Yet Will I Trust Him: Understanding God in a Suffering World

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Jun 2000 by Bush, L Russ

Yet Will 1 Trust Him: Understanding God in a Suffering World. By John Mark Hicks. Joplin: College Press, 1999, 338 pp., $19.99 paper.

Traditional yet fresh! That is how I would characterize Hicks's treatment of the intellectual problem of evil and suffering for Christian theists. The freshness comes from the fact that he is no casual observer or purely philosophical theologian. His marriage plans for career missions were cut short when his youthful companion developed a blood clot after minor surgery and to his shock died. Their prayers for health and protection seemingly went unheard. Time passed and love came again. From the new marriage came three children and the issues of divine providence in some ways seemed less threatening. Then Hicks's only son was diagnosed with a genetic disorder from which there is no escape and which leads to a humiliating physical regression and a lingering death. "Lord, who sinned," we ask, "that such grief would come into the life of this devout theologian?"

Hicks asks all the questions a human mind would ask, but his remarkable search for answers results in a Biblical theology. Job, notes Hicks, attributes everything to God while yet maintaining that his (Job's) suffering is undeserved. Non-theistic worldviews have no answer, but the Biblical story does. Hicks reviews the Biblical materials for the original Fall, taking the story literally but surprisingly claiming that Adam's sin ultimately was his choice to follow Eve rather than God. Hicks concludes that God took the risk of creating free will-and thus the possibility of sin-in order to magnify his glory and share his love-though neither were necessary for God. The story of Job tells us just how much suffering-even innocent suffering-God will permit in this created world. Job chooses God over family or personal comfort, even when he gets no intellectual answers to why God has allowed the many tragedies to come into his life. Hicks concludes that God permits Satanic freedom and natural disasters just as he permits human freedom because he seeks genuine fellowship, not manipulated love. He uses our suffering to punish sin and refine our faith, to turn us away from seeking selfish happiness, to discipline and educate us spiritually, and in fact to redeem us. I thought it was interesting to consider Hicks's comment-that the ungodly stop praying when distress comes but believers cry out to God-as another aspect of why suffering is allowed by God.

In Chapter 7 Hicks summarizes the extensive lament and complaint content of the psalms. He assumes the modern critical stance that these are "community" speeches and thus serve a generic purpose in Israel. My own view is that they were used by the community due to the typical nature of the personal experience that led an author to pen those words. Thus in many details I could not follow Hicks's arguments, but in the end I can agree with many of his applications. I don't agree that theodicy is rooted in human arrogance.

In a particularly helpful chapter, Hicks analyzes three instances of God's sovereignty in the death of a child: Job's children, David and Bathsheba's first child, and Jeroboam's son. I think I would have included the daughter of Jairus and the son of the widow of Nain. Even so, it is a touching chapter given what Hicks is facing with his own son.

In the closing chapters Hicks addresses the ultimate solution: the atonement and the eternal state in which justice will finally be realized. Hicks wisely counsels that our "interpretation of suffering" is not the proper conversation in the funeral home parlor. The interpretation, he suggests, is at that moment best left to the suffering ones who will with spiritual hindsight find their way.

This is a readable and exegetically responsible work. As a handout for sufferers it is too long, but as a personalized summary of Biblical affirmations on suffering for those who wish to be ministers or for those who are (in hindsight) searching for answers, this book receives my recommendation.

L. Russ Bush

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, NC