The Double Trauma of Suffering 

The trauma of suffering is two-fold. In God’s Healing for Life’s Losses, I introduce the biblical concept of two levels or layers of traumatic-suffering:

1. Level One Suffering: What happens to us. What we experience. “The world is fallen and it falls on us.”

2. Level Two Suffering: What happens in us. How we process what we experience. “The world is a mess and it messes with our minds.” 

What happens to us in unjust suffering is bad enough. It is crushing.

What happens in us as we remember, respond to, and interpret our suffering determines whether the crushing weight of suffering leads to despair and doubt or to dependent hope.

Calculating the Cost of Traumatic-Suffering 

The embodied-soul can calculate the cost of traumatic-suffering in two very different ways.

• Despair and Doubt: “Life is unjust, God must be unjust, too.” (Think of Job’s doubts.)
• Dependent Hope: “Life is bad, but God is good.”

 

• Despair and Doubt: “When trauma hits, I see life only under the sun—from a temporal perspective, from a Christless worldview.” (Think of Solomon’s repetitive focus on fallen life “under the sun.”)
• Dependent Hope: “When trauma hits, I see life in the Son—from an eternal, Christ-centered worldview.”

 

• Despair and Doubt: “When life hurts, I lose hope.” (Think of Solomon’s constant cries of “meaningless, utterly meaningless, all is meaningless!”)
• Dependent Hope: “When life hurts, I cling to resurrection hope.”

 

• Despair and Doubt: “When life is bad, I crop Christ’s goodness out of the picture.”
• Dependent Hope: “When life is bad, I crop Christ’s goodness back into the picture.”

Let’s see what these two very different responses to suffering look like in the lives of two famous Bible characters: Solomon and Paul. 

Ecclesiastes: Traumatized by Traumatic-Suffering 

In my previous post, we viewed what this despair and doubt perspective looks like in Ecclesiastes. What Does Ecclesiastes Teach Us About How We View Traumatic Suffering? When we experience the unrelenting pain of unjust suffering, we either despair as we view life under the sun, or we find hope as we view life in the Son.

Imagine being Solomon. Your life work is to study suffering! Solomon is repetitively clear about what he’s doing in Ecclesiastes. At least fifty-nine times in Ecclesiastes, he tells us that he is observing life under the sun. He is studying fallen creation.

Using modern terminology, we might say he is doing descriptive research on trauma. Studying trauma traumatized Solomon! Solomon book-ends Ecclesiastes with hopeless despair.

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Everything is meaningless!” (Ecclesiastes 12:8).

Solomon is like the counselor who is so saturated by hearing story after story of trauma, that they begin to experience the effects of trauma themselves. 

Paul’s Spiritual Mathematics 

When I was studying Ecclesiastes, my mind kept going to Paul. I first reflected on his famous words about suffering in Romans 8:17-27.

Here Paul is ruthlessly candid about life under the sun. He is brutally honest about level one suffering and what happens to us when our fallen world falls on us. In fact, he uses the same Greek word for meaningless that the Septuagint uses when it translates Solomon’s Hebrew word for meaningless. “For the creation was subjected to frustration”—to vanity, vapor, mist, futility, purposeless, meaningless.

However, Paul is not a hopeless descriptive researcher. Yes, Paul observes suffering. But then Paul draws conclusions about suffering from an in-the-Son worldview.

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18).

“Consider” is the Greek word logizomai. It’s a word from the world of math, a term from the world of weights and measures. Paul calculates. He does some spiritual mathematics. Paul factors Christ into the picture. He computes with an eternal perspective. Paul counts on resurrection hope.

2 Corinthians: The “Anti-Ecclesiastes” 

As I read Ecclesiastes, I kept seeing Paul in 2 Corinthians, as the “anti-Ecclesiastes.” Notice in the following passages how Paul addresses both level one suffering—what happens to him, and level two suffering—what happens in him. And notice in each passage how Paul calculates Christ. How Paul crops Christ and resurrection hope into his picture. In each passage, notice the contrast between Ecclesiastes and 2 Corinthians.

