The Profound Connection Between Suffering and Glory

Darkness and Light

The Gospel of Mark ends with startling abruptness—three women, told that Jesus has risen from the dead, fleeing in “trembling and astonishment” (Mark 16:8). In the briefest Gospel account, sparing in its details, we are for some reason informed that this occurs “very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen” (Mark 16:2).

What is so striking about this detail is that we are told what the sun is doing only one other time in Mark’s Gospel: at the very beginning, as Jesus ministers to people “at sundown” (Mark 1:32). Jesus then launches his ministry—not once the sun comes up but, we are told, “while it was still dark” (Mark 1:35). As the Gospel account unfolds, the alert reader feels the presence of darkness throughout the Gospel as Mark tells us repeatedly of the presence of evening darkness at regular intervals (Mark 4:35; 6:47; 11:19; 14:17; 15:42). This pervasive “evening time” looming over the whole account culminates in a total blackout from noon to 3:00 p.m. as Jesus is on the cross (Mark 15:33).¹ Why? “Because the Candle that lighted the sun and the moon was blown out,” as Rutherford poetically put it in a 1643 sermon.²

Finally Home

Dane Ortlund

In Finally Home, Dane Ortlund ushers readers into the surprising wonders of our final future in the new heavens and the new earth. It provides deep comfort and joy that outweigh all our many heartaches as we journey through this broken world.

And suddenly—solar brightness on Easter morning (Mark 16:2). Mark’s Gospel is one long descent into total darkness, suddenly exploding into brightness at the very end. What’s the point? When Jesus rose from the dead, the sun was rising on human history. Earth’s evening time was over. The prophets of old had already spoken of a rising sun as more than merely meteorological in significance: “The sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings” (Mal. 4:2). Jesus Christ’s own terrible, dark death had unfolded into a bright resurrection morning, but this was to more than his own benefit. It was history’s sunrise. More than this: It was the assurance that every follower of Jesus will experience just what Jesus did—darkness unfolding into corresponding light, death into corresponding life, pain into corresponding joy. What else would we expect? Jesus himself had already declared: “He is not God of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:27).

Jesus died in darkness. He rose in brightness. Death was thrown into reverse. For those who get united to this Christ, we will not only find our own death eventuating in a bodily resurrection, as Christ’s was. We will also find all our deaths throughout this life unfolding into corresponding resurrection resplendence.

We know this to be true from other surprising texts in the New Testament, beginning with the greatest chapter in the Bible.

Romans 8 declares that our union with Christ means that “we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8:17). Suffering and glory apparently rise and fall together. The next verse teaches that of those two realities, one far outweighs the other: “For I consider that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is about to be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18).³ Present real-time suffering, which feels so endless, cannot even be compared with imminent future glory. Suffering upon us now, glory upon us then.

We might conclude from a passage such as this that the glory we will wear in the next life will far outweigh the suffering of this life. As John Newton wrote to a naval captain in 1763, “He knows how . . . to give more than he takes away, and to cause our consolations to exceed our greatest afflictions.”⁴ That is true, and good news enough. But other texts take us even further.

In 2 Corinthians we find a closer connection between suffering and glory: “This light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17). The key here is the Greek word katergazetai, rightly translated in the present tense as “is preparing.”

Here suffering and glory are brought into a closer connection than in Romans 8. Pain now is not only outweighed by glory then; pain now is itself seeding glory then. Hebrews 11 speaks of saints refusing to be released from torture “so that they might obtain a better resurrection” (Heb. 11:35)⁵—a welcoming of present pain as a guaranteed investment in future glory.

This theme of reversal surfaces in the Old Testament too. In Numbers 22–24, Israel travels through Moab. The pagan king Balak, daunted by Israel’s military victories, hires Balaam to come and curse Israel. Moses later reflected on God’s care for Israel in Deuteronomy 23 as he reminds the people what had actually happened: “The Lord your God turned the curse into a blessing for you, because the Lord your God loved you” (Deut. 23:5). Likewise when Shimei is throwing both rocks and insults at David, and one of David’s warriors asks if he can please go lop off Shimei’s head, David responds:

If he is cursing because the Lord has said to him, “Curse David,” who then shall say, “Why have you done so?” . . . Leave him alone, and let him curse, for the Lord has told him to. It may be that the Lord will look on the wrong done to me, and that the Lord will repay me with good for his cursing today. (2 Sam. 16:10–12)

The point once more is not that a future blessing merely outweighs a present curse but that the present curse is itself the key ingredient in that future blessing. This may refer to future blessing
in this life. But even in the Old Testament, there are hints that God will turn present hardship into future blessing in the next life. David prayed:

You have kept count of my tossings;
put my tears in your bottle.
Are they not in your book? (Ps. 56:8)

Every trouble, apparently, is recorded by God, one day to be rectified. Similarly, an enigmatic phrase in Ecclesiastes suggests a final divine restoration in light of pain in this life: “God seeks what has been driven away” (Eccl. 3:15).⁶

In any event, 2 Corinthians 4:17 is clear: “This light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory.” There is a whole theology of heavenly human glory in that verb “preparing.” But we look not only to the future to believe this. We look also to the past, where Christ himself has already walked through the climactic and paradigmatic instance of curse folding back into blessing in his own death folding back into resurrection.

