many who have difficulties with these points appar-
ently expect God to act like a hard-hearted, unforgiving tyrant
rather than a forgiving father. Such an expectation probably
arises from the fact that such action is typical of short-fused
people like ourselves. But, then, we are no examples of real
love in being short-fused.
In actual fact, we would expect a God of love to try to
salvage what he could out of the carnage. It takes the patience
of genuine love to set about this process. He had warned in
faithfulness and sternness of the consequences of the wrong
choice—men would surely die of it—but neither angel nor man
heeded. One thing God would not be expected to do, once the
wrong choice had been taken, would be to block the way back
to himself—our heart's love—by attempting to threaten, cajole,
or force us back. Force cannot restore anything in the way of
love. That would be to cut off all possibility of a way back.

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HOW TO RESTORE LOVE
Thus, in order to restore to love, there remains only one way
open—the exercise of further patient love. Accordingly, God
exercises long-suffering and patience in trying to win us freely
back to love and reason. This same process culminated in the
sending of his own Son to lay down freely his life for us all.
Therefore, we should expect a God of love, confronted by
the situation in which we find ourselves, to patiently wait and
quietly woo, or attempt to woo, us back. We should expect
the consequences of the fall, then, not to be "fire and thun-
der," but rather the "still, small voice" in the attempt to real-
ize the word said about God by the apostle: "Who desires all
men ... to come to the knowledge of the truth."5
But this attitude of quietness and perseverance can be mis-
taken for passivity or even inactivity. A large part of the Scrip-
tures is devoted to just this point, in fact. God is not inactive;
he is not indifferent. He is certainly not dead: "The Lord is
not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slack-
ness; but he is longsuffering to usward, not willing that any
should perish, but that all should come to repentance."6 This
means just what it says. It does not mean that all men will
repent and come to a knowledge of the truth. But it confirms
that God is a God of love and patience who is ready and
willing to receive all who do turn to him.
The fact, then, that he has waited so long after the "bomb-
ing" of his handiwork before judging the "bombers," both the
original one and those who have carried on the same work in
every generation (which includes me) is, in reality, another
indication of God's true character—loving-kindness, patience,
long-suffering, not being easily provoked. Only by looking at
the situation in this way can I see any explanation of why
God, the almighty, omniscient, omnipresent, righteous one,
has not long since exercised withering, general judgment on all
of us and set up a "puppet state" on earth and in heaven to
slavishly and immediately carry out his every command, just as

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every dictator would do, if he could, particularly if his will had
been thwarted as God's will certainly has been.
THWARTING GOD'S WILL
Some will feel shocked. Can, then, God's will be thwarted?
The fatalistic Muslims think not. Is it possible that his will may
not be done on earth as it is in heaven? Anyone who is not
sure about this point should ask himself whether God planned
any act of sadism that has taken place. Was it his will to kill six
or seven million Jewish men, women and children in gas cham-
bers for no other reason than that they were Jews? Those poor
people were ordered to strip themselves naked, fold their
clothes, put their shoes neatly on the floor, and then were told
in four or five languages that coffee and cookies would be
served them "after their communal bath." Then they were
forced into a room fitted with nozzles to deliver prussic acid
instead of water directly onto their naked bodies. Any chil-
dren who had been forgotten in the crowd were thrown in
through the windows, only openable from outside, even after
the gassing had started. Often the screams lasted for fifteen
minutes after the slaughter had begun. Was that not thwarting
God's perfect will? And does not any other sin also thwart it?
Sinning is one way of thwarting his will. Another way
would be to set up a dictatorship to "restore order to the
chaotic creation." If this route to rebuilding the creation were
adopted, it would just as effectively thwart God's real purpose
of setting up a kingdom of love. Under the present circum-
stances of freedom to do good or bad there are still a few men
who see the situation as it really is and who turn to God to be
refreshed by his love, even in the midst of the general anguish
of creation. Even a little of such love and refreshment is better
than none at all. If the Lord had judged immediately after the
fall or after any other sin, how many who have since drunk of
the water of the well of life and love would have been lost to
him and his kingdom of love forever? His patience has been

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rewarded with responding love which would have been impos-
sible if immediate judgment had supervened.
KING GEORGE VI OF ENGLAND
A story is told about King George VI of Great Britain and how
he won Elizabeth. As a young man the future king fell in love
with the charming young Scottish lady. After a long time of
reflection he plucked up his courage and approached her on
the subject, although he was rather shy, especially with the
opposite sex. He had never been much of a lady's man and was
neither very robust nor strongly masculine in the film-star
sense of the word. Moreover, he had a slight speech defect,
which added to his difficulties. His proposal was rejected.
The young prince, greatly upset over this rebuff, asked his
mother, Queen Mary, for her advice. The queen listened
sympathetically to her son's tale of woe. Then she told him
she wanted to ask just one question before advising him. Did
he really love Elizabeth only? would he be able to find a
substitute if Elizabeth proved reluctant? After a moment's
consideration, he replied that he would marry Elizabeth or no
one else. "Well, then," said his mother, "there is only one way
open to you. Go and ask her again."
So the young prince put his pride in his pocket, gathered up
his remaining courage, and arranged another interview with
Elizabeth. He probably stuttered as he repeated his proposal,
remembering what had happened to him the first time at her
hands. She refused him again.
Not knowing what to do then, he returned to his mother,
Queen Mary, for advice. Again she listened quietly—some say,
severely—to the whole story. She showed him every sympathy
and, after hearing all he had to say, indicated that she had one
question to ask before she could advise him. The question was:
"Do you really want her after this rebuff? There are plenty of
other young ladies around who would be delighted to have a
prince as a husband. I myself could show you some." But poor

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George was quite clear about his feelings. It was Elizabeth or
no one at all. "Then," said his mother, "in that case there is
only one way open to you. Go and ask her again."
So, after a considerable period of mental preparation, the
young prince approached the pretty young Scottish lady the
third time. In the meantime, she had noticed how serious the
prince was. His love and determination to win her had indeed
been constant. She saw that the great effort he made in com-
ing the third time, putting his pride in his pocket, demon-
strated his singleness of purpose. And she began to recognize
something new in herself. His undoubted love toward her was
beginning to kindle an answering fire in her own heart. His
warmth of love, even though he was awkward and not very
good at courting a young lady's affection, was beginning to
warm her affection toward him. In short, his love began to
kindle her love, and she began to transmit some of the love
which she received from him. She began to feel she was able to
say that she loved and admired him in his singleness of purpose
and constancy. Thus, the story goes, began one of the really
happy families in the annals of royal households. And this love
lasted until the king's death.
Love begets love. But it often has to be very patient, long-
suffering and kind until the fire is kindled in the prospective
partner's heart. The Scriptures say that God woos in one way
or another every man and woman ever born.1 Through the
circumstances of life, or through the Scriptures, he quietly
goes on as the years pass, until we begin to return to him some
of the warmth of love which he has for us. For we are told
that God has his delight among the sons of men.8 He loves us,9
rejectors though we have been of his overtures toward us. He is
working toward the day when we may begin to return to him
the same love, and to delight in his friendship as he will delight
in ours.
Once kindled, this love must be regularly tended in order to
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to be—warming and refreshing to both partners, so that both
can rejoice in the happiness which love brings. God is love and
we were so constructed in his image that we can only flourish
when bathed in such love—breathing it in and giving it out.
But, it would be one-sided to leave the story here. All love
stories do not end this way. We must look at one other less
pleasant possibility.
THE FINAL REFUSAL
There comes a time in every love affair when a final answer
toward the wooer must be made. This final answer may be
either yes or no. One day the wooed one may make a rejection
which, although she perhaps did not know it, was the final
one. It turns out to be permanent. In the one case she may, of
course, die. That finishes the wooing of a mortal man—when
immortality lays hold of the prospective bride.
Another possibility is that the wooer may cease to woo. The
"wooed" is not the only one who has a free will to accept or
reject the wooer. God as the wooer has a free will too—to stop
or to continue wooing according to his infinite wisdom. He
can decide how long to woo and be rejected and also when to
stop wooing altogether. Even this final decision to stop wooing
will, we are told, be made on the basis of love. It will, accord-
ingly, be put off as long as at all possible.
There is a third and last possibility. If the wooed marries
another, then further courtship by the first suitor would be
thoroughly out of order and outside the confines of love. The
Scriptures say quite clearly that this state of affairs may be
reached in the spiritual sense. There comes a time when a man
"marries this world," and after that, God no longer offers his
salvation, his "marriage relationship" to him. His Spirit strives
with him no longer. A man's spirit and God's Spirit become
forever estranged, for man's spirit finally "marries another,"
selling itself to this world and its rebellion against the Most
High. A man can close his ears finally to the "still small voice"

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that so long had whispered to him to return—he then "marries
another" and the pleading rightly stops forever.
We humans can seldom clearly see when such a final act
takes place. We cannot determine when God's Spirit gives a
man up forever. But that such does occur is perfectly clear,
even though it is invisible to man's mortal eye. As Wesley's
beautiful hymn put it, Jesus is the lover of man's soul. He is
the patient lover. But there comes a time when all courtship
ceases and when a man can irrevocably "marry another" and
cut off God's striving permanently. This can be done in many
ways. We can give ourselves entirely over to material things
such as a career, money, or social standing. It may be the love
of things more definitely sinful that cuts us off. In extreme
cases we can "sell ourselves to the devil" quite consciously—as
many Nazis did when they knowingly cooperated with Hitler
in liquidating human beings in the interests of their own pro-
motion within the party. Many do the same just as effectively
when they value promotion in their jobs before promotion in
the kingdom of heaven. They do not seek "the kingdom of
heaven first."10 Some men resolve never to discuss spiritual
matters again because "they disturb." For them, the courtship
is over; they're married to another.
The New Testament letter to the Hebrews speaks of that
cessation. "Today, when you hear his voice, do not harden
your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the
wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test and saw my
works for forty years. Therefore I was provoked with that
generation, and said, 'They always go astray in their hearts;
they have not known my ways.' As I swore in my wrath, ''They
shall never enter my rest.' "n
The context of this statement shows that the Lord spoke
and spoke again, and wooed and wooed again, but the
Hebrews of that generation closed their hearts and inward ears.
In the end God gave them up, and that generation, except for
Joshua and Caleb, never entered the promised land but per-

