Nobody likes to suffer. Nobody likes pain. Discomfort discomforts us. Why do we complain? Because we don’t like something. Why don’t we like something? Because we only seem harm in it, not benefit. We are under the impression if everything in our lives is going our way, is to our liking, then that is good. When things don’t, that is bad. Why do we think this? Because the stuff that is not good is generally unpleasant, and unpleasant is well, unpleasant! When we become Christians, however, this way of thinking, a worldly, secular, God-less way, should stop. Of course, we can’t go cold turkey because we’re used to seeing the world this way, and complaining comes naturally. Take a look at the Israelites after God brings them out of the bondage of their Egyptian slavery. They complain about dying of thirst and hunger in the desert, and long to go back to the “fleshpots” of Egypt. We mock them for such stupidity, as if we would do any differently. We would not! We’re complainers too. It’s one of the features of being a sinner.
What is the most common question in the history of humanity? Why God? And because there is no answer outside of the truth revealed to us in Scripture and in Christ, we think the only answer is, just because; deal with it. Because people don’t get the answer they want, many get angry at God and reject him. I have the answer though, and while it doesn’t make life any easier, it’s a wonderful way to live.
I’ve only been at this Christianity thing for 45 or so years, so I’m just getting started, but God has taught me a few things along the way, the process always a version of pain and frustration, mostly little and petty, sometimes more than a little. Some time ago I was speaking to a family member about the travails of his life, and an apt phrase came to mind I’d never heard before that I remember. I told him, what you’re going through is the “pain of sanctification.” That, brothers and sisters, is called life. I hate to break it to you, but if everything is going well, and life is easy, that’s not good. We learn nothing floating downstream. There is no sanctification in ease. It is the natural friction of life that builds spiritual strength. Life is like climbing a mountain, mostly up. Just when you get to the peak and take a little breath, you look up and notice there is a higher mountain up ahead. Ugh.
This seemingly unfortunate fact of existence is why we are enjoined throughout Scripture to give thanks, sometimes exhorted, others commanded. It won’t surprise us that the word thanks or thanksgiving is found most often in the book of Psalms. The one verse that convicts me most is from the Apostle Paul in I Thessalonians 5:18:
Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
Although Paul is often blunt, this is unusually blunt. And he prefaces this command with two others, “16 Rejoice always, 17 pray continually.” Those are three pretty all-encompassing adverbs! All, always, continually. Doesn’t leave us much wiggle room now does it. We get a magazine from Voice of the Martyrs every month, and these commands take on a different hue at that level of suffering. For most of us who live in material prosperity and liberty, we’ll never know that kind of suffering, but Paul’s commands apply to all of us equally no matter what God calls us to or he allows or causes life to throw at us.
I started doing down the sanctification rabbit hole when I read Philippians 1 earlier this year, and parked for a bit on verse 27 where Paul says, “conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” I wondered what Paul meant when he wrote those words, and what he was thinking what such a manner looks like. When I got to verse 29 is when I took the dive:
29 For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him, 30 since you are going through the same struggle you saw I had, and now hear that I still have.
Is there, I wondered, some connection between living in a worthy manner and suffering.
John Calvin Gives the Answer
That name does strange things to some people, as we say nowadays, triggers them. For those of you who might be guilty of that, just ignore the name and focus on the content. Most people who don’t like Calvin or Calvinism have never read him, and if they did they would be pleasantly surprised when he doesn’t at all fit their negative stereotype. Sorry, but I had to defend my man Calvin because so many think they know what he believes, and they have no idea.
Anyway, I’m reading very slowly through Isaiah with Calvin. The morning I read Phillipians 1, I also read a passage as he is working his way through chapter two. You’ll notice reading through Isaiah that God’s judgment against Israel is a consistent theme. We tend not to apply it to our lives because, after all, we believe in Jesus, and as Paul says, we are “in Christ,” so God’s wrath and judgment was fully poured out on him for us. Correct, but we’re still confronted with the inconvenient fact of our sin, which as we are all aware doesn’t go away, at least not easily or without a struggle. That process is the pain of sanctification.
Isaiah 2 is a magnificent Messianic chapter, and depending on your understanding of the term, “last days,” will determine how you interpret it. Being postmillennial I see it as having commenced when Jesus rose from the dead, ascended to the right hand of God, and sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost. I believe these stirring words from this chapter were fulfilled on that day:
2 In the last days
the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
and all nations will stream to it.3 Many peoples will come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
4 He will judge between the nations
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.5 Come, descendants of Jacob,
let us walk in the light of the Lord.
I don’t have the space to argue the postmillennial position here, but if you’re curious why I would think something so counter intuitive to modern Evangelicals, read The Millennium by Loraine Boettner and Victory in Jesus: The Bright Hope of Postmillennialism by Greg Bahnsen.
The fundamental fact of redemption is that Jesus accomplished all this in his first advent, and the working out of that redemption of His people and His earth applies not only to the church, but to the entire world. Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords. Remember, John tells us that God so loved the entire world, the cosmos, so not just the individual people who make up His body, His people. And as we know, God is never in a hurry, and his working redemption in history is a very slow incremental process, like a mustard seed becoming the biggest tree in the garden, and yeast working its way through a huge batch of dough (Matt. 13). We’re only 2000 years in, but my what God has accomplished so far is magnificent. Imagine what he can do in the next 2000!
