God does not bring] about suffering in order to discipline a person. …This presumption morphs to cruel absurdity when we are speaking of horrors like a man mourning his murdered wife or a mother grieving over her stillborn child.

This way of thinking takes the cruel arbitrariness of life and deifies it by projecting it onto God. When this is done, the beautiful clarity of God’s loving will revealed in Christ and centered on the cross is obscured by a nonbiblical picture of a God of power. And Jesus’ simple words “If you see me, you see the Father” are qualified by every terror-stricken scream of torture throughout history