I entitled my first talk, "The Terrible Truth." And this second one is entitled, "The Message." I look upon suffering as one of God's ways
of getting our attention. I entitled my first talk, "The Terrible Truth."
And this second one is entitled, "The Message." I look upon suffering as one of God's ways
of getting our attention. In fact, C. S. Lewis calls pain "God's megaphone." He said, "God
speaks to us in our conscience." I think I've got that wrong. C. S. Lewis said, "God whispers
to us in our conscience, speaks to us in our joys, and shouts to us in our pain. Pain is
God's megaphone." And I'd like for us to think about some of the things which God needs to
say to us, that He needs to get our attention for, first of all, and it's interesting to
me it's of great significance, I think, that as far as we know, the oldest book in the
Bible, the book of Job, is the one that deals most specifically and head on with the subject
of suffering. You remember that Job was called "a blameless
man," "that righteous man." God Himself said that Job was a blameless man, and if the morality
of those days was that a good man would be blessed, and an evil man would be punished,
then Job's experience seemed to turn that completely upside down. And Job lost everything.
You remember that there was a drama that went on behind the scenes that, as far as we know,
Job was never given a clue about, where Satan challenged God in heaven. And he said, "Of
course, Job trusts You, but does he trust You for nothing? Try taking away all those
blessings, and then see where Job's faith goes." And God accepted Satan's challenge,
and here we have a mystery which we cannot begin to explain. In fact, it was God who
called Satan's attention to that individual, Job, and he gave Satan permission to take
things away from Job. And so he lost his flocks, and his herds, and his servants, and his sons,
and his daughters, and his house, and finally even the confidence of his wife. And as he
sat on his ash heap and his health had been touched by that time, and he was scraping
himself with pot shards and in utter anguish and misery, he kept silence for seven days
as his friends, as they were called, sat there and looked at him and apparently didn't say
anything, either, for seven days, and when Job finally broke silence, he howled his complaints
at God. We hear Job called a patient man, but if you
read the book of Job, you won't really find a lot of evidence that he was patient, but
he never doubted that God existed. And he said some of the very worst things that could
possibly be said about God, and isn't it interesting that the Spirit of God preserved those things
for you and me. God is big enough to take anything that we can dish out to Him, and
He even saw to it that Job's howls and complaints were preserved in black and white for our
instruction. So never hesitate to say what you really feel to God, because remember that
God knows what you think before you know and certainly knows what you're going to say before
you even think it. So for some samples of these dreadful things
that this patient man Job said to God, how about Job chapter 3 verses 11, 19-20, where
he says, "Why was I not stillborn? Why did I not die when I came out of the womb? Why
should the sufferer be born to see the light? Why is life given to men who find it so bitter?
You see -- you see Job here dialoguing with God. There is no question in Job's mind throughout
this entire book of the existence of God. He knows that it is God with whom he has to
deal. "Somebody is behind all this," he's saying, and the question, "Why?" presupposes
that there is reason, that there is a mind behind all that may appear to be mindless
suffering. We would never ask the question, "Why?" if we really believed that the whole
of the universe was an accident, and that you and I are completely at the mercy of chance.
The very question, "Why?" even if it is flung at us by one who calls himself an unbeliever,
or an atheist, is a dead giveaway that there is that sneaking suspicion in the back of
every human mind that there is somebody, some reason, some thinking individual behind this. And then Job addresses God directly in the
tenth chapter, and he says, "Can't you take your eyes off me? Won't you leave me alone
long enough to swallow my spit? You shaped me and made me; now You've turned to destroy
me. You kneaded me like clay, and now You are grinding me to a powder." Anybody ever
felt like that? Does that ring any bells out there? "God is grinding me to a powder! He
doesn't give me a chance to swallow my spit." And then, of course, his friends, who are
very orthodox, they never say a word that is not theologically sound, they begin to
accuse him of foolish notions, "a belly full of wind," they say. Job is utterly lacking
in the fear of God, and he is pitting himself against the Almighty, charging Him head-down
like an angry bull. Then Job calls Eliphaz a windbag, this is, you know, the pot calling
the kettle black, but his friends and enemies, he says, can't hold a candle to God who has,
quote, "set upon me and mauled me, seized me by the neck and worried me. He set me up
as his target; His arrows rained upon me from every side; He is pitiless. He cut deep into
my vitals. He spilt my gall on the ground." Now, can you top that? Would you dare to say
such things aloud? And then Job asks God question, after question,
after question, and at one point he says, "If I ask him a thousand questions, He won't
even answer one of them." And he was right. Remember that when God finally breaks His
silence, God does not answer a single question. God's response to Job's questions is mystery.
