When God Says, “Enough!”
When God Says, “Enough!”
If you’ve ever wrestled with suffering, you know how your sense of timing can become warped. Sometimes circumstances seem to slide from bad to worse, from pain to deeper pain, from anxiety to agony. You begin to wonder when and if it will ever end.
God’s Word—whether in little pieces or big chunks—can bring welcome perspective into times like these.
First, it’s good to know that one day the curtain will be closed on all suffering and pain. There will come a point in time when the Lord God will say, “Enough!” In the end, God will create new heavens and a new earth where there will be no more tears or mourning or pain. The earth as we know it will simply pass from existence and be replaced.
The last book of the Bible gives a glorious preview of God’s ultimate triumph over sin—and its counterparts like suffering and sickness and sorrow. It’s all going to happen when God deals the final death blow to the devil and his angels. And when they’re done away with, we have the assurance that suffering will fade from memory like a bad dream.
But in the meantime, God is able to use our suffering to glorify Himself. It is not wasted!
The Book of Proverbs says, “The LORD works out everything for his own ends—even the wicked for a day of disaster” (16:4). That means He has a plan and purpose behind your pain. Even the evil over which you have no control—evil men or evil schemes or injustice or iniquity—works mysteriously together in a pattern for your good (Romans 8:28).
Right now, however, you may be wondering what to do with all that time on your hands. Days that seem like weeks and minutes that seem like hours (how well I know!).
I can only say once again that the time is coming when victory, equity, and release are assured. Time, which allows for the existence of sin and evil, poses no threat to God and His character. Nor does it threaten you as His child, because freedom and fulfillment wait just over the horizon.
That’s hope! Hope pure and simple. Listen to the triumphant ring of it—like the voice of great bells on a clear morning!
Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.
For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the LORD, because you know that your labor in the LORD is not in vain (I Corinthians 15:51-58).