Like most people, Christians usually deal with suffering by trying to get rid of it. Most of the time Christians start by asking God to remove the problem that causes the suffering: cancer, heart diease, loss of a job, a strained marriage, overweight (I once knew a fellow who, every time he decided that he needed to lose weight he would "fast and pray." It never worked. Using praying for personal gain--pardon the pun--harms the spiritual life).
And yet God often does not remove the adversity. A young lady of my aquaintance was diagnosed last year with a benign but inoperable brain tumor, an astrocytoma. She might live long enough to raise her five-year-old daughter to adulthood. It's still there. It hasnt't grown, but it's still there.
What happens in a case like that, where God does not remove the problem? Some of us give up on God. Having threatened him with not believing in him if he didn't act right, some of us carry through with that threat. That'll show him. Some try the "try harder" approach, praying more, praying differently, having other Christians pray for us. If we get our part right, the thought seems to be, then God has to come through.
This isn't helped by all those TV people who tell us that if we only send them enough money, God will have to "bless" us. "It's right there in his word! God is bound by his word! He will send you EVEN more!!"
God's job is to relieve Christians of all their burdens when and how they ask him, I guess.
Yes, the Christian life is a fairy tale, complete with fairy God Father and happily ever after.
Too bad such people who want to believe that don't read the Bible. There's a reason that Jesus told us sternly to "count the cost." The cost is high. It is our entire life.
God's people have often encountered adversity and suffering. Take the Exodus. This is supposed ot be the pattern of God delivering his people, and at first glance it seems like it. God's people, through no fault of their own, are enslaved in Egypt. Life is hard--oppressed, no freedom, in exile and wanting to go home, harsh labor, and subject to their children being killed by their Egyptian slavemasters.
Then (swelling movie music) Moses appears, proclaims the Lord's mercy and their deliverance. The people rejoice. And then life gets harder. They have to work more for the same number of bricks. The Hebrews grow angry with Moses. This isn't deliverance. Then the plagues come, one by one, with who knows how long between plagues. All the Hebrews can do is watch. Then they have to obey some pretty bizarre orders--a lamb's blood on their doorposts. Well, they've seen something of this God's power, so most of them anyway obey. They've learned to trust enough to obey, and they survive.
That trust is the key to the lesson they needed to learn.
Well, they leave Egypt rejoicing, until they get to the shore of the Sea. IF they were where many scholars think they were, there was desert to their south, army garrisons to their north, the sea in front of them, and Pharaoh thundering up behind them. This wasn't deliverance--it was murder. And the people again grow angry with Moses. But then God opens the sea for them and closes it on the pursuing Egyptians.
Whew. They are delivered once more, and Miriam and others sritke up a band and sing a song.
But then they have to face the desert. This is the Promised Land, Moses? Are we there yet? They have to face more adversities: thirst, hunger, heat, sand, and snakes. When they get to the border of the Promised Land, they refuse to go in. "There's giants in them hills!" So they must wander and live in the wilderness for forty more years.
When they finally do decide to go into the Land, they must face determined military opposition.
Life gets harder before it gets easier, and all that they once took for granted they must recognize actually comes from God's hand. Every time they face suffering, they think it was better in Egypt. But the more they live in the wilderness, the more they learn about God's faithfulness, the more they learn that God can be trusted. Without trust, they cannot live for God or for (or with) each other. In order to be a true people of God they must first learn to trust in God. "Experience keeps a hard school, but a fool will learn in no other."
When they finally enter the Land, God gives them some rather strange marching orders: circle the city once a day for seven days, then circle it seven times and then shout and blow the trumpets.
And they actually do it. That's how far they've come in learning to trust him.
And so they can live in the land--oh, they have a long way to go yet and much hard labor still lies ahead of them. Moab and Philistia are not going to be exactly good neighbors. And they have yet to learn that other gods will only get them into trouble, but they will learn that, too, even though it will take a conquest and an exile to learn it.
That's why the Christian life is not a fairy tale, In a fairy tale the characters face a problem, overcome it, and then go back to life as usual. The adversities in a Christian's life are not meant to let us go back to life as usual. Life as usual is what brought the adversities on to begin with.
We live in and for self-interest. Teh cries for deliverance that the people of God offer up to him are out of this self-interest. They complain about having to find straw, about not having water, not having bread, then they complain about having too much bread and no meat. then they complain about Moses's leadership. they complain about everything.
Yet God delivers his people. This is the lesson of God.
But he does not deliver them so that they can go back to life as usual. God saves them from their suffering--not always as and certainly not when they'd like him to--in order to change them. He wants a people who will obey, to know that all things come from him and that nothing matters as much as obeying him.
But we do not change willingly. We only change when it becomes harder to go on than it is to stop. Israek is forced to confront it servile nature and instaed change to trust in God and live and risk in him.
So it is with us. Since no one has been more loved by the Father than the Son, we can expect that some of his experiences--and he did suffer--will be part of his love for us, too. For his desire is not that we have a life without suffering, but that we live a life transformed.
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