Does God cause our suffering? How is it a privilege to suffer for Christ? And what happens to a person's faith when experienced suffering and how can we have joy in adversity? We'll answer these questions and a whole lot more with our guest, Dr. Craig Keener, we're in his new book entitled Suffering, Its Meaning for the Spirit-filled Life. I'm your host, Scott Ray. And I'm your co-host, Sean McDowell. This is Think Biblically from Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. Craig, so glad to have you with us. We're delighted to read your book. So welcome. Good to have you with us. Well, it's always, it's always great to be with you, Scott and Sean.

I'm happy when I get to see you at conferences and happy to get to talk with you,

even when we can't see each other.

That's right.

Now, Craig, this book is really different from your other scholarly works. I mean, you've produced over 20,000

pages of commentary on different books of the Bible, but this is different than that.

And what prompted you to write on this subject of suffering at this particular time?

I know that there are people in the U.S., of course, there's plenty of people with suffering,

people who are grieving the loss of loved ones, or people who are sick with cancer, or a whole

variety of things. But I've long felt that the church in the U.S. isn't really ready for the full kind of scale collective suffering that's seen in many parts of the world.

And we also neglect what our brothers and sisters face around the world.

In 2024, one of the estimates was that about 10,000 of our brothers and sisters in Nigeria were

martyred for their faith.

And of course, Christians being martyred in Mozambique and Cameroon and, yeah, so many other

places.

Craig, you experienced suffering and especially your wife has and you share some of these

experiences quite freely in the book.

Will you tell us a bit about both of those experiences?

Sure.

I mean, some of mine has been when I've been sharing my faith on the street, sometimes I've

been beaten and had my life threatened.

That was more in my younger days.

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