Why Good Christians Suffer: PART 15

How much does it all depend on us?

What’s our role in the very things we feel like blaming God for?

We are utterly dependent upon the One in whom “we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). We did not as much as choose to be born. When speaking about himself, even the incarnate Son of God said, “I can of myself do nothing,” (John 5:30). How much more must this apply to us!

Does this mean, however, that we have no accountability; that it is all up to the sovereign Lord? Does it mean we could not disobey even if we chose? Are we hapless pawns in a battle between two spiritual superpowers? Or is the Almighty so powerful that Satan barely rates a mention and we are solely God’s pawn?

There is no question that if it came down to sheer power or ability or importance, we are no match even for Satan, let alone the Almighty. God could at any moment crush our every effort so that not even a stain remains. Before shriveling into total defeatism, however, let’s not be so blinded by the obvious that we miss something equally obvious: an omnipotent God is able to assign power or ability or importance to anyone of his choosing.

Instead of keeping us helpless pawns in some supernatural power-play, the sovereign Lord has chosen to dignify us with freedom of choice. Christ has won the victory and is eager to shower on us all the glory and the spoils of war but he leaves it to us whether, by submitting to God and resisting the devil (James 4:7), we win, or whether we chose defeat by letting the deceiver devour us (1 Peter 5:8). The Almighty has placed us at the tipping point so that who we choose to lean toward – God or Satan – determines whether any event ultimately ends up turning good or evil. The Lord has set things up so that it all hinges on us.

As the psalmist marveled:

Psalm 8:4-6 what is man, that you think of him? What is the son of man, that you care for him? For you have made him a little lower than God, and crowned him with glory and honor. You make him ruler over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet

And by honoring people this way, our astonishing God of love has granted every human the power to crush his tender heart, ruin his plans and vandalize his artistry.

The entire Bible screams human responsibility. Scripture speaks of little children not being able to tell good from evil, and so not being morally accountable (Deuteronomy 1:39; Isaiah 7:15; Romans 9:11). Infants aside – and, presumably, some with serious mental deficiencies – the God who knows precisely how much good and how much evil we are capable of, clearly holds the rest of us highly accountable for our every action and attitude.

Ecclesiastes 12:14 For God will bring every work into judgment, with every hidden thing, whether it is good, or whether it is evil.

Matthew 12:36 I tell you that every idle word that men speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment.

Romans 14:12 So then each one of us will give account of himself to God.

1 Corinthians 4:4-5 For I know nothing against myself. Yet I am not justified by this, but he who judges me is the Lord. Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and reveal the counsels of the hearts. Then each man will get his praise from God.

Hebrews 4:13 There is no creature that is hidden from his sight, but all things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him to whom we must give an account.

We earlier touched on the following Scripture but let’s look a little deeper:

1 Corinthians 3:7, 10-15 So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase. . . . According to the grace of God which was given to me, as a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another builds on it. But let each man be careful how he builds on it. For no one can lay any other foundation than that which has been laid, which is Jesus Christ. But if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, or stubble; each man’s work will be revealed. For the Day will declare it, because it is revealed in fire; and the fire itself will test what sort of work each man’s work is. If any man’s work remains which he built on it, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned, he will suffer loss, but he himself will be saved, but as through fire.

God has made it so that everyone can be rewarded, but even among those who scrape into heaven, some will live with the endless regret of missing the rewards that could have been theirs. What makes the difference is not what God does, but what we do.

God’s guidance, instructions, commands, warnings, wrath, judgments and so on, would all be a meaningless farce unless we have been divinely granted the power to make critically important choices.

Jesus spoke of him being the vine and us the branches. Except for the vine, a branch would not only produce no fruit, it would shrivel up and die. In Jesus’ words, “. . . apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Far from this absolving us from accountability, however, our utter dependence gives us a huge responsibility – to do all it takes to remain in submissive union with our Lord. In that very discourse, in fact, Jesus said we must obey his commands (John 15:10).

In Jesus’ parable of the talents, it was the master’s money. He had set everything up to make success possible. There were risks and challenges but it all came down to each servant. When the wicked servant was caught out, instead of finally taking responsibility for his own decisions, he proved his unworthiness by trying to blame his laziness on the master – accusing him of being a “hard man” (Matthew 25:24). That slimy attempt at blame-shifting merely added to his offense.

If we could, many of us would choose to run our lives and keep God around only as an obligation-free sugar daddy and someone to blame when we inevitably mess up. Any such attempt would be fooling no one but ourselves.

Had you been born into a universe where sin had never existed, you would never have known any pain or suffering. Everything would be a sheer delight, sparkling with the exquisite perfection of God’s heart and ways. There would only be one issue: being born into a world that has never known sin would involve having a different ancestry and DNA to ours. The Almighty could easily create such beings. They could be perfect and exquisitely happy, but anyone with different genes could no more be you than an angel is you or than any of the billions of people already in existence who have different parents to you.

As shocking as it is, our very existence depends on sinful rejection of God’s loving ways. We each have a family tree riddled with people who have broken God’s heart over and over and over. For us to be born, our holy Lord had to force himself to tolerate atrocious sin for at least as long as it took for each of our ancestors to procreate. Trace back far enough, in fact, and we are each sure to find a direct ancestor who was conceived by rape, incest, adultery, prostitution, or by some other act God hates, such as a male ancestor murdering the former partner of a female ancestor. Were it not for sin, none of would ever have been born. It is literally part of our DNA; a fundamental part of who we are.

