Before walking with a grief, you must know what you believe about pain. Otherwise you recite explanations that comfort the one who speaks — and crush the one who suffers.
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Roberto Badenas, an Adventist theologian, opens Frente al dolor with an observation every pastor should have before his eyes : suffering is an ever-present enemy. “ From Adam to the last newborn, and from Job and Jesus to the most unknown soldier of the most forgotten war, we all carry the shadow of pain stuck to our own. ”No one is safe, however well he plans his life.
Look hard at that list.Not one of these causes is a plan of God. They describe a broken world, a real freedom, a mortal flesh. That is the whole difference between God willed this and God entered into this.
“Pain may be unavoidable, but our sense of misery is, to a certain extent, optional.” — R. Badenas, Frente al dolor
It is the most important sentence you will have to hold.You must be able to defend it. John C. Peckham, professor of theology and Christian philosophy at Andrews University, gives it its ground in The Love of God: A Canonical Model.
Peckham calls it the transcendent-voluntarist model — the heir of Luther and Calvin. Its signature : the will of God is “ unilaterally determinative, irresistible and fully efficacious ”. Everything that happens happens because God decreed it.In that system, God is the author of your child’s cancer. One may dress it in pious words ; the conclusion does not move.
1. God is affected. In Genesis 6:6-7, God is “ grieved in his heart ” because of the evil of men. Peckham establishes that God’s negative emotions are always a response to evil— never its origin.One does not grieve over what one has decreed. God is neither impassible nor indifferent.
2. His love goes first, but does not crush. Peckham speaks of a foreconditional (foreconditional love : God loves first, before any merit, and it is his love that makes our response possible (Jer 31:3 ; 1 John 4:19). But this love is reciprocal : it can be received — or refused.Human freedom is real. And a real freedom is precisely what allows evil to exist without God being its author.
“ God wills and works to save every human. God does not desire that any perish. ” — J. C. Peckham (John 3:16 ; 12:32 ; 1 John 2:2)
There is your answer at the bedside, when someone asks : “ Why did God allow this? ” Not a theory — but the assurance that God did not will it, and that He is grieved by it before you even got there.
Peckham devotes a second book to this one question : Theodicy of Love(2018). What follows is what a pastor can take from it to the bedside.It is little. And it is enormous.
Evil unfolds within a cosmic conflict : an accusation brought against the character of God, which “ cannot be settled by power alone ”. To crush the accuser would prove nothing — except that God is the stronger. And that is not the question asked.
Peckham shows that God acts within covenantal rules of engagement— a bilateral agreement, negotiated, and “far from ideal”, which God cannot unilaterally alter. Because God does not lie (Titus 1:2) and does not break his promises (Heb 6:18), what he has promised binds him.
The consequence, and read it twice : his power is not diminished — his freedom of action is.“ There may be things God morally cannot do, even though he would want to do them. ”
“We need not claim that there is something good in every evil God does not prevent. It may be that God longs to prevent that evil and morally cannot, given the rules of engagement.”— J. C. Peckham, Theodicy of Love
You never never have to say “ there is a hidden good in this ”. An Adventist theologian tells you that it is not required. And he adds : “ we are not privy to the rules of engagement ”— so we are in no position to know, in this particular case, why God did not intervene.
What you can say, and what is true : God did not will this. It may be that he longed to prevent it. And he has not resigned himself to it : he is coming to destroy death.
In Job, it is the satan, not God, who strikes(Job 1:12 ; 2:7). And the book falsifies the theology of retribution — the theology of the friends. Peckham insists : Job’s friends were “ so sure of themselves, and yet wrong ”. In the end, it is they whom God rebukes, not Job.
“Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” — Job 38:2
Make it your rule for the visit.The comforter who explains is not neutral : he plays again the part of Job’s friends.
That is the title of Peckham’s chapter 5, and it is your preaching at the cemetery. The cross has defeated evil ; the resurrection will destroy it. Between the two, there is the hole you are looking into.Do not pretend it does not exist. Say that it will not last(1 Cor 15:26).
It steals the words.“ Pain does not only shut us into a sense of powerlessness : it often leaves us without words. And that silence adds to our affliction the weight of loneliness. ” The one who says nothing is not refusing to speak — he no longer has a tongue.