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ished in the wilderness. This serves as a parable for us, to
whom God also speaks. We can be so occupied with the trials
and joys of this life that we, too, do not hear. We, too, can
miss the joy and rest of his love by acting as did the Hebrews.
"For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those
who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly
gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have
tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the
age to come, if they then commit apostasy, since they crucify
the Son of God on their own account and hold him up to
contempt."12
This warning is to those who have at one time responded to
God's wooing, and have therefore tasted his goodness, and
then cease to respond. A time comes when it is impossible to
renew them, for the striving of God's Spirit with them ceases.
Another Scripture passage speaks in exactly the same tenor:
"For if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the
truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful
prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire which will consume
the adversaries. . . . How much worse punishment do you
think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of
God, and profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was
sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace? ... It is a fearful
thing to fall into the hands of the living God."13
I take this warning for myself, believing that I can learn
from all of Scripture. The point is, God can and does speak to
men; he does woo. If they respond he allows them to taste in
this life the things of his kingdom of love. But his wooing is
dynamic, and it is dependent on our daily response. Continual
spurning may end in our "marrying another forever." Then his
wooing stops, for we have committed the sin of spurning the
Son of God. Rejecting God's grace in Christ simply means
declaring ourselves as candidates for no grace, which is the
same thing as being ripe for judgment.
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so-called loving and gracious God. Can we accept this? Is all
suffering a judgment? Or must suffering and judgment be kept
apart in our minds? Suffering certainly accompanies judgment,
but is all suffering judgment?

chapter
6
Suffering and Anguish-
Any Reasonable Interpretation?
RESENTMENT AGAINST PURPOSELESS SUFFERING
Many people as they undergo suffering resent what is happen-
ing because they can often see no constructive purpose behind
it. Is it cosmic sadism? When we can see a good reason for pain
or suffering, as in surgery or the dentist's drill, we can endure
it without resentment, even though the actual pain may be
worse. The relief of knowing why is tremendous and can
change resentment and impatience into anticipation and pa-
tience.
"Senseless" suffering, such as we see when innocent chil-
dren are destroyed or mutilated in war, sickness, plague or
famine, makes our anger and impatience rise. The impatience
increases when we see pain which is not only "senseless" or
"random" but apparently designed and calculated, or even "re-
fined," as is the pain at the root of malaria, for surely that
pain looks directly sadistic in its very mechanism, as we have
already mentioned. When senseless pain is apparently not
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person tends to lose restraint in considering it.
A good example of this arises in considering, as did C. S.
Lewis, the deafness of a musical genius such as Beethoven.1
An absolute master of the art and science of sound struck
down with stone deafness! Could a greater refinement of
apparent sadism be conceived? Hence the impatience of many
when they merely begin to consider the problem of suffering.
Yet, on the other hand, anyone who considers himself to be
a Christian is warned on every side to expect both joy and
suffering as normally as summer and winter. Both are, accord-
ing to Scripture, integral parts of the Christian experience. Just
because he is a Christian he is not excused from suffering with
the rest of mankind. Rather, he is promised additional suffer-
ing just because he is a Christian. The apostle Paul says ex-
plicitly that the Christian must enter the kingdom not only in
joy but also through the gates of many trials, tribulations and
sufferings, being forsaken of man, and apparently by God too,
before reaching the final gate of death.2
Why? If we could only get a reasonable answer, our misery
could be borne with more patience and less rebellion. Surely a
good, loving, omnipotent and kind God could have found
some method of reducing the sharpness of the dreadful reali-
ties of living and dying. Can he be both good and just while
quietly sitting by and letting the slaughter and anguish go on
and on, generation after generation?
IF GOD IS GOOD, WILL HE HURT US?
Lewis puts this very question in another light when he writes,
"If God's goodness is inconsistent with his hurting us, then
either God is not good or there is no God; for, in the only life
we know he hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all
we can imagine."3 Plainly, this means that if we believe in God
at all, we must believe that it is consistent with his perfect
nature, kindness and love to hurt us and to leave us wallowing
in our own blood, as it were, right up to the end.

