Key to her work was the discovery of a man, Pedro, who knew the unwritten dialect that Margaret needed to learn in order to translate the Bible into that particular language. He began the to teach her the language, and her painstaking work of systematically recording and documenting it moved forward.[1]
Pedro, she believes, had been the answer to her prayer. “God now seemed to be bringing things together. Margaret imagines the possibility of bringing the Bible to a million people in remote regions of the mountains.”[2]
One day she arrived at Pedro’s home to continue their work. She discovers that Pedro has a painful, infected wound in his leg. Since Margaret was equipped to provide routine medical care, she gives him a penicillin shot. It turns out he is allergic, and he begins convulsing from anaphylaxis. Within moments, and despite her fervent prayers, he dies.
All the years of labor are wiped away. “As for translation of the Bible, of course, I cannot go ahead without an informant. God knew about that when Pedro died. I do not write prayer letters [to my supporters] anymore, for I have nothing to say about my work. It seemed, on the night of Pedro’s death, as though Finis were written below all I had done.
The books ends, and there’s no happy ending or silver lining for Margaret. Her only consolation is found on the last page, which includes this line: “God, if He was merely my accomplice, had betrayed me. If, on the other hand, He was God, He had freed me.”[3]
Elliot gave a lecture at Keller’s seminary shortly after the book was published. After drawing attention to the preceding line,
[s]he went on to explain to us that the graven image, the idol of the title, was a God who always acted the way we thought he should. Or more to the point—he was a God who supported our plans, how we thought the world and history should go. That is a God of our own creation, a counterfeit god. Such a god is really just a projection of our own wisdom, of our own self. In that way of operating, God is our “accomplice,” someone to whom we relate as long as he is doing what we want. If he does something else, we want to “fire” him, or “unfriend him,” as we would any personal assistant who was insubordinate or incompetent.
But at the very end, Margaret realizes that the demise of her plans had shattered her false god, and now she was free for the first time to worship the True One. When serving the god-of-my-plans, she had been extraordinarily anxious. She had never been sure that God was going to come through for her and “get it right.” She was always trying to figure out how to bring God to do what she had planned. But she had not really been treating him as God—as the all-wise, all-good, all-powerful one. Now she had been liberated to put her hope not in her agendas and plans but in God himself. In short, suffering had pointed her to a glorious God, and it had taught her to treat him as such.[4]
Keller (and Elliot) raise the troubling question, Why did God allow this bad thing to happen? According to my previous way of thinking, I might have said something like, “Really horrible, evil things happen in the world. God hates it for you and suffers alongside you. In the end he’ll make it all right.”
This isn’t a horrible answer, but it doesn’t account for God’s will in the matter. It’s true, as orthodox Christian teaching has it, that God doesn’t cause evil. But how does that let God off the hook—if that’s what we imagine we’re doing by asserting that God doesn’t cause evil?
God has the power, we Christians believe, to answer prayer and prevent evil and suffering. Nearly every time evil and suffering happen, a prayer has gone unanswered, a petition has not been granted. Why does God answer some prayers and not others? Is it because he isn’t as powerful as we imagine? Is it because prayer doesn’t really work? Is it because he really just lets events run their course naturally?
I hope not! Yet, in so many words, that’s what we learned about God and suffering in the mainline Protestant seminary I attended. The theological deficiency here is that we have failed to make sense of God’s sovereignty, which is a clear biblical theme. Pastorally speaking, a god who fretfully wrings his hands over suffering but can’t really do anything about it isn’t very comforting, to say the least.
No, Keller and Elliot have it right: The correct answer to the question, Why does God allow this bad thing to happen? is this: We don’t know, but we can be sure God has his good reasons. So we can trust him.
Besides, if we could fully comprehend his reasons, God would be less than God.
1. Timothy Keller, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering (New York: Dutton, 2013), 170.
2. Ibid., 171.
3. Ibid., 172.
4. Ibid., 172-3.