A Sovereign God in a Suffering World

David Libby

My wife, Lisa, and I raised our two daughters, Kayla and Bethany, in rural Maine.

We hunted, fished, foraged for wild edible plants, went camping in remote and undiscovered places, grew gardens, raised livestock, and preserved our own food.

Lisa was a homeschooling/homesteading mom, and I was a self-employed logger. As an unintended consequence of this lifestyle, we were all bitten by dozens of ticks.

About the time our girls were in their mid-teens the whole family had become desperately ill with Lyme Disease, along with a whole host of complications.

For years I served in the church, first as a deacon, and then as an elder.

I have long been a self-taught student of Theology and philosophy. I have learned all the correct answers to some of the most difficult questions, and can hold my own as a Christian apologist and Theologian.

But when my family's health fell apart I discovered something that the books do not teach: that there is a sharp disconnect between an encyclopedia of head knowledge, and an application of that knowledge in the muddy and bloody trenches.

It is there that this book was conceived.

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So my life has been spent following the Lord.

The years of very, very serious chronic illness my family went through and times of intense suffering, that was a milestone that really tried my commitment to the Lord and I guess tried in the sense of refining more than in the sense of challenging.

My commitment was radically, radically enhanced through times of suffering.

I like the way Job put it when he said, though he slay me, yet will I trust in him? And that's the kind of faith that we don't know that we have until we've been in a place of deep suffering.

And I've noticed that intense suffering tends to kind of have a winnowing effect that the people who really don't have a commitment to the Lord, you know, the frauds and pretenders tend to be driven away, whereas people who really do love the Lord are drawn closer to Him. We rely on him more heavily.

And also we can look in Scripture. And we can see that he's promised us trials and tribulations in this life, so why in the world would we see them as reasons to reject Him?

The Lord who was put through the intense trials, not only did he suffer with us, but he suffered for us.

You know, more importantly that, that same Lord who suffered for us, you know, told us that we will be in a place where we have to take up our crosses and follow him in that sort of thing.

So we should expect suffering in this life.

I anticipated a life where we would spend a life together really working hard and playing hard.

And a year after marriage that her health began to decline, so we didn't have much time of really good health.

And the cause of it all But the cause of it all was Lyme disease. A tick borne illness.

Now, her health wasn't always terrible. There were times when she was debilitated, but it was up and down. But she was never fully well from, you know, about. For about 29 of 30 years.

And there were times when her health was very bad. She was hospitalized over and over again. Many times I thought that I would be widowed at a fairly, fairly young age.

A lot of times I didn't think she would make it.

We had two daughters. They grew up really kind of taking care of the mother who would ordinarily be taking care of them. They learned to do the household chores and cook and that sort of thing at a very young age.

And then when my girls were, oh, youngest, roughly 15 and oldest 17 or so, they also became very seriously ill.

And the symptoms were chronic fatigue, flu, like symptoms, they were sick all the time.

Terrible pain throughout their bodies.

My wife described it as feeling like she had shards of broken glass all throughout her body.

Extreme vertigo. There were times when she couldn't walk. She would have to be helped to get around. We never quite put her in a wheelchair, but I expected that we would have to terrible seizures.

The girls particularly would have horrible seizures, sometimes lasting for hours. We'd watch their buddies contort and twist in a shapes I didn't know bodies could contort into.

And a lot of bad mental problems, psychotic episodes, hallucinations.

And my youngest daughter developed a symptom that the doctors called sound sensitivity. Which is a bit of an understatement. It got so bad that we had the. Via noise canceling headphones and she still had trouble.

You know, we still would have to be careful how we ate so the fork didn't click the plate, you know, too loudly and that sort of thing. And you know, any noise would cause seizures and.

But it was really, really ugly, really bad. She was locked away in a soundproof closet for days at a time. Sometimes we'd have to put the meals outside the door and you know, send a text message and the cause of it all back earlyon.

But God….

It really drew me closer to the Lord. I love the Lord now more than ever before. And, and I kind of get a kick out of the atheists, some of whom I've had interactions with, who point to all the suffering in this life as proof that there must not be a good, benevolent and all-powerful God.

But the God of the Bible promises us these things. So what they're doing really is they're looking at the world around them and they're seeing exactly the kind of world that God promised us and saying, hey, that proves there is no God.

And that's really kind of a kind of a dumb argument.

So how do we, you know, reconcile God's absolute sovereignty with our responsibility, man's free will and that sort of thing?

I think the reconciliation of all that is something that is outside of our reach. If I could be honest. I think God's word teaches very clearly that God is a sovereign God, which means that nothing happens outside of his decree.

But yet we are responsible. He's not the author of sin- we are. Sin is our fault, not his.

And the fact that God has ordained from before the foundation of the earth that we'd be having this conversation doesn't mean that we're not also freely choosing to do so.

How does this all work out? How do we reconcile all of this? And I think that we can.

First of all, we can see fairly clear clearly that it's not irrational, but it's something that I don't think any of us can entirely wrap our brains around.

We have to accept what evidently is. Even though we can't understand it.

There's so many things in the Bible that just were put there for everybody because everybody goes through things. Everybody's got some kind of hardship somewhere along their life.

To suffer. In one sense, it gives us the occasion to glorify God in ways that we wouldn't have otherwise. He sanctifies us, refines us through trials and afflictions.

And so, there's a lot in God's word that answers a lot of our why questions and gives us a lot of comfort. There is purpose behind our suffering.

2 Corinthians 4:17-18
"For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."

Isaiah 41:10
"So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand."

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