“Suffering”

I'd like for you to take your Bibles please this morning and let's find the Book of Job, the Old Testament Book of Job.  If you'd like to follow along, and I think you would, specifically because of what we are reading this morning, you can find Job Chapter 1 on Page 416 in the pew Bible.  I going to read the scriptures and then I'll explain to you what we are doing this morning.  I don't know that it is all that much different, but it feels different, to me anyway. 

Job Chapter 1, we're going to begin reading in Verse 6.  I want you to follow along.  I'm going to read to the end of the chapter; I want you to listen closely and may God open our eyes to his Word and may his Spirit, who authored this word, speak to us, so give it your attention; look at the words, think of the action, think of who is taking the action, think of the truths that God is telling us through this ancient book.

Verse 6, Job 1:

Job 1:1-22

   [6] Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. [7] The Lord said to Satan, From where have you come? Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it. [8] And the Lord said to Satan, Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and an upright man, who fears God, and turns away from evil? [9] Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Does Job fear God for no reason? [10] Have you not put a hedge about him and his house, and all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. [11] But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to you face. [12] And the Lord said to Satan, Behold, all that he has is in your hand; only against him do not stretch out your hand. So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord.

    [13] And there was a day when his sons and his daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: [14] And there came a messenger to Job, and said, The oxen were plowing, and the donkeys feeding beside them: [15] And the Sabeans fell upon them, and took down the servants with the edge of the sword; and I alone have escaped to tell you. [16] While he was yet speaking, there came another, and said, The fire of God fell from heaven, and burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them; and I alone have escaped alone to tell you. [17] While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The Chaldeans have formed three groups, and made a raid on  the camels, and took them and have struck down the servants with the edge of the sword; and I alone have escaped to tell you. [18] While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, Your sons and your daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: [19] And, behold, a great wind came across the wilderness, and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young people, and they are dead; and I alone have escaped to tell you. [20] Then Job arose, and tore his robe, and shaved his head, and fell on the ground, and worshipped, [21] And he said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return: the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. [22] In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.

Suffering was the planned topic for the day.  I don't think I've ever felt more over my head while standing in the pulpit than I do at this moment.  In researching, praying, plus the pastoral ministry of the week that has taken me to some of the extremities of life, I can't say, yes, this is a sermon, it is a preaching of the Word of God, but what I'm going to ask you to do with me this morning is to simply travel with me through some of my travelings in the study.  I don't have an outline, I can't put it together, but the truth is here that you and I, I think need to begin to at least hear and get a grasp with our faith on suffering in this world and in our lives.   There are so many things that came to mind, the path, sometimes, was easy to follow and well-trodden; at other times it was almost difficult to go through.

But, let me say, before we get going, some things that probably will be said again at the end and should be said at the end.  Here are some few of the conclusions that could be drawn, as you take a lifetime to study this, this is true in our society, I'm studying it from the viewpoint of an American:

1.                    From this study of suffering it is apparent from the scriptures that typically the easier our earthly life is, the dimmer our view of Heaven is.   Can you follow me with that? The easier life is for us here, the more distant and dim and without detail is our view of heaven.  We really don't want to die and go there.  [There is no order to these particular thoughts right now.]

2.                    When it comes to suffering and it comes to this life in dealing with it, weighing out the issues of a sovereign and loving God and a suffering world, we must, as Christians saturate ourselves with and in the cross, the gospel, the sufferings of Christ and specifically how he went through it, committing himself to the one who judges justly.

3.                    It is better that we would build our faith now in fair weather because when the storm comes, it may be too late. 

4.                    We need to learn to fight and wrestle with God, not against him.  We don't need to fight against God, we need to fight for faith in God and if you haven't ever had to fight for your faith, it is unlikely that you yet have been troubled by much suffering.  We need to wrestle to get our hearts settled in him alone.  I can promise you that a blow can come your way that strikes you so hard, you might question everything you have ever believed in.  Many of you may never suffer that; some of you already have, but I can promise you that it can come.

5.                    If Jesus suffered and is crowned with glory, the whole truth of the Bible is that we will suffer and we will be crowned with glory because we have died and our life is hid with Christ in God.  If we are like him in the likeness of his death, we will be like him in his resurrection and we need to have that clear hope.  So, let's get a picture of some suffering.

