23. We are surprised by any joy found in suffering

As science moves forward more of our questions are answered. We have become so used to having our every inquiry answered with the flick of a finger on a keyboard. Questions about the natural are more easily answered these days, but the spiritual questions are never answered, because we are finite. In these two different spheres of knowledge, we are allowed into the natural sphere where we can understand the physical world in a limited and finite fashion. But we want that same sort of privilege for the supernatural sphere as well. We want proof of how things work in the super world, the spiritual world. But there is no proof in the supernatural, no logic, no understanding like in the natural. When we are converted and baptised we become part of the spiritual supernatural as well. We are buoyed up and enthused by our relationship with God. We speak to Him as we might speak to our father in the natural world, depending more and more on Him. Yet, when we move into the higher supernatural realm, we express ourselves in the lower natural realm, because we know no other. That’s how He made us, and He understands.

Christ brought the two worlds together. The “word became flesh”, and then we could also be like Christ Jesus, truly in Him. He, the Supernatural, dwells in us, in our natural body. In that way, the seen world then is part of the unseen world, when God abides in our natural body. We are made in “the image of God.” We bear that image, and He enhances that image with His gifts. He decided before His creation that any supernatural risk was worth the scoffing of the unbelievers that He knew would be present. So “He descended… with gifts”, loving gifts for us.

CS Lewis said suffering and grief is God’s hiddenness, like a closed door, locked and bolted with, it seems, no one at home. Everyone, sooner or later, is confronted by it. Those doubts and fears are all valid responses, and in anticipating our disappointments, God includes those responses in the Scriptural record of Psalm 22. It seems God understands the cost of maintaining faith in us, and so He gives us the wherewithal to counteract our faithlessness. When Job said, Job 10:20, “look away from me, let me alone that I may take comfort a little … in the shadow of death”, he was grieving about the witnesses who judged him, and in his appeal to God he cried to his tormentors, 12: 2 and 13, ”No doubt you are the people and wisdom shall die with you. But I have understanding… I am not inferior to you…Only with him (God) is wisdom and strength, he hath counsel and understanding”. We also can cry the same way about those who tell lies of us, and He reassures us that He will hear the falsehoods, and our cries. He will be with us in our “dark night of the soul” for He has promised. He has not abandoned the affliction of the afflicted.

There is another lesson in Job that we can throw anything at God, our anger and our bold insults and He will absorb it all and still support us. Even using unnecessary insurance, like Jacob, in terrible fear, approaching his first meeting with Esau after Haran, He will support us. Wrestling had been a big part of Jacob’s life strategy, and here in his terrible anxiety, Jacob wrestles with God, and he learns the mighty Peniel lesson. He now knows that God is there in the crisis, and so this crisis becomes a turning point in his life. Jacob, now disabled, could no longer wrestle anyone. Psalm 22:14, also assures us that God is there for us when “our bones are out of joint”.

The Jacob story deserves its place in Scripture because it is about life and death, and struggle and recognition of sin, and confession and forgiveness, and going forward in faith. These Old Testament stories are about the ultimate questions, they are concerned much less with men and women, but rather with the lessons of God for them, and Him superintending it all. He really is the subject, the inner core, the maintaining factor. People are never important for their own sakes, or for their contributing work’s sake, but always as objects of the divine momentum within their lifelong stories. Whether they affirm or deny Him, He is always the inner and most important story. It is His mission that is important, and men and women can be part of that, only if they wish to show by their commitment and their lives, that they are friends of God. That puts His glory on show as His mission mandate is being fulfilled. Looking back, then, there is joy in the suffering.