Meaning

Thanks for listening to this special podcast series questioning Christianity. This short series is meant to address common questions people have about the claims of the Christian faith. In each podcast, Tim Keller addresses a variety of questions like, can there be moral absolutes? And how can you believe in something you can't prove?

We encourage you to share this podcast with others and discuss the topics addressed with friends. And for more content about exploring Christianity, visit gospelandlife.com slash explore. Every week we like to share a fun fact about Tim, and this week we'll share that when he was younger, he used to drive all throughout Pennsylvania as a delivery driver, and rumor has it that he would often drive with his knees so that he could read books at the same time.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Timothy Keller. Hi, thanks for coming or coming back. What we said last week... was that you can't prove that there's a God, slam dunk demonstrably prove, but you also cannot prove that there's no God. So, for example, does the material world... just exists? Did it generate itself? Or did you say, well, the material world has always been here, so matter is beginningless? Our understanding of matter is...

that matter's contingent. Material things are caused by something else. So, are you really saying that matter, in a sense, has generated itself and it can sustain itself? Or, like the religions of the world believe, do you believe there's a transcendent reality, an immaterial, a God? who generates matter and who sustains it. So is the material universe something that exists on its own and generated itself, or it needs to be upheld?

Those are your two options. How do you prove one or the other? See, if you don't believe in God, you believe the material world has just always been there, how would you prove that? What kind of scientific experiment could you set up? In order to prove that, you can't. These are two philosophical or religious statements, which means at the very bottom, if you believe in God or you don't believe in God, it's a belief. It's just what I said.

At the bottom of your thinking is an act of faith that you cannot demonstrably prove. However, having said that, we said this also last week, that doesn't mean that you can't compare belief systems. You can't sit back and say, okay, prove that atheism is right, or prove that Christianity is right, or prove Islam is right. You can't do that, but you can compare the systems, and you can compare them rather rationally.

and decide which system is actually the best system or the better system to adopt and embrace. And now there's a number of ways to go about it, and if we are able to continue this series as long as I'd like to, we're going to get to a whole lot of them. But in the next few weeks, what I want to do is I want to find out how livable these various...

systems of belief are. You see it's one thing to have a set of beliefs on paper, but what if you can't live them out? What if they don't actually fit our experience? What if there's something that you really can't live? In that case, of course, we would say, well, wait, if this one sounds good on paper, but it really can't live, well, then that's a mark against it. See, the way you rationally judge between these belief systems is you...

Compare them. And what we're going to do over the next few weeks is this. No matter what your beliefs are, you can't live without several things. You can't live without satisfaction and happiness in life. that can sustain you through the changing circumstances of life. You can't live without satisfaction and happiness. You can't live without a meaning in life that makes you resilient enough to be able to face suffering.

You can't live without an identity that's solid enough to handle the ups and downs of your performance. You can't live life without some way of determining what's right and what's wrong to do. You can't live life without some way of having hope for the future. In other words, no matter what your belief system is, you've got to have those things. And not only that, you have to have a working theory of how you get those things.

because these are lifelong endeavors to find satisfaction and meaning and justice and hope and identity. So no matter who you are, no matter what your belief system, you have to get those things. And your belief system has an operating working theory of how you get those. So I want to compare. And tonight I'd like to talk about meaning in life.

You can't live without meaning in life, and you can't live without a meaning in life that helps you face troubles and evil and suffering and so forth. And what we want to do tonight is compare the different systems. different sets of belief as to how they compare. Now, and, as you may guess, I'm going to try as much as possible to be completely fair to all the different views. And if I'm not, you can call me out.

But I'm here to say each week that Christianity offers you unequaled resources, arguably unequaled resources for these things. So let's compare tonight.

Meaning in life. And let's just do it under three headings. I'd like to talk to you about the problem of meaning today, the acid test of meaning, and the unique resources of Christianity for it. The problem of meaning. the acid test of meaning, and the unique resources of Christianity for it. Now, what do I mean by the problem? Well, let's first talk about what meaning, what is meaning? What is mean meaning? What do you mean, what does meaning mean? What does meaning mean?