Fifty-seven million (57,000,000) people a year die in this world.  That's about 156,000 people a day.  You cannot hold your breath without some hundreds of people dying from this earth, going into eternity before you begin to breathe again.  Of that 57,000,000, 44,000,000 of those deaths are in the undeveloped countries of this world; that is 77% of all deaths.  How is the church responding? Of those 44,000,000 deaths, did you know that 18,000,000 of them are children under the age of 5; that is 33% of all the deaths in the world this year will be children under the age of 5.  Infectious disease kills 15,000,000 a year.  Circulatory systems: 20,000,000.  Cancer: 7,000,000.  Injuries: 5,000,000.  All other cases, that would be famines, wars, violence and aging: 10,000,000.  The conclusion is simply this: Most people do not die happily in their beds.  Have you thought about that?

Well, it's going to get darker before it gets better.  There are no jokes to be told during this sermon, and I think you understand why, but, oh, I hope, I hope that because of what we look at, you and I will begin to taste and share with our Lord the joy that was set before him.  You can go nowhere else and hear nor find truth that you will hear this morning.  There is no other place other than the scriptures that you can find an excuseless reasoning for the evil that's in this world.  No place else will tell you the stark truth that will rattle your cage and cause you to be confused like the scriptures until God and your wrestling clears you up by faith.

Os Guinness has a book called, Unspeakable.  He mentions four troubling facts that make up the challenge to rethink evil and suffering in our times.  I'm only going to quote from one of them, I think; maybe two of them, and I'm going to quote lengthy portions of what others have written because I think we need to understand the scale of this problem and its weight, so that we can begin to deal with it.

He says, "It's cause for pause, the suffering and evil in this world.  First, he says, the scale and scope of evil has increased in the modern world.  To anyone who thinks deeper than the morning headlines, the atrocity of September 11 forms part of the wider record of the dark catalog of human evil in modern history and pales beside the worst of the evils.  The Ottoman massacre of 1 ½ million Armenians in World War I and the Rwandan and Sudanese massacres in the 1990s in which nearly 3 million people died, are like a pair of grizzly bookends that frame the 20^th Century as the most murderous century in all of history.  Leaving aside the 100 million human beings killed in the century's wars, more than 100 million more were killed by their fellow human beings in political repression, massacre and genocide.  That's just the past century.  It is sometimes argued that the modern world is more humane than ever before, and in some ways it is.  The paradox, however, is that we save more victims than ever before and slaughter more victims than ever before.  The Rwandan bloodbath, for example, was one of the fastest massacres in history.  In less than 3 months, machete-wielding Hutus ferociously slaughtered more than 800,000 Tutsis.  The clearest case of genocide since the Holocaust. It was carried out 3 times the speed of Hitler's extermination of the Jews and gypsies, now get this quote, "It was the equivalent of more than 2 World Trade Center slaughters every single day for 100 days straight."  The trouble is, he says, the second thing is that modern people have demonstrated a consistently poor response to modern evil.  The trouble with us today, as we know, when evil happens all over the world, it would probably be better not to know because in some ways we are responsible for what we know and we're not good at responding.

Guinness says, "In 2001, the world responded to America's tragedy with an outpouring of sympathy and aid.  'We are all Americans now,' the French said, famously, but [and get this] in 1994 when the defenseless Tutsis cried out for help, the world watched and turned away.  Not a single country went to their rescue and this was the response from the generation that had coined the word, genocide, trumpeted the universality of human rights, built and visit memorials such as the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC so that we might never forget."   I'm afraid we have forgotten.

One thing, however, I've learned is suffering around the world doesn’t really mean anything to you when you are suffering.  Have you ever noticed how closed in life gets when you are the one who is in the crucible? You are the one being crushed? And have you ever noticed how pat and cheap and trite our answers are to people who suffer?  Most of us who have answers are those of us who have never suffered very much, because we're ready to spit one out very quickly.  If Job's three friends ever did anything right, the first thing they did right was their first 7 days when they sat there in silence for an entire week.

You know the name of Joni, Joni Eareckson Tada, the quadriplegic?  Maybe you need to hear something from her in personal suffering.   Maybe we can touch a little closer… by the way, when I read this I made a note in the margin of the book, here's my note: "I've learned I don't take God seriously enough."  Does it really do any good when you go to the bedside of a dying victim and you read the scriptures or you sing a psalm?  When you pray for them?  Does it do any good at all?  Do we see the reasoning behind reading the Word of God into the ears of a comatose person?