In other words, God answers Job's mystery with the mystery of Himself, and He starts
right in snowing poor Job with questions. "Where were you when I laid the foundation
of the world? Have you seen the treasures of the snow? Have you walked in the great
deep? Do you know where the wild ass gives birth? Have you presided over the doe in labor?"
And He goes on, and on, and on, question, after question, after question, but what He's
doing is revealing to Job who He is. And as I said in my first talk, God through my own
troubles and sufferings has not given the explanations, but He has met me as a person,
as an individual, and that's what we need. Who of us in the worst pit that we've ever
been in needs anything as much as we need company, just somebody, perhaps, who will
sit there in silence, but just be with us. Job never denies God's existence, never imagines
that God has nothing to do with his troubles, but has a thousand questions, and so do we. And let me just tell you a story or two that
comes out of my first year as a missionary. I thought of myself as being very well prepared
to be a missionary. As I told you, I came from a strong Christian home. My parents had
been missionaries themselves and we had dozens, probably hundreds, of missionaries traipsing
through our house. We had a guest room which always seemed to be full, we had suitcases
bumping up and down the stairs all the time, and we listened from our earliest memories
to many, many missionary stories at our own dinner table. And I went to a school for missionaries'
children, which was here in Orlando, as a matter of fact, and I heard thousands of missionary
talks, I looked at tens of thousands of terribly bad missionary slides, and sort of lived,
ate, breathed, drank missionaries and turned out to be a missionary myself, as were four
my other brothers and sisters. There were six of us in the family; five of us turned
out to be missionaries of one sort or another, and the sixth is a professor in Christian
colleges. Anyway, I thought that I was probably God's gift to the mission field as a missionary,
and had all this training behind me. I went to a Bible school, and I had home missionary
work in Canadian Sunday School Mission, etc., etc. But, within the first year, God saw fit to
give me three major blows to what I thought was a very well-founded and very sinewy faith.
And the first of these was that a man by the name of Macario, who was my informant as I
was attempting to learn an unwritten Indian language in the Western jungle of Ecuador,
the language of the Colorado tribe, a very small tribe who had never had any written
language, and therefore had none of the Bible in their language. I had prayed that God would
give me an informant, someone who would be prepared to sit down with me and go over,
and over, and over, what for him was the easiest language in the world, and have the patience
to deal with this apparently retarded foreigner. And God answered my prayer by sending me this
man by the name of Macario, who was bilingual, which was an enormous advantage. He spoke
Spanish and Colorado, and I had had to learn Spanish as the national language of the country,
and so we worked together very happily for about six weeks or two months -- I've forgotten
exactly what it was. And I was on my knees one morning in my bedroom, as was my habit,
reading my Bible and praying, and I happened to be reading in the third chapter, or the
fourth chapter of 1 Peter, and these were the words: "Think it not strange concerning
the fiery trial that is to try you, as though some strange thing happened. It happens to
give you a share in the sufferings of Christ." And at that very point, I heard gunshots.
