God's Sovereignty and Suffering
One of the most important issues in the life of a Christian is the place of God’s wisdom in their suffering and that which they see around them in the world. In recent times we have seen disaster in Haiti, war in the Middle East and an escalating tragedy in Japan. Add to that the unimaginable daily pain that people struggle through due to illness death disability and so much more.
With all this said, one of the most important jobs we have as pastors is to prepare our people for the day of calamity that will come to everyone; that day when disaster strikes and a child is abducted or a parent dies or cancer is diagnosed or finances are stretched or persecution is received and depression takes hold of an individual’s life. And the thing is that it can come at the most unexpected time and we cannot work out why-it seems so unjust.
David Wells says, ‘This moment of tragedy and evil [referring to 9-11] shone its own light on the Church and what we came to see was not a happy sight. For what has become conspicuous by its scarcity, and not least in the evangelical corner of it, is a spiritual gravitas, one which could match the depth of horrendous evil and address issues of such seriousness. Evangelicalism, now much absorbed by the arts and tricks of marketing, is simply not very serious anymore.”
The problem for so many Christians is that God is simply not big enough, not magnificent enough, not majestic or holy or powerful or righteous or merciful enough to fit their senses, their categories of thought about Him. In the western world and our day of such relative ease and comfort we have become desensitized to hardship and so we are quite simply not ready to suffer as we follow the Lamb of God along the Calvary road.
We must return to a biblical vision of our God. In the middle of a rebuke against his wicked people in Psalm 50:2, God says, "You thought that I was one like yourself". You see we have a tendency to reduce God down to our size when we depart from the Word of God and his self revelation. We have seen this very recently with Rob Bell's unfortunate book Love Wins. Bell makes God what he wants him to be and what is palatable to an anti-God society. In fact Bell fits David Well's description of modern day evangelicalism very well. Let this be a warning to us as pastors to labor hard to present the truth of Scripture to our people. That is the best way to love them. Give them God as he really is. God decides what God is like and he is glorious.
We must return to a biblical vision of our God. In the middle of a rebuke against his wicked people in Psalm 50:2, God says, "You thought that I was one like yourself". You see we have a tendency to reduce God down to our size when we depart from the Word of God and his self revelation. We have seen this very recently with Rob Bell's unfortunate book Love Wins. Bell makes God what he wants him to be and what is palatable to an anti-God society. In fact Bell fits David Well's description of modern day evangelicalism very well. Let this be a warning to us as pastors to labor hard to present the truth of Scripture to our people. That is the best way to love them. Give them God as he really is. God decides what God is like and he is glorious.
And so the question we must ask ourselves is how can we put theological steel in backbones of our people, and build into them this sense, this vision of a completely sovereign God who works all things ‘according to the counsel of His will’ for our good and His glory? Well first we must see the vision and savor it ourselves.
N.B. Read Kevin De Young's Review of Love Wins-http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/2011/03/14/rob-bell-love-wins-review/