Chapter Two: The Message
Chapter 2
The Message
I look upon suffering as one of God’s ways of getting our attention. In fact, C. S. Lewis said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”6 I’d like for us to think about some of the things that God needs to say to us, for which He needs to get our attention. First of all, it’s interesting to me, it’s of great significance, that as far as we know the oldest book in the Bible is the book of Job. Of all the books in the Bible, it is this one that deals most specifically and head-on with the subject of suffering. You may recall that Job was called a blameless man, a righteous man. God, Himself, said that Job was a blameless man. This is significant because the common understanding of morality those days was that a good man would be blessed and an evil man would be punished . . . so, Job’s experience seemed to turn that completely upside-down.
Job lost everything. His ten children were killed in a storm. His vast number of animals were killed. His household was essentially destroyed. This man who had been esteemed, wealthy by all accounts, was without all that signified wealth and blessing. Yet the destruction did not stop there. His physical body suffered as well with painful boils and disfigurement so significant that he was unrecognizable to some of his closest friends. All of this happened and Job did not know why. You may remember that there was a drama that went on behind the scenes that, as far as we know, Job was never given a clue about, where Satan challenged God in Heaven. And he said, of course Job trusts You. But does he trust You for nothing? Try taking away all those blessings and then see where Job’s faith goes. And God accepted Satan’s challenge. And here we have a mystery that we cannot begin to explain. In fact, it was God who called Satan’s attention to that individual, Job. And He gave Satan permission to take things away from Job.
And so he lost his flocks and his herds and his servants and his sons and his daughters and his house and finally even the confidence of his wife. And as he sat on his ash heap and his health had been touched by that time and he was scraping himself with potsherds and in utter anguish and misery, he kept silent for seven days as his friends—as they were called and had apparently been when times were good—sat there and looked at him and didn’t say anything either for seven days. And when Job finally broke silence, he howled his complaints at God.
We may often hear Job called a patient man but if you read the book of Job you won’t really find a lot of evidence that he was patient. But he never doubted that God existed and he said some of the very worst things that could possibly be said about God. And isn’t it interesting that the Spirit of God preserved those things for you and me? God is big enough to take anything that we can dish out to Him. And He even saw to it that Job’s howls and complaints were preserved in black and white for our instruction. So never hesitate to say what you really feel to God because remember that God knows what you think before you know and certainly knows what you’re going to say before you even think it.
So for some samples of these dreadful things that this patient man, Job, said to God, how about Job chapter 3, verses 11, 19, and 20 where he says why was I not stillborn? Why did I not die when I came out of the womb? Why should the sufferer be born to see the light? Why is life given to men who find it so bitter?
You see Job here dialoguing with God. There is no question in Job’s mind throughout this entire book of the existence of God. He knows that it is God with whom he has to reconcile his circumstances. Somebody is behind all this, he’s saying. And the question “why” presupposes that there is reason, that there is a mind behind all that may appear to be mindless suffering. We would never ask the question why if we really believed that the whole of the universe was an accident and that you and I are completely at the mercy of chance. The very question why, even if it is flung at us by one who calls himself an unbeliever or an atheist is a dead give-away that there is that sneaking suspicion in the back of every human mind that there is somebody, some reason, some thinking individual behind this.
We would never ask the question why if we really believed that the whole of the universe was an accident and that you and I are completely at the mercy of chance.
And then in Job chapter 10, Job addresses God directly. And he says can’t You take Your eyes off me? Won’t You leave me alone long enough to swallow my spit? You shaped me and made me; now You’ve turned to destroy me. You kneaded me like clay, and now You’re grinding me to a powder. Anybody ever felt like that? Does that ring any bells out there? God is grinding me to a powder. He doesn’t even give me a chance to swallow my spit.
But what about his friends? His friends who were very religious. Well, they never say a word that is not theologically sound as they understand the ways of God. They begin to accuse him of foolish notions, a belly full of wind, they say. Job is utterly lacking in the fear of God and he is pitting himself against the Almighty, charging Him head down like an angry bull.