There was nothing unusual about gunshots in that particular clearing of the jungle. We
were surrounded by Indians who hunted with guns that they had bought from the white man,
and there were white people also in that clearing who hunted as well, so we often heard gunshots,
but these particular ones were followed by yelling, and screaming, and horses galloping,
and people running, and general pandemonium. So I rushed outside to hear that Macario had
just been murdered. Now, it would be very nice if I could tell
you that I easily found another informant, but the truth was that Macario was literally
the only person in the world who was capable of doing the job that he had been doing with
me. Nobody else knew both Spanish and Colorado. So I was faced for the first time in my personal
experience with that awful "Why?" Like Job, I didn't doubt for a second that God was up
there, and that God knew what He was doing. But I couldn't imagine what He could possibly
have in mind, and God's answer to my "Why?" was, "Trust me." No explanations. Just "Trust
me." That was the message. Now, if I had had a faith which was determined that God had
to give me a particular kind of answer to my particular prayers, that faith would have
disintegrated. But my faith had to be founded on the character of God Himself, and so what
looked like a contradiction in terms: "God loves me; God lets this awful thing happen
to me." What looked like a contradiction in terms, I had to leave in God's hands and say,
"Okay, Lord, I don't understand it. I don't like it," but I only had two choices. He is
either God, or He's not. I am either held in the everlasting arms, or I'm at the mercy
of chance, and I have to trust Him, or deny Him. Is there any middle ground? I don't think
so. And I thought of Daniel in the lion's den.
I remember the picture that we had on our wall at home, a painting. When I was a child,
I often gazed at that painting, and Daniel is standing in the den of lions, there's a
light on his face, and he stands very tall and straight with his hands behind his back,
and just very faintly in the dark you can see these glowing eyes of the hungry lions,
and I realized that the painting is telling me that here's a man whose faith rests in
the character of God. Now, of course, I wouldn't have put it in those terms as a child, but
that picture spoke volumes to me. God was there in the pit. He was not making it unnecessary
for Daniel to go into the pit anymore than it was unnecessary for Joseph to go into that
pit where his jealous brothers threw him, or to be put into prison as were Paul, and
Silas, and Peter and many other people in Scripture, John the Baptist, who got his head
chopped off. It was necessary for Shadrach, and Meshach and Abednego to go into the fiery
furnace, because God had a message not just for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, but also,
you remember, for the King. He said, "Has your God whom you serve been able to deliver
you?" And you remember his challenge before he threw them into the furnace, "Do you think
your God can deliver you?" And those ringing words of faith, "Our God, whom we trust, is
able to deliver us, but if not, be it known unto you, O king, that we will not bow down
or serve you." "But if not." And that is the lesson that has to come to all of us at some
point in our lives. Every one of us, I'm sure, sooner or later,
has to face up to that painful question, "Why?" and God is saying, "Trust me." If your prayers
don't get answered the way you thought they were supposed to be, what happens to your
faith? The world says God doesn't love you; the Scriptures tell me something very different.
Those blesseds of the -- those blesseds of the Beatitudes, Paul's word, "It is my happiness
to suffer for you." We don't know the answer, but we know that it lies deep within the mystery
of the freedom to choose. When God created man, Adam and Eve, He created them with the
freedom to choose, to love Him, or to defy Him, and they chose to defy Him. Adam and
Eve abused that freedom, and C. S. Lewis says in his book, The Problem of Pain, "Man is
now a horror to God and to himself, and a creature ill-adapted to the universe, not
because God made him so, but because he has made himself so by the abuse of his free will."
And Lewis goes on to state this knotty problem in its simplest form: "If God were good, He
would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were Almighty, He would
be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy, therefore, God lacks either
the goodness, or the power, or both." So answering the question depends upon our
definition of "good." An ancient man thought of goodness in moral terms; modern man equates
good with happiness. "If it ain't fun, it ain't good." The two things almost seem to
be mutually exclusive. They put it the other way around: "If it's good, it ain't fun."