Meaning is an overlap of purpose and significance. Purpose is a backward glance and significance is a forward glance. Let me give you an example. If you're walking up a hill... and you see three rocks together. The question is, what do those three rocks together mean? And if you, the answer is, if somebody put them on purpose there, if somebody put them there on purpose.

like as a way of, say, guiding you on to keep you on the path to get over the mountain, okay? So if they were put there on purpose to show you the path to the next town, if they were put there for a purpose, then they have significance.

That is, they make a difference. It matters. You're going to study them. But if they're just there by accident, they just happen to be there, nobody put them there on purpose, then they're insignificant. That is, they don't matter. They don't mean anything. You don't have to look at them. When somebody says, I'm experiencing a lack of meaning in life, they may say, yeah, I got a good job. Yes, I have people who love me, but I don't know what it's all for.

And I don't know in the end whether it's going to make any difference. See, meaning is there's a purpose and there's a significance where it makes a difference. Now... Every religion and every culture based on a religion in the past has always said the meaning of life, the meaning that all human beings, the meaning of human life, the meaning of your life, is to connect to the divine.

Every religion has always said, you need to connect to the sacred. You need to connect to the divine. But as we've been saying, as we said last week, we can say, is the modern secular world is very different. than every other religion, every other culture. The modern secular world says there's no God, or the modern secular culture says there might be a God, or we don't know there's a God, but the key thing is what really matters is here and now.

This material world, as far as we know, is all there is. Everything has a natural cause. Everything has a scientific explanation. There is nothing but the material world. Now, as soon as you say that... That you're not here for a purpose. Nobody put you here for a purpose. And in the end, you're going to die, and then after a while, the sun is going to go out, and nobody will remember anything that anybody's ever done.

In other words, because we're not here for a purpose and because in the end nothing we do makes any difference. The secular mindset has always had a kind of problem with meaning in life that no other religion or no other culture has ever had. So, for example, Somerset Maughan...

Somerset Maugham was a British novelist when I was younger. He was famous. Nobody's ever heard of him anymore, but he was a brilliant guy. And a secular man is what he said at one point. He says, if one puts aside the existence of God... And if you believe that survival after life is too doubtful, one has to begin to make up one's mind as to the meaning or use of your life. If death ends everything, if I have neither...

To hope for good, nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what I'm here for and how in these circumstances I should conduct myself. And the answer is plain, but very unpalatable. There is no meaning for life.

and life has no meaning. Carl Becker, who is another writer of the same period of time, has famously said, from a scientific viewpoint, human beings are, quote, Little more than a chance deposit on the surface of the world, carelessly thrown up between two ice ages by the same forces that rust iron and ripen corn.

Now, what they're both saying, and they're being very stark about it, if we're not, remember we said meaning is purpose and significance. We're here for a purpose, and what we do now counts forever. That's how all religions have always said. If you're here for a purpose to connect to God or to connect to the divine, and if you do that, then what you do now will count forever and it will make an eternal difference. But modern secular culture doesn't believe in the past or the future.

We just have this life. That's it. We didn't come from anywhere and we're not going anywhere. And this life is all there is. So it's created a meaning problem that no other cultures ever had. Now, the way it's been solved and probably the way some of you have solved it. can come out in these next three quotes I'm going to give you. Stephen Jay Gould, who was a paleontologist at Harvard University, he's deceased now,

In the 1980s, there was a Life magazine. A lot of you look to me, you're too young to even know what that was, but there was a magazine called Life magazine, and they asked a bunch of intellectuals and celebrities, what is the meaning of life? And the whole issue was on, it was the meaning of life issue. They asked all these people, what is the meaning of life? And, you know, why are we here? What are we here for? And Stephen Jay Gould wrote this. He says, we are here...

because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures. And we're here because the Earth never froze entirely during a certain ice age. We may yearn for a higher answer, but none exists. This explanation, though superficially troubling, is ultimately liberating. We must construct these answers for ourselves.

Now, more recently, Jerry Coyne, who's a professor of biology at University of Chicago, he writes this. He says, secularists see a universe without any apparent purpose, and they realize we must forge our own purposes and ethics. See, it's the same thing. He says, but although the view, even though the universe is purposeless and human life is purposeless, your life is not. You make your own purposes and they're real.

And a perfect example of this, I just got this off the internet. I don't know who wrote this, actually, but it was a person who had grown up in the church, and this person had lost any Christian faith, and he considered himself a secular person. And he asked this question. He says, does atheism make my life meaningless? Because now he's an atheist. He says, does atheism make my life meaningless? And he writes this. He says, not at all.

