By Dr. Tim Keller

Tim Keller (1950-2023) was the Senior Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Manhattan, NYC.

In 1 Peter 1:3-12 we read:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade—kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.

In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.

Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstance…

It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.

This is the Word of the Lord.

Every week we’re going to take one—just one—of the big questions or big problems that people in our culture, especially in New York City, have with Christianity. What are those big problems? Each week we’ll look at one, and this week we’re looking at the one often called the problem of evil and suffering. It is a very formidable challenge to Christian belief.

If I could summarize the argument against Christianity on the basis of evil and suffering, it would go like this:

* If God allows evil and suffering to continue because he can’t stop it, then he might be good, but he’s not all-powerful.

* If God allows evil and suffering to continue because he could stop it but won’t, then he might be all-powerful, but he’s not good.

Either way, the good, all-powerful God of the Bible couldn’t exist.

It’s a formidable argument. So what do we say? How do we address it?

Some of you know that on Sunday night, September 10—just three or four weeks ago—I was asked to speak at a memorial service at Ground Zero, mainly for families of police officers, firefighters, and Port Authority workers who were killed on 9/11. It was primarily for the families of the victims. Some of you know this because I wasn’t here that Sunday, and some of you weren’t thrilled about that. But it was quite an experience.

I was asked to speak to people who had lost loved ones on 9/11 about the problem of evil and suffering. And they said, “You’ve got seven minutes.” Seven minutes to address the problem of evil and suffering for people who have been wrestling with it personally for five years.

So, like a typical preacher, I took eight and a half minutes.

Tonight I want to share some of the thoughts I shared that night—at a little greater length.

This text tells us, first, one thing you should not do—one way not to face evil and suffering—and then three ways to face it. One way not to, three ways to. This is 1 Peter 1.

Peter is writing to people who have suffered a great deal and are about to suffer more. And when we experience horrendous suffering or catastrophe, one of the ways we often respond is by backing off from, or even abandoning, our belief in God. It’s perfectly natural. Many people do it. When terrible things happen, we pull back from God.

But notice what Peter says in verses 6 and 7. Let me highlight a few phrases:

“You have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials… so that your faith… may result in praise, glory, and honor.”

He’s saying the pain and suffering you’re going through doesn’t have to weaken or destroy faith. It can strengthen faith. It ought to strengthen faith.

How does that happen? We’ll get to that in a moment. But first, consider Peter’s point: abandoning your belief in God doesn’t help you understand suffering, and it doesn’t help you handle suffering. It doesn’t help at all.

Why not?

Martin Luther King Jr., in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, famously wrote that the only way he could know a human law was unjust was if there existed a divine law—a higher law from God. If there were no God, no divine law, then there would be no way to say a particular human law was unjust. Someone might say, “That law is unjust,” but that would simply be according to their personal standards. And why should their standards be privileged over anyone else’s?

Take that a step further:

If there is no God—if we abandon belief in God—then how can we say any historical event is unjust? If nature is all there is, then violence is perfectly natural. It’s how you and I got here—natural selection, the strong eating the weak.

Jean-Paul Sartre understood this. In his signature essay on existentialism he wrote:

If God does not exist, there is no longer any possibility of an a priori good existing… Dostoevsky once wrote, “If God did not exist, everything is permitted.” That is correct. If God does not exist, we have neither behind us nor before us a luminous realm of values, nor any means of justification for any behavior whatsoever.

He’s saying that if there is no God, then your sense that something is wrong or unjust is just that—a feeling. A personal feeling. On what basis could you object that the “natural order” of violence is unnatural?

So you see: evil and suffering are a problem for those who believe in God, but they are just as big a problem—if not bigger—for those who don’t. If there is no God, who’s to say anything is wrong? On what basis do we even ask for a better world?

Abandoning belief in God won’t help you understand evil and suffering. It won’t help you handle it.

So what will?

According to Peter, there are three things you must do. You have to:

1. Look back to something.

2. Look ahead to something.

3. Look into something.

Look back, look ahead, and look into—three ways to face the evil and suffering of this world.

First, you have to look back to something. Notice in this passage—and again in chapter 4—Peter likens suffering, pain, and trouble to a fire.

He likens suffering to a furnace—the kind you use to refine gold or other metals. It’s a powerful image: troubles and suffering are like a fire, a fiery furnace through which precious metals are purified. It’s a rich metaphor, and you can draw a great deal from it if you sit with it.

But once in the Bible, it wasn’t just a metaphor. It literally happened. And Peter may very well have had that incident in mind.

You remember it from Daniel 3. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar sets up a great image and commands everyone to bow down and worship it. But three young Jewish men—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—refuse. In a rage, Nebuchadnezzar orders them thrown into a fiery furnace. He heats it so hot that the soldiers who throw them in are killed by the flames.

Then, from a safe distance, Nebuchadnezzar looks into the furnace and is astonished. Daniel tells us: "Then King Nebuchadnezzar leaped to his feet in amazement and asked, 'Weren’t there three men that we tied up and threw into the fire? But I see four men walking around in the fire, unbound and unharmed, and the fourth looks like a son of God.'”

