One of the most faith-destroying, soul-destroying things is the way bad things happen to good people. Another is the way they happen to us.
`God, I thought you answered prayer. God, I thought you wanted your work to go forward. God, I thought you cared.’ Not all of us have these thoughts, maybe, but many of us do. And if the just are supposed to live by faith, well, acting like the just isn’t always easy…
And yet the Bible warned us it could be this way. There is the slow enormity of the pileup of disasters that clatter down on the hapless Job. First, much of his possessions wiped out in a surprise assault by Sabaeans. Then, much of the rest destroyed by what seems, of all things, the `fire of God’. Then the knockout: a building collapses and bereaves him, at one horrifying stroke, of all his children.
There is Habakkuk, that we explored not long ago (https://petelowmanresources.com/latest-habakkuk-a-prophet-we-really-need-to-know/): watching the triumph of violence and injustice, and the swallowing up of the righteous by the wicked; appealing to God, and receiving an answer that runs, approximately, If you think this is bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet, and by the way, the just shall live by faith.
These things we know, with our heads. With our heads we recall Christ’s warning that in this world we shall have tribulation – and also, the promise we’ve seen repeatedly in 1 Peter that through it, by God’s power, we will genuinely grow into nothing less than glory. But, this world is not yet heaven. It is fallen; it is a real war zone; and actually it is `in all these things’, as Paul (no stranger to pain) puts it in Romans 8, that we will in fact be more than conquerors.
With our heads we know these things. It is in our hearts that the problem comes. Claiming an apparent promise from God that consistently fails to materialise. Watching family members or close friends lose their way. Watching a project disintegrate that seemed to be so valuable. Seeing a church fellowship torn apart by dissension. Finding a key Christian worker taken off the frontline by some totally avoidable sin or folly. Or it may just be the extended experience of singleness or unemployment; and the deep sense these can generate of unfulfilled potential, creating a spirit somehow calloused, a secret cynicism that doesn’t really expect God to `come through’. With our heads we understand: the Bible did warn us to expect such things, for now. But inside, we may feel the `Yes-God-is-good-in-general-but-not-to-me’ syndrome. Inside, we may feel that something is dying.
Rereading Mark, it struck me how very helpfully it can speak to these questions. So we’re going to look at Mark in these next posts. The aim with this blogsite has generally been to `pioneer’ into passages we may not know so well, hence we’ve largely omitted the gospels. But just this once we’ll aim to `pioneer’ within Mark, taking an angle that, for me at any rate, was a little new. And we’ll take Mark at speed, in large chunks (four to eight pages at a time – not too much, when you compare it with how we read other books), because we’re just looking at this one issue. But moving through a gospel at that speed gives us perspectives we miss when we focus more closely. It’s something we all need to do from time to time.
So then: Mark’s first six chapters next time…
PS Here are two really helpful comments from when this post appeared on my facebook site: from Barrett Horne, `Hi Pete. In many ways, I think the question you raise is always pressing and relevant. It was the painful experience of most of those listed in Hebrews 11. I think of all the still faithful Jews carried off to Babylon, swept up in God’s judgement of the nation. It is THE challenge, perhaps, of living faithfully, hopefully, confidently in a broken world, waiting for our and its final healing. Easy to know in our head. Much more challenging to embrace and rest with the truth in our hearts.` And from Sophie Scenic-Daniel, `What an important message, this is. So poignant—thank you for sharing. The good news is that God always comes through, even when we hit rock bottom. He reaches down to retrieve us, not because we’ve prayed or believed, but because He sees us in our broken state. And, our High Priest, Jesus empathises with our weaknesses and sends us help.`
