“Charlie Kirk got shot!” On Wednesday afternoon, my sixteen-year-old shared this message with me about the shocking murder of one of his generation’s heroes. Charlie Kirk was just 31 years old, a husband and father, an outspoken Christian, a compelling apologist, a best-selling author, an influential cultural leader. As he responded to questions from a large crowd of students at Utah Valley University, he was struck in the neck by an assassin’s bullet. One of his final online posts clearly commended his Savior: “Jesus defeated death so you can live.”
This latest example of wicked and unjust violence leaves a knot in our stomachs. It prompts deep emotions—sadness, anger, fear—as well as perplexed questions—What is going on in our nation and in our world? Why does a sovereign and good God allow such heinous evil? How long, oh Lord?
Suffering, pain, and death have indelibly marked the human experience east of Eden. In the beginning, there was no killing, cancer, or chronic pain—God’s world was “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Everything changed when sin and death entered the world, and creation itself “was subjected to futility” (Romans 5:12; 8:20). Suffering, sickness, and sadness accompany the “thorns and thistles” of creation’s curse and humanity’s “dust . . . to dust” sentence. Adam’s oldest son murdered his own brother, and the world was filled with corruption and violence.
Into this groaning world, Christ came to save his people and set things right. Stunningly, the divine Son redeemed us from the curse by “becoming a curse for us” at the cross (Galatians 3:13). The God who rules the world designed for the best man to suffer the worst fate to save bad people.
Christ’s crucifixion is the foundation and focus of the Christian understanding of suffering, which is strange and offensive to all other worldviews. Our perspective is “cruciform”—cross-shaped. Paul called his message about Christ crucified “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). But for Christians, the cross reveals Christ as “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). The cross appeared to reveal Roman might and Jesus’s weakness, yet paradoxically Christ conquered in seeming defeat, he completed his mission in apparent loss, he saved his people when it looked like he couldn’t save himself. This is the cruciform power and wisdom of God that turns conventional wisdom on its head and offers true help and hope for all who believe. (I reflect more on these points in my Desiring God article, “God’s Answer to Human Suffering: The Cross of Christ and Problem of Pain”).
Throughout history, Christians have been slandered, sidelined, and slain for their testimony about their suffering Savior and risen Lord. From the early church to the present day, persecution and opposition have served as a catalyst for emboldening believers and challenging unbelievers to consider the stunning news that Jesus Christ gave his life to forgive his enemies and make them his friends. The apostle Paul wrote from prison to assure fellow believers, “What has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel” (Philippians 1:12), and he prayed for an open door to commend Christ clearly even in the most challenging circumstances (Colossians 4:3–4).
It is right for a nation to weep. It is right for Christians to pray for God to comfort a broken-hearted family bearing a huge loss. It is right for Christians to pray for evildoers to be brought to justice while not taking matters into our own hands (Romans 12:19). And it is right to pray for sleepy churches to be revived, for timid believers to be emboldened, and for the gospel of Jesus Christ to go forth in power because of the life and death of a courageous Christian apologist and statesman who truly believed that “Jesus defeated death so you can live.”
Brian J. Tabb, Ph.D.
President