It is true I do not have an absolute purpose in life. I am not dedicated to glorifying God anymore. But I find creating my own purpose is thrilling. And then he writes, I'm the author of a novel. and that book is my life, and the freedom of all this is exhilarating. Life is as happy and as meaningful as you make it.

So the way the secular world has solved this problem, yes, we're not here for purpose, and we're not, in the end, nothing you do is going to make any difference. Whether you're a nice person or a nasty person, in the long run, it makes no difference at all. But while you're here, even though there's no purpose for human life, you can decide your own purpose. You say, I'm going to fight poverty, or I'm going to write a book, or I'm going to...

Fall in love and live for my family. So you can create your own meaning in life. So there's no discovered objective meaning in life. There is, though, subjective emotional meaning in life, and that's fine.

So how workable is that? How workable is that particular approach to meaning in life? I'd like to argue that at a top level... it's unworkable for many people, and at a practical level, it's unworkable for all people. What do I mean? At the top level, when I say it's unworkable for many people, I mean just this. Secular meaning in life only works if you don't think too hard about the nature of the universe and about your true condition.

There's a philosopher who's an atheist, and I really respect him in many ways. I love his writings. In fact, some of you have pointed out I quote him often. His name is Thomas Nagel. He was at NYU. I guess he's retired. He was a philosophy professor there. And he wrote a little book called An Introduction to Philosophy. Yeah. The name of the book is What Does It All Mean?

Subtitle, A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy. It's a really great book. The last chapter, though, it's very short, too. That's one of the things that's so great about a short philosophy book. But the last chapter is called The Meaning of Life. And as a secular person, this is what he says. He says, quote, the meaning of, even if you produce a great work of literature, which continues to be read thousands of years from now.

You must remember that eventually the solar system will cool or the universe will wind down and collapse and all trace of your effort will vanish. If your life is going to matter, it can only matter from the inside emotionally. From the outside, objectively, it wouldn't matter whether you'd ever existed or not. But then he goes on to say, but why dwell on that? Dwell on the thing that you're living for.

Just try to enjoy life and don't think too much about that big picture. Now, even for a second, you might want to say that's intellectually dishonest, but okay, well, for a moment, let's just not say that.

Is that workable? And the answer is it depends. Some of you may have run into Leo Tolstoy's famous thing called The Confessions, which is a short book in which he... tells how in the middle of his 50s, when he was very, very famous and well-known, that his secular belief about the universe started to, the meaninglessness of it all started to fall, you know, come down on him and start to crush him.

And he began to say, what is it all for? What is it all for? C.S. Lewis has a very famous passage here where he says this. He was asked the question, aren't you afraid of atomic warfare? The name of this essay, you could probably find it somewhere online, it's called Living in an Atomic Age. And the question was, aren't you afraid that the atomic warfare is going to happen and human civilization will be ended?

And he says, well, from a secular point of view, for a moment, though he was a Christian at the time, he stepped out. He said, from the secular point of view, not at all. And this is what he said. If nature is all that exists... In other words, if there's no God and no life or some quite different sort somewhere outside of nature, there's no God, nature is all that exists, then all stories will end in the same way, in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return.

Civilization, in the end, will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it. No doubt atomic bombs may cut its duration. on this present planet a little shorter than it might have been but the whole of civilization even if it lasted for a billion years would be so infinitesimally short in relation to the oceans of dead time

which precede and follow it, that I can't feel excited about its curtailment. And then he goes on and says, you see, if this life is all there is, then we're just the product of evolutionary biology. And here's how he says, One of the problems with believing that human life is meaningless, but I can really enjoy loving a girl, or I can enjoy loving a boy, or I can enjoy writing a novel or something like that, he says, here's the problem with that.

The meaninglessness sometimes can keep breaking in on you. And he says this, just goes on, he says, you might decide to simply try to have as good a time as possible. That's what Tom Nagel says, of course. But you can't accept in the lowest animal sense be in love with a girl if you know and keep on remembering that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern.

produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can't go on getting any serious pleasure from music. if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion and that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still in the lowest sense have a good time, but just in so much as...

