What Should Christians Remember amid Tragedies?

It was just after 11 p.m. on an unusually cold January night in north Florida when the knock came at our door—a dreaded knock that no parent ever wants to receive. The knock informed us that our twenty-three-year-old firstborn son, a firefighter and paramedic, had just died.

And it felt as though we died. Our hearts were frozen stiff in that cold night air.
How do you go on? How do you endure in the midst of suffering? How do you face the deepest miseries of life? What are the things that will ballast your soul in fierce storms of this present evil age?
Here are three plain biblical truths that have helped me. They are not new truths. They are probably all things you already know and believe. They are certainly things that as a pastor I had known and believed for many years, and yet they are truths that have, in the midst of personal tragedy, become more precious to me than ever before.

1. God is always good.

After Sam died, I did what I often do. I read. I read the Bible. I read books on suffering, on grieving, on loss, on lament, and a lot of books on heaven. But of all the things I read, one of the most surprisingly helpful things came from a children’s book by Jonathan Gibson called The Moon Is Always Round. I had picked it up to read with my disabled daughter to help her process her loss. I think in the end, it may have been just as helpful for me.

In this little book, Dr. Gibson uses an analogy drawn from the phases of the moon to help explain the goodness of God. The simple illustration is that in spite of the way things may appear from our perspective, “The moon is always round.” Sometimes it may look like an apple slice or a squished orange, and sometimes it may give only a sliver of light, but however it might appear, the truth remains that the moon is always round.

And what is true of the moon is true of God. Sometimes, in the dark night of the soul, God’s goodness appears hidden: hidden behind deep sorrows, profound losses, and excruciating griefs. And yet the Scriptures testify to the fact that in spite of how it might appear, God is always good:

For the Lord is good;
his steadfast love endures forever,
and his faithfulness to all generations. (Ps. 100:5)

He is good in His being, in His works, and in all His ways, and He does not change (Mal. 3:6). So even when it is hard for us to see, even when His goodness seems hidden by the shadow of a difficult providence, we can trust in the goodness of God.

There is no greater demonstration of that fact than the cross itself. Nowhere does the dark shadow of God’s providence seem to cover His goodness more than at Calvary. And yet even there, even when His face seemed to be most hidden, the light of His goodness was shining in all its resplendent roundness. If this was true on that darkest day of history, then it is true in your darkest day as well.

2. God works evil things for good.

The second truth is a corollary of the first. In Genesis 50:20, Joseph makes the profound confession that what his brothers had meant for evil “God meant for good.” The same God who summoned the famine was also the God who sent Joseph ahead of them to save them. In the end, Joseph would get to see the good that God had been doing. After all, Joseph says, “God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive.” Those people included his brothers and the whole house of Israel. But Joseph didn’t get to see that in the midst of the trial, in the pit, in the dungeon, or when his feet and neck were bound. In those times, the word of the Lord was testing him. Would he trust that God was good and working good in spite of how it seemed? (Ps. 105:16–19).

We may never get to see all the good that God is doing. The secret things belong to God (Deut. 29:29). But I trust that one day in glory we may yet get to behold the full tapestry of God’s providence. And perhaps then we will better appreciate how these perplexingly dark threads were woven into the whole of His purposes serving to make the surrounding threads of His goodness shine all the more brightly.

3. God is working all things together for good in me.

The third truth is a corollary of these first two. Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that *for those who love God *all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” The good that God works is specifically “for those who love” Him and “who are called according to his purpose.” It is a particular sort of good: that we might “be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29).

Through suffering, God is conforming us to the image of His Son. When we are faced with personal tragedies, we should remember that God is not just working outside of us, but He is working in us. He is sanctifying us and shaping us to become more like Christ. It’s not in a way we might choose, but it’s in a way that He knows is best.

Just about every morning I still walk to the cemetery where my son is buried. Some days it feels more like limping. And every day, I long for that day when Jesus will come again to wipe these tears from my eyes, to raise our bodies from the dust, and to make all things new. Until then, every day I kneel at my son’s grave, and I draw two things in the dirt. I draw a moon to remind myself that God is always good, and I draw a cross to remind me of the greatest expression of His goodness. And then I pray that this suffering would not be wasted on me, but that God would be pleased to use it to conform me into the image of His Son.