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... His only begotten Son! Why on earth would we
expect a life free from suffering... a Health and Wealth free ride? 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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