How does God use suffering for our good? And what does it mean to honor God in the midst of the

suffering that we endure? And how does our eternal hope give us comfort in the midst of suffering?

We'll address these questions and a whole lot more with our guest and former colleague, Dr. Clay Jones,

ran this new book that he's co-authored with his wife. How does God use our suffering for our good? 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. Clay, great to have you back with us. Well, thank you. So appreciate the work that you and your wife have done on this new

book. It's great stuff. And I think a lot of help for our listeners. So I'm looking forward to

getting into it. Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be with both of you again. And I wish I could

be there in studio. But that would have been a long drive during rush hour.

And so I'm glad we can just do this via, you know, remote.

All right.

So, Clay, tell us a little bit of the backstory that gave rise to your book.

Well, you know.

As briefly as you can, covering a 20 year period. Yeah, you know, it's funny, because in

1994, I decided to start working on the problem of evil. And of course, as you know, I wrote a book

entitled, Why Does God Allow Evil?

And then, you know, that didn't come out, though, until 2017.

So it took 23 years for that to come out.

But, and then I started, you know, I wrote a book on death and how we can overcome our fear of death.

And it just seemed like a natural thing to write on suffering.

Because if you've written on evil and death, why not write on suffering and put them all together?

So that's what I did.

And of course, we, Jeannie and I have gone through a lot of suffering. I've had cancer.

I just had open heart surgery 10 weeks ago. I'm fine, by the way, but it's been quite an adventure.

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