A missionary is killed when a 4x4 board catapults through the windshield of her bus, a financial reversal leaves a retired minister homeless, a pastor is electrocuted in his church baptismal, a worship leader is killed on a ministry trip, leaving behind ten young children, a pastor’s five year old daughter has cancer, a worship leader’s son accidentally drives over and crushes his toddler brother, a quadriplegic minister accidentally paralyzed twenty years ago now has cancer. These are examples of the millions of real life difficulties that Christians face daily. Whether physical, financial or relational, adversity knows every saint’s address. Bad things happen to Godly people, you can count on it.
These roads, like all roads, lead to the cross. “It was the Lord’s will to crush Him (Jesus) and cause Him to suffer.” Picture this: The world’s greatest lover commits history’s most heinous event on history’s best and only sinless person, who just happens to be the very object of His passionate love. Why on earth would we expect a life free from suffering? We do not know why God chose to cloth Himself in weakness and suffering to overpower all opposition in accomplishing his eternal purposes, or why He endowed mankind with limits and suffering, subject to sorrows, pain and death. Perhaps Good does not draw one to God as forcefully as Bad. Perhaps man’s stubborn independence, willful self-centeredness and casual love affairs with the world require something more forceful then Good to produce lasting transformation. Perhaps Self’s preoccupation with Good breeds a sense of entitlement. But we do know God keeps His own rules, exacting nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He lived as flesh, born in poverty and acquainted with sorrow and grief, and died in tortured disgrace, deserted by His greatest love, His Daddy.
The Atonement somehow tore God apart. The Cross exceeded the worse human suffering, exposing the Godhead to rejection and pain of cosmic proportion, exceeding human capacity for pain as infinitely as God’s knowledge and power exceeds man’s. In this qualitative sense, Jesus endured the agony and anguish of hell itself: Sweating blood speaks volumes, capillary walls blowing out from emotional intensity, blood oozing from divine pores. God, the maximum Good, is personally acquainted with the maximum Bad. Isn’t it remarkable the omnipotent creator God, sovereign of all, would create a world where no one suffered more than He. When we begin to fathom the foreboding terror at Gethsemane, the denigrating spectacle of the Trial, the torturous brutality of the Beatings and Scourging, the excruciating pain and mental anguish of the death march to Golgotha, and the lonely horror of Love’s utter abandonment at the time of its greatest need on the Cross, we will refrain from ever questioning God’s understanding or His love. Rather than question His “allowings” in our life, ask instead, “Lord, Why did you do that for me”? Only a God of wounds can speak to the wounded. Never doubt God cares -- see the blood, scars and savage brutality -- He cares and suffers still, suffering with us in our suffering.
There will always be raging storms in our sea of life, we should know we will all get the opportunity to walk on water, more often than we would like. Why? Jesus: The only answer bigger than all questions. Jesus is God’s answer to why! But, know this: We serve a sovereign omnipotent God who is totally in control and personally guarantees the mysterious hope of Good coming out of all the Bad things His children endure. No power in heaven or earth can “make straight what He has made crooked”, restrain or thwart His purposes. He never fumbles the ball, or the flight of a 4x4, never!
GOD NEVER FUMBLES ANYTHING
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