When Job calls Eliphaz a windbag, this is, you know, the pot calling the kettle black. But his friends and enemies, he says, can’t hold a candle to God who “has shattered me; He also has taken me by my neck, and shaken me to pieces; He has set me up for His target, His archers surround me. He pierces my heart and does not pity; He pours out my gall on the ground” (Job 16:12–13 nkjv). Now can you top that when you are railing at God for the broken heart borne out of suffering? Would you dare to say such things aloud?
And then Job asks God question after question after question. And at one point he says if I ask Him a thousand questions, He won’t even answer one of them. And he was right. Remember that when God finally breaks His silence, God does not answer a single question. God’s response to Job’s questions is mystery. In other words, God answers Job’s mystery with the mystery of Himself.
God answers Job’s mystery with the mystery of Himself.
And He starts right in nailing poor Job with questions. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the world? Who laid the cornerstone when the morning stars sang together? Have you seen the treasures of the snow? Who enclosed the sea with doors? Have you walked in the great deep? Have you ever in your life commanded the morning and caused the dawn to know its place? Have you presided over the doe in labor? Tell me, where is the way to the dwelling of light? He goes on and on and on; question after question after question.
He knows the answers to these questions, of course. And he knows that Job most certainly cannot answer them. He is revealing to Job who He is. God, through my own troubles and sufferings, has not given me explanations. But He has met me as a person, as an individual, and that’s what we need. Who of us in the worst pit that we’ve ever been in needs anything as much as we need company? Just somebody, perhaps, who will sit there in silence but just be with us. Job never denies God’s existence, never imagines that God has nothing to do with his troubles, but he has a thousand questions and so do we.
Who of us in the worst pit that we’ve ever been in needs anything as much as we need company?
Now, it may seem like an odd transition, but this is a good place for me to tell you a story or two that comes out of my first year as a missionary. I thought of myself as being very well prepared to be a missionary. As I said, I came from a strong Christian home. My parents had been missionaries themselves. And we had dozens, probably hundreds of missionaries traipsing through our house. We had a guest room that always seemed to be full. We had suitcases bumping up and down the stairs all the time. And we listened, from our earliest memories, to many, many missionary stories at our own dinner table.
I went to a school for missionary’s children, and I heard thousands of missionary talks. I looked at tens of thousands of terrible missionary slides showing pictures of church plants, baptisms, and Vacation Bible Schools all in grainy, generally indistinguishable portrayal. I lived, ate, breathed, drank missionaries and turned out to be a missionary myself, as were four of my other brothers and sister. There were six of us in the family. Five of us turned out to be missionaries of one sort or another, and the sixth is a professor in a Christian college.
I thought that I was probably God’s gift to the mission field as a missionary and had all this training behind me. I went to a Bible School and I had some Home Missionary work in Canadian Sunday School Mission. I mean, I had it all. But within the first year God saw fit to give me three major blows to what I thought was a very well-founded and boldly developed faith.
The first of these blows came as I was attempting to learn an unwritten Indian language in the western jungle of Ecuador, the language of the Colorado Tribe. They were a very small tribe who had never had any written language and therefore had none of the Bible in their language. I had prayed that God would give me an informant, someone who would be prepared to sit down with me and go over and over and over what for him was the easiest language in the world. I knew this informant would need to have the patience to deal with this apparently ignorant foreigner.
And God answered my prayer by sending me this man by the name of Macadao who was bilingual, which was an enormous advantage. He spoke Spanish and Colorado. This was significant as I had already learned Spanish as the national language of the country. We worked together very happily for about two months. Then, I was on my knees one morning in my bedroom, as was my habit, reading my Bible and praying. And I happened to be reading in the third chapter or the fourth chapter of 1 Peter. And these were the words: “Think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you” (1 Pet. 4:12 kjv). And at that very point I heard gunshots.
