You know, honey, we humans are so bizarre. We know in our heart of hearts that only Good comes from God. We know He created everything beautiful and glorious and loving and safe, and that evil comes from two places- Satan, and Mankind. Death came to us because Mankind made an unsavory deal with Satan one day in the Garden, electing to believe the devil over the Divine and to trust in himself rather than the One in Whose image he was created. God's heart almost exploded when we brought Death into the world by choosing to cut off our umbilical cord with Him and go float with the other Self-Worshipers in the ‘we can make ourselves good without your help God thank you very much” club.
Satan managed to make us believe that God was the selfish one who was trying to keep something good from us, rather than the reverse, which was true, that choosing to trust in ourselves would ultimately mean we couldn’t sustain Life—you can’t cut yourself off from the Giver of Life and expect to not also cut yourself off from Life-not rocket science and yet, that urge to put oneself in God’s place is strong in human kind…we brought death to earth when we chose to believe that God was holding out on us and we broke the rules He had put in place to keep us safe.
I’ve heard it explained that the reason God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden after they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was that they would then most certainly also eat from the tree of life and if they ate from that tree before they got redeemed, they would be stuck eternally in their state of damnation, cut off from God. He banished us to save us again. The way we put fences around our yards to keep our children from walking under trucks.
When shit happens to us we shake our fists at God. It’s so amazing. We ALL do it (or at least, have done it at some point in our lives). It’s an interesting proclivity that we see in people who have been molested as children by someone other than their father. Though their father was innocent, they are often unbelievably angry at their fathers! Why? He didn’t molest them! But he didn’t protect them either. In our minds we are angry at the one who is supposed to protect us. You always hear people talking about how angry they are at God. I have often felt that way myself. Trust me, way toooo often. And yet you never hear people saying that they are so mad at Satan, from whom all the crap comes. From Satan and our own fallen selves, that is. It’s a bit like getting furious at your mom because you got burned by the stove which she told you to stay away from for precisely that reason.
Well, it is and it isn’t. You didn’t specifically do something evil to make the people you love die. (Even though sometimes you doubt this because of the normal processes of grief, I understand). But you’re a part of the human family and we share in the inheritance of the sins of our fathers. And we do choose ourselves on a daily basis. So we do participate in the chain of self-worship and stubborn heartedness against God. We do know that we desperately need a Savior to make us good and to redeem us in all our ugliness. . .
Now, I don’t want you to feel even crappier about what’s happening right now than you already did, which you may be doubting based on my comments so far, but hear me out! (: God’s heart breaks when yours does! And He’s not the heart breaker! It’s just that He has all the power and we think He should whip it out to protect us whenever bad stuff starts happening. It’s a natural human response. Unfortunately, His power is under man made constrictions for this era in history--this was the grand experiment of letting man be in charge. Adam made that choice for us by choosing to live by his own rules rather than God's. I believe that it is man's prayer and faith and collaboration with God that releases Him to act on our behalves even though He hasn't resumed His full reign on earth yet because the time has not yet come.
However, the weird thing is…it’s actually very logical. Basically since the world got f’ed up, the only way for us to get un f’ed up is to go through a kind of reverse f’ing. If you get shot with a bullet you can only get well by having the bullet dug out of you the reverse of the way it got there. Which is going to hurt just as much as getting it in there in the first place did. Get your arm pulled out of socket, the only way to fix it is to pop it back in, which is going to hurt like hell, but that’s the way it works. Jesus made the reversibility stuff possible. He paid the ultimate price so that we wouldn’t get stuck with eternal death. So that we would get a second chance to make that choice about Whose/whose laws we wanted to honor and thus which kind of universe we want to live in.
All we have to endure is temporary death. Which in our finite little minds feels pretty permanent. But you have to read the end of the Book-WE WIN!!! Everybody that chooses to get back with God after the Great Divorce, gets to be Raised from the Dead. I mean holy crap! How awesome is that! And here is the big paradox and part of the reason theologians often refer to the Fall of Man as the Fortunate Fall— If nobody ever died, we’d never get to see anybody raised back to life! If nobody was blind, we wouldn’t get our breath taken away when God made them see again. God didn’t create the Fall and didn’t plan it; there is no way we can pin it on Him. However, the glorious thing about His redemption plan is that He can make all these amazing miracles happen that could never have happened without our grand F-Up in the grand garden at the grand entrance to humanity’s grand story.
Because here’s the thing. If you don’t know ugly, you can’t know beauty. If you’ve never been lied to, you can’t fully appreciate the precious gift of honesty and transparency in others. If you’ve never felt agony, you won’t really know Joy even if it tap dances right across your nose! The big mystery: the degree of joy and ecstasy you are able to experience is directly proportionate to the degree of agony you are also able to experience. . . and thus you have James urging us to consider it pure joy when we encounter hardship...
