Can God Be Trusted When You are in Constant Pain?
Who better to answer that question than someone who is experiencing it every day? A few years ago Dr. John Ankerberg interviewed Dr. Michael Easley, former president of Moody Bible Institute. He was forced to step down from that position because he suffered from unrelenting pain. Listen to his heart as he describes the God he could trust.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Michael, you had a great quote that went something like this: What do people do when all the props are knocked out? Your husband can’t help you, your wife can’t help you, your best friend can’t help you, the doctors can’t help you, the attorneys can’t help you, and the church doesn’t help you. Where in the world do you turn?
Dr. Michael Easley: Well, John, my pain started in 2000 with some minor things and it progressed. It’s called degenerative disc disease, and it’s sort of a Catch-22 diagnosis for problems in the spine. And the time you were referring to, when you have a cabinet full of medications, you’re taking the max of all these meds, you’re dizzy, you’re bleary, but you’re still in excruciating pain. And I’ll never forget sitting in our little house in northern Virginia. I had tears running off my jaw, in so much pain, intractable. And I looked at Cindy and said, “I understand now why people would take their lives.” I wanted to jump off a bridge. Now, I never would, but that truly crossed my mind. I got it. And when you get to those very dark places where a friend of Joni’s and mine says you have three things in a dark tunnel: me, God, and pain. And when the props are knocked out, your faith either becomes real, or I don’t know where you turn.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. And you said that you never asked God to explain it to you, you just said, “How am I to live with this constant pain?” What answers did you get?
Dr. Michael Easley: You know, I never asked why, and I still haven’t after all these years. I deserve hell. I deserve His condemnation; I know that from the little bit I know of Scripture. But for me it was, “Okay, Lord, if this is my new lot in life, how do I live this way? How am I not bitter to people around me? How do I not blame others? How am I kind and civil? What do I need to do to be the kind of person you want me to be? And Hebrews 4 was a chapter that really opened up for me.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. Let me read it for you, then I want you to unpack this. You said this is one of your favorite verses that God brought you to. Hebrews 4:14-16, “Therefore, since we have a great high priest, who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way just as we are—yet was without sin. Then let us approach the throne of grace with confidence so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” Unpack that for us.
Dr. Michael Easley: First of all, the high priest is our intercessor. And no matter what our religious background, whether we grew up in a culture that did or didn’t teach us about God, there’s something intrinsic in our heart that we want to talk to the Big Guy. We want to know we can get to Him. And this passage in Hebrews explains clearly that we don’t need any intermediator; we have the high priest. Now, we know that He’s the God-man, fully God, fully man. That’s a big idea. But the concept is that He completely understands where I’ve come from, who I am, because He Himself has experienced the same kind of things. So here’s someone who knows exactly what we’ve gone through in ways we can’t even measure. So, first, the great high priest.
Second, to hold fast to our confession, to our belief that, what did I believe when I trusted in Christ and Christ alone? That He lived, that He died, He was buried, He came back from the dead. And any and all who trust in Christ and Christ alone are promised a free gift of eternal life. That’s the benchmark, that’s the bedrock. So no matter what my experience tries to tell me, I want to go back to, what did I believe? What does Scripture tell me about this Jesus? He’s my intermediary to God; He has sympathized with me completely; I can turn to Him.
And the two outcomes, grace and mercy, are interesting concepts. Grace is undeserved favor in the face of deserved wrath. None of us is better than the other one, we all deserve wrath. We may think we’re a little bit better than some others, but we’re not. And so grace is undeserved favor—we don’t ever merit it, we can’t earn it, we can’t be better than someone else. And mercy is justice withheld, justice suspended. So if a police officer pulls you or me over—you more likely than me—pulls you over, says, “John, you were speeding.” And you say, “Okay, I was.” And he says, “I’m going to let you off this time.” Law would give you a ticket and a punishment and a penalty of some kind, but mercy would suspend the justice, “I’m not going to penalize you now.”
And the author of Hebrews is saying we draw near to Him because He empathizes, He knows, and He’ll give us that grace and suspended justice in time of need. And that package, it’s a lot; that package helped me a lot, John, in trying to piece together: I draw near to Him; He understands completely; there’s nothing I’ve gone through that He can’t completely comprehend. He knows. And from there I appeal for that grace and mercy.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. Explain a little bit more about this: He sympathizes with us; He empathizes with us. Unpack that just a little bit more.