The myth of the right to happiness. Our society has persuaded everyone that he ought to be happy. The consequence : the one who suffers thinks himself abnormal, or at fault. To the pain is added the shame of feeling it.
And remember : not suffering does not mean being happy. Badenas notes this with rare clear-sightedness — one may avoid a great many afflictions and still feel wretched.
This is Badenas’s most useful chapter for a pastor — and his most severe.
“Our magical mentality refuses to accept chance.” — R. Badenas
After a disaster, we tell of those who should have been there and were not : “ God protected them. ” But we forget those who should not have been there and were — a car breakdown, a medical appointment.Why, in the same accident, do some die, others are injured, others walk away unharmed? Almost always, we know nothing about it. So we invent : “ it was not his time ”, “ it was his destiny ”, “ it was bound to happen to him ”.
These sentences do not comfort. They reassure the one who utters them— because he cannot bear the emptiness of having no explanation. And they crush the one who suffers, who has just been told that his loss was willed.
The lesson : to promise healing in exchange for faith is to prepare a collapse. Never make a miracle depend on the quantity of a family’s faith — you give them, on top of the grief, the guilt of not having believed enough.The answer to María is further down : it is called Gethsemane.
“ Suffering is a vocation, a calling from God. ” — and its ground : “ God ordains everything according to His purposes. ”
Sproul is a serious Reformed theologian, and his book is a classic.But his root contradicts ours. If suffering is a calling from God, then God is its author. That is exactly the transcendent-voluntarist model that Peckham dismantles : you cannot pick its fruit without planting its root.
And there is worse for us. Sproul teaches the intermediate state : “ The Bible does not teach two states of human life, but three… we continue to exist, alive, as disembodied spirits. ” The soul would survive, conscious, between death and the resurrection. He even attacks by name soul sleep — it is our doctrine he is aiming at(Eccl 9:5-6 ; Ps 146:4 ; 1 Thess 4:13-17).
That is the question the family will ask you. Peckham devoted a whole book to it : Why We Pray (2024).
Intercession does not make God want the good : he wants it already. What it does is to open avenues so that God may in fact accomplish the good he already wanted to accomplish. God looks for someone to stand in the breach (Ezek 22:30). “ He will be very gracious to you at the sound of your cry ; when he hears it, he will answer you ” (Isa 30:19).
In other words : prayer is neither a vending machine nor a mere therapy. It is a real act in a real conflict.
“Christ’s own unanswered request at Gethsemane demonstrates that great faith does not guarantee that a request will be granted here and now. Unanswered requests therefore do not necessarily indicate that those praying lacked faith.”— J. C. Peckham, Why We Pray
Christ prayed. His faith was perfect.The cup did not pass. That is what you lay on the table when a family wonders whether they did not believe enough.No one has ever had more faith than He.
In Daniel 10, the prayer is heard from the very first day— and the answer takes twenty-one days to come, held back by an opposition (the prince of Persia). In a real conflict, a delay is not a silence, and a silence is not a no.
On the cross, Jesus cries out : “ My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? ” Peckham draws the rule from it : Christ demonstrates that to lament is not a sin.
So : when the bereaved complains to God, accuses him, cries out his anger —do not correct him. Do not catch him. Do not silence him. He is doing what the Son did. Your prayer, too, may carry his complaint before God instead of covering it with formulas.
“When we suffer, what we most need is not for someone to explain the why to us, but for someone to be with us and to show us sympathy.” — R. Badenas
The law of sharing. Badenas is categorical : sorrows that are shared grow lighter ; those we manage to share with no one usually grow worse. This is not an image — it is a clinical observation.
What a welcoming community does. The feeling of “ being in the way ”, of counting for no one, is far less frequent among the sick who belong to a living community. Visits, calls, messages, prayers in solidarity : these are not courtesies, they are what keeps hope from being lost.
And the turning. Nothing lightens our own sorrows so much as turning toward those of others. The comforter is also the one who is healed.
A book does not enter a ministry on the strength of its title or of its author’s reputation. Four questions, in this order.One wrong answer is enough to set it aside — or to keep it only with tongs.
R. C. Sproul (Surprised by Suffering) teaches the intermediate state and makes suffering a vocation decreed by God.He appears in this file as a counter-model, and on that ground only. Badenas and Peckham ground what you will say.Kübler-Ross does not come under this filter : it is a clinical observation, useful in its place (the dying), with its reservations.