Saturday, July 02, 2011

The School of Suffering

As He also says in another place: “You are a priest forever According to the order of Melchizedek”; who, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear, though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. (Hebrews 05:06-08, NKJV).

The contempt with which modern, enlightened secularists hold faith in God, and the study of God, is rife with a certain kind of arrogant and mind-numbing delusion. So confident are they of their materialist/naturalist/educated world view that they routinely scoff at even the name of Jesus Christ, or at the thought of Biblically-based Christian faith. They hold true Christians as mentally defective, and the most rabid among them would seek to outlaw religion, and especially Christianity, itself. Their current chief public spokesman is Richard Dawson, who makes a substantial income from deriding God and those who follow Him.

It would be more than a little infuriating if it wasn't so… tragic.

The pressure to conform to this elitist view is overwhelming in some circles, and it is subtly reinforced by popular culture and the western entertainment media. We who believe are stereotyped in any number of vile ways, and are marginalized as being on the fringe of "proper" society.

But the greatest intellectual and societal equalizer of all is the very nature of life on this fallen world. It is best summed up by this:

"…All flesh is grass, And all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades… Surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades…” (Isaiah 40:6-8, NKJV).
And,

…For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. (James 4:14, NKJV).
And,

…Certainly every man at his best state is but vapor. (Psalms 39:5, NKJV).

Physical death is the enemy that conquers all conceit and false self-assurance. And inevitably, before the final battle, a conscious life lived with even minimal self-examination is full of suffering. I dare any vaunted intellect to honestly claim otherwise. I challenge any self-assured secularist or elite academic to squarely face suffering and death personally with the same mocking derision heaped upon followers of Christ. Try gritting your teeth and not aging, or avoiding the loss a loved one, or blithely watching a family member suffer and die.

It is only Christianity that gives assurance that life has ultimate purpose and meaning, and it is only a follower of Christ that can know that the final enemy, death, has been defeated.

One of the most common modern criticisms of faith in Jesus is that it is too simple, too easy, too much of wishful thinking.

That is a criticism founded on nearly complete ignorance of at what cost the war against death has been won.

Imagine being exquisitely alive and powerful and at the pinnacle of your experience as a human, and then voluntarily becoming an invalid. Think about it for just one second, as life goes on around you unfettered and free. Imagine surrendering all your authority and influence and control over your own immensely significant life and becoming completely subservient, and doing so out of a love so indefinable that no words exist to convey it. 

In that dependent state, imagine being not in the company of loved ones or friends, but in the the thrall of implacable enemies who are not just ruthlessly hostile, but wish you the worst imaginable harm.

Now imagine going through all this suffering and humiliation for the sake of the very creatures who are killing you and at the behest of the One Being in existence who is your equal.

Perhaps such images will give some insight, some scant glimpse, into what it means for God to become Man to provide the example of learning and suffering, and to die for the utterly unlovable, and in so doing accomplish the impossible: saving the world.

Suffering is the Grand Teacher. Without it in this world, nothing of any lasting importance can be learned.

Without suffering as contrast, any enjoyment in this life is shallow and without real appreciation. It is a lure into a trap of self-entitlement and eventual jaded bitterness.

Without suffering there can be no true thankfulness in the human heart, for it is by genetic inheritance as hard as stone, requiring the furnace heat of pain to soften.

Without suffering the human mind remains as ignorant and self-centered as a newborn, incapable of knowing where she ends and the universe begins.

Even the most decadent, and supremely self-confident man, woman or child, is guaranteed at the moment of death to face the fathomless black abyss of death without God, and if the lesson of dependence on Him and obedience to Him has not been learned in the light of this life, the fiery darkness of eternal suffering will teach it.

But then it will be too late for the lesson to have any effect other than to solidify forever a life lived in ignorance.

The Son of God was perfected as our sacrifice by learning obedience by the things which He suffered.

He did so for us, and for the Father.

No amount of lofty, conceited intellectualism, or blithe animalistic living, can, in the end, effectively deny the reality and truth of our lives being in the hands of the One who made us.

To attempt to live life without acknowledging that fact, and respond accordingly, is the ultimate stupidity.

And it is tragic beyond words.

God allows us pain to combat the deadly anesthetic of sin.

Like leprosy of old, if left unchecked our inherent sinful nature deadens our sensitivity to the truth of God.

Without the lessons offered through suffering, every human soul would be guaranteed to fall inevitably into everlasting torment, after living a purposeless life.

Only Christianity can make sense of suffering.

Only Christianity can make life-giving use of suffering.

Thank God for suffering. It is the key that opens the door from ignorance to intelligence; from darkness to light.

My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. (James 1:2, 3, NKJV).