What happened in there? As we know, the three men came out unharmed—but only three came out. Who was the fourth?

The Hebrew Scriptures give us a clue. In Isaiah, God makes this promise:

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you… When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon you.” (Isaiah 43)

We sing a hymn in this church based directly on that passage. Two of its verses say:

When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie, My grace, all-sufficient, shall be thy supply. The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.

Fear not, I am with thee; O be not dismayed, For I am thy God and will still give thee aid. I’ll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand, Upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.

What a promise. But notice something crucial:

God does not promise, “If you belong to me, you won’t go through deep waters. You won’t face fiery trials.” He doesn’t say that. In fact, the promise isn’t even if you go through fiery trials.

The promise is when.

“When you walk through the fire… when you are plunged into the furnace… I will be with you.” God says, “I will so care for you, and you will so sense my love and presence, that it will be as if I am walking with you. And if you sense me walking with you, the fire will not consume you.” Meaning: the trial won’t harden you, won’t embitter you, won’t break you. Instead, it will refine you. It will give you splendor. It will deepen your character, your soul, your faith.

You might say, “That’s inspiring—but how do I know it’s true?”

Here is the New Testament’s answer.

In the Old Testament, God says, “I will be with you in the furnace of affliction.” But not until you get to the cross of Jesus Christ do you see how far God was willing to go to make good on that promise. Only at the cross do you realize the extent to which he went to be with us in our affliction.

Look at verses 10 and 11: the prophets—Isaiah among them—“predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow.”

Only Christianity, of all the world’s religions, says that in Jesus Christ, God became vulnerable—subject to suffering, pain, and even death.

On the cross, to our astonishment, we see God as a political prisoner, the victim of unjust suffering, weakness, and death. If you’ve lost a loved one, you look at the cross and see the Father losing his only Son. If you’re crying out, “Why, God? Why?” you look at the cross and see Jesus crying out, “Why?”

He suffered everything we have ever suffered—and more.

Because when you read the accounts of Jesus’ death, one thing stands out, especially if you know history: many people died better than Jesus. The Maccabean martyrs, for example—those Jewish heroes who resisted Antiochus Epiphanes between the Old and New Testaments—died bravely. They encouraged onlookers. They held their heads high. They faced death with confidence.

But in Gethsemane, Jesus is in shock. Blood comes through his pores. He asks if there is any way out. On the cross he cries, “Why have you forsaken me?”

Why the difference?

Because Jesus did not merely suffer what we suffer. His suffering went infinitely beyond the physical. He was experiencing the cosmic consequence of our desire to be our own masters. If you say to someone, “I don’t want you in my life,” the natural consequence is separation. Humanity has said to God, “We don’t want you to rule us.” The natural consequence is to be cast out of his presence—the source of all life and light.

On the cross, Jesus Christ was cast out of the presence of God. He experienced absolute, infinite suffering.

Jonathan Edwards describes it in terms of a furnace. In his sermon on Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane, he writes that Jesus had a “full and immediate view” of the cup of wrath—“vastly more terrible than Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace.” He was brought to the mouth of that furnace, Edwards says, so he could look into it, see its raging flames, feel its heat, and know exactly what he was about to endure for us.

For us.

Let’s take this big question to the cross. Go to the cross and ask, “God, why are you allowing evil and suffering to continue?” And even though the cross cannot tell you what the answer to that question is, the cross can tell you what the answer cannot be.

It cannot be that he doesn’t love us.

It cannot be that he doesn’t care.

We may not know the reason he allows evil and suffering, but the one thing it cannot be is that he is indifferent or remote. He came and plunged himself—not only into the fiery furnace of our suffering—but into suffering to infinite degrees beyond anything we will ever endure. He did it because he loves us that much, and because he hates suffering that much. He was willing to be plunged into it so that one day he could end all evil without ending us.

The implications of this are vast. The cross does not tell us the answer to the question, “Why does God allow evil and suffering?” But it tells us what the answer cannot be: that he doesn’t care.

Even Albert Camus, of all people, understood this. In an extraordinary passage he writes: "Christ, the God-man, suffers too. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him, since he suffers and dies. The night on Golgotha is so important because the Divinity ostensibly abandoned its traditional privilege and lived through to the end, despair included, the agony of death."

And because Jesus Christ went into the ultimate furnace for you—the only furnace that could truly consume you—there is your assurance that he is walking into your personal furnaces with you. Whether you feel him or not, no matter how hot it is right now, he is beside you.

So if you want to deal with evil and suffering, the first thing you must do is look back—look back to what he did on the cross.

But the second thing you must do is look forward. You have to look ahead to something.

What is that?

At the very beginning of the passage, remember, Peter is speaking to people who are suffering and who are going to suffer more. And he says: "You have been born again into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade—kept in heaven for you until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time."

That’s a mouthful, but look at what he’s saying.

You cannot go through the furnace without a living hope. Hope is always about the future, of course, but a living hope is a power. It’s a dynamism. It’s something that actually gets you through the furnace.