You know that commercial for some kind of cereal, I can't remember what it is, but too
little kids have heard that it's natural, and it's good for you, so they say, "Well
let's get him to try it; he'll eat anything. He doesn't know it's good for him." So the
little kid eats it, because he doesn't know any better that the other two kids wouldn't
even try it because it's good for you, and you've heard the saying, "Everything that
I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening," or something like that, a notion that the
world has that the two things are mutually exclusive. If it's good, it's not fun. It
has nothing to do with my happiness. Moral man was concerned primarily with moral goodness.
If we learn to know God in the midst of our pain, we come to know Him as one who is not
a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. He is one
who has been over every inch of the road. I love that old hymn from, I think, the 17th-century,
by Richard Baxter, "Christ leads me through no darker rooms than He went through before."
I love those words. I have some dear friends who were missionaries
in North Africa. He was one of the many seminary students who have lived in our house. And
I had a letter from them about a year or so ago to tell me that they had just lost their
baby girl. I think it was either at birth, or just within a few hours after birth, and
their letter was filled with the anguish that that caused them. And of course, I wanted
to answer the letter, but I never lost a baby. I only have one child who was 10 months old
when her father was killed, and so I couldn't write to Phil and Janet and say, "I know exactly
what you've been through." But I've read the wonderful letters of Samuel Rutherford, that
Scottish preacher from the 17th century, who seems to have been through just about every
imaginable human mill, and he had lost at least one child. And I had his letters in
my study, and so I looked up one of his letters to a woman who had lost a child. And this
is what he wrote to her, and I quoted these words to fill in Janet, after saying to them,
"I don't know what you're going through, but I know the One who knows," and I sent them
Samuel Rutherford's words. He had lost two daughters, I have here in my notes. This is
what he said, "Grace rooteth not out the affections of a mother, but putteth them on His wheel
Who maketh all things new, that they may be refined. He commandeth you to weep, and that
princely One took up to heaven with Him a man's heart to be a compassionate high priest.
The cup ye drink was at the lip of sweet Jesus, and He drank of it." And Janet wrote to me
these words: "The storm of pain is calming down, and the Lord is painting a new and different
picture of Himself." And I saw in her experience that the very suffering itself was an irreplaceable
medium. God was using that thing to speak to Janet and Phil in a way that He could not
have spoken if he had not gotten their attention through the death of that little child. Now, I don't mean to simplify, to oversimplify
things as though that explains it, that God had to say something to those two people because,
if I know anything about godliness, I know that Phil and Janet Linton are both godly
people, and that raises another painful question, doesn't it? We often say, "Why did such and
such have to happen to her? She is such a wonderful person? Why did he have to go through
this? He's such a wonderful person." Well, again, the word is, "Trust me." And back when
I was a college student, I was dabbling around in poetry, as I suppose most teenage girls
do at some point, but I wrote some words that later on seemed to me to be almost prophetic.
I wrote these words, and I really don't remember exactly whether there was any particular reason
why I wrote them at the time, but something had given me a clue that there could be some
loneliness ahead for me, and so these were the words that I wrote. "Perhaps some future
day, Lord, Thy strong hand will lead me to the place where I must stand utterly alone.
Alone, O gracious Lover, but for Thee, I shall be satisfied if I can see Jesus only. I do
not know Thy plan for years to come. My spirit finds in Thee its perfect home, sufficiency.