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Lewis adds a rider to his statement which asks, in effect: If
we accept that in this life God can hurt us beyond all that we
can imagine, and that this hurting is consistent with his good-
ness, have we any valid reasons for believing that he should
not, if necessary, continue hurting us in the same way after
this mortal life is over?4 Obviously there is no moral reason
why he should not, if spirits can endure suffering as mortal
men do. Numerous passages of Scripture need to be examined
carefully in this connection. Neither Lewis nor we are sug-
gesting that the torments of hell are universal after death! The
real question is whether suffering serves any purpose in this
life and in that to come.
We can, however, go one step further and still remain on
safe ground. If God has reasons—other than sadism, which we
cannot attribute to thim—for hurting us now in this mortal
life, he might, conceivably, have equally good reasons for con-
tinuing the same process afterward, in death. Clarity on such
questions will only come by first asking ourselves, "What does
the Scripture say?" And second, from our answer to why he
hurts us now and what he intends to achieve by it in this life
and beyond.
WAS CHRIST EVER IN MAN'S POSITION?
It is often helpful in dealing with such questions to find out
whether Christ the Man was ever in the same position as we in
regard to suffering. If he was (and in other matters he plainly
was, except in questions of sin), then the investigation of what
suffering achieved in him will, perhaps, provide the answer as
to what it is supposed to achieve in us.
Accordingly, looking at one of the most obvious cases of
Christ's suffering—the cross—may help to solve the problem.
God the Father "stood passively by," as it were, while men
crucified his own beloved Son. There can be no doubt about
the fact that Christ was the Son of his love, the second Person
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Father and the Father loved the Son, for the disciples and
others heard the voice from heaven saying so. Yet, it is also a
fact that God remained "passive" while the awful deed was
done, just as he remained "passive" while millions of Jews, his
own people, were gassed in brutal cynicism.
To make matters worse, the Scripture says this brutal act
was the culmination of the prophecy that Christ was the Lamb
of God slain from the foundation of the world. Thus, the
cruel cross was an eternally foreseen event—an event which
God presided at eternally in a purely passive manner in that he
did not stop it. Therefore, the hurting of the beloved one must
have been consistent with God's eternal character. In fact, God
himself suffered, for he was in Christ as he suffered (2 Cor.
5:19), so he was not really passive, for he actively suffered—
and suffers—too.
THE CROSS AND GOD'S LOVE
This means that if the central doctrine of the Christian faith,
the cross, is true, then it is obviously also true that it must be
consistent with God's eternal love to hurt those he loves best
—including himself—even to the point of what we would call
barbarism, for the cross is barbaric. Considering the barbarism
of the cross, which God eternally allowed, one is tempted with
Lewis to say: "God forgive God."5
The conclusion we must draw, then, from the fact that
Christ did suffer the cross is that God allowed Christ, his be-
loved one, to be "put under the harrow" (to use Lewis' terms)
from which there was no escape, even to death. In fact, God
was in Christ as he allowed this act. The same applies to the
whole human race and to biology, which can also be said to be
"under the harrow" in a large way.
Whichever way we look we find the same picture in princi-
ple. Christ on the eternal cruel cross and a so-called God of
love behind him and, indeed, in him. Humanity and biology
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according to the Scripture, a God of love behind us, who is
until now entirely passive at the spectacle. Confronted with
this situation, what Lewis feared was not so much a loss of
belief in any God at all with its concomitant victory of pure
materialism in him. That solution would have been too easy,
for it would have meant that a simple overdose of sleeping pills
at any time could have gotten him out from "under the
harrow" forever. Far too simple! What worried Lewis was that
the "harrow" might mean that man and biology were all
trapped, as it were, in a laboratory in which God might be the
eternal vivisector and we the rats!6 Lewis says that the despair
in which the Son of God died when he cried out, "My God,
why hast thou forsaken me?"7 might have been the result of
Christ finding out that the cross was, in reality, a carefully
baited laboratory trap which sprang at death and from which
there was no escape after God had lured him into it.
Looked at dispassionately, surely even an admittedly fallen
person like myself, possessing scarcely a trace of the love I
attribute to a God of love, could not have stood passively by
while they crucified him—or gassed the millions of Jews with
prussic acid. Even a person like myself, who is no example of
love in any sense, would have tried to arrange things better
than that and would not have allowed my dearest to be treated
thus, right to the bitter end! But, then, if we take that view,
God must be morally inferior—even to me—which is com-
pletely nihilistic. We shall have to scrap that view too, for it
leads straight to the destruction of all rational thought on the
subject.
Of course God is more compassionate than I. But why then
was he so relentlessly passive at the cross? Why doesn't he
relent at all the millennia of human and biological agony? At
the slow starvation of millions? At the sight of the cancer
victims, dying while they yet live? At the sight of children and
old people losing eyes or limbs at play or on the street? If all
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therefore not sadistic, what is all the grief and anguish about?
HURTING IN ORDER TO HEAL
Can the key to the sore problem be found in the following
considerations: Can we allow that to do good there may be
occasions when we must apparently do that which looks as
though it were bad? Put another way, can we hurt to heal?
Obviously we can allow that, for every good surgion and den-
tist does so regularly and routinely, nobody even raising an
eyebrow about it, for it is so obvious. To be a really good
surgeon or dentist one has to be perfectly relentless quite regu-
larly in hurting in order to do good. If, every time I flinched,
gripped the dentist's chair, or drew back my head in pain at
the relentless drill, he were to stop and consider ending the
torture and filling up the still dirty cavity with amalgam, he
would be less than a good dentist. He would not be being
good, or even kind or loving to his patient if he were anything
but absolutely unrelenting in his thoroughness in inflicting this
therapeutic suffering. We would all be in trouble again in no
time if he did relent. And then all the pain he had already
inflicted in the early drillings would have been in vain. Thus,
to be good he has to be absolutely relentless in his infliction of
suffering. He has to be apparently passive to the pain he is
causing. Not only does he not stop the pain but he goes on
inflicting more distress on me. Does he seem devoid of feeling?
In reality, of course, his passiveness to suffering, his apparent
lack of feeling and his relentlessness are merely motivated by
common sense and consideration for his patient, even though
the intolerable pain might persuade me otherwise.
For anyone who has undergone root treatment of a molar
tooth, two further points will emerge to throw light on this
problem. The bacterial infection not only causes excruciating
pain, but the toxins released into the blood will poison the
patient to such an extent that his very consciousness may
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cause of the pain and poison. Then the dentist begins work
with his awful drill. The pain becomes more excruciating until
the center of the infection is reached. Then the poison pres-
sure is released, and immediate relief is felt, though it is not
yet complete. As soon as no more poison is being released into
the blood, the head begins to clear and the pain to subside.
First, then, in order to remove the hurt of decay, sometimes
more pain has to be inflicted—worse than that of the original
sickness. But the worse pain acts curatively on the first pain
and purges it away. Second, only when the basic trouble be-
gins to be cured does clarity of thought return.
THE SCRIPTURAL POSITION
Scripture teaches, in essence, precisely this view on the mean-
ing of suffering. The fall introduced the "decay" of humanity
and nature which results in the hurt which afflicts us. Thus
arose the pain of the festering tooth pulp. To cure this fester-
ing mess, the Bible says a good but relentless surgeon is needed
to drill and drill until reality is too horrible to bear, until flesh
and blood can no longer take it—until we believe we're for-
saken by God and man. The Bible describes in detail both the
setting in of the decay and its radical if painful cure. Our
species has decayed from its original state and become, as it
were, a lower or decayed species, as I have described else-
where.8 To cure this decay and loss of species requires radical
and drastic treatment involving, first of all, the reaching of the
"focal point of infection," and then the "removal of the de-
formities produced by the decay." Christ's death and resurrec-
tion "reached the focal point" of the trouble, as it were. But
the "deformities of the decay" have also to be corrected, and
that takes time and can be expected to be painful.
One of these "deformities" is connected with the "clouding
of the intellectual and rational process" which accompanies
the fall. The apostle Paul described them in Romans 1 as a
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processes for which we were designed became garbled. One of
the by-products of suffering is seen here. For although suffer-
ing and toxins may "knock us silly," the removal of the latter
can bring clarity of thought. It is a fact that sin darkens the
mind. The corollary that redemption and holiness enlighten
the mind is also true. For salvation not only redeems us from a
lost eternity; it also redeems us from a lost, clouded, be-
fuddled life at present. It makes the face and intellect radiant
and removes the darkness, even intellectually speaking. By
taking away our sin, we become saved for eternity. But we
must not forget that this same saving process brings light and
radiance to the heart and intellect right now, the process being
one of growth—growth in this life.
ACCURATE SURGERY OR WHOLESALE BUTCHERY?
Can the skilled, accurately aimed work of the dentist on a
tooth, with its concomitant pain and healing, be compared
with the wild, undisciplined, purely destructive agony which
afflicts much of mankind today? Can we believe that war, the
wholesale gassing of the innocent, and the mutilation of chil-
dren and the aged are the work of a "surgeon" in curing man-
kind? Here again, for any satisfactory answer, we must turn
back to the archetype of all barbarous suffering, namely, the
cruel cross.
Is it possible to believe that when wicked men, inspired by
hatred and jealousy, decided to take Jesus, hold a mock trial,
scourge him with their equivalent of a cat-o'-nine-tails, display
him all night for the raucous amusement of the troops, and
then finally drive iron stakes through his hands and feet,
raising him on a cross to bleed to death by exhaustion—can we
reasonably hold that such a performance was the work of a
skilled surgeon in his efforts to cure the world of its disease?
THE EXACT THERAPY OF THE CROSS
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God, with the butchery of the cross, did cure the world of its
disease, and that the cross was the work of a skilled surgeon,
even though it looked from the human point of view like the
exclusively destructive and adventitious work of the ribald
Roman soldiers and hateful Pharisees. It looks so very much
like this that the cross was considered by the Greeks to be so
unworthy of divinity that it was a sheer "scandal." But the
fact is, outward appearances may deceive. They certainly did
in the case of the Son of God dying the death of a common
criminal. May not outward appearances deceive also in our
particular cases of suffering?
The reason for this deception is simple. Outwardly wicked
men cruelly put him to death and that was all that man ever
saw of the process. But behind the scenes the great surgeon did
an unseen work through Christ's suffering. Unseen by men,
Christ took into his own body the very "virus" which was at
the root of man's sickness—the turning of man's back upon the
only good one and his perfect will. The Bible says that this
turning is "sin." It is as though Christ in his death took the
organism of decay (sin) away from me, as well as the products
of decay (the egoism, hate, impatience, untruthfulness, etc.,
which result from and are produced by a sinful attitude),
which are the toxins (sins), and allowed the organism to be
cultured in his body until it killed him. A parasite may kill the
host organism, as when the influenza virus kills the man it lives
on as a parasite. But in killing the host it also kills itself at the
same time. So Christ took on both the causative organism (sin)
together with its "toxins" (sins), such as my hates, lies and
general unrighteousness, so that mankind and I could be freed
from both by embracing his act. In taking into his body the
lethal organism, as well as the products of its activities (meta-
bolism, if one will), he himself had to die. But, in that the
"parasite" (sin) killed the "host organism," the parasite killed
itself too.
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seen to the human eye when they crucufied him. Thus, the
senselessness of the cross is only superficial—superficial to the
uninitiated. Its senselessness becomes sense to those who
probe to the bottom of the mystery and find that he did, in
fact, bear their sin and sins in his own body on the tree. This
fact accounts for the reality of their experience at the begin-
nings of the secret but healing therapy wrought for them at
Calvary.
The actual mechanism of this secret therapy is quite simple.
The "virus" which schemed and killed the human race and
brought the fall to our universe was known as disobedience to
the known good will of God. That is, it was a turning away
from the only good, which automatically brought with it an
embracing of the bad. The organism which introduced death
to man and biology was characterized by turning away from
the sustainer and Creator of life itself.
Christ at Calvary simply reversed this process of rejecting
God's known will by turning to, embracing and doing God's
known will, even though it meant his own suffering and death.
Man's act in turning away from God was reversed by Christ
when he embraced God for us anew with his will. However, he
embraced not only the basic cause of the ill—the turning away
—but he took on himself the consequences, the "metabolic
products," as it were, of that fatal wrong choice. He took my
sickness and my sicknesses on himself. No one watching at the
cross actually saw him do this. No one knows just how he did
it, that is, just what mechanism he used. All we know is that
we could not do it, for none of us could die in a valid way
before God for the sin of another. All we know is that the
Father gave his permission and command to Christ to lay
down his life as a ransom for many. And Christ obediently did
just that. The man Christ reversed man's disobedience.
A LESS UGLY WAY?
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Christ accomplished for me at the cross. As such, it is of vast
importance, providing, as it does, the basis of salvation from
the guilt of sin for eternity. Some will say it is horrible. It is.
To think that God could find no other method than a bloody
cross, cruel iron nails through hands and feet, before he could
redeem me from Adam's fatal mistake, fills me with dismay.
Surely a more genteel, aesthetically acceptable method could
have been found for such a momentous piece of therapy.
This brings us to the second point we must make on this
subject. It concerns the blood, the sweat, and the forsakenness
of the cross of Calvary, in short, the ugliness and horror of
such a piece of restorative therapy. For the utter cruelty of it
shocks even wicked men. Let us look then at this second great
problem of the cross—its ugliness.
It is written of Christ: "In the days of his flesh, Jesus
offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears,
to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard
for his godly fear. Although he was a Son, he learned obedi-
ence through what he suffered; and being made perfect he
became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him."9
That is an almost incredible statement for the writer of the
letter to the Hebrews to have made. The Son of God had
always been perfect from eternity until he came into time at
the incarnation. And during the incarnation he was without
sin, and therefore, still perfect. What the writer is teaching
here will answer our question as to why God chose such a
cruel, ugly and bloody method of redemptive therapy.
MADE PERFECT
The process of "being made perfect" referred to here means,
in this context, being "made mature." If a child is perfect in
mind and body, there is nothing we can complain about. But
his perfection as a child needs to grow into the mature perfec-
tion of an adult. This process is one of growth in body, mind
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ine, it must be gone through experimentally.
This is exactly what Christ went through experimentally as
a man. He was perfect from a child onward. But the Bible says
he grew in wisdom and stature—that is, he matured by his
experience as a man. Even though he was the second Person of
the Trinity, he was perfected by growing up as a man, for he
gathered actual experience of manhood which he lacked ex-
perimentally before the incarnation. He certainly knew all
about manhood before he became a man, because he was
omniscient. But now he experienced manhood in the body—
and matured or became experienced, and therefore perfected,
in it.
Now notice what some of this manhood experience involved
for Christ—something he, as God, had not experienced as a
man before: "In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers
and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was
able to save him from death." God the Son had never had that
experience, common to all men, while he was God the Son and
had never yet experienced the incarnation. It was the fight
between the will to be obedient and the terrible reality of a
bloody death on the tree. This was a new experience. Here we
have anxiety, anguish and suffering—right up to bloody
sweat—in anticipation of the abyss of such a death. He
matured as a man by the experience of anguished prayer in
faith to him who could deliver him. We are assured that he was
heard because of his godly fear. But he was only saved from
death by going down through death and thus being led out of
it after tasting it.
The result, then, of this seemingly unreasonable and cruel
death of the cross and the anguish which preceded it was that
although he was a Son, yet he learned obedience through what
he suffered. Of course, he had always been obedient to the
Father's will—the two wills were always congruent and the
Father loved the Son and the Son the Father. But here was a
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anguish of facing death such as all creatures, but not God,
face. The God of life was to die for all his creatures and share
ail their ugly experiences.
The anguish and suffering of the cross and the preceding
events demonstrated that Christ was perfectly obedient to the
Father in all things. The experience of the unnameable pain,
anguish and forsakenness of the cross did something to the
incarnate Son of God which would have been impossible be-
fore the incarnation. The discipline, the setting of his face as a
flint to go to Jerusalem to face it all, the refusal of even the
analgesic (the myrrh) before the nails were driven through
him, all that perfected even him, the Son of God—as Man.
Thus, the fact of the cross laid down the legal basis for our
salvation, but the bloody cross showed what suffering and
anguish can do if accepted as Jesus accepted them. His death
was expiatory for sin. But the manner of his death served at
the same time as a teacher of obedience to God the Man; it
was a maturer, a perfecter of the perfect one. If the Son of
God as man was matured in his experience and learned obedi-
ence by it, then we find yet another secret, hidden element in
the mode of "therapy" God introduced by his Son to cure the
creation of its fatal malady.
It will be obvious then, that, purely legally, Christ's bare
death—by any method—would have secured our salvation for
eternity. However, it was, perhaps, not immediately obvious
why such a shocking and barbarous route to death needed to
be taken—a route which made the cross a scandal to the
Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews. No wonder so few
of the Greeks or Jews could understand it without the extra
information given on the subject of suffering by the New
Testament—and by experience too.
SUFFERING-NOT SENSELESS
Thus, the anguish and suffering of the cross are not senseless.
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eyes of the mortal man in general. But their function teaches
us why the whole Bible is full of references to pain, suffering
and anguish. Every person who embraces the death of Christ
(and his resurrection) as his basis for eternal salvation is
warned to expect, as a matter of routine, sufferings of some
sort. Christ having suffered in the flesh, he is told, is warning
enough for us to arm ourselves with the same mind—that is, to
be on the lookout for the squalls of suffering which certainly
await the consistent Christian.10 In giving us salvation, Christ
suffered. In accepting that salvation, suffering will certainly
find us out.
Further, we are told that the disciple is not above his Master
even in these matters.11 This means that, in this context, if
the perfection or maturation of the Master could not be
effected without the anguish of suffering, neither can the
maturation or perfection of the disciple be accomplished by
any other means. The Christian who thinks he can get through
the Christian life without this sort of perfecting is living in a
fool's paradise. The disciple is not above his Master even in
learning matters.
The New Testament is full of teaching of this kind, teaching
which is seldom even touched upon today, for by its very
nature it is unpopular to the natural human. Paul the apostle,
when writing to the Philippians, informed them that "it has
been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not
only believe in him but also suffer for his sake."12 Surely it
would have been unnecessary for Paul to have told the Philip-
pians that it had been granted them not only to believe but
also to suffer if just believing without suffering was an ideal
state. Clearly, no one wants suffering. But, in the light of the
above, it must be a special privilege. Christ did not relish it. He
sweat blood in anticipation of it. But he endured it as a privi-
lege in view of the glory of the maturity gained by it.
This means, again, that even for us mortals "senseless"
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adventitious agony produced in a mortal body of flesh and
blood. It can be the gateway to special results in our char-
acters. In any case, it is poor policy to avoid suffering by
disobedience, for Christ embraced trials and suffered because
of obedience, thus being matured and perfected thereby. It is
the Christian path to try to follow the same policy. For by
following this policy Christ has been matured and exalted by
the Father to his right hand. He has committed the entire
government of the world into Christ's capable hands—hands
rendered capable, mature and fit for the job by being obedient
even to letting them be pierced at the cross.
Is it because the fruit of suffering is so little known in the
Western churches that we have so few "giants" in the land
today? In the East, behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains, the
total number of Christians has been reduced greatly by suffer-
ing. But the proportion of "giants," mature Christians, has
certainly greatly increased there.
PROMISED TRIBULATION
The Bible—both the Old and the New Testaments—is crammed
with references to suffering, anguish, tribulation, grief, trial
and affliction.13 For example, there is this rather neglected
text by the apostle Paul: "But whatever gain I had, I counted
as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss
because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my
Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and
count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be
found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on
law, but that which is through faith in Christ. . . that I may
know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his
sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I
may attain the resurrection [out] from [among] the dead."14
THE REASON WHY
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experienced salvation on the basis of a gift of God and not on
the basis of any works he had done. Nothing he could do
could save him from the penalty of sin. On the Damascus road
he had learned that his own works could not help him but that
Christ's work could and did. Why, then, does Paul now insist
so much on the value of the work of suffering he had done in
losing everything for Christ's sake? Those losses would never
save him.
As we read the cited passage carefully it becomes obvious
that Paul is referring to the value of sufferings and losses in
gaining a knowledge of the surpassing worth of knowing
Christ. He is referring to a process which can only be described
as one of Christian maturity or perfection. He suffered the loss
of every privilege which he had possessed as a well-respected
Pharisee in order to be obedient to Christ. No doubt this
caused anguish. But his losses were not only abstract. He was
whipped, imprisoned, mishandled, shipwrecked and generally
treated as the offscouring of the world for Christ's sake. He
couples these experiences with the greater experience which
resulted directly from their knowing the surpassing worth of
Christ. Most of us Western Christians know little of this. Is it
because we have not sought out the only maturing process
known in Scripture leading to this knowledge—and to Christ?
Paul's obedience, like Christ's obedience, in suffering while
doing the will and Word of God is the key to such depth of
experience.
But more about the maturing process is to be discovered in
Philippians 3. Christ was exalted to power because he was
fitted for it by the things he obediently suffered. Paul says in
effect precisely the same of himself and his own exaltation.
For he couples his loss and his suffering with a capacity to
take part in what he calls the "out-resurrection" (exanastasis)
which he regarded not as a matter of course for every Christian
but as that which depends on Christian maturity. We all
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wicked and good, rich and poor, will be resurrected at the
great day of final judgment to receive the things done in our
bodies. But before the day of general "anastasis" there will be
an "exanastasis" of rising of the dead, not in a general, but in a
special, resurrection. This will be at the time of the return of
our Lord in glory to set up his kingdom on earth and reign. In
order to rule and reign, Christ is looking for men and women
among his redeemed who have allowed themselves to be
matured for this high office—by means of the same process by
which he was made fit for it—by anguish and suffering.
Apparently Paul's aim was to obediently accept the same
type of loss and suffering that his Master had gone through in
order to become prepared for high office with Christ. All this
is based upon the free gift of salvation by the blood of Christ.
But in building upon this sure basis of free salvation, a matur-
ing or a perfection process occurs by means of suffering in the
will of God, foreseen both by Christ and by Paul. Paul's atti-
tude of heart is confirmed by his instruction to Timothy: "If
we have died with him, we shall also live with him; if we
endure, we shall also reign with him; if we deny him, he also
will deny us."15 This surely clinches the matter. The Christian
owes his redemption to the free gift of God. But he owes his
degree of exaltation to close knowledge of the surpassing
worth of Christ and close association with him and his pur-
poses in his kingdom, and to the maturation processes which
fitted even the Son for his supreme office in the kingdom. The
experiences of suffering, endurance and anguish in obedience
to the will of God, no matter how outwardly senseless and
adventitious they may appear, are the therapeutic instruments
God used on his Son and uses on all his redeemed who declare
themselves willing for the process.
The same process produces not only the surpassing knowl-
edge of his will, but it also makes us useful to others. "For
because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able
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be better fitted to help mankind than the Son of Man who has
been through the same kind of temptation—though far more
acute? This establishes a bond of confidence between us and
him. He understands because he has experienced the fire of
anguish. Therefore he can help us because his is a sympathy
engendered by understanding. Our lot and his as mortals were
once congruous. It gives me confidence toward him. If I suffer
I can help those who are suffering, even as Christ has helped
me.
PERFECTION
This leads us to the third point. The first point was that Christ
died and rose again to justify and redeem us, giving us the basis
for fellowship with a holy God. The second point was that his
sufferings and endurance were the means of qualification and
maturation for his exaltation to the right hand of God the
Father. In a parallel manner, the sufferings of Christians (for
the gospel's sake and in general) are calculated to mature them
for high office with him in his kingdom. The third point is also
directly concerned with suffering and its consequences. Peter
develops the subject in saying, "Since therefore Christ suffered
in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same thought [mind or
will], for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from
sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer
by human passions but by the will of God."17
Peter was referring to "suffering in the flesh" which, he
says, leads to ceasing from sin in the flesh. But the same princi-
ple also applies to matters not necessarily directly connected
with the flesh, as he also confirms: "For one is approved if,
mindful of God, he endures pain while suffering unjustly."18
This simply means that any discomfort we have to endure
because of our faithfulness to God's will eventually leads to
our being "approved." In fact, Peter says that as Christ suf-
fered the same kind of discomfort for our sakes, so he left us
"an example, that you should follow in his steps."19   This,

