Hard Cases and Honest Wrestling

Today's Scripture

Genesis 16:13 — "So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, 'You are a God of seeing,' for she said, 'Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.'"

2 Corinthians 1:3-4 — "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God."

Psalm 34:18 — "The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit."

The Big Idea

Today we face the questions slogans cannot answer: rape, incest, a pregnancy that threatens the mother's life, a diagnosis no parent should ever hear. These cases are rare among abortions, but they are not rare to the women living them. Honest wrestling means refusing two easy exits — pretending the child's life doesn't matter, and pretending the woman's agony doesn't either. God refuses both exits too. He sees, he weeps, and he has suffered.

Reflection

The God who sees Hagar

The Bible does not hide from hard cases. It opens one in its first book.

Hagar is an Egyptian servant with no rights and no voice. Sarai, unable to conceive, hands her to Abram so a child can be produced through her — Hagar is not asked. When she becomes pregnant, the household turns poisonous, and Sarai treats her so harshly that Hagar runs into the desert, pregnant and alone (Genesis 16:7-13). She is about as low as a human being can be: used, blamed, and discarded.

And there, by a spring in the wilderness, the angel of the Lord finds her. He calls her by name — the first time anyone in the story has done that. He tells her God has heard her affliction. And Hagar does something no one else in the entire Bible does: she gives God a name.

Genesis 16:13 — "So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, 'You are a God of seeing,' for she said, 'Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.'"

A pregnant, abused, runaway slave is the Bible's first theologian of the God who sees. Mark that. When we talk about pregnancies that began in violence or coercion, we are not in territory God finds awkward. He has been meeting women in that desert for four thousand years.

Notice, too, what the angel's message holds together. God sees Hagar's affliction — her suffering is fully real to him. And God speaks over the child she carries — a future, a name, a place in the story. He does not honor the mother by erasing the child, and he does not honor the child by ignoring the mother. Both are seen. That double seeing is the standard for everything else we say today.

No painless doors

Now let us say plainly what the slogans on both sides will not.

A pregnancy caused by rape is a collision of two innocents — a woman who chose none of this, and a child who committed no crime. There is no door out of that room marked "painless." Anyone who implies otherwise — who chirps that everything works out, or who breezily treats the child as a problem to be removed — has stopped doing moral reasoning and started doing marketing.

The same honesty is owed elsewhere. When a mother's life is genuinely in danger, almost the whole Christian tradition has recognized that doctors may act to save her, even when, tragically, the child cannot be saved — not because the child matters less, but because letting both die is not mercy. And when parents hear the words "incompatible with life" at a twenty-week ultrasound — when the quiet of that dim room goes from cozy to unbearable in one sentence — they are entering a grief most of us cannot imagine.

C.S. Lewis, after his wife died of cancer, wrote down what comfortable answers sound like from inside the furnace:

"Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand." — C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

That is a warning to every Christian who has a verse loaded and ready before the suffering person finishes her sentence. So is this: the Bible itself tells us some answers are above our pay grade. Deuteronomy 29:29 — "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever." We are given enough to obey, not enough to explain everything. Humility is not weakness in these conversations. It is accuracy.

Yet humility is not the same as having nothing to hold on to. Charles Spurgeon, who knew crushing depression firsthand, gave the church a sentence for exactly these moments:

"God is too good to be unkind and He is too wise to be mistaken. And when we cannot trace His hand, we must trust His heart." — Charles Spurgeon, Sermons

We cannot trace God's hand through a rape, a doomed diagnosis, a delivery room with two lives at stake. Tracing is not our assignment. Trusting is — and trust needs to know what kind of heart it is trusting. That is where today must go.

Weep first

Before it goes there, one instruction for the rest of us — the friends, the church members, the people on the other end of the phone call that begins, "I have to tell you something."

Romans 12:15 — "Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep." Notice what the verse does not say. It does not say explain to those who weep, or correct those who weep, or win the debate near those who weep. The first Christian response to tragedy is tears, not talking points.

This is harder than it sounds, because explanations make us feel better. When a friend's suffering frightens us, we reach for reasons the way a drowning man reaches for driftwood — "God has a plan," "everything happens for a reason" — and we call it comfort when it is really self-defense. Job's friends did their best work in their first week, when Job 2:13 says they sat with him on the ground in silence. The trouble started when they opened their mouths.

Jesus modeled it. At the tomb of his friend Lazarus, knowing full well he was minutes from raising him, John 11:33-35 says he "was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled... Jesus wept." If the Son of God wept when he already knew the happy ending, we can weep with people who don't know theirs.

And God does more than tolerate those tears; he treasures them. Psalm 56:8 — "You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?" Every sleepless night logged. Every tear kept. Nothing about her suffering is invisible to the God of seeing.

Elisabeth Elliot — whose first husband was killed by the people he went to serve, and who buried a second husband after watching cancer take him — spent her life on one hard-won sentence:

"Suffering is never for nothing." — Elisabeth Elliot, Suffering Is Never for Nothing

Be careful with that sentence. It is not a Band-Aid to slap on someone else's wound; Elliot earned the right to say it through her own. But received from a fellow sufferer, it is bedrock: in God's hands, no agony is wasted, even the ones that are never explained.

The Man of Sorrows

Here is where Christianity says something no other view of the world can say. To the woman in the hard case who asks, "What does God know about any of this?" — the answer is a person.

Isaiah 53:3-4 — "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief... Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." Jesus was conceived in circumstances his town gossiped about for thirty years. He was born poor, hunted by a king who killed babies, executed unjustly while his mother watched. The Bible's word for him is not "exempt." It is "acquainted" — acquainted with grief.

John Stott confessed that this is the only thing that kept him believing:

"I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross... In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?" — John Stott, The Cross of Christ

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, awaiting execution in a Nazi cell, wrote it even shorter:

"Only the suffering God can help." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

A God who only watched our pain from a safe distance could be respected, maybe. He could not be trusted with a rape survivor's pregnancy or a dying child's diagnosis. But the cross means God's answer to the hardest cases was to enter one — to absorb violence, shame, and death itself, and to come out the other side carrying resurrection. Tim Keller, who pastored New York City through 9/11 and then walked through his own cancer, explained why this matters so much in the dark:

"Suffering is unbearable if you aren't certain that God is for you and with you." — Tim Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

The cross is how we become certain. Whatever else a hard case means, it cannot mean God is against us — he has already bled to be for us. And suffering runs in the family. Augustine put the resemblance plainly:

"God had one Son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering." — Augustine, Sermons

So Psalm 34:18 is not a greeting card. "The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit" — near, because he has been where they are. And 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 turns that nearness into a job description for us: the "God of all comfort" comforts us "so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction." Comforted people comfort people. That is the whole strategy.

Corrie ten Boom learned it in a concentration camp, where her sister Betsie died — words Corrie carried out of Ravensbrück for the rest of her life:

"There is no pit so deep, that God's love is not deeper still." — Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place

The hard cases are pits. We will not always know what to say at the rim of them. But we know who is already at the bottom, and we know nothing — not violence, not diagnosis, not death itself — has ever dug deeper than his love.

Going Deeper

Make one private resolution today, and write it down: I will never use another person's tragedy as a debating point. Then practice the better reflex. Think of someone you know who is inside a season of real suffering — and send a message that contains no advice, no explanation, and no verse used as a fix-it tool. Just: "I've been thinking of you. I'm so sorry. I'm here." Weep first. The conversations can come later, and they will go differently because you did.