Lord, all my desire is before Thee now. Lead on, no matter where, no matter how. I trust
in Thee." I began keeping journals back when I was about
16 or 17, and so I've been keeping them ever since. That makes quite a few years. And as
I went back to reread some of those earlier journals in preparation for these talks, I
thought, "Well, I'd really better go back and see whether I know anything about what
I'm talking about," and as I said in my first talk, I don't think I know very much by comparison
with others, but I found a few little things in the journal, and one of the things which
I did feel was significant was the fact that again and again, I quote hymns about the cross,
hymns which were favorites at different times. And one of them that I learned in college
was, "O teach me what it meaneth, that cross uplifted high, with One, the Man of sorrows
condemned to bleed and die." One of the hymns that we learned as very small children in
our family prayers -- we used to sing a hymn every morning -- in family prayers, was, "Jesus,
Keep Me Near the Cross." My daughter has taught some of those hymns to her own children, and
I don't think I will ever forget seeing little two-year-old Jim violently swinging his newborn
baby sister, Colleen, in one of those little canvas swings, and singing, "In the cross,
in the cross, be my glory ever, till my raptured soul shall find, rest beyond the river." And
here's this little boy just violently swinging this infant who is having the time of her
life, and singing this profound hymn about the cross. And I could go on and on with hymns
that I could quote. "Beneath the Cross of Jesus" has always been a favorite of mine,
but as I came across those in my journals, I thought, "What did I imagine would be the
answer to the prayers that I was praying in those hymns?" What kind of an answer did I
really expect God to give me? Did I expect some kind of a -- a miraculous revelation,
perhaps, some deep original insight into the meaning of the cross? Did I expect God to
make some kind of a spiritual giant out of me so that I would have mysteries at my fingertips
that other people didn't know anything about? Well, I haven't the slightest idea what I
really thought. I suppose it was all very vague and mystical in my mind, and I didn't
know what God would do by way of answering that prayer, but I can look back over these
45 years or so, and see that God, in fact, is in the process of answering those prayers.
"Teach me what it meaneth, that cross uplifted high." What is this great symbol of the Christian
faith? It's a symbol of suffering. That is what the Christian faith is about. It deals
head on with this question of suffering, and no other religion in the world does that.
Every other religion in some way evades the question. Christianity has, at its very heart,
this question of suffering. It comes -- the answer to our prayers, "Teach me what it meaneth
in the cross be my glory ever, beneath the cross of Jesus." The answer comes, not in
the form of a revelation, or an explanation, or a vision, but in the form of a person.
He comes to you and me in our sorrow, and He says, "Trust Me. Walk with Me." I have to insert in here another little grandchild
story, and you're going to have to bear with me. You know, grandmothers do tell grandchild
stories, but they seem so appropriate so often, and in this particular case, my little four-year-old
granddaughter, Christiana, had had to be spanked four times -- three times in one day for the
same offense. She had not come running quickly when she was called, and my daughter, like
my mother treated as -- as my mother treated delayed obedience as disobedience, Valerie
tries to do the same thing, and so Christiana was spanked three times on that particular
Sunday. So Sunday night when it was time to go to church and she was called, she came
charging out to the car, tears pouring down her face, her arms full of a Bible, a notebook,
a pen -- four years old, mind you -- on her way to church, had to have a Bible, notebook,
a pen, her barrettes, her -- her necklaces or bracelets, her hair ribbons, who knows
what else was essential, all this stuff falling out of her arms, she was tripping over things,
tears pouring down her face, and she stopped and she said, "Oh mama, if only Adam and Eve
hadn't sinned." Now, that child was suffering because she lives in a fallen world, and you
and I live in that same fallen world. We have to look at these awful facts: the fact of
sin and suffering and death, the fact that God created a world in which those things
were possible, the fact that He does love us. That means he wants nothing less than
our perfection and joy, that He gave us the freedom to choose, and that man decided that
his own idea of perfection and joy was better than God's, and believed what Satan told him,
and therefore sin and suffering entered into the world. And now we're saying, "Why doesn't
God do something about it?" And the Christian answer is, "He did. He became the Victim,
a Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world." George Herbert, another 17th-century
poet, wrote this: "Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes, fine nets and stratagems to
catch us in." Then George McDonald, a 19th century poet said this: "Pain, with dog and
spear, hounds false faith from human hearts." Two different expressions of what God is up
to. "Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in," to give us this message. And as the psalmist
said in Psalm 46, "Though the mountains shake and be carried -- though the earth shake,
and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea, God is our refuge." And
I speak to you as one who has desperately needed a refuge. And in that same psalm, He
says, "Be still," and I'm told that it's legitimate to translate that, "Shut up and know that
I am God." That's the message.