Ecclesiastes Crops Comfort Out of the Picture; Paul Crops Comfort Into the Picture 

Hear Solomon cropping out comfort in Ecclesiastes 4:1. 

Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed—and they have no comforter; power was on the side of their oppressors—and they have no comforter.

Solomon witnesses abuse—level one suffering. Solomon crops out comfort—level two suffering.

Hear Paul cropping comfort into the picture in 2 Corinthians 1:3-4.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.

Paul witnesses troubles—level one suffering. Paul crops the Father of compassion, the God of all comfort, and the comforting body of Christ, back into the picture. When Paul witnesses under the sun trauma, he calculates into his equation in the Son comfort. 

Ecclesiastes Crops Hope Out of the Picture; Paul Crops Resurrection Hope Into the Picture 

Hear Solomon cropping out hope in Ecclesiastes 3:18-21. 

I also said to myself, “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.  Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?” 

Hear Paul cropping resurrection hope into the picture in 2 Corinthians 1:8-9.

We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.

The embodied-soul remembers. Paul doesn’t forget, and he doesn’t want the Corinthians to forget. “Remember the horrible level one suffering we experiences—troubles beyond our ability to endure.” The embodied-soul experiences. In response to his traumatic-suffering, Paul despaired of life itself. He felt the sentence of death.

Ecclesiastes would have stopped here—casket closed; hope killed. But not Paul. The embodied-soul—in Christ—calculates. “But this happened so that we might not rely on ourselves but on the God who raises the dead.” Paul clings to Christ-dependent hope.

Ecclesiastes Crops Eternity Out of the Picture; Paul Crops Eternity Into the Picture 

Twenty-nine times Solomon repeats the phrase, “under the sun.” It’s a poetic way to picture life in this fallen world, instead of life in the age to come. According to Solomon, life “under the sun” is filled with suffering that tempts us to lose all hope. Thirty-eight times Solomon concludes that life is “meaningless.” Ecclesiastes crops eternity out of the picture.

Hear Paul cropping eternity back into the picture in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 

Paul is so heavenly minded that he is of great earthly good. Paul is not pie-in-the-sky, sweet-by-and-by naïve here. Right before these words of heavenly hope, Paul is intensely frank about traumatic-suffering.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed (2 Corinthians 4:7-9).

See all the level one suffering: jars of clay, hard pressed on every side, perplexed, persecuted, struck down.

See all the level two responses to suffering: the all-surpassing power of God, not crushed, not in despair, not abandoned, not destroyed.

Paul candidly faces suffering face-to-face with Christ—factoring in Christ and cropping eternal hope back into the picture. Outwardly, under the sun, we are wasting away. Inwardly, in the Son, we are being renewed day by day. We fix our eyes not on what is seen—temporary under the sun life. Instead, we fix our eyes on what is unseen—eternal life in the Son and with the Son.

And Us? 

What about us?

When traumatic-suffering hits, when our fallen world falls on us, how do we respond?

1. Our Level One Traumatic-Suffering Response: Like Solomon and Paul, let’s be honest about our suffering. Denial profits nothing. Trying to suppress our embodied-soul’s remembrances of our suffering is impossible. Resistance to remembrance is futile.

2. Our Level Two Traumatic-Suffering Response: When traumatic-suffering strikes, Satan seeks to crop Christ out of the picture. Unlike Solomon, but like Paul, we crop Christ back into the picture. We do some spiritual mathematics, and we draw some biblical conclusions. We crop God’s comfort, Christ’s resurrection power, and our eternal hope back into the picture. We encapsulate our embodied-soul response like this:

• The body keeps the score; the embodied-soul calculates the cost.
• The body remembers the past; the embodied-soul remembers our eternal future hope.
• The body remembers past traumatic suffering; the embodied-soul remembers the end of the story.

In the words of the Heidelberg Catechism:

Question: What is your only comfort in life and death? 

Answer: That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with His precious blood, and has set me free from all the power of the devil. He also preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, all things must work together for my salvation. Therefore, by His Holy Spirit He also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for Him.