In one of his books, John
MacArthur tells the testimony of a lady who found purpose in her pain. He wrote:
“When I was in college I was asked to visit a girl in the
hospital who had been accidentally shot in the neck. The bullet severed her
spinal cord and she was paralyzed from the neck down. I had never met the girl
but I was told she was a cheerleader at her school and had been very active and
vivacious. When I came into the hospital room she was lying on a sheepskin pad,
unable to do anything but speak. After we talked a while she confessed that, if
she were able, she would commit suicide, because she did not want to face a
future of helplessness. I presented Christ to her and, after some questions and
discussion, she received Christ as her Lord and Savior. I went back to visit
her several times, and one day she said to me, “I can honestly say that now I’m
glad the accident happened. Otherwise, I may have never met Christ and had my
sins forgiven.”[1]
Without a doubt, the “why?”
question is probably the most asked when it comes to the problem of pain. “Lord, why did you allow this to happen?”
Many times, those who suffer never get an answer from God, at least not on this
side of eternity. For example, Job did not know that God permitted Satan to
take his fitness, family and fortune (Job 1:21). As we read his story of ruin
and redemption, we know more than poor Job ever did concerning that cosmic wager
between God and Satan.
You may be like Job today—hurting
but never knowing “the why.” Or you may be like the paralyzed girl in MacArthur’s
story. She saw that providential hand of God in her paralysis and even came to
embrace it as a good thing. In this fallen world, some get more light than
others and that makes the problem of evil that much knottier to unravel.
Oddly, in the case of the
paralyzed girl we see that one of God’s great purposes in pain is to draw us to
Himself. We see this happen often in the Gospels as desperate people seek out
Christ for miraculous healing—there was the paralytic whose friends lowered him
down through the roof to meet Jesus (Mark 2:1-12), there was the woman with the
issue of blood (Luke 8:40-56) and the official who had the sick son (John 4:46-54).
In each of these instances it was their dire circumstances that caused them to
seek the Savior.
This demonstrates a timeless
principle—in times of ease, comfort and prosperity we have little reason or motivation
to need God in our lives. As long as we have plenty of money in the bank, our
health is good, and things are peachy we want to keep God at arm’s length—a spare
tire only for emergencies. David said it like this, “Before I was afflicted I
went astray, but now I keep your word” (Ps. 119:67). However, desperation drives
us to God like nothing else.
In his masterful work, The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis writes
with clarity, “Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God
when everything is going well with us. We ‘have all we want’ is a terrible
saying when ‘all’ does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St
Augustine says somewhere, ‘God wants to give us something, but cannot, because
our hands are full—there’s nowhere for Him to put it.’ Or as a friend of mine
said, ‘We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for
emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.’ Now God, who has made us,
knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it
in Him as long as he leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be
looked for. While what we call ‘our own life’ remains agreeable we will not
surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make ‘our own
life’ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible source of false
happiness?”[2]
In other words, God can
and does use afflictions to change our affections. Suffering strips away all
that superficial so that we might deal with those matters that are eternal and
spiritual. Hard times are that icy cold splash that wakes us from spiritual
slumber and gets our attention. Pain helps us reorder our priorities and
reminds us of our weakness. Adversity exposes our pride and produces humility. Its
only when we are lying flat on our back, that we will look up and find God. -DM
[1] John
MacArthur, The MacArthur New Testament Commentary—Matthew
8-15 (Chicago: Moody Press, 1987), 52.
[2]
C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (San
Francisco: Harper One, 1940), 94.
No comments:
Post a Comment