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then, is the line of action to which we "have been called."
Therefore, according to Peter, suffering leads to ceasing
from sin, and approval before God. Is it then any wonder that,
after his death and resurrection, Christ asked the disciples
questions which bring the whole problem of suffering into
focus: "Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these
things and enter into his glory?"20 "The Christ should suffer
and on the third day rise from the dead."21 The same subject
was the theme of Paul's three-week argument with the Jews in
Thessalonica: "And Paul went in, as was his custom, and for
three weeks he argued with them from the Scriptures, explain-
ing and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer
and to rise from the dead."22 Among other things, suffering
made Christ "approved."
It is generally conceded that Christ's death is basic to the
Christian's salvation. But the suffering type of death is not
usually emphasized. Perhaps it is too barbaric for our cultured
society to bear. Regardless of our reactions to the awfulness of
the death on the cross, God chose it in order to bring to
mankind a full salvation—not only from the guilt of sin but
also from its power, not only to save us from eternal damna-
tion but also to demonstrate to us how to become approved in
the same way that Christ became approved. In fact, it was to
teach us how to cease from sin.
REJOICING IN SUFFERING
Paul sums it all up: "So we do not lose heart. Though our
outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being re-
newed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is pre-
paring for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all compari-
son."2* Clearly, Christ's death and resurrection are the corner-
stones of any salvation that will take us to heaven. But Paul is
talking about something built as a superstructure on the
foundation of salvation. It is an eternal, incomparable weight
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temporary afflictions, the suffering and pain borne in the will
of God, which make us approved for incomparable glory, just
as afflictions and sufferings brought approval to Christ after he
had patiently and triumphantly borne them. Temporary afflic-
tions exchanged for an incomparable weight of glory! Paul
considered it a bargain. So he acted on it immediately!
A POSSIBLE MISUNDERSTANDING
Of course, one might say that if suffering and afflictions are so
useful and well rewarded in the will of God, then let us afflict
and scourge our fellowmen all we can and seek suffering our-
selves. We are doing them a favor by hurting them or ourselves.
This seems to echo the old argument: Let us sin willfully so
that grace may abound. Let us seek and provoke suffering!
God forbid! The dentist does not willfully or wantonly bore
holes anywhere and everywhere in our teeth to stop the future
possibility of decay. God is the surgeon, so let him operate just
where he finds it necessary. He may and will use wicked men
as his scalpel. He has promised to reward them for their evil
intentions because they afflict others just for the sake of hurt-
ing and killing. Though he uses that same evil for his own
purposes, that doesn't give us the right to sin so that grace may
abound by hurting others or ourselves unnecessarily.
To indiscriminately inflict pain is wanton. Jesus himself
never regarded pain and suffering as good things in themselves,
for he abolished them by healing on many occasions. He also
told us to do the same. The Scripture speaks of death itself as
the last enemy. Pain falls into the same category. Pain and
death entered into the world by the fall, when man turned his
back upon God. The point is that God reverses the evils of
pain and death to produce a glorious result—to glorify his Son
and to glorify man when they both withstand and endure pain
and death in doing his will. This is how God triumphs over
evil—not by "stopping" it, but by using it to his greater glory.
In another book I have attempted to describe the character

