Date: For the Week of February 28, 2011
There is a strange but predictable thing that happens in the human mind during hard times and crises. It is something of a spiritual calculus that ties the ratio of divine love to human suffering. By all human calculation, the greater my comfort with life, the greater my certainty that God knows and loves me; the greater my pain and struggle, the less confident I am that he cares about me.
But that’s all wrong. Human circumstance has never been a reliable index either to one’s spiritual status or her value to God.
For more than a dozen years, Joseph was either a slave or a prisoner in a country where he had no civil rights or legal protection. By the calculus of our time and place, anything beyond a few days or weeks of suffering would be taken as solid proof that God had abandoned Joseph.
Job lost his children, fortune, health, and friends. By the rule of inverse ratio between divine love and human comfort, God had forgotten that good man. A faith-filled prayer should have healed him. That it didn’t would be taken as incontrovertible evidence for God’s failure in Job’s life, if not for his nonexistence.
Tamar was raped. Samson was betrayed by a woman he tried to trust. Ruth’s husband died, and she had to fend for herself in a hostile culture. An unnamed man in John 9 was born blind. Prophets were put in dungeons, thrown to wild animals, and forced to watch their children be murdered.
If the relationship between divine concern and human comfort really holds, not one person in the paragraph above was the object of God’s love.
For that matter, what would you think of a child born before his parents had been married nine months, shuttled from pillar to post during infancy, and forced to grow up under circumstances that would haunt him for his entire life? Then suppose he died young - the victim of an unjust legal system? If the alignment of God’s love and our good fortune are necessary to faith, Jesus should have renounced the whole spiritual enterprise.
The point of all this is that the world’s calculus is wrong. Or perhaps the point is that you and I must be on guard against thinking the world’s way. Otherwise, we get drawn into the trap of citing our woes as the justification for unbelief.
There is absolutely no correlation between your circumstance today and God’s faithful love. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, your situation may be only a period of discipline prior to entering the Promised Land. Like Paul’s thorn in the flesh, it may be your invitation to experience God’s grace at a deeper level.
“What we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later” (Romans 8:18 NLT).
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