It becomes very good, just insofar as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy. So far, you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you think you really live.

Tom Nagel says, the only way to have meaning in life for a secular person is to not think too much about the universe in which you believe you live. Lewis finally ends this talking about this fact, that if you're a Christian and you're not experiencing peace and meaning. The problem is you're not thinking enough about the universe in which you really live. See, Christians believe the universe is like this. Christians believe that God made us for a love relationship with him.

but that we turned away from him to live for ourselves, which is what Christians call sin. But God has returned into earth. He's broken in in Jesus Christ, and he has come to pay the debt. of what we have done our injustice and our our sin he's paid that debt himself so that now when we believe in him he can come into our lives and he can put his own nature in us so that we can not only have a relationship with him now, but when we die, all the deepest longings of our heart will be fulfilled.

So here's Tom Nagel saying, if you want to have meaning in life as a secular person, don't think too much about the universe in which you believe you live. C.S. Lewis says, if you're a Christian and you're not experiencing meaning in life, you're not thinking enough.

about the universe in which you believe you live. Now, which of those two approaches is more rational? One of them says, don't think too much, and the other one says, think, think, think, think. The Christian one says, think, think more.

And so what Lewis is saying and what Tolstoy said was the trouble is when you say, well, we can find meaning in life by writing a novel. It's interesting that this man who said, I'm the author of a novel and the book is my life. That's why I have meaning in life. But Tolstoy, hate to say it. guy. Tolstoy wrote a few novels that are probably going to do better than anything you write. And he said it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to give me meaning in life.

Thank you for listening to Questioning Christianity. If you're exploring the claims of Christianity, we would like to send you a free book, Making Sense of God by New York Times bestselling author Tim Keller. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it's easy to wonder, why would anyone believe in Christianity?

As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. In this book, Dr. Keller demonstrates how Christianity provides modern people with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. To request your free copy, go to gospelinlife.com slash free. Free copies will be shipped while supplies last. Again, that's gospelinlife.com slash free. Now here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of his talk.

Now, I don't believe, and here's what I think, and by the way, I have said this before, I've spoken on this before, and I've had plenty of people push back and say, well, I'm not Tolstoy. I don't sit around thinking about how meaningless my life is.

I've got a family. I've got a job. I've got children. I've got grandchildren. I'm just living for the moment, and I'm actually having a great time. And I did say to you, did I not, that the secular approach to meaning in life... at the top level at this sort of philosophical level that it actually

doesn't work for some people, but actually works for plenty. But there's a second way I'd like you to look at this, the most practical level. At the practical level, I would like to argue that the secular approach to meaning in life doesn't work for anybody.

And what do I mean by that? At the most practical level, whoever you are, you're going to suffer. This is the acid test of meaning in life. Suffering is inevitable. There's that line in Macbeth that just haunts me. It has always haunted me. Each new morn, new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows strike heaven upon the face.

By the way, that's empirically true. You know that. Wake up tomorrow morning. Each new morn, new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows strike heaven upon the face. Suffering is inevitable. For every one of us. And suffering will not leave you the way you were. It'll make you better or worse. It'll make you more tender or harder. It'll make you wiser or stupider. It'll make you weaker or stronger. But it will not leave you the way you were. And what it does to you...

will depend on how you respond to it, and how you respond to it will depend on the thickness and the rootedness of your meaning in life. Now, what do I mean by that? Every single religion in the history of the world. Now, I'm going to get back and show how Christianity is unique here. But for a moment, let me just say every religion in the history of the world has equipped its members for suffering because it has told its members.

the meaning of life is something outside or beyond this world. Every religion has always said, your meaning in life is nothing in this world. So the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, the meaning of life is to live and believe in such a way that you live forever with God and with your loved ones forever. The karmic religions say the meaning of life is to live a virtuous life here so that eventually you'll get off of the cycle of reincarnation into eternal bliss.

Buddhism would say the meaning of life is to get over the illusion that this world is real. and eventually go into the all soul, go back into the all soul. And of course, the old pagan religions, the old pagan religions always said, the meaning of life is to live an honorable life. To live a life of honor so that when you die, you will go to be with your ancestors and you will not be ashamed in their mighty company. Now you realize, if you look at all those, and there's others.