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of the Man Jesus and have used the Sermon on the Mount to
illustrate some of my points.24 He said of himself that he was
"meek" and "humble" of spirit. Such an attitude of mind
would scarcely be compatible with his having created the
world by the principles of chance and natural selection of the
stronger specimens as laid down by Darwin. For Jesus did not
destroy the sick, the weak nor the importunate beggars, un-
fitted for the commercial life of his day, as Darwin's principles
would demand.
GENTLING PROCESS
A minister wrote to me, after reading the book cited, about
the subject of the meekness of Jesus, pointing out that the
word meek is often misunderstood. In the context used in the
Sermon on the Mount the word translated by meek really
means "gentled" or "broken in " as those terms are applied to
horses trained to work in harness. The minister recounted
how, as a boy, he had worked on a farm and helped with
"gentling" horses, breaking them in for farm work. Later the
horses were often used for pulling out tree stumps prior to
preparing wasteland for arable purposes.
The untrained wild horses were useless for doing the skilled
work necessary for removing tree stumps. They had to be
thoroughly "tamed" before they could work constructively
with other horses in teams. The taming or breaking-in and
"gentling" process was a prior necessity for useful work. Once
they had been submitted to the sometimes harsh process of
breaking in, which involved whipping and punishment as well
as rewards, they worked productively the rest of their lives and
obviously enjoyed it thoroughly. As their experience grew, the
reins could be left on their necks and they would go by them-
selves from tree stump to tree stump, assume the correct posi-
tion, wait for the chains to be hitched to the trunk, and then
with all their strength—nipping and nudging one another in the
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first pull they would move to a more favorable angle and try
again.
Affliction and suffering can work as a "gentling" process,
fitting us for God's work in the present world and the next.
This is the true meaning of the word meek as Jesus used it.
What if the abysmal suffering of mankind and of nature, a
result of the fall into sin, is now being used in God's good
hands to "gentle" us all—even as it "gentled" his Son? The
stakes are indeed high. Suffering makes us kind to others who
suffer. But what if a bloody war, a rule of tyranny (while
being recognized as culpable sin on the part of their perpetra-
tors, who are promised a just reward for their deeds) is really
working out an incomparable weight of glory for all those who
allow themselves to be "gentled" and disciplined thereby? If
this is so, it would be a fatal blow to the despair and nihilism
into which our generation is so obviously falling. If eternal
glory were to result (and the Bible says it will), then we could,
with the Christians of old, rejoice in suffering and jubilate with
the apostle Paul: "We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that
suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces charac-
ter, and character produces hope, and hope does not disap-
point us, because God's love has been poured into our
hearts."25
AGAIN, WHY ALL THE BARBARISM AND CRUELTY?
Some time ago I had the pleasure of discussing this and related
questions with a U. S. Air Force chaplain. We came to two
main conclusions which, as we shall see, throw light on the
above problem:
1. We all have some sort of freedom to choose among the
paths in life which are made available to us. Our freedom,
which incidentally proves that we're real persons, allows us
choices of paths in one way or another almost continuously.
But we never have any freedom of choice as to the conse-
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cause of the pain and poison. Then the dentist begins work
with his awful drill. The pain becomes more excruciating until
the center of the infection is reached. Then the poison pres-
sure is released, and immediate relief is felt, though it is not
yet complete. As soon as no more poison is being released into
the blood, the head begins to clear and the pain to subside.
First, then, in order to remove the hurt of decay, sometimes
more pain has to be inflicted—worse than that of the original
sickness. But the worse pain acts curatively on the first pain
and purges it away. Second, only when the basic trouble be-
gins to be cured does clarity of thought return.
THE SCRIPTURAL POSITION
Scripture teaches, in essence, precisely this view on the mean-
ing of suffering. The fall introduced the "decay" of humanity
and nature which results in the hurt which afflicts us. Thus
arose the pain of the festering tooth pulp. To cure this fester-
ing mess, the Bible says a good but relentless surgeon is needed
to drill and drill until reality is too horrible to bear, until flesh
and blood can no longer take it—until we believe we're for-
saken by God and man. The Bible describes in detail both the
setting in of the decay and its radical if painful cure. Our
species has decayed from its original state and become, as it
were, a lower or decayed species, as I have described else-
where.8 To cure this decay and loss of species requires radical
and drastic treatment involving, first of all, the reaching of the
"focal point of infection," and then the "removal of the de-
formities produced by the decay." Christ's death and resurrec-
tion "reached the focal point" of the trouble, as it were. But
the "deformities of the decay" have also to be corrected, and
that takes time and can be expected to be painful.
One of these "deformities" is connected with the "clouding
of the intellectual and rational process" which accompanies
the fall. The apostle Paul described them in Romans 1 as a
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processes for which we were designed became garbled. One of
the by-products of suffering is seen here. For although suffer-
ing and toxins may "knock us silly," the removal of the latter
can bring clarity of thought. It is a fact that sin darkens the
mind. The corollary that redemption and holiness enlighten
the mind is also true. For salvation not only redeems us from a
lost eternity; it also redeems us from a lost, clouded, be-
fuddled life at present. It makes the face and intellect radiant
and removes the darkness, even intellectually speaking. By
taking away our sin, we become saved for eternity. But we
must not forget that this same saving process brings light and
radiance to the heart and intellect right now, the process being
one of growth—growth in this life.
ACCURATE SURGERY OR WHOLESALE BUTCHERY?
Can the skilled, accurately aimed work of the dentist on a
tooth, with its concomitant pain and healing, be compared
with the wild, undisciplined, purely destructive agony which
afflicts much of mankind today? Can we believe that war, the
wholesale gassing of the innocent, and the mutilation of chil-
dren and the aged are the work of a "surgeon" in curing man-
kind? Here again, for any satisfactory answer, we must turn
back to the archetype of all barbarous suffering, namely, the
cruel cross.
Is it possible to believe that when wicked men, inspired by
hatred and jealousy, decided to take Jesus, hold a mock trial,
scourge him with their equivalent of a cat-o'-nine-tails, display
him all night for the raucous amusement of the troops, and
then finally drive iron stakes through his hands and feet,
raising him on a cross to bleed to death by exhaustion—can we
reasonably hold that such a performance was the work of a
skilled surgeon in his efforts to cure the world of its disease?
THE EXACT THERAPY OF THE CROSS
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God, with the butchery of the cross, did cure the world of its
disease, and that the cross was the work of a skilled surgeon,
even though it looked from the human point of view like the
exclusively destructive and adventitious work of the ribald
Roman soldiers and hateful Pharisees. It looks so very much
like this that the cross was considered by the Greeks to be so
unworthy of divinity that it was a sheer "scandal." But the
fact is, outward appearances may deceive. They certainly did
in the case of the Son of God dying the death of a common
criminal. May not outward appearances deceive also in our
particular cases of suffering?
The reason for this deception is simple. Outwardly wicked
men cruelly put him to death and that was all that man ever
saw of the process. But behind the scenes the great surgeon did
an unseen work through Christ's suffering. Unseen by men,
Christ took into his own body the very "virus" which was at
the root of man's sickness—the turning of man's back upon the
only good one and his perfect will. The Bible says that this
turning is "sin." It is as though Christ in his death took the
organism of decay (sin) away from me, as well as the products
of decay (the egoism, hate, impatience, untruthfulness, etc.,
which result from and are produced by a sinful attitude),
which are the toxins (sins), and allowed the organism to be
cultured in his body until it killed him. A parasite may kill the
host organism, as when the influenza virus kills the man it lives
on as a parasite. But in killing the host it also kills itself at the
same time. So Christ took on both the causative organism (sin)
together with its "toxins" (sins), such as my hates, lies and
general unrighteousness, so that mankind and I could be freed
from both by embracing his act. In taking into his body the
lethal organism, as well as the products of its activities (meta-
bolism, if one will), he himself had to die. But, in that the
"parasite" (sin) killed the "host organism," the parasite killed
itself too.
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seen to the human eye when they crucufied him. Thus, the
senselessness of the cross is only superficial—superficial to the
uninitiated. Its senselessness becomes sense to those who
probe to the bottom of the mystery and find that he did, in
fact, bear their sin and sins in his own body on the tree. This
fact accounts for thé reality of their experience at the begin-
nings of the secret but healing therapy wrought for them at
Calvary.
The actual mechanism of this secret therapy is quite simple.
The "virus" which schemed and killed the human race and
brought the fall to our universe was known as disobedience to
the known good will of God. That is, it was a turning away
from the only good, which automatically brought with it an
embracing of the bad. The organism which introduced death
to man and biology was characterized by turning away from
the sustainer and Creator of life itself.
Christ at Calvary simply reversed this process of rejecting
God's known will by turning to, embracing and doing God's
known will, even though it meant his own suffering and death.
Man's act in turning away from God was reversed by Christ
when he embraced God for us anew with his will. However, he
embraced not only the basic cause of the ill—the turning away
—but he took on himself the consequences, the "metabolic
products," as it were, of that fatal wrong choice. He took my
sickness and my sicknesses on himself. No one watching at the
cross actually saw him do this. No one knows just how he did
it, that is, just what mechanism he used. All we know is that
we could not do it, for none of us could die in a valid way
before God for the sin of another. All we know is that the
Father gave his permission and command to Christ to lay
down his life as a ransom for many. And Christ obediently did
just that. The man Christ reversed man's disobedience.
A LESS UGLY WAY?
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Christ accomplished for me at the cross. As such, it is of vast
importance, providing, as it does, the basis of salvation from
the guilt of sin for eternity. Some will say it is horrible. It is.
To think that God could find no other method than a bloody
cross, cruel iron nails through hands and feet, before he could
redeem me from Adam's fatal mistake, fills me with dismay.
Surely a more genteel, aesthetically acceptable method could
have been found for such a momentous piece of therapy.
This brings us to the second point we must make on this
subject. It concerns the blood, the sweat, and the forsakenness
of the cross of Calvary, in short, the ugliness and horror of
such a piece of restorative therapy. For the utter cruelty of it
shocks even wicked men. Let us look then at this second great
problem of the cross—its ugliness.
It is written of Christ: "In the days of his flesh, Jesus
offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears,
to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard
for his godly fear. Although he was a Son, he learned obedi-
ence through what he suffered; and being made perfect he
became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him."9
That is an almost incredible statement for the writer of the
letter to the Hebrews to have made. The Son of God had
always been perfect from eternity until he came into time at
the incarnation. And during the incarnation he was without
sin, and therefore, still perfect. What the writer is teaching
here will answer our question as to why God chose such a
cruel, ugly and bloody method of redemptive therapy.
MADE PERFECT
The process of "being made perfect" referred to here means,
in this context, being "made mature." If a child is perfect in
mind and body, there is nothing we can complain about. But
his perfection as a child needs to grow into the mature perfec-
tion of an adult. This process is one of growth in body, mind
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ine, it must be gone through experimentally.
This is exactly what Christ went through experimentally as
a man. He was perfect from a child onward. But the Bible says
he grew in wisdom and stature—that is, he matured by his
experience as a man. Even though he was the second Person of
the Trinity, he was perfected by growing up as a man, for he
gathered actual experience of manhood which he lacked ex-
perimentally before the incarnation. He certainly knew all
about manhood before he became a man, because he was
omniscient. But now he experienced manhood in the body—
and matured or became experienced, and therefore perfected,
in it.
Now notice what some of this manhood experience involved
for Christ—something he, as God, had not experienced as a
man before: "In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers
and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was
able to save him from death." God the Son had never had that
experience, common to all men, while he was God the Son and
had never yet experienced the incarnation. It was the fight
between the will to be obedient and the terrible reality of a
bloody death on the tree. This was a new experience. Here we
have anxiety, anguish and suffering—right up to bloody
sweat—in anticipation of the abyss of such a death. He
matured as a man by the experience of anguished prayer in
faith to him who could deliver him. We are assured that he was
heard because of his godly fear. But he was only saved from
death by going down through death and thus being led out of
it after tasting it.
The result, then, of this seemingly unreasonable and cruel
death of the cross and the anguish which preceded it was that
although he was a Son, yet he learned obedience through what
he suffered. Of course, he had always been obedient to the
Father's will—the two wills were always congruent and the
Father loved the Son and the Son the Father. But here was a
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anguish of facing death such as all creatures, but not God,
face. The God of life was to die for all his creatures and share
all their ugly experiences.
The anguish and suffering of the cross and the preceding
events demonstrated that Christ was perfectly obedient to the
Father in all things. The experience of the unnameable pain,
anguish and forsakenness of the cross did something to the
incarnate Son of God which would have been impossible be-
fore the incarnation. The discipline, the setting of his face as a
flint to go to Jerusalem to face it all, the refusal of even the
analgesic (the myrrh) before the nails were driven through
him, all that perfected even him, the Son of God—as Man.
Thus, the fact of the cross laid down the legal basis for our
salvation, but the bloody cross showed what suffering and
anguish can do if accepted as Jesus accepted them. His death
was expiatory for sin. But the manner of his death served at
the same time as a teacher of obedience to God the Man; it
was a maturer, a perfecter of the perfect one. If the Son of
God as man was matured in his experience and learned obedi-
ence by it, then we find yet another secret, hidden element in
the mode of "therapy" God introduced by his Son to cure the
creation of its fatal malady.
It will be obvious then, that, purely legally, Christ's bare
death—by any method—would have secured our salvation for
eternity. However, it was, perhaps, not immediately obvious
why such a shocking and barbarous route to death needed to
be taken—a route which made the cross a scandal to the
Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews. No wonder so few
of the Greeks or Jews could understand it without the extra
information given on the subject of suffering by the New
Testament—and by experience too.
SUFFERING-NOT SENSELESS
Thus, the anguish and suffering of the cross are not senseless.
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eyes of the mortal man in general. But their function teaches
us why the whole Bible is full of references to pain, suffering
and anguish. Every person who embraces the death of Christ
(and his resurrection) as his basis for eternal salvation is
warned to expect, as a matter of routine, sufferings of some
sort. Christ having suffered in the flesh, he is told, is warning
enough for us to arm ourselves with the same mind—that is, to
be on the lookout for the squalls of suffering which certainly
await the consistent Christian.10 In giving us salvation, Christ
suffered. In accepting that salvation, suffering will certainly
find us out.
Further, we are told that the disciple is not above his Master
even in these matters.11 This means that, in this context, if
the perfection or maturation of the Master could not be
effected without the anguish of suffering, neither can the
maturation or perfection of the disciple be accomplished by
any other means. The Christian who thinks he can get through
the Christian life without this sort of perfecting is living in a
fool's paradise. The disciple is not above his Master even in
learning matters.
The New Testament is full of teaching of this kind, teaching
which is seldom even touched upon today, for by its very
nature it is unpopular to the natural human. Paul the apostle,
when writing to the Philippians, informed them that "it has
been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not
only believe in him but also suffer for his sake."12 Surely it
would have been unnecessary for Paul to have told the Philip-
pians that it had been granted them not only to believe but
also to suffer if just believing without suffering was an ideal
state. Clearly, no one wants suffering. But, in the light of the
above, it must be a special privilege. Christ did not relish it. He
sweat blood in anticipation of it. But he endured it as a privi-
lege in view of the glory of the maturity gained by it.
This means, again, that even for us mortals "senseless"
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adventitious agony produced in a mortal body of flesh and
blood. It can be the gateway to special results in our char-
acters. In any case, it is poor policy to avoid suffering by
disobedience, for Christ embraced trials and suffered because
of obedience, thus being matured and perfected thereby. It is
the Christian path to try to follow the same policy. For by
following this policy Christ has been matured and exalted by
the Father to his right hand. He has committed the entire
government of the world into Christ's capable hands—hands
rendered capable, mature and fit for the job by being obedient
even to letting them be pierced at the cross.
Is it because the fruit of suffering is so little known in the
Western churches that we have so few "giants" in the land
today? In the East, behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains, the
total number of Christians has been reduced greatly by suffer-
ing. But the proportion of "giants," mature Christians, has
certainly greatly increased there.
PROMISED TRIBULATION
The Bible—both the Old and the New Testaments—is crammed
with references to suffering, anguish, tribulation, grief, trial
and affliction.13 For example, there is this rather neglected
text by the apostle Paul: "But whatever gain I had, I counted
as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss
because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my
Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and
count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be
found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on
law, but that which is through faith in Christ. . . that I may
know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his
sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I
may attain the resurrection [out] from [among] the dead."14
THE REASON WHY
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experienced salvation on the basis of a. gift of God and not on
the basis of any works he had done. Nothing he could do
could save him from the penalty of sin. On the Damascus road
he had learned that his own works could not help him but that
Christ's work could and did. Why, then, does Paul now insist
so much on the value of the work of suffering he had done in
losing everything for Christ's sake? Those losses would never
save him.
As we read the cited passage carefully it becomes obvious
that Paul is referring to the value of sufferings and losses in
gaining a knowledge of the surpassing worth of knowing
Christ. He is referring to a process which can only be described
as one of Christian maturity or perfection. He suffered the loss
of every privilege which he had possessed as a well-respected
Pharisee in order to be obedient to Christ. No doubt this
caused anguish. But his losses were not only abstract. He was
whipped, imprisoned, mishandled, shipwrecked and generally
treated as the offscouring of the world for Christ's sake. He
couples these experiences with the greater experience which
resulted directly from their knowing the surpassing worth of
Christ. Most of us Western Christians know little of this. Is it
because we have not sought out the only maturing process
known in Scripture leading to this knowledge—and to Christ?
Paul's obedience, like Christ's obedience, in suffering while
doing the will and Word of God is the key to such depth of
experience.
But more about the maturing process is to be discovered in
Philippians 3. Christ was exalted to power because he was
fitted for it by the things he obediently suffered. Paul says in
effect precisely the same of himself and his own exaltation.
For he couples his loss and his suffering with a capacity to
take part in what he calls the "out-resurrection" (exanastasis)
which he regarded not as a matter of course for every Christian
but as that which depends on Christian maturity. We all
know—as  do  the Muslims—that  all of us, small and great,