English speakers are fond of citing the shortest verse in the bible as the one in John11:35 that says, Jesus wept. (I'm not sure what the shortest verses are in Hebrew and Greek). If you look it up in context you see that it is His response to the death of Lazarus when He finally gets to the tomb (after deliberately waiting a couple of days after receiving news that Lazarus was deathly ill) and He sees Mary and Martha absolutely beside themselves with grief. Jesus loved those two women. And He loved Lazarus as one of His close friends. But Jesus also knew that He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead! Why did He weep if He knew how Very Temporary this state of affairs was going to be for this family for at least another decade or two?? Why would God weep when He knows the happy ending?
Apparently the Greek word that gets translated “wept” is only used like twice in the whole Bible and gets translated with some other much stronger word in the other use-of course I can’t remember it right now. . .but Tim Keller is a pastor who says that the word we translate as ‘wept’ here is more like ‘snorted with fury!’ It’s a word for a grief that is so angry it makes you want to explode! Jesus’ heart was breaking with Mary and Martha because theirs were breaking and He loved them so much. He didn’t want them to be in this horrible suffocating gut wrenching agonizing pain.
But He was also about to perform His greatest miracle yet, only surpassed when He would do it Himself 3 days after the crucifixion. Jesus was letting Lazarus’ story be a foreshadowing of His own story—He was giving everyone a sneak preview. And a preview that was probably necessary so they could get their heads around His own resurrection later on—how could they believe He would be raised from the dead if they’ve never seen that happen before? He was preparing them to hope and believe and experience the joy rather than feel lied to and stolen from when His body went missing!
Still, He knew about the happy endings for both 3 day stints in a smelly tomb…why did He weep/snort with furious grief??!! Keller suggests that He was taking in the whole picture of ALL the death of ALL the humans from the beginning of time till the end of the Age, He was taking in that picture of all the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives and friends throughout time whose hearts would be stabbed again and again with the horrific power of suffering and death—Jesus was feeling all humanity’s pain at once—He was furious at Satan and sin and death for wreaking this agony on His beloved humanity.
And then He put some teeth in His anger and He ordered Lazarus to come forth!!! He was screaming it because He was screaming against death and giving us that preview of how He was going to kick sin & death’s ass in the end and rescue us all, resurrect us all, every last one who reaches out to Him and asks for it—And then we can rock out and sing with Petra, Tell me death, where is your victory, where is your sting? When the Grave Robber comes and death finally DIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????????????
So you feel like God doesn't know how weak you are. But you really know He knows just exactly what you can and cannot bear. Not like He wants to rub our face in it, but every time we get to the end of ourselves, we have to reach up and take His hand and let Him carry us...every time we fall and skin our knees or whatever, we are reminded that we are weak and He is strong, that we cannot save ourselves from suffering, but He is always right there ready and willing to get us through it. Moreover, every time we experience weakness is an opportunity for His power to be displayed in our lives...
Our whole lives are theses series of painful reminders that we are not all that after all-we were dead wrong in the garden of Eden and are dead wrong now when we think we can just go our own way...there is a way that seems right to a man but the end thereof is death and destruction...each time we feel overwhelmed it is a reminder that we were never intended to fly solo and constantly crash--we were intended to fly on His strong and perfect wings...and never crash. But since the crashes are here now, He's going to make beautiful things come out of them. He's going to use the fire to refine us into the purest gold. He is, as my mother likes to say, an economical God--He will not waste a single tear or trial--He will use absolutely every crappy thing that ever happens to us to grow beautiful flowers in our hearts and lives if we'll just surrender the crap to Him.
Humans are amazing at attributing their own successes to their own hard work and awesomeness, and the crap in their lives they blame on God. That is why we desperately need to fail with some regularity so we don't get confused about Who has all the power and who is frail and fragile and fraught with flaws and fears and failure...and James, who may have sounded like he was on crack to the first century Christians who were getting tortured and killed for following Jesus...James said consider it pure joy when you encounter trials of many kinds....because when these are allowed to do their work they will make you perfect and complete...
If you want to be like Jesus, you have to suffer. You have to go through all kinds of trials and tests. But that means that every trial and test is a gift-it's a promise. It's an opportunity. It's a door behind which is more of Him, more beauty, more Love, more Power, more of you, lost (and found!) in more of Him.
Death sucks, no two ways about it. But it ain't God's gig!! And it's ok to be angry at death, God is angry about it, too. But for all who choose to be redeemed, it's only temporary. And God can use the suffering to make us strong and beautiful, children He can be proud to call His own. (:
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