By the way, we need to stop  and do something right now.  Do you remember last week, we prayed for Steve and Carolyn Davis, and he was not doing good at all?  He's already in rehab.  Once he turned the corner, he even surpassed even what the doctors thought he would do.  He's been sitting up in his bed, he's been taking his own showers, and now he's at Frazier Rehab so we do need to thank the Lord for that, so can we pause and pray?

Father in Heaven, in this particular suffering, which was great for Steve and Carolyn, you decided to come in and show your strong arm.  We thank you that you did.  We know it was you, Lord, because all things are from your hand, and so we humble ourselves before you as we did last week to ask, we do this week to say "Thank You."  Lord, Thank You.  Thank you for doing such a gracious thing for them.  Honor your name in it, and bless us with good.  And Father, when we face similar tragedies, may we lay ourselves before you, ask for healing, but say "Your will be done," and even if we have to say with Job, "Naked came I from my mother's womb, naked shall I return there, the Lord gave and the Lord took away, blessed by the Name of the Lord, in Jesus' name, Amen.

Joni writes, "Sometimes hope is hard to come by.  Like the other week when I visited my friend, Grace Sutherland, in the hospital.  Gracie has been volunteering at our Joni and Friends family retreats for many years, and despite her age of 61, she has always been energetic and active with the disabled children at our camps.  All that changed a month ago when she broke her neck in a tragic accident.  Gracie has always been happy and buoyant, but when I wheeled into her Intensive Care Unit to visit her, I did not even recognize the woman lying in the hospital bed with tubes running in and out of her, a ventilator shoved down her throat, and Crutchfield tongs screwed into her skull.  Gracie looked completely hopeless.  She couldn't even breathe on her own.  All she could do was open and close her eyes.  I sat there by Gracie's hospital bed; I read scriptures to her, I sang to her, "Be still my soul, the Lord is on your side."  Sadly, right now it appears as though my friend Gracie is busy dying.  She is stuck at UCLA waiting for surgery on her neck and an infection in her body is running rampant.  The doctors are trying to get her white blood count down, but it doesn’t look promising.  Now when visitors come into see her, she shuts her eyes against them. 

Joni goes on to talk about her own life.  You  know the story of her, I'm sure, when she was a teenager she was swimming, dove in shallow water, broke her neck and has been a quadriplegic ever since. This is her story.  I appreciate deeply her honesty. 

But, hope is hard to come by.  I should know.  I remember the time when I was once busy dying.  It wasn't long after I had broken my neck in a diving accident that I spent one particularly hopeless week in the hospital.  I had endured long surgeries to shave down the bony prominences on my back and it was a long recovery.  I had lost a great deal of weight, and for almost 3 weeks I was forced to lie facedown on what's called a striker frame, a long flat canvas sandwich, where they put you face up for 3 hours, then strap another piece of canvas on you and flip you facedown to lie there for another 3 hours. Trapped facedown, staring at the floor hour after hour, my thoughts grew dark and hopeless.  All I could think was, "Great, God, way to go.  I'm a brand new Christian.  This is the way you treat your new Christians? I'm young in the faith.  I prayed for a closer walk with you.  If this is your idea of an answer to prayer, I'm never going to trust you again with another prayer.  I can't believe that I have to lie facedown and do nothing but count the tiles on the floor in this stupid torture rack.  I hate my existence.  I asked the hospital staff to turn out the lights, close the blinds, close the door and if anybody came in, visitor, patient, nurse, I just grunted.  I justified it all, I rationalized that God shouldn't mind that I would be bitter, after all I was paralyzed.  I didn't care how much joy was set before me.  This was one cross I was not going to bear without a battle.  My thoughts got darker because no longer was my bitterness a tiny trickle; it had become a raging torrent, and in the middle of the night I would imagine God holding my sin up before my face and saying lovingly, but firmly, 'Joni, what are you going to do about this?  What are you going to do about this attitude? It is wrong, this sin is wrong, get rid of it.' But I, hurting and stubborn, preferred my sins.  I preferred my peevish, snide, small-minded, mean-spirited comments, grunting at people when they walked in or out and letting food drool out of my mouth.  Those were sins that I had made my own.  [Now listen to her words]  You know what it's like when you make sin your own? You housebreak it.  You domesticate it.  You shield it from the Spirit's scrutiny.  I did not want to let go of the sick, strange comfort of my own misery, so God gave me some help.  About one week into that three-week stint of lying facedown, staring at the floor waiting for my back to heal, I got hit with a bad case of the flu, and suddenly not being able to move was peanuts compared to not be able to breathe."