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wicked and good, rich and poor, will be resurrected at the
great day of final judgment to receive the things done in our
bodies. But before the day of general "anastasis" there will be
an "exanastasis" of rising of the dead, not in a general, but in a
special, resurrection. This will be at the time of the return of
our Lord in glory to set up his kingdom on earth and reign. In
order to rule and reign, Christ is looking for men and women
among his redeemed who have allowed themselves to be
matured for this high office—by means of the same process by
which he was made fit for it—by anguish and suffering.
Apparently Paul's aim was to obediently accept the same
type of loss and suffering that his Master had gone through in
order to become prepared for high office with Christ. All this
is based upon the free gift of salvation by the blood of Christ.
But in building upon this sure basis of free salvation, a matur-
ing or a perfection process occurs by means of suffering in the
will of God, foreseen both by Christ and by Paul. Paul's atti-
tude of heart is confirmed by his instruction to Timothy: "If
we have died with him, we shall also live with him; if we
endure, we shall also reign with him; if we deny him, he also
will deny us."15 This surely clinches the matter. The Christian
owes his redemption to the free gift of God. But he owes his
degree of exaltation to close knowledge of the surpassing
worth of Christ and close association with him and his pur-
poses in his kingdom, and to the maturation processes which
fitted even the Son for his supreme office in the kingdom. The
experiences of suffering, endurance and anguish in obedience
to the will of God, no matter how outwardly senseless and
adventitious they may appear, are the therapeutic instruments
God used on his Son and uses on all his redeemed who declare
themselves willing for the process.
The same process produces not only the surpassing knowl-
edge of his will, but it also makes us useful to others. "For
because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able
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be better fitted to help mankind than the Son of Man who has
been through the same kind of temptation—though far more
acute? This establishes a bond of confidence between us and
him. He understands because he has experienced the fire of
anguish. Therefore he can help us because his is a sympathy
engendered by understanding. Our lot and his as mortals were
once congruous. It gives me confidence toward him. If I suffer
I can help those who are suffering, even as Christ has helped
me.
PERFECTION
This leads us to the third point. The first point was that Christ
died and rose again to justify and redeem us, giving us the basis
for fellowship with a holy God. The second point was that his
sufferings and endurance were the means of qualification and
maturation for his exaltation to the right hand of God the
Father. In a parallel manner, the sufferings of Christians (for
the gospel's sake and in general) are calculated to mature them
for high office with him in his kingdom. The third point is also
directly concerned with suffering and its consequences. Peter
develops the subject in saying, "Since therefore Christ suffered
in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same thought [mind or
will], for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from
sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer
by human passions but by the will of God."17
Peter was referring to "suffering in the flesh" which, he
says, leads to ceasing from sin in the flesh. But the same princi-
ple also applies to matters not necessarily directly connected
with the flesh, as he also confirms: "For one is approved if,
mindful of God, he endures pain while suffering unjustly."18
This simply means that any discomfort we have to endure
because of our faithfulness to God's will eventually leads to
our being "approved." In fact, Peter says that as Christ suf-
fered the same kind of discomfort for our sakes, so he left us
"an example, that you should follow in his steps."19   This,