And what is this living hope? It’s an inheritance—yes, a kind of wealth—kept in heaven. But it’s not merely spiritual, because the guarantee of it, the foretaste of it, is the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

His physical resurrection is the firstfruits of the final salvation to be revealed at the end of time. And what is that? The new heavens and new earth.

At the end of Revelation 21–22, heaven comes down into this world to purify it and renew it. Paul describes it in terms of resurrection. In 1 Corinthians 15 he says: "The trumpet shall sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed… Death has been swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory? Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ."

Do you see what he’s saying?

God is not preparing an ethereal, spiritual heaven as compensation for the life we lost. No. Resurrection is not compensation for the life we lost. Resurrection is the restoration of that life.

The new heavens and new earth mean this world—your body, your loved ones, your home—restored to you, purified and beautified. This world, this body, comes back. It all comes back.

Pure. Unfading. Imperishable. Unspoiled.

And Paul goes so far as to say that suffering and death will be swallowed up by victory. I’ve thought about that for years. To be swallowed up doesn’t mean suffering simply stops. It means it is taken up into the victory.

When I swallow and digest something, it becomes part of me. It makes me bigger. Paul is saying that the resurrection will swallow up the suffering you’re going through now in such a way that it will make the glory infinitely greater.

The best illustration I have—and it’s imperfect—is a nightmare I once had. Years ago, I dreamed that my entire family had been slaughtered. It was the most awful dream I’ve ever had. And then I woke up, and there they were.

Before the nightmare, I loved my family. I was comforted to see them around me. But after the nightmare—after losing them and getting them back, as it were—I couldn’t even look at them without crying for joy. The experience of losing them made the experience of having them infinitely more precious. It was as if the loss had been swallowed up by the joy.

Now, that’s only a dim hint. But if Jesus Christ’s resurrection happened—and it did—then our resurrection will happen. And that means everything sad, everything horrible, will be brought up into our future glory and will make it infinitely better than it would have been otherwise.

That is the final and ultimate defeat of suffering and death. That’s why Dostoevsky writes these astounding words: "I believe, like a child, that suffering will be healed and made up for… that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts… that it will make it not only possible to forgive, but to justify what has happened."

It sounds unbelievable. But if the resurrection is true, it is absolutely right.

Everything sad will come untrue.

And yet the resurrection will be infinitely greater for having once been true—all that suffering, all that evil.

So you have to look back at what he has done.

You have to look ahead to what is coming.

But there is one more thing this passage tells us. At the very end, Peter says there is something we must not only look back to and look ahead to, but look into.

Verse 12 says that the gospel—the message preached to you—contains “things into which even angels long to look.”

And that word long, my friends—that word long is an amazing word. It’s the Greek word epithumia, which really means lust, an intense desire. The angels obsessively, passionately look into the gospel. They gaze at the story of God saving us through Jesus Christ, and they never grow tired of it. They are constantly looking into it.

You say, “Isn’t the gospel just the elementary ABCs—the basic minimum beliefs to get into the Christian life? Don’t we move on to more advanced stuff after that?” Don’t tell the angels that.

The angels are far smarter than you and me. They’ve been around forever. And yet they never, ever tire of looking into the gospel. It is the one thing they are always studying.

Why?

Let me show you why—and why we must do the same. Think for a moment about everything we’ve said, but now in terms of the gospel.

How did Jesus get through his furnace?

Jesus went through an unimaginable furnace of affliction. How did he endure it?

Hebrews 12 says, “For the joy set before him, he endured the cross.”

He had a living hope. And the only way anyone gets through the furnace is with a living hope.

So what was his living hope?

You might say, “Perhaps he was hoping for bliss in heaven with his Father.” But remember—this living hope is what drew him out of heaven and into the furnace. What could he possibly have been looking for that he didn’t already have?

Isaiah 53 says, “He will see the results of his suffering and be satisfied.”

That is an astonishing statement.

What could make infinite suffering worth it?

Isaiah answers: “My righteous servant shall justify many.”

You are his living hope.

You are the one thing he did not have in heaven. You are the reason he came to earth, went to the cross, and plunged himself into the fiery furnace. You—beautified, unspoiled, unfading, perfect, restored, resurrected, glorified in his arms—that is his living hope.

That is what filled him with such joy. That is what gave him such inexorable, infallible resolve that he went into the furnace and came out like gold.

And the thought that you were his living hope—that is what will make him your living hope.

Knowing that you were his joy, his treasure, his living hope—that is what will enable you to walk through your furnace with him. And if you do, look at that wonderful verse 8: if you learn to look into the gospel the way the angels do, always discovering new depths of what he has done for you—as we’ve tried to do tonight—then sometimes, even though you do not see him, you will love him. And you will rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.

And as you do, your grief will be taken up into his story and turned to gold.

This article is based upon a verbatim transcript of a sermon by Dr. Tim Keller. It has been lightly edited for clarity by Copilot as well as the theological staff at Third Millennium Ministries.