In every one of those situations, you realize that if suffering comes along, as painful as it is, it drives you more into your meaning in life. It actually hastens your destination, your journey to your destination. It drives you more. It can actually enhance your meaning in life. Because, so for example, what if you're a pagan? And the whole idea, the old Anglo-Saxon pagans, for example, and the meaning of life was to live an honorable life.

so that when you died, people would be proud of you and you knew you would go to be with your ancestors. Do you realize that an early death in battle against hopeless odds is a great way to go? Because it means, what more honorable way to die going down to defeat, being true to your people or to your sovereign or whatever. And even though you die, it's sad and you've left children behind and so on. But everybody will be happy for you because you died a man of honor.

or what if you're a christian or a jew or a muslim and suffering drives you more to believe in christ and or more to believe in god and to rely more on see what in every situation Same thing with Hinduism, same thing with Buddhism. Suffering, if anything, can actually push you more toward your meaning in life, strengthen you, but the difference with...

secular, is because the secular person says, I've got to make my own meaning of life, what that means is I've got to find something here and now. In other words, my meaning in life has to be something in this material world, and that's what suffering takes away. Listen, as a pastor, I've got to tell you, when I read this blog post, I already read it to you once, when the man said, I'm no longer dedicated to glorifying God anymore.

but I find creating my own purpose thrilling. I am the author of a novel, and the book is my life. When I hear a man say, the book is my life, I just want to shudder. Do you realize how fragile, how infinitely fragile his life is? See, if you're a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Muslim or you're a Christian or you're an old Anglo-Saxon pagan and you're writing a book,

And what happens when the Twitter mob hits? And the book you've been working on for a year and a half, and your publishers yanks your contract, and your career is over. You know what that means? It's not just your career over. It's not just the book that's over. Your life is over. But anyone in the other sets of beliefs, that can actually drive them more into the arms of their meaning in life. But in your case, Mr. Author, it destroys you.

And listen, it doesn't matter if it's more noble. If you say, my meaning of life is my family, what happens when they die? They can die. Then you have no life left. If your meaning in life is grounded in anything in this world, your meaning in life will not be able to handle suffering any more than a spider web will be able to stop a falling rock.

And therefore, ironically, only if your meaning in life is rooted in something outside this world will you actually be equipped for life inside this world. Just to give you an example. Now, having said that, there's a lot of evidence that modern secular people, modern secular culture, gives its members...

less equipment and less help for facing suffering than any culture in the history of the world. Dr. Paul Brand, who was a pioneering orthopedic surgeon, he was British, and he spent half of his career in India, treating people in India, and half of his career... treating people in the United States. And this is what he said at the end of his career. He said, in the United States, I encountered a society that seeks to avoid pain at all costs.

In the West, that's in the United States, patients in the West lived in greater comfort and had a greater lifestyle level than any I'd previously treated, but they were far less equipped to handle suffering. and far more traumatized by it. And Richard Schwetter, who's a cultural anthropologist, by the way, a secular man, at University of Chicago, a very prominent academic, says that modern Western culture...

is the most, does less for its members when it comes to helping them handle suffering than any other culture in history. And he explains why. He says, the reigning metaphor of contemporary secular culture... is that suffering is from, the sufferer is a victim under attack from impersonal forces devoid of intentionality.

And that means suffering is separated from the narrative structure of human life. Now here's what he means by that. He says suffering is a kind of noise. It's an accidental interference into the life story of the secular man. or woman suffering has no intelligible relationship to any plot except as a chaotic interruption And he goes on and says, older cultures and in religious people, suffering is actually an expected part of a coherent life story. It's an important period of testing.

it's a crucial way to live life well and to grow as a person. A few years ago, the Boston Review ran an interview with a woman named Larissa McFarhar, and she was a New Yorker staff writer for The New Yorker, and she'd done a lot of writing and research on... people around the world who most were willing to sacrifice in order to go help people. By the way, Nick Kristof in the New York Times has done this too. She went around looking for people who were willing to put themselves in harm's way.