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then, is the line of action to which we "have been called."
Therefore, according to Peter, suffering leads to ceasing
from sin, and approval before God. Is it then any wonder that,
after his death and resurrection, Christ asked the disciples
questions which bring the whole problem of suffering into
focus: "Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these
things and enter into his glory?"20 "The Christ should suffer
and on the third day rise from the dead."21 The same subject
was the theme of Paul's three-week argument with the Jews in
Thessalonica: "And Paul went in, as was his custom, and for
three weeks he argued with them from the Scriptures, explain-
ing and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer
and to rise from the dead."22 Among other things, suffering
made Christ "approved."
It is generally conceded that Christ's death is basic to the
Christian's salvation. But the suffering type of death is not
usually emphasized. Perhaps it is too barbaric for our cultured
society to bear. Regardless of our reactions to the awfulness of
the death on the cross, God chose it in order to bring to
mankind a full salvation—not only from the guilt of sin but
also from its power, not only to save us from eternal damna-
tion but also to demonstrate to us how to become approved in
the same way that Christ became approved. In fact, it was to
teach us how to cease from sin.
REJOICING IN SUFFERING
Paul sums it all up: "So we do not lose heart. Though our
outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being re-
newed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is pre-
paring for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all compari-
son."23 Clearly, Christ's death and resurrection are the corner-
stones of any salvation that will take us to heaven. But Paul is
talking about something built as a superstructure on the
foundation of salvation. It is an eternal, incomparable weight
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temporary afflictions, the suffering and pain borne in the will
of God, which make us approved for incomparable glory, just
as afflictions and sufferings brought approval to Christ after he
had patiently and triumphantly borne them. Temporary afflic-
tions exchanged for an incomparable weight of glory! Paul
considered it a bargain. So he acted on it immediately!
A POSSIBLE MISUNDERSTANDING
Of course, one might say that if suffering and afflictions are so
useful and well rewarded in the will of God, then let us afflict
and scourge our fellowmen all we can and seek suffering our-
selves. We are doing them a favor by hurting them or ourselves.
This seems to echo the old argument: Let us sin willfully so
that grace may abound. Let us seek and provoke suffering!
God forbid! The dentist does not willfully or wantonly bore
holes anywhere and everywhere in our teeth to stop the future
possibility of decay. God is the surgeon, so let him operate just
where he finds it necessary. He may and will use wicked men
as his scalpel. He has promised to reward them for their evil
intentions because they afflict others just for the sake of hurt-
ing and killing. Though he uses that same evil for his own
purposes, that doesn't give us the right to sin so that grace may
abound by hurting others or ourselves unnecessarily.
To indiscriminately inflict pain is wanton. Jesus himself
never regarded pain and suffering as good things in themselves,
for he abolished them by healing on many occasions. He also
told us to do the same. The Scripture speaks of death itself as
the last enemy. Pain falls into the same category. Pain and
death entered into the world by the fall, when man turned his
back upon God. The point is that God reverses the evils of
pain and death to produce a glorious result—to glorify his Son
and to glorify man when they both withstand and endure pain
and death in doing his will. This is how God triumphs over
evil—not by "stopping" it, but by using it to his greater glory.
In another book I have attempted to describe the character

