On Brain Tumors and Other Suffering, Sickness, Sorrow and Sin

This morning, I come to work with a heavy, praying heart. Two people who are loved by my loved ones are this very moment undergoing surgery for life-threatening brain tumors. Another friend is recovering from extensive knee surgery. My morning’s work takes me to preparing notes on the Consummation for our Learning God’s Story Bible study, and as I study, I thank God for his unfailing kindness to all of us who struggle with suffering and sin in these sometimes sorrowful days. I thank him that the story is true: one day Christ will return, and there will be no more sorrow, sickness, suffering, or sin.

This from John Piper was an encouragement to me; perhaps it will be to you as well.

If God is going to heal us in the end, why doesn’t he just do it now?

That seems to be part of the larger question of why there is a history of redemption at all. Why didn’t God just kill off Adam and Eve after they fell and start over again with a redeemed humanity with no millennia-long struggle with sin and corruption? Why didn’t he do it that way? He could have!

He is going to snap his fingers one day and extinguish all evil on this earth. He’ll snap his finger and make us holy that day too. And if he can do it someday he can do it now. So why this long, drawn-out battle with sin and disease?

I believe that there are things that God wants to reveal—about the nature, depth, and depravity of sin, and about his own patience, love, and wisdom—that are better displayed by a long history of redemption and a lifetime of struggling out of sin and towards holiness. These things are better displayed through time than if he had simply, in an instant, taken all of my sin away and made me holy the day I got converted, or taken all of redemptive history away and made mankind holy one hour after Adam and Eve fell.

God plans that there be a long history of redemption and a long battle in every individual’s life, because in that battle certain elements of his glory, patience, wisdom, love, kindness, wrath, and justice are displayed in ways they would not be displayed if he redeemed things instantaneously.

To read the entire article, visit The Gospel Coalition website.