There was nothing unusual about gunshots in that particular clearing of the jungle. We were surrounded by Indians who hunted with guns that they had bought from the white man. And there were white people also in that clearing who hunted as well. So we often heard gunshots. But these particular gunshots were followed by yelling and screaming and horses galloping and people running and general pandemonium.
So I rushed outside to hear that Macadao had just been murdered. Now it would be very nice if I could tell you that I easily found another informant. But the truth was that Macadao was literally the only person in the world who was capable of doing the job that he had been doing with me. Nobody else knew both Spanish and Colorado.
So I was faced, for the first time in my personal experience, with that awful why. Like Job, I didn’t doubt for a second that God was up there, that God knew what He was doing. But I couldn’t imagine what He could possibly have in mind. And God’s answer to my why was “Trust Me.” No explanations. Just, trust Me. That was the message.
Now if I had had a faith that was determined God had to give me a particular kind of answer to my particular prayers, that faith would have disintegrated. But my faith had to be founded on the character of God Himself. And so, what looked like a contradiction in terms: God loves me; God lets this awful thing happen to me. What looked like a contradiction in terms, I had to leave in God’s hands and say okay, Lord. I don’t understand it. I don’t like it. But I only had two choices. He is either God or He’s not. I am either held in the Everlasting Arms or I’m at the mercy of chance and I have to trust Him or deny Him. Is there any middle ground? I don’t think so.
I am either held in the Everlasting Arms or I’m at the mercy of chance and I have to trust Him or deny Him.
I thought of Daniel in the lions’ den. I remember the picture that we had on our wall at home, a painting. When I was a child I often gazed at that painting. And Daniel is standing in the den of lions. There’s a light on his face and he stands very tall and straight with his hands behind his back. And just very faintly in the dark you can see these glowing eyes of the hungry lions.
And I realized that the painting is telling me that here’s a man whose faith rests in the character of God. Now of course, I wouldn’t have put it in those terms as a child. But that picture spoke volumes to me. God was there in the pit. He was not making it unnecessary for Daniel to go into the pit anymore than it was unnecessary for Joseph to go into that pit where his jealous brothers threw him or to be put into prison, as were Paul and Silas and Peter and many other people in Scripture, even John the Baptist who got his head chopped off.
It was necessary for Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego to go into the fiery furnace because God had a message not just for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego but also, you remember, for the king. He said “has your God, whom you serve, been able to deliver you?” And you remember his challenge before he threw them into the furnace, “Who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands?” (Dan. 3:15 kjv). And, then come those ringing words of faith, “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up” (Dan. 3:17–18 kjv). But if not . . .
If your prayers don’t get answered the way you thought they were supposed to be, what happens to your faith? The world says God doesn’t love you. The Scriptures tell me something very different.
And that is the lesson that has to come to all of us in some point in our lives. Every one of us, I’m sure, sooner or later, has to face up to that painful question. Why? And God is saying, trust Me. If your prayers don’t get answered the way you thought they were supposed to be, what happens to your faith? The world says God doesn’t love you. The Scriptures tell me something very different. Those “blesseds” of the Beatitudes. Paul’s word, it is my happiness to suffer for You.
We don’t know the answer. But we know it lies deep within the mystery of the freedom to choose. When God created man, Adam and Eve, He created them with the freedom to choose to love Him or to defy Him. And they chose to defy Him. Adam and Eve abused that freedom. And C. S. Lewis says in his book, The Problem of Pain, “Man is now a horror to God and to himself and a creature ill-adapted to the universe not because God made him so but because he has made himself so by the abuse of his free will.”7 And Lewis goes on to state this knotty problem in its simplest form. “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore, God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.”8
So, answering the question depends upon our definition of good. An ancient man thought of goodness in moral terms. Modern man equates good with happiness. If it ain’t fun, it ain’t good. The two things almost seem to be mutually exclusive. They put it the other way around, if it’s good, it ain’t fun. There’s a commercial I’ve seen recently for some kind of cereal with two little kids who have heard that it’s natural and it’s good for you. So they said, “Well let’s get him to try it. He’ll eat anything. He doesn’t know it’s good for you.” So the little kid eats it because he doesn’t know any better that the other two kids wouldn’t try it because it’s good for you. And perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “Everything that I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening,” a notion that the world has that the two things are mutually exclusive. If it’s good, it’s not fun. It has nothing to do with my happiness. Moral man was concerned primarily with moral goodness.