What is life out of Christ? Pain, preparing for deeper pain.

What is life in Christ? Pain, preparing for future glory. To be sure, life in Christ is joy too, more sublime than we’ve ever known. But Christian faith brings griefs and pressures we would never face otherwise (Acts 14:22; 2 Tim. 3:12), in addition to the heartache that all humans endure.

What is life in Christ? Pain, preparing for future glory.

The doctrine of reversal, then, is the shocking news that the deeper the darkness in my life now, the brighter the light in my life then. Sunset: sunrise.

We tend to think of the Christian life in three categories:

Category 1: events in our life that will finally prove to have heightened our heavenly joys (reading the Bible, praying, singing praise to God, encouraging another Christian, successfully resisting temptation, generous giving, and so on)

Category 2: events in our life that are ultimately neutral with regard to enjoying heaven (eating breakfast, driving a car, paying the bills, sleeping, playing golf, chatting with a friend, and so on)

Category 3: events in our life that will finally prove to have diminished our heavenly joys (sinning, being sinned against, failing, hitting a dead end, running out of energy, dashed hopes, aborted ambitions, rejection, being misunderstood, and so on)

The doctrine of Christian reversal is: For those united to a resurrected Christ, there is no category 2 or 3. The parenthetical examples above in category 2, and even category 3, should be cut and pasted into the parentheses in category 1. That’s all there is.

We tend to think that God will so order our lives that the neutral and bad things will ultimately be outweighed by the good. But the logic of the New Testament goes deeper. The New Testament would say to us that this kind of thinking is like saying that the resurrection glory of Christ merely outweighed his crucifixion. agony. But of course it was through his death that he was raised into glory. “He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him” (Phil. 2:8–9). For Jesus, resurrection glory was not compensation for terrible suffering but the naturally converse result of that suffering.

So too with anyone who gets united to that Christ, says the New Testament: “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5). “That is what mortals misunderstand,” says a character in The Great Divorce. “They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”⁷

If Jesus was raised from the dead, then even the darkness of our lives is part of a mosaic that would finally be less beautiful without it. The devil knows it and hates it, but he can’t do anything about it. We are invincible.

No other system of human thinking has ever had the audacity to dare to believe this stunning assurance. Greek mythology had no doctrine of reversal, so they came up with the next best thing—the River Lethe in Hades, which, when drunk from, causes people to forget their lives. We today, even in the church, tend to think similarly: Hopefully the next world will provide consolation for the sufferings of this life, provided we don’t suffer too much here.

The Christian hope is far different and more wonderful. Our pains now are preparing future joys (2 Cor. 4:17). When we are told at the end of the Bible that God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Rev. 21:4), this is not simply the subtraction of sorrow but the folding of sorrow back into corresponding joy. Goodwin comments on this text: “Our miseries and sufferings in this life being many and various, the blessedness of heaven itself is set out to us by several words, opposite to those miseries.”⁸

Note the phrase “opposite to those miseries.” Tears of sorrow here morph into matching tears of joy there. God is not mocked. In any way of thinking except the Christian one, life is essentially one long pursuit of pain avoidance. And as we experience pain, we hope that the next life, if we believe in one, makes up for it. But in the Christian way of thinking, while we don’t positively pursue suffering, we receive it with cheerful defiance, almost hilarity.

This does not lessen the pain itself. The Psalms teach us how to weep, how to cry out in anguish to God. So we do. But as we weep over our pain we also laugh at our pain, because anguish here can only bless us there. As the eighteenth-century English poet Thomas Gray put it, regarding a believer who knew only sadness in this life: “Heaven did a recompense as largely send.”⁹

Our scars here will be beauty marks there. The uglier the scarring, the brighter the beauty.

Notes:

The reader who wishes to pursue this theme further may consult Dane C. Ortlund, “History’s Dawning Light: ‘Morning’ and ‘Evening’ in Mark’s Gospel and Their Eschatological Significance,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 61, no. 3 (2018): 493–511; G. K. Beale and Dane C. Ortlund, “ ‘Darkness Over the Whole Land’: A Biblical-Theological Reflection on Mark 15:33,” Westminster Theological Journal 75 (2013): 221–38.
Samuel Rutherford, Fourteen Communion Sermons by the Rev. Samuel Rutherford, with a Preface and Notes by Andrew A. Bonar, 2nd ed. (Glasgow, 1877), 286.
My translation.
John Newton, Letters of John Newton, ed. Josiah Bull (Banner of Truth, 2007), 59.
My translation.
See Eric Ortlund, Ecclesiastes (Hodder & Stoughton, 2024), 80–81.
C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Touchstone, 1996), 67.
Thomas Goodwin, A Discourse of Election, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin (Reformation Heritage, 2006), 9:376.
Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” in The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost, ed. Harold Bloom (Harper Perennial, 2007), 286.

This article is adapted from Finally Home: The Christian Hope of Heaven by Dane Ortlund.

Dane C. Ortlund (PhD, Wheaton College) serves as senior pastor of Naperville Presbyterian Church in Naperville, Illinois. He is the author of Gentle and Lowly and Deeper. Dane and his wife, Stacey, have five children.