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of the Man Jesus and have used the Sermon on the Mount to
illustrate some of my points.24 He said of himself that he was
"meek" and "humble" of spirit. Such an attitude of mind
would scarcely be compatible with his having created the
world by the principles of chance and natural selection of the
stronger specimens as laid down by Darwin. For Jesus did not
destroy the sick, the weak nor the importunate beggars, un-
fitted for the commercial life of his day, as Darwin's principles
would demand.
GENTLING PROCESS
A minister wrote to me, after reading the book cited, about
the subject of the meekness of Jesus, pointing out that the
word meek is often misunderstood. In the context used in the
Sermon on the Mount the word translated by meek really
means "gentled" or "broken in " as those terms are applied to
horses trained to work in harness. The minister recounted
how, as a boy, he had worked on a farm and helped with
"gentling" horses, breaking them in for farm work. Later the
horses were often used for pulling out tree stumps prior to
preparing wasteland for arable purposes.
The untrained wild horses were useless for doing the skilled
work necessary for removing tree stumps. They had to be
thoroughly "tamed" before they could work constructively
with other horses in teams. The taming or breaking-in and
"gentling" process was a prior necessity for useful work. Once
they had been submitted to the sometimes harsh process of
breaking in, which involved whipping and punishment as well
as rewards, they worked productively the rest of their lives and
obviously enjoyed it thoroughly. As their experience grew, the
reins could be left on their necks and they would go by them-
selves from tree stump to tree stump, assume the correct posi-
tion, wait for the chains to be hitched to the trunk, and then
with all their strength—nipping and nudging one another in the
process—pull out the stump. If a stump did not come up at the

112
The
Paradox
of
Pain
first pull they would move to a more favorable angle and try
again.
Affliction and suffering can work as a "gentling" process,
fitting us for God's work in the present world and the next.
This is the true meaning of the word meek as Jesus used it.
What if the abysmal suffering of mankind and of nature, a
result of the fall into sin, is now being used in God's good
hands to "gentle" us all—even as it "gentled" his Son? The
stakes are indeed high. Suffering makes us kind to others who
suffer. But what if a bloody war, a rule of tyranny (while
being recognized as culpable sin on the part of their perpetra-
tors, who are promised a just reward for their deeds) is really
working out an incomparable weight of glory for all those who
allow themselves to be "gentled" and disciplined thereby? If
this is so, it would be a fatal blow to the despair and nihilism
into which our generation is so obviously falling. If eternal
glory were to result (and the Bible says it will), then we could,
with the Christians of old, rejoice in suffering and jubilate with
the apostle Paul: "We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that
suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces charac-
ter, and character produces hope, and hope does not disap-
point us, because God's love has been poured into our
hearts."25
AGAIN, WHY ALL THE BARBARISM AND CRUELTY?
Some time ago I had the pleasure of discussing this and related
questions with a U. S. Air Force chaplain. We came to two
main conclusions which, as we shall see, throw light on the
above problem:
1. We all have some sort of freedom to choose among the
paths in life which are made available to us. Our freedom,
which incidentally proves that we're real persons, allows us
choices of paths in one way or another almost continuously.
But we never have any freedom of choice as to the conse-
quences of any path we choose. For these consequences are

129
Appendix
date the fact that the two are congruent and not exclusive. To
cut out predestination so as to be able to maintain free will is
like cutting out the wave-function description of light so as to
be able to maintain corpuscular theory. To effect such a "sim-
plification" is to introduce a false picture of reality. Both
concepts are complementary and are a part of reality even
though, to our restricted view, they appear to be contra-
dictory.
Thus, we maintain that free will is a reality and so is pre-
destination. It is our limited means of description which makes
them appear to be mutually exclusive. Reality contains both,
and both describe reality. But we must note one important
consequence of this. If free will is a reality, in spite of predesti-
nation, then all the consequences of free will described in this
book operate in full vigor—in spite of predestination which
exists alongside it.
Thus, I know that I, of my own free wil, when confronted
with Christ, chose not to say no to him. But having said yes to
him, I learned afterward that my yes was, in the eternal
counsels of God (ultimate reality) a foreknown and pre-
destined yes. "No" is foreknown but, as far as I know, not
predestined in the Bible. To eliminate either free will or pre-
destination is to rob reality of one of its aspects which needs
to be described by these terms. It is important to realize the
difficulties of description in regard to infinity and eternity-
phenomena with which our language and thinking apparatus
both deal inadequately. But, obviously, for the purposes of
this book the one aspect of the truth, that of free will, had to
be emphasized to clarify the message. But it would be tenden-
tious to try to eliminate the other side of the coin. If bona-fide
free will exists, as the Scriptures and experience maintain it
does, then it exists in its full force and with all its conse-
quences as outlined.
It will be obvious from the foregoing that, if God courts
man's free-will decisions, he is aiming at influencing him for

130
The
Paradox
of
Pain
good. This activity is entirely legitimate and does not interfere
with our freedom of action.
The Scriptures teach that there is more in this question than
merely influencing our wills for good. There is, working
against God's Holy Spirit, also a contrary activity striving to
influence man for evil. Just as a personal good one (God)
courts our will for good, so a personal evil one (Satan) courts
us for ill. The Bible teaches that men do not fight only against
flesh and blood in this life but also against spiritual wickedness
in "high places." The stark reality of this fact in the struggle
for man's will and man's good is underestimated in this day
when the masses of people really believe neither in God nor
the devil. But a whole book would be necessary to attempt to
deal adequately with this struggle.

notes
CHAPTER 1
1 Julian Huxley, ed., The Humanist Frame, p. 42, as cited by Francis
Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1968),
pp. 26-27.
2See Acts 17:2; 18:4, 19; 24:25.
3Gited by Schaeffer, p. 34. Cf. Ps. 30:9-11.
CHAPTER 2
Rom. 1:19-20
CHAPTER 3
*Cf. A. E. Wilder Smith, Man's Origin, Man's Destiny (Wheaton, 111.:
Shaw, 1968), and The Creation of Life (Wheaton, 111.: Shaw, 1970).
2Ibid.
3SeeIbid.
4The Glorious Koran. Dawood trans. (New York: Daybreak, Penguin
Classics, 1968), p. 23. See also Prov. 16:6.
CHAPTER 4
^ee Schaeffer, p. 100.
2The Glorious Koran, pp. 115, 167.
3John3:16, RSV.
4Rene A. Spitz, the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (New York:
International Universities, 1945), 1:53; 2:113.
s Wilder Smith, The Creation of Life.
61	Cor. 1:21.
CHAPTER 5
^eb. 12:2.
2C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: Seabury, 1961), p. 25.
32 Cor. 4:17.
41 Cor. 13:4-8.
5lTim. 2:4, RSV.
62	Pet. 3:9.
7John 1:9; Rom. 1:19-21.
8Prov. 8:31.
9John3:16.
10Matt. 6:33.
nHeb. 3:7-11, RSV.
12Heb. 6:4-6, RSV.
13Heb. 10:26-30.

132
The
Paradox
of
Pain
CHAPTER 6
'Lewis, p. 31.
2Acts 14:22.
3Lewis, p. 25.
*Ibid., pp. 25-26.
5	Ibid.
6	Ibid.
7Matt. 27:46; cf. Mark 15:34; Ps. 22:1.
8Cf. Wilder Smith, The Drug Users (Wheaton, 111.: Shaw, 1969), p. 156.
9Heb. 5:7-9, RSV.
1O1 Pet. 4:1.
"Matt. 10:24.
nVhü. 1:29, RSV.
13Mark 8:31; 9:12; Matt. 17:12; Luke 9:22; 17:25; 22:15; 24:26, 46;
Acts 3:18; 9:16; 17:3; 1 Cor. 12:26; 2 Cor. 1:6; 4:17; Acts 26:23; 2
Tim. 2:12; Matt. 24:9; Col. 1:24; 1 Pet. 5:9; 2 Tim. 1:8; Heb. 11:25,35;
Phil. 3:10; Acts 14:22; Rom. 5:3; 8:35; Gal. 3:4; Phil. 1:29; 2 Thess.
1:5; Heb. 2:18; 5:8; 1 Pet. 2:19, 21; 3:17-18; 4:1, 19. (The sequence is
partly in accordance with the word occurrence.)
14Phil. 3:7-11, RSV.
152 Tim. 2:11-12, RSV.
16Heb. 2:18, RSV.
171 Pet. 4:1-2, RSV.
181 Pet. 2:19, RSV.
191 Pet. 2:21, RSV.
^Luke 24:26, RSV.
21Luke 24:26, RSV.
22Acts 17:2-3, RSV.
^2 Cor. 4:16-17, RSV.
^Wilder Smith, Man's Origin, Man's Destiny, pp. 170-74.
^Rom. 5:3-5, RSV.
^Luke 13:4.
271 Pet. 4:1.
28	Rev. 7:14.
29	Wilder Smith, Man's Origin, Man's Destiny.
^. 21.

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In a world ^jVen over to the despair of the irrational and the absurd,
man needs to find intellectually satisfying answers to
the paradox of pain.
This book searches out meaning in the abyss of suffering, evil,
injustice, blood and anguish in which the human race finds itself.
The author discovers that love is the great producer of meaning
even in suffering.
by the same author:
The Drug Users— the psychopharmacology of turning on :
drugs, their clinical effects, and the reasons behind the epidemic of
drug abuse. Cloth, 304 pages, $5.95.
Man's Origin, Man's Destiny—a critical evaluation of the principles
of evolution and Christianity. Cloth, 320 pages, $5.95.
The Creation of Life—a cybernetic approach to evolution,
contains startling evidence from the computer sciences for intelligence
behind the order of life. Cloth, 270 pages, $5.95.
Harold Shaw Publishers
Wheaton, Illinois 60187
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