That, I would classify as suffering.  If you know any and all of her, that is not the end of her story by any stretch of the imagination.  God has grace her and she has responded greatly to her problems, though she would still admit her humanity.

I know I'm reading a lot, but I think you need to hear it.

John Piper said his chapter on Suffering, in his book, Desiring God,  he says, "When Paul says that if the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, he does not mean let us all become lechers.  [What he is doing, he is talking about a man who interviewed a monk who gave his life to spirituality, holiness and deprivation, and the interviewer said, "What if you came to the end of your life and you found out your faith in God was all just a mask, it was false, he said, 'What would you do with your lifestyle then, wouldn't it be a waste?" And the monk replied, "Oh, no, it wouldn't be a waste at all, this was a lovely way to live anyway."

Sounds noble, doesn't it?  It is not, and it is not Biblical.  Paul said that if Christ is not raised from the dead, we are of all men most to be pitied.  There is a reason in this life for suffering, it's called "Sin," and Christ came to die for our sin, he took our sin on his back, but he suffered to pay for that; he suffered as an earthly man, he suffered as a model for us, he suffered as a substitute for us, and he now is in heaven resurrected from the dead so that we can have hope. 

James Denny talked of a man who was going to offer himself in a sacrifice and we would consider him a madman if he ran down the streets of London saying he loved the world, and then jumped off the bridge into the river Thames, to say he was sacrificing himself for the world for no point at all.  He said that would be ludicrous.  But there was a point in Jesus' sacrifice; it was heaven for us.  It was forgiveness of sins.  It was eternal life!

Now, Paul did not mean that the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink.  He did not mean, Piper says, let us all become lechers, drunks, gluttons.  What he meant was there is a normal, simple, comfortable ordinary life of human delights that we may enjoy with no troubling thoughts of heaven or hell, or sin or holiness or God if there is no resurrection from the dead.  And then Piper comments, and what stunned me about this train of thought, is that many of the professing Christians seem to aim at just this and call it Christianity.

The study of suffering has led me down many paths.  Some of them, and I'm speaking personally now, are well worn and not so hard to travel; others, however, are confusing and difficult.  All difficult paths lead to the same place, the difficulty of a sovereign loving God and a suffering world.  If God loves me, why do I have to suffer?  There is no easy answer and those who make it easy don't know what they're talking about.  It just does not make sense to the human mind that God is in control  and that God is loving, and that suffering still occurs in this world.  We ask, "Why does he not put a stop to it?"

My aim in the study of suffering was chiefly to offer comfort to those of you who suffer, but it just wasn't that simple.  As I dove into the Word and was grabbed by the suffering in the world and just held by the sufferings of Christ, and then, looking at what I learned in Job, did you catch any of those things?  Look back at Job Chapter 1, Verse 6.

   [6] Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord….. [they came there to get their orders, to bow before him, to find out what he was doing, these are angels, spirit-beings]

and Satan also came  among them. [He had access to this place.  Most of us have painted a picture of God and Satan that is faulty.]

[7] The Lord said to Satan, From where have you come? Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.  [Sounds strangely like 1 Peter 5:8, that the devil is a roaring lion walking about seeking whom he may devour?]

 [8] And the Lord said to Satan, Have you considered my servant Job…..

[Ron Dunne did always say if he were Job he would have wondered why he ever brought him up in conversation.]

Have you considered my servant Job that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and an upright man, who fears God, and turns away from evil?

[Did you get that?  A blameless and upright man.  Satan says to God, "Well if you would just strike him with your hand and remove all your hedges around him, then he would curse you to your face."  It's almost like a wager.  Well, you see the first truth that the biblical writer is telling us is the one we really don't want to hear.  Innocent people suffer.  That is a Biblical truth we have to grapple with.  Innocent people suffer!  I don’t know what that does to you, that bothers me!  It sends my mind into all sorts of contortions and I have one North Star to go to that keeps my faith straight.  Has there ever really been a totally innocent human being? Only one!  Did he suffer?  More than any other human being has ever suffered on the face of the globe or ever will, and for whom did he suffer? All who would put their faith in him.  And why did he suffer? For the glory of God and the good of all peoples. Can you grasp that? Can you hold onto it?  This web of paths to gain godly wisdom has crossed up my intentions and greatly divided my attention, so let me say just a few things that I am certain of.  I say them with both conviction and caution; conviction-- because God has said them; caution -- because, as Samuel Rutherford said, "It is easier to give counsel than it is to suffer."

