From his book ‘The Reason for God’ Timothy Keller wrote:
“Just after the climax of the trilogy The Lord of the rings, Sam Gamgee discovers that his friend Gandalf was not dead (as he had thought) but alive. He cries, “I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself! Is everything sad going to come untrue?”13 The answer of Christianity to that question is—yes. Everything sad is going to come untrue and it will somehow be greater for once having been broken and lost.
Embracing Christian doctrines of the incarnation brings profound consolation in the face of suffering. The doctrine of the resurrection can instill us with a powerful hope. It promises that we will get the life we most longed for, but it will be an infinitely more glorious world than if there had never been the need for bravery, endurance, sacrifice, or salvation.14
Dostoevsky put it perfectly when he wrote:
“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like a despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, 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, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened. 15
More succinctly, C.S. Lewis wrote:
They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that heaven, once attained will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. 16
This is the ultimate defeat of evil and suffering. It will not only be ended, but so radically vanquished that what has happened will only serve to make our future life and joy infinitely greater.~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God, 2018 (Penguin Books, New York, N.Y.) p 33-4
13. J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Field of Cromallen,” The Return of the King (various editions)
14. This may be the reason George MacDonald can say: “We do not know how much of the pleasures of life we owe to intermingled sorrows. Joy [alone] cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be the deepest joy.” Phantastes: A Faerie Romance (Eerdmans, 1981). p. 67.
15. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Chapter 34/ I think it should be stated that Dostoevsky does not say it will be possible to justify the evil itself. Evil may be used by God to bring about even greater good than if it had not occurred, but it nonetheless remains evil, and therefore inexcusable and unjustifiable in itself.
16. C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Macmillan, 1946), p. 64.