If we learn to know God in the midst of our pain, we come to know Him as one who is not a High Priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. He is one who has been over every inch of the road. I love that old hymn by Richard Baxter, “Christ leads me through no darker rooms than He went through before.” I love those words.
If we learn to know God in the midst of our pain, we come to know Him as one who is not a High Priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. He is one who has been over every inch of the road.
I have some dear friends who are missionaries in North Africa. He was one of the many seminary students who have lived in our house. And I had a letter from them about a year or so ago to tell me that they had just lost their baby girl. I think it was either at birth or just within a few hours after birth. And their letter was filled with the anguish that that cost them. And of course, I wanted to answer the letter. But I’ve never lost a baby. I only have one child who was ten months old when her father was killed. And I so couldn’t write to Phil and Janet and say I know exactly what you’ve been through. But I’ve read the wonderful letters of Samuel Rutherford, that Scottish preacher from the seventeenth century who seems to have been through just about every imaginable human mill, and he had lost at least one child and I had his letter in my study.
And so I looked up one of his letters to a woman who had lost a child. And this is what he wrote to her, so I quoted these words to Phil and Janet after saying to them that I didn’t know what you’re going through but I know the One who knows, and then I sent them Samuel Rutherford’s words. This is what he said after losing two daughters: “Grace rooteth not out the affections of a mother, but putteth them on His wheel who maketh all things new, that they may be refined . . . He commandeth you to weep: and that princely One, who took up to heaven with Him a man’s heart to be a compassionate High Priest . . . The cup ye drink was at the lip of sweet Jesus, and He drank of it.”
Janet wrote to me this reply, “The storm of pain is calming down and the Lord is painting a new and different picture of Himself.”9 I saw in her experience that the very suffering itself was an irreplaceable medium. God was using that thing to speak to Janet and Phil in a way that He could not have spoken if He had not gotten their attention through the death of that little child.
Now I don’t mean to simplify, to over-simply things as though that explains it, that God had to say something to those two people because if I know anything about godliness I know that Phil and Janet Linton are both godly people. That raises another painful question, doesn’t it? We often say why did such and such have to happen to her? She’s such a wonderful person. Why did he have to go through this? He’s such a wonderful person. Well, again, the word is, “Trust Me.”
Back when I was a college student, I was dabbling around in poetry, as I suppose most teenage girls do at some point. I wrote some words that later on seemed to me to be almost prophetic. I wrote these words and I really don’t remember exactly whether there was any particular reason why I wrote them at the time, but something had given me a clue that there could be some loneliness ahead for me. So these were the words that I wrote,
Perhaps some future day, Lord, Thy strong hand will lead me to the place where I must stand utterly alone.
Alone, O gracious lover, but for Thee.
I shall be satisfied if I can see Jesus only.
I do not know Thy plan for years to come, my spirit finds in Thee its perfect home.
Sufficiency.
Lord, all my desire is before Thee now, lead on no matter where, no matter how.
I trust in Thee.
I began keeping journals back when I was about sixteen or seventeen, and I’ve been keeping them ever since. That makes quite a few years at this point. So I went back to re-read some of those earlier journals in preparation for this message. I thought, well, you know, I’d really better go back and see whether I know anything about what I’m talking about.