The first thing that I am sure of is that God is God!  What I mean is, God is sovereign.  Not one thing happens in the universe without his controlling arm, not…. one…..thing!  It's hard to grasp that.  How could it be?  How could it be that not one thing happens in the universe without the controlling arm of God? How could that be?  Well there are some who would give us an answer, and this is later in what I'm supposed to say, but I should say it now…. It's called open theism, and this is coming out of the church's conservative evangelical movement, that we have discovered something that hasn't been known for centuries and that God, himself, doesn’t even know, that because, yes, he's God, but because he has given freedom to the earth and free will and a free mind that we can make decisions out in our future that God, himself, doesn’t even know about, and that God, himself, can't control  because he doesn’t know about them, but God is big so he can come in after we have made these wrong decisions and he can clean up the mess.  One pastor says so boldly, "He can only find that as a way to comfort people, this particular lady whose husband had been unfaithful to her and left her and left her in a bad place."

Tell me, please, how is it ever comforting that God can't know something?  How is it ever comforting that God can be taken by surprise?  How is it ever comforting that every evil in the world is a triumph of Satan over God?  We have no God to bow to in worship if his hand does not control all things.  We have got to get a grasp of what it is to live in a fallen world with a sovereign God.  Satan is the prince of the power of the air, but he can't draw one breath, he can't do one thing without God's permission.  Does God give him permission to do drastic things?  You have to say, "Yes." 

Who crucified Jesus?  Turn to the Book of Acts, please. If it weren't for the scriptures, we couldn't deal with this.  It is more than our minds can handle. Look in the Book of Acts, Chapter 3, and I'm searching with you because this is not in the plan…. Chapter 2, I'm sorry, Verse 22, Peter is preaching his sermon:

Acts 2:1-47

 [22] Men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did by him in your midst, as you yourselves also know: [23] This Jesus, [now listen] delivered up  according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you  crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. [24] God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death: because it was not possible for him to be held by it.

Now who crucified Jesus?  The men did because God delivered him up to do so.  Do you really think earthlings could crucify the Son of God by the power of their own hand?  Can my mind hold onto that?  Can I get my brain around that? No!  But I can humble myself before a sovereign God whose mind is divine and never makes a mistake, who worked such an amazing plan in his gospel that I could know him; I'll bend before him and trust him.

This is no place for shallow, lame Christianity.  The only Christianity that can face the difficult delights of wrestling with God over our understanding, better yet trusting his control over all things is a robust, knee-bending, Christ-exalting faith in the Word and works of God through Christ.  John Piper said, "God is absolute and eternal and infinite.  Everything else and everybody else is dependent and finite and contingent. God, himself, is the great supreme value.  Everything else that has any value has it by connection to God.  God is supreme in all things.  He has all authority, all power, all wisdom and he is all good!" And he quotes Lamentation 3:25:

"To those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him" …

and his name as Creator, redeemer and ruler of all is Jesus Christ.

However in our day, the church's responses to tragedies of our time seem to demonstrate that we bring a rather juvenile faith to these horrendous tragedies, even our own personal ones.  David Wells said, "Evangelicalism now much absorbed by the arts and tricks of marketing, is simply not very serious anymore, and this demands a serious faith."

It will further help us see the demanding nature of facing the reality of suffering by hearing a few more of Piper's words.  I quote, "The church has not been spending its energy to go deep with the unfathomable God of the Bible.  Against the overwhelming weight and seriousness of the Bible, much of the church is choosing, at this very moment, to become more light and shallow and entertainment-oriented, and therefore, successful, in its irrelevance to massive  suffering and evil.  The popular God of fun church is simply too small and too affable to hold a hurricane in his hand!  The Biblical categories of God's sovereignty lie like land mines in the pages of the Bible waiting for someone to seriously open the book.  They don't kill, but they do explode the trivial notions of the Almighty!" 

The truth the Bible teaches us about suffering, hear this please, you will probably rebel against initially because it won't fit our homemade picture of God.  The Bible clearly teaches us that innocent people suffer.  The Bible teaches that God is sovereign over our suffering, look back at Job, can you get there real quick?

Job 1, Verse 20:

[20] Then Job arose, and tore his robe, and shaved his head, and fell on the ground, and worshipped…  [This was after he had lost every material possession he had and every relative he had but his wife…..gone.  How?  How can one worship after that?  I am not trying to pretend to you that as your pastor I am in that position.  I am telling you what God is teaching us through his word and Job was in that position.  Here are his words, and it teaches us that God is sovereign over our suffering…..