Dr. Michael Easley: Yes, the Greek words, sympathy and empathy, we gum up in English a little bit. But it’s really “feeling along with;” that He knows completely. The grief that He bore is so much more exponential than you or I. But there’s a sense in which any pain, any disappointment, any heartbreak that a human experiences, He knows this already. It’s not new to Him, “Oh, I didn’t know that people, human beings, could suffer that way.”
And it’s impossible for us as humans to grapple with what Christ endured on Calvary when the wrath of God poured out from heaven on His only son, and He actually turns Himself away. And we have the words recorded where Christ said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We can’t understand an immeasurable amount of what the suffering Christ endured there. But that gives us a glimpse into the fact that this high priest has endured every pain, every disappointment, every abuse, everything we could ever envision, all the more. So this high priest understands us; He’s our intercessory to God; He’s the God-man; He empathizes. And we come to Him for grace and mercy in time of need. When I need Him.
Dr. John Ankerberg: There are times when you come home. On a regular scale of 1-10, what’s a good day for you?
Dr. Michael Easley: Anything below a 6 I’m sort of civil; otherwise I’m ornery.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Okay. So when you get up there, 8 and 9, and you come home and Cindy knows, you go down in the basement to your private room. How does this verse help you?
Dr. Michael Easley: I cling to what I know; I don’t let my experience tell me something about God that I don’t believe. And when the pain crashes in, when the disappointment comes in, when the physicians can’t help, when all those things you named before can’t help you, it’s you, God, and pain. And I continue to remind myself my experience does not tell me who God is.
Dr. John Ankerberg: That’s very important. Say that again.
Dr. Michael Easley: My experience does not tell me who God is. His Word tells me who He is. And this is one of the problems we have in the West and around the world. We look at our experience to see who God is and what He’s like. And that’s a lie. We have to erase that. We can’t in human terms define this God. And so, His Word tells us who He is, what He’s done, what He’s accomplished. And so, for me it’s that it’s sort of a cocoon of me, God, and pain. And when I have His Word, the pain doesn’t go away, it’s not like a spiritual ibuprofen—all of a sudden I feel better and I have joy in my heart—but I know in my head and I believe in that confession that what He said about His Word is true. If I can stake my soul on that, can I stake my day-to-day life on it?
Excerpted from our series, “Where is God When Life Hurts?” Edited for publication. See complete series in our online store at jashow.org.
You may know the story. At the age of 17, Joni dove into shallow water and broke her neck, leaving her a quadriplegic. Where was God? Had He deserted her? Let’s ask her.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Joni, I want you to give the audience a little bit of background of what happened to you. Because at 17 you were a beautiful vivacious girl. What happened? And then I want you to talk specifically to people that are in so much pain. I asked some of my staff members to ask some of their mates that are in great pain, “Give me four questions for my guests for this program on suffering and pain and what God can do for you.” The four questions were this:
- When does that pain stop?
- When does the pain stop?
- When does the pain stop?
- When does the pain stop?
That’s the only thing they wanted to know.
There are some people that do not want to hear anything from God that is beyond their suffering, okay? You were there for two years. You didn’t want anybody to talk to you about Bible verses, okay? So, give me the background. Start with what happened, give me that story, and then a word to those people that are saying, “You know, I don’t really care what you say.”
Joni Eareckson Tada: Well, I was an athletic young active teenager and did reckless things when I would get into athletics. And took a stupid dive into what was really very shallow water, thinking I would come up out of the pike dive. But I did not. And my head hit the bottom of a sand bar. It snapped my skull back and crunched my vertebrae and severed my spinal cord. And I’m lying face down in the water totally paralyzed. And thankfully my sister who was in the water with me happened to see that I was floating face down. Ironically enough I had just colored my hair the night before with peroxide, and she could see my blond hair floating on the surface of the water. That captured her attention, and she quickly came, rescued me, pulled me up out of the water. I’m spitting, I’m sputtering, I’m gasping for breath.