I found a few little things in the journal, despite my earlier admission that I don’t think I know very much by comparison with others. And one of the things I noted that I did feel was significant was the fact that again and again I quote hymns about the cross, hymns which were favorites at different times. And one of them that I learned in college was, “O, teach me what it meaneth that Cross uplifted high, with one the man of sorrows condemned to bleed and die.”10 One of the hymns that we learned as very small children in our family prayers—we used to sing a hymn every morning in family prayers—was “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross.”11
My daughter has taught some of those hymns to her own children, and I don’t think I will ever forget seeing little two-year-old Jim violently swinging his newborn baby sister, Colleen, in one of those little canvas swings and singing, “In the Cross, in the Cross, be my glory ever. Till my raptured soul shall find rest beyond the river.” And here’s this little boy, just violently swinging this infant who is having the time of her life and singing this profound hymn about the cross.
I could go on and on with hymns I could quote. “Beneath the Cross of Jesus” has always been a favorite of mine. But as I came across those in my journals, I thought, what did I imagine would be the answer to the prayers that I was praying in those hymns? What kind of an answer did I really expect God to give me? Did I expect some kind of a miraculous revelation? Perhaps some deep original insight into the meaning of the cross? Did I expect God to make some kind of a spiritual giant out of me so that I would have mysteries at my fingertips about which other people didn’t know anything? Well I haven’t the slightest idea what I really thought. I supposed it was all very vague and mystical in my mind, and I didn’t know what God would do by way of answering that prayer.
But I can look back over these forty-five years or so and see that God, in fact, is in the process of answering those prayers. Teach me what it means, that cross lifted up high. What is this great symbol of the Christian faith? It’s a symbol of suffering. That is what the Christian faith is about. It deals head-on with this question of suffering, and no other religion in the world does that. Every other religion, in some way, evades the question. Christianity has, at its very heart, this question of suffering.
It comes, the answer to our prayers, teach me what it means, “In the cross be my glory ever.” The answer comes not in the form of a revelation or an explanation or a vision but in the form of a person. He comes to you and me in our sorrow. And He says, “Trust Me.” “Walk with Me.”
I have to insert in here another little grandchild story and you’re going have to bear with me. You know grandmothers do tell grandchild stories. But they seem so appropriate so often. And in this particular case, my little four-year-old granddaughter, Christiana, had to be spanked four times, three times in one day for the same offense. She had not come running quickly when she was called. And my daughter, just as my mother treated delayed obedience as disobedience, Valerie tries to do the same thing. And so Christiana was spanked three times on that particular Sunday.
So Sunday night when it was time to go to church and she was called, she came charging out to the car, tears pouring down her face, her arms full of a Bible, a notebook, a pen—four years old, mind you—on her way to church had to have a Bible, notebook, a pen, her barrettes, her necklaces, her bracelets, her hair ribbons, and who knows what else was essential. All this stuff falling out of her arms. She was tripping over things. Tears pouring down her face. And she stopped and she said, “Oh, momma. If only Adam and Eve hadn’t sinned.” Now that child was suffering because she lives in a fallen world and you and I live in that same fallen world.
We have to look at these awful facts, the fact of sin and suffering and death, the fact that God created a world in which those things were possible. The fact that He does love us, that means He wants nothing less than our perfection and joy. The fact that He gave us the freedom to choose and man decided that his own idea of perfection and joy was better than God’s and believed what Satan told him, therefore sin and suffering entered into the world. And now we’re saying, why doesn’t God do something about it? And the Christian answer is, He did. He became the victim, a lamb slain from before the foundation of the world.
George Herbert, another seventeenth-century poet, wrote this, “Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes. Fine nets and schemes12 to catch us in.”13 Then George MacDonald the nineteenth-century poet said this, “Pain, with dog and spear, false faith with human hearts will hunt and hound.”14 These give us two different expressions of what God is doing. Fine nets and schemes to catch us in, to give us this message. And, the second expression is reiterated as the psalmist said in Psalm 46, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea” (Ps. 46:1–2 kjv).
I speak to you as one who has desperately needed a refuge. And in that same Psalm he says, “be still.” I’m told that it’s legitimate to translate that, “shut up and know that I am God.” That’s the message.
He comes to you and me in our sorrow. And He says, “Trust Me.” “Walk with Me.”