A WORD TO SINNERS LIKE ME
I’m
sorry if life is so painful for you now and I’m sad even if you’ve
brought much of your trouble on yourself. I’ve dug a lot of holes for
myself down the years and I’ve often thought that when you’re hurt by
someone else’s wrong (and not your own) you can console yourself a bit
by thinking you’ve entered into the kind of suffering Jesus experienced
but when your guilt hurts you, that sort of stabilizing truth isn’t open
to you.
There’s
not a bit of doubt in my mind that God cares that we experience pain
and loss even when we “deserve’’ it. Judges 10:15-16 explicitly says
so. The book is all about Israel getting what they ‘’deserved’’ (I’m sure you’ve read it). God’s redemptive response is to bring judgment on them and when they turned to him he began the rescue.
The
point of particular interest is that even while they were under foreign
domination God saw it and didn’t like it. That is, found no pleasure in
their pain even though it was the pain of “just punishment’’. It’s said
of him that he “could bear Israel’s
misery no longer.’’ Isaiah 63:9 (there’s a bit of textual debate about
this verse) tells us in all their affliction he was afflicted. The
Jewish Publication Version says, “In all their trouble he was
troubled.’’
But
beyond specific texts his incarnation in Jesus makes it clear he cares
when we hurt. Your analogy with your children is legitimate—you’d feel
their pain so why should it surprise us that he does. You’d go to rescue
them so why would it surprise us if he did. The basics, I think, are
beyond honest dispute.
The
problem is the complexity of some situations. If for some good reason, a
reason your children or your friends or observers couldn’t fathom, you
judged that the immediate rescue of one of your children would prevent
you doing good, a larger, more pervasive good, for your other
children—if for that good reason you didn’t move to rescue him that
would generate further pain.
But even if you didn’t move to rescue him it wouldn’t mean you were being vindictive or even harsh and it certainly wouldn’t mean that you didn’t feel pain about him.
I
don’t believe, and I think the scriptures forbid us to believe, that
God insists on dishing out a dollar’s punishment for a dollar’s sin all
the time. [That’s a good legalist view but it isn’t God’s view.] A
psalmist thought that God didn’t punish us as much as our sins deserve. I
wonder what we’re to make of that? In our most contrite moments we feel
the same way. Now and then we’re convinced he should simply bury us and
go off and forget us. We’re often guilt-ridden and that may not be the
direct action of God at all. A lot of our pain is self-inflicted though
God has long lifted his hand off of us. [This generates further good
questions for another time perhaps.]
I’m
perfectly satisfied that we should ask God to help us out of our
trouble. Get a modern speech version—loose as a goose—and read through
the psalms without trying to understand them—no study, just a thoughtful
reading—and see how often psalmists confess sin and ask him to be kind
to them though they have not been faithful.
When
you’re hanging by your thumbs it doesn’t matter after a while that you
got yourself there. We can’t help wanting the pain to stop. Only the
truly impenitent, only the people (whoever they are) who have no heart
for God and don’t care that they have no heart for God and who want
simply to use him—only they have no “right’’ to ask him for rescue.
Those who are in covenant with him and regret their wrong, when they
speak to God, speak to their covenant Father and ‘’expect’’ to be
forgiven and helped. You’d want your wayward child to come to you even
if you see in the end for good reasons that you can’t change things for
him.
Will
God rescue you from your present trouble? Who can say? But you’ve been
rescued before and know it (Psalm 124) but you may have been rescued
repeatedly and didn’t know it or recognize it. If things don’t change
in that visible way we want them to change it won’t mean he’s holding a
grudge or that he’s being the flinty “sin in—punishment out to the nth
degree, come what may’’ type judge. He’s never that and he never was.
We
want the pain gone, of course, but if we have a heart for him at all,
it’s his good will we want and the marker that he’s taken us back to his
heart is that easing of our pain and trouble. Some kids may not care
what their fathers or mothers think about them so long as he/she bails
them out of every jam they get themselves into. But kids with a heart
want the good will and acceptance as well as the rescue that is an expression of the good will.
Still,
they want the pain removed and however stupid they’ve been we feel
their pain. All of these illustrations—true to life and even true to the
life of God—deal with only one aspect of the father’s relationship to one child;
his tenderness and affection. And here’s a truth we don’t always care
to hear: he has a responsibility toward the child to help him grow in
all the ways that would make him good for the family and whoever he works with. God has more than one child and they all have needs! That complicates things.
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