Furthermore, sin is never victimless. Sin breaks not only God’s laws but his heart. And it hurts and corrupts the sinner. And the sins we delight in calling ‘little’ – cheating, greed, lying, slander, being a poor role model, and so on – all end up hurting other people. In short, each of us has personally contributed to this world’s pain and suffering.

Disturbingly, if we were placed in a sin-free world where there is no unpleasantness our very presence would corrupt that world, preventing it from remaining pristine. And consider this; if God were to spare some other sinner but not us – sparing him either arbitrarily or by assessing his sin as more excusable or less serious – imagine the stink we would make, accusing God of being unfair, and so on. But if it were reversed and we were spared but not others, wouldn’t it be equally unfair? We all want to draw the line as to what is excusable and for some suspicious reason, our self-drawn line almost always seems to put us on the right side of it. A righteous judge can have no part is such hypocrisy.

The Almighty could easily use brute force to obliterate Satan. Indeed, hell’s eternal fire was created as his destination (Matthew 25:41). Through our sinful rebellion against God, however, we have each joined forces with Satan and have earned the same fate as him. So God sparing us from what we deserve could not be merely a matter of force, nor of mercy, without the Holy One denying who he is – a God of justice and integrity, who acts not by whim but only by what is right.

It cost the good Lord horrifically for we who deserve nothing but hell to be granted access to heaven and even to make it so we could enter without defiling its perfection and turning it into a sewer as corrupt as the world we currently live in. Christ had to become us, suffer the devastating consequences of our sin, defeat Satan on our behalf, and bestow on us his moral perfection. Through unparalleled generosity, heroism and power, the Son of God has seized the humanly impossible and placed it in our hands. This is not because we are great but because of what our great God has done out of his unfathomable love. Whether we accept this, however, is still up to us.

The Story So Far

Disturbingly often, Bible believers construct in our own imagination a God who is so ‘sovereign,’ aloof and untouched by human sin and suffering as to have almost no resemblance to the God of the Bible. It too often happens that people think God has a heart of stone, when the real hardness of heart is their callous indifference to the anguish that people inflict on the God who loves them. God’s wrath is but a manifestation of the inconceivable extremes to which people push divine anguish.

We humans are continually grieving God, bringing him shame and foiling his plans to bless us. He deserves so much better than us.

With appalling frequency, we betray and abuse his trust and soil his name and then have the audacity to try to blame him for letting us devastate him. Let’s not be so blind as to think today’s Christians are any less despicable than the most hypocritical, sin-hardened Jews in Bible times.

Judges 10:16 . . . his soul was grieved for the misery of Israel.

1 Samuel 15:11 It grieves me that I have set up Saul to be king; for he has turned back from following me, and has not performed my commandments . . .

Psalm 81:11-14 But my people didn’t listen to my voice. Israel desired none of me. So I let them go after the stubbornness of their hearts, that they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways! I would soon subdue their enemies, and turn my hand against their adversaries.

2 Kings 17:13-15 Yet the Lord testified to Israel, and to Judah, by every prophet, and every seer . . . Notwithstanding, they would not listen, but hardened their neck, like the neck of their fathers, who didn’t believe in the Lord their God. They rejected his statutes, and his covenant that he made with their fathers, and his testimonies which he testified to them; and they followed vanity, and became vain, and followed the nations that were around them, concerning whom the Lord had commanded them that they should not do like them.

Ezekiel 18:31-32 Cast away from you all your transgressions, in which you have transgressed; and make yourself a new heart and a new spirit: for why will you die, house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of him who dies, says the Lord God: therefore turn yourselves, and live.

Hosea 2:8 For she did not know that I gave her the grain, the new wine, and the oil, and multiplied to her silver and gold, which they used for Baal.

Matthew 21:33-39 Hear another parable. There was a man who was a master of a household, who planted a vineyard, set a hedge about it, dug a wine press in it, built a tower, leased it out to farmers, and went into another country. When the season for the fruit came near, he sent his servants to the farmers, to receive his fruit. The farmers took his servants, beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again, he sent other servants more than the first: and they treated them the same way. But afterward he sent to them his son, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But the farmers, when they saw the son, said among themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and seize his inheritance.’ So they took him, and threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.

Luke 17:17 Weren’t the ten cleansed? But where are the nine?

2 Timothy 3:2-5 For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, not lovers of good, traitors, headstrong, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God; holding a form of godliness, but having denied its power.

James 2:3-4, 9-11 . . . you pay special attention to him who wears the fine clothing, and say, “Sit here in a good place”; and you tell the poor man, “Stand there,” or “Sit by my footstool”; haven’t you shown partiality among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? . . . But if you show partiality, you commit sin, being convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law, and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all. For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not commit murder.” . . .

Revelation 2:5 Remember therefore from where you have fallen, and repent and do the first works; or else I am coming to you swiftly, and will move your lamp stand out of its place, unless you repent.

Coming soon - Part 16 to 20