Which brings us to judgment and Calvin, and the purpose of it in the Christian life, or sanctification. Calvin takes verse four specifically to be about this fact, that God is judging “between the nations” to bring peace on earth, good will toward men, a reminder of yuletide. Calvin tells us the word rendered “settle disputes” means to expostulate, sometimes to correct, and likewise to prepare. He continues:
But the ordinary interpretation is most suitable to this passage in which the Prophet speaks of the reformation of the Church. For we need correction, that we may learn to submit ourselves to God; because, in consequences of our obstinacy which belongs to our nature, we shall never make progress in the word of God, till we have been subdued by violence.
Have you ever thought you, wretched sinner that you are, need to be subdued by violence? Me neither. That seems kind of harsh, but as he says, we are obstinate little buggers, and God often has to go to extremes to get our attention. I know he does with me. This is the reason I would never want to be young again; I’ve gone through enough “violence” for one lifetime. I would also change none of it because God is making me the man he wants me to be, like it or not! And most of the time, I do not. Although I trust because of the results maybe others like me a little more.
As an aside, Calvin throughout his writing refers to the OT saints as “the Church.” We, Calvin and I, and Presbyterians in general, believe God’s people prior to the coming of their Messiah are part of the same covenant community of God’s people after his death and resurrection. So Israel was the Church, God’s “called out” ones, Greek ekklésia- ἐκκλησία, as clearly Israel was.
What is the Purpose of Suffering in the Christian Life?
Given a cross on which people were brutally tortured and crucified is at the heart of the Christian religion, it doesn’t surprise us that suffering is as well. Suffering, however, is something human beings don’t even like to think about, let alone endure, but think about and endure it we must. The problem is that our understanding of suffering is too narrow because we think it is primarily physical in nature, but it can be psychological and emotional as well, and whatever the suffering might entail, for the Christian none of it is in vain.
We also don’t think of suffering as a blessing, but as something that is primarily negative, and to be avoided . As I said above, nobody likes to suffer, but as Paul says suffering has been granted to us by God. That doesn’t sound like a negative, does it. The Greek word Paul uses for granted is where we get our English word charisma, and it means to show favor or kindness. Thinking of suffering as a favor is counter intuitive to us, even nonsensical, but that is the Christian understanding of suffering. For a Christian, suffering is an unpleasant, inconvenience, and sometimes bad can be good because God promises all of it is for our good and His glory. Nothing that happens in the Christian’s life is in vain.
Which brings me to one of the most important blessings of the Christian life, our God-given telos, the Greek word for purpose. The origin of the concept comes from Aristotle and his four causes. For The Philosopher, as Aquinas called him, a cause was the reason for the existence of a thing. So let’s use a mundane example to explain the idea, a table.
- Formal Cause-The idea or concept of the table in the mind of its creator.
- Material Cause-The physical stuff, wood, out of which the table will be made.
- Efficient Cause-The person doing the crafting of the table.
- Final Cause-The purpose, or telos, of the thing for what it will be used.
For the Christian, our telos, the cause of our existence is God, and not just any divine being, but God in Christ. Big difference, as we’ll see. The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks: What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever. The only true fulfillment comes from our relationship to our Creator in Christ and through Christ. God is our formal, material, efficient, and final cause.
By contrast, people who have imbibed secularism like the air they breathe, and its Darwinian assumptions, have no formal cause or final cause. Add to that depressing fact that the material of which they are made comes from nothing for no reason at all, and the efficient cause of their existence is chance because circumstances with no purpose do the crafting. The final cause, the purpose of their existence as they see it, is their fulfillment and happiness. This vision of their reality doesn’t offer much of either of those. In America, upwards of 50,000(!) people every year successfully kill themselves, and many more try. Millions are addicted to various medications to ease their anxiety and depression. The telos of chance is a fickle God indeed.
All Things Work for Our Good
To finish this up let’s go back to Calvin and his blunt assessment that God needs to subdue us “by violence.” We learn in Hebrews 5 that Jesus “learned obedience from what he suffered,” and if so for the Son of God in the flesh, how much more we who are by nature self-centered rebellious little cretins who want to be our own gods. We have to be continually reminded of this inconvenient fact of our beings because our capacity for self-deception is endless. Thus the necessity of suffering in our lives. And just because it isn’t physical doesn’t mean it isn’t any less traumatic.
The title of this section is from Romans 8:28. I often joked with my children as I was raising them in our generational faith, that surely, Paul didn’t mean all. I mean, maybe 98 percent, but all? That’s crazy. Unless, of course, God is God, and in fact our Savior. Paul tells us he is confident “that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6). God finishes what he starts because He is God. God is sovereign, which means all powerful, which means, his will cannot be thwarted even by we rebellious sinners. Your theology may not allow you to believe this because we see people, and ourselves for that matter, resisting God all the time. But do we not take into account that too is not beyond God’s sovereign control of all things? He is not in control of only some things, or he would not be sovereign, and we would be. That is not an option. It’s one or the other.
Instead of trying to figure how all this works, how God is sovereign and yet we are accountable beings who have agency and whose choices really matter, we can let God be God and trust him. It all comes down to trust in the character of God, his goodness and love, and his absolute power. Either you believe this or you do not. I can promise you something if you do, Isaiah 26:3:
You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.
If we want perfect peace, we’ll trust in Him, even through our suffering. I didn’t say it would be easy. Something to remember: work like it depends on you, pray because it depends on God.
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