To go, for example, into the most dangerous places in the world and do medical help or something like that. Places where there was a high percentage possibility of being attacked or contagion infection. And she did find... that almost all the people who were doing that were highly religious people. And McFarhar, who had no religious faith herself, and was not raised in a religious faith, was asked in this interview,

How do you view the fact that almost all the people who are willing to suffer and handle this sort of thing were religious? And here's what she said. She was very, very honest. She said within religion, religious traditions... There is an acceptance of suffering that is not just part of life, but it helps you to become a fuller person. Speaking as a secular person, we see suffering...

as having nothing good in it at all. And then she went on and said, for people of faith, God is in control and God's love will see the world through. Whereas for secular people, it's all up to us. We're alone here. That's why I think, she said, for secular people, there can be an additional layer of urgency. and despair so what larissa mcfarher is saying what richard schwedder is saying what paul brand is saying is at the at the most practical level since everybody suffers

the meaning in life, the operating approach to meaning in life that secular people have doesn't work. It doesn't work for anybody. It's not livable. In fact, Schweder said, that when people suffer, secular people almost always start to borrow things from other religions, even if they're not religious themselves, because they don't have the resources to face suffering.

Now, having said that, you might have said, okay, so you're saying get religious. Well, yes, no, because I'd like to tell you, finally, here's my last point, Christianity has some unique resources, really unique. There is a book.

by Ronald Ritgers called The Reformation of Suffering. And it's actually a history... of Western culture and how at various times in history its people have handled suffering. And when you go all the way back to the Greco-Roman world, the Greco-Roman world was dominated by Cicero and Seneca. who said, who believed like the Buddhists, by the way, that when you're here, you're personal.

But when you die, you go back into the all souls. So you exist after death, but not as a person. You just become part of the... collective spirit of the universe. So you don't think anymore, you're not personal, which means love relationships are temporary. So you have a spouse, you have a child, you have a grandchild, you have a friend, those are temporary.

And what Seneca and Cicero said, what you should do if you want to handle suffering, is that you need to remind yourself this is temporary. It's all temporary. And so when somebody dies, you don't let it get to you. Stoicism, of course. In fact, Epictetus is one of the Greek philosophers who said, when you kiss your little boy in the morning, in your heart, tell yourself that he's going to die. So you don't get too attached. Be compassionate, but don't get too attached.

And when suffering happens, don't grieve, don't wail. I mean, that's a lack of virtue. That shows that you haven't really thought about life. Ronald Rickers points out that that was an extraordinarily cold and harsh approach to suffering. And when Christians came along and people saw them dying during the plagues, when people saw them dying in the arena, they saw Christians able to handle suffering in a way they'd never seen before.

And Ronald Rittger says that the Christian approach to suffering was one of the reasons why people turned away from the old paganism. And the reason why was because Christianity offered four ideas, four things that no culture before or since, in fact, our culture today doesn't have four things.

To help you handle suffering. If you believe in Christianity, you get these four things. What are they? By the way, if you want to see these four things, I'm going to run right through them quickly, just here as we end. If you want to see them, go to John chapter 11. in the New Testament, Gospel of John, and there's a story about Jesus Christ showing up at the tomb of his friend Lazarus.

And everyone's weeping and everyone's wailing and everyone's grieving. And Lazarus' sisters, Mary and Martha, are there. And Jesus raises them from the dead. And if you look at that chapter, you'll see four things. The four things that Christianity gives its believers, and also that no other culture has ever had. Number one, a weeping Savior. When Mary says, Lord, why weren't you here? We're told all he did was weep. Not stoic at all. Jesus was a man of sorrows. He's always weeping in the Bible.

Online you can find an interesting article by B.B. Warfield called The Emotional Life of Our Lord. And what he did was he went through the gospels and he looked every single time that Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ has spoken of experiencing an emotion. He looked at every single place, every verse in the Bible that talked about Jesus Christ's emotional life. And he found that by far.

The emotion Jesus most often is said to have had was grief, moved with compassion, weeping all the time. That was so different. No stoicism there. And see, the ancient pagans, when they saw Christians, were able to weep. It's okay to cry. It's okay to scream. Because Jesus was crying. Jesus was sorrowful. And that was liberating. So first of all...

Christianity brought us a weeping Savior. Secondly, Christianity brought us an angry Savior. The other thing that's really strange about John chapter 11 is that when Jesus goes to the tomb, it says he was bellowing. and snorting with anger. A lot of your modern translations don't bring that out, but that's what it says. Because Jesus Christ, though he was the God of heaven, knew that this world was not originally created by God, to have suffering and death in it. He's mad at it.