They take me to the hospital; they rip off my swimsuit; they drive bolts into my skull; they put me in traction on a long canvas sandwich, a Stryker frame. And all this is happening in a whirlwind of speed. And suddenly, when the doctors told me, “Joni, you’ve severed your spinal cord; you’re never going to use your hands again; and you’re never going to walk,” I plummeted into depression. I couldn’t even compute what it meant never to be able to walk again, never to be able to hold a Coca Cola or brush my hair or my teeth, or…. I was overwhelmed. And this kind of suicidal despair really gripped me. I would lie in bed at night wrenching my head back and forth on the pillow hoping to break my neck up at some higher level and so thereby kill myself. But I was afraid to do that because then I’d only be worse. And I felt so alone.
And I desperately wanted to believe God, but if He was the God that He made Himself out to be in the Bible, then somehow, some way, He had a hand in this. And how could He be trusted if He had a hand in it?
But one night, John, I was feeling so overwhelmed and so lonely, so desperately alone in my pain and in my despair. For some reason I started imagining this Jesus that Michael was speaking about. I pictured Him walking through the door of my hospital room, past my roommates who were all sleeping. I pictured Him coming up to the edge of my hospital bed. I imagined Him—I didn’t see Him, I just imagined Him—taking the guard rail and gently clunk, clunk, lowering it. And then sitting on the edge of my hospital mattress and brushing my hair out of my eyes. And then showing me His handprint, His palm, and saying to me gently, “Joni, if I loved you enough to die for you, don’t you think I can be trusted even with this?”
And that, to me, epitomized what you two were talking about a moment ago from Hebrews 4. I had a high priest. I had a God. The God of the Bible wasn’t some meditating mystic of a guru of a god on some far-off mountain top contemplating his naval, twiddling his thumbs, staying at some arm’s length distance from me and my pain. No, He got right down into the depths of my pain. And I began to see that night that Jesus goes where nobody else goes. He goes where no doctor goes. He goes where no counselor goes. He goes where no medication goes. And if you, if I, would but open my heart to Him and let Him in, I would begin to see His plan and purpose for my life. And it didn’t happen overnight, not with a snap of a finger. But that night that I imagined Him visiting me and saying, “Joni, I can be trusted,” that was a step in the right direction.
Dr. John Ankerberg: You’ve given us two pictures. Describe the first one.
Joni Eareckson Tada: Well, this right here is a copy of a charcoal sketch that I did when I was in the hospital. I learned how to hold charcoal pencils between my teeth and write and sketch and draw. I was a bit of an artist before my accident, and when I drew this ghoulish picture, a picture of deep anguish, what I wanted to convey was, “Oh, God, this is now my life? This is what I’m going to have to live with for the rest of my life? I can’t do this. I can’t; it’s impossible.” And I know what I’m saying resonates with so many of our viewers who are in that same pit of despair, “Oh, God, this is now my life?” You have a brain injury, perhaps a deep loneliness, a mental illness, maybe a child born with severe disabilities, or your husband leaves you, or you get a bad medical report that’s game-changing, and life-altering, and you think, “This is now my life? I can’t do this.” And I just want our viewers to know that Michael and I have said the same thing. In fact, I said the same thing this morning when I got up, “Oh, Jesus, I can’t do this.” BUT, and this is what I love about the Bible, it’s always so full of hope. And there are all kinds of anchors of hope to hold on to. And the one I held on to this morning was, BUT, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” Philippians 4:13. I can’t do this, but I can do all things through Christ.
Dr. John Ankerberg: That picture is going to haunt me forever. What was the second picture about?
Joni Eareckson Tada: Well, this second picture… I did not draw this particular one, a friend of mine drew it of me when I got out of the hospital. And when he saw me piecing together the puzzle of my life, he wanted to convey, “Joni, I know you want your life to fit, be tidy, neat, orderly. I know you want everything to be logical. I know you want your life to make sense. But you know what, a lot of puzzle pieces are going to go missing, and you’re not going to find them until the other side of eternity.” And when I saw this sketch that my friend did of me, my first thought was, well then, wisdom is not being able to put all of the puzzle pieces together as to why God allowed this to happen. Wisdom is trusting God even when most of the puzzle pieces go missing; even when you know that on this side of eternity your life is not going to make sense. But it will on the other side. And that hope is what keeps me going. To know that one day God’s going to give me the key that will unlock sense out of my seemingly senseless quadriplegia. And I can’t wait for that day. I’m looking forward to it.
Excerpted from our series, “Where is God When Life Hurts?” Edited for publication. See complete series in our online store at jashow.org.