[21] And he said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return: the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

We learn from Job that there is an unseen world that not only observes but acts upon our world: God, holy angels, unholy angels, and Satan.  Many times this action they take is done without apparent reason and definitely without explanation.  When mankind decides to face up to and understand the truth about suffering and evil, only Christianity provides a clear and excuseless answer.  It is not, however, a tidy answer.  It is the answer that faces the issue squarely and unsentimentally spells out reality.  Every other answer is make believe. 

One of the best comments I read in all my reading, especially for those who are trying to reshape God, to tell us that God doesn’t know the future, they are fashioning a new God for us to make him more palatable and more excusable, Francis Anderson wrote in his commentary on Job these words:

"When the bad as well as the good is received at the hand of God, every experience of life becomes an occasion of blessing, but the cost is high." 

Here's his other statement: "It is easier to lower your view of God than to raise your faith to such a height."

So, what in the world do we do with this?  First of all, I know that many of you are suffering, some of you lightly, some of you terribly.  The first thing I can say is, God is in charge of your suffering, but the only place you can deal with that is at the cross.  It's the only place that will bring you any rest.  How could a God of love allow such suffering to come to me or my family? Why is that the case?  You see, if we've had an easy life, we'll always ask that.  But I wonder if we were in Rwanda, or the Sudan, or Darfur, if our perspective on life and heaven might be just a little bit different.  I read story after story of suffering Christians for whom God's grace was amazing and it almost turned my stomach; my mind could not hold to the suffering they went through.  A young girl in particular, in Russia before the fall of the curtain, was in the underground church.  They discovered her once, a beautiful young lady.  They beat her.  The guard went back the next time they were to go to this house church and to his astonishment, the young girl was there again.  He beat her again.  I think a third time she was beaten, and the third beating they stripped her clothes off her back, they beat her so hard on the back that her back was almost unrecognizable and pushed her off the table.  The fourth time they returned she was at church again.  When the head guard stepped in to beat her one more time, the most vicious of all the men stopped him, stood in front of him and threatened his life, and said, "You can't touch her, she has something we don't."

How God supplies the grace to be sufficient in an hour like that, I can't pretend to tell you, but I can tell you he does.  What I would say to you is this:  There is only one place you can reckon with and deal with such suffering.  There is only one place you can go when your feet are knocked out from under you to where you question everything you've ever believed and that is the cross of Christ.  It is the Son of God who left heaven and took upon himself the form of a servant.  He did not have to do that.  Can you imagine what it was alone, to be omnipotent, ruling with God at his right hand, and come and be formed into a human, face sinners, love sinners who hated you, be betrayed by those you gave your life to, be hung on a cross for those you are going to die for, pray "God forgive them for they do not know what they are doing."  Have your own friend say "I will die for you" and they reject you even in that same night; to have a Holy God turn his back on you because the sins of the world have been put on top of you!  There is no reason; there's no right; there's no thing that should have caused such an action.  It is at the cross that God both destroys and establishes his own reputation!  The Bible, itself, tells us that it is a foolish thing to have a crucified king!  To the Jews it is a stumbling block.  What do you mean, a Messiah that is crucified?  How can he ever rule and reign over us?  To the Greeks it was totally foolish!  There is no such thing as a God who is weak and dies!  The human mind can't comprehend that, but this one, this human suffered more than we will ever know, and Peter tells us he suffered as an example also, committing himself to the one who judges justly, and thinking about justice is a whole other sermon.

We're done for this day.  We'll discuss it more, Lord willing, tonight at 6:30. 

Has your cage been rattled?  Have you ever suffered in life to the point you wonder where God is and even if there is one?  That suffering does come to some of us and it is not a fun place to be, but I can promise you, you will never, never suffer the way the Son of God did, and if you place your faith in him, you will never suffer needlessly, "For I consider, Paul said, "these light and momentary afflictions, to pale in significance,[to not be comparable] to the weight of glory that is to be revealed."

Father in Heaven, may this just begin our struggle to see you as sovereign, as God.  I wish, Lord, that I had words or ways to make this clearer and not confusing, but Lord it is unclear and it is confusing, all except for the cross. Father, for those in our congregation, you promised to be with them, to never leave them nor forsake them and you are with them in their suffering, let them know that.  And for those of us who struggle, wondering where you are, be merciful, be gracious, thank you that you are, and forgive us for our wee, little faith, in Jesus' name, Amen.