And see, here's one of the things about the karmic religions. You know, in Hinduism, what they'll say, if you're suffering right now, there's no such thing as unjust suffering. You know why? If you're suffering right now, don't tell me it's unjust. You are being punished now for something you did in a past life.

See how neat that is, by the way? There's no such thing as unjust suffering. You're paying for something you used to do. But you know what that means? That religion is saying there's no such thing as unjust suffering. You know what? That's wrong.

Some suffering is unjust. Some suffering is worth getting angry at. Jesus Christ did not deserve the suffering he got, did he? Jesus is the ultimate example of that. He didn't deserve the life he got. He didn't deserve to be tortured and killed, but he was. Now, Christianity says weep when you suffer. Christianity says there is unjust suffering. You can be angry at it. Number three, you not only have a weeping saver, you have an angry saver. Thirdly, you have...

a risen Savior. When Martha says to Jesus, why were you not here? How could you have left us? Jesus looks at her and says, I'm the resurrection and the life. Every other religion says, if you die, you go to be with God or something like that. And that's consolation for the suffering of this world. Christianity is the only one that teaches you're not just going to go into heaven in your soul.

You're going to get a new body. You're going to be raised, and there's going to be a new heaven and new earth. Christianity is the only religion that says the future is not just an ethereal consolation for the life you lost. It's the restoration of the life you lost, in fact, of the life you never had. All the things you've ever wanted. Jesus Christ, when he rose from the dead, he ate a fish.

He says, a spirit hath not flesh and bones. And he ate a fish to show that we're not talking about a future in which you're just sort of an ethereal ghost. It's an astounding, an astounding promise. In Brothers Karamazov, there's one place where Ivan Karamazov sort of channels the Christian hope. At one point, he says this. He says, 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.

I believe like the despicable fabrication, it'll be like the 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, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity.

of all the blood they've ever shed, that it will make it not only possible to forgive, but to justify everything that's happened. See, Christianity actually doesn't just say, someday you'll just sort of live in heaven. It actually says, there'll be a new heavens and new earth. Because we don't just have a weeping Savior, an angry Savior, we've actually got a risen Savior. And lastly, we also have a dying Savior. And this is the last thing, and then we're done.

We know at the very last, the last line in John chapter 11, where it talks about how Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, it says that when the religious leaders saw Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead, it says from that day on, they knew he had to die. you don't think jesus knew that you don't think jesus knew he knew that the only way to take lazarus out of the grave was to put himself in the only way that he could take us out of the grave was to put himself in he had to die for our sins

But he did. And here's the thing. If you tell me, and somebody's going to say, why doesn't God end evil and suffering? Why does a good and powerful God allow evil and suffering? Why doesn't he end it? And my answer to you is, We don't know what the reason that God allows suffering is, but we do know what the reason He allows suffering isn't. It isn't because He doesn't love us. Did you catch that?

We still don't know the reason that God allows evil and suffering. We don't know what that reason is. He's got a good reason. I don't know what it is. We don't know what it is. But I know what it isn't. It isn't. He doesn't allow evil and suffering because he doesn't care. Because he came to earth. It's the only religion on the face of the earth that says God actually suffered. He came down and got involved in our suffering.

He came down and became one of us, and he was tortured, and he was beaten, and he was experienced injustice, and he was put to death for us. So, summary. Here's a good way I can summarize it.

Christianity teaches that contrary to stoicism, suffering is painful. Contrary to Buddhism, suffering is real. Contrary to karma, suffering is often unfair. But contrary to secularism, suffering is... meaningful there's a purpose in it and if faced rightly it can drive you like a nail deep into the love of god and into more stability and spiritual power than you can imagine Thanks for listening today to Tim Keller on the Questioning Christianity podcast.

We encourage you to subscribe and share this podcast series with others and discuss them with a friend. We hope you'll go on to listen to the Q&A session for this talk in the episode that follows. And remember that you can find more content about exploring Christianity by... visiting gospelandlife.com slash explore that's gospelandlife.com slash explore

The Questioning Christianity talks in this series were recorded in 2019 in New York City, where Dr. Keller spoke with a local live gathering made up of attendees who did not identify as Christian and their Christian friends who invited them.