Suffering, and questions about why God allows it, are the main thing Job and his friends talk about through the majority of the Bible book that bears Job’s name. We often say that it is a book about suffering. Since reading Philip Yancey’s book The Bible Jesus Read, however, I’ve realized Job’s story is actually about a whole lot more than suffering.
Yancey says that if you’d asked him what Job was about, he would have once said, “It’s the Bible’s most comprehensive look at the problem of pain and suffering” (p. 46). But then he took a closer look. Job asks all the questions we want God to answer about suffering, but then the book points us to a completely different way of looking at the problem.
The Stage Is Set
The book of Job begins by setting the stage for a dramatic story. We’re introduced to Job, a man who “was blameless and upright, and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1, quotes from WEB translation unless otherwise noted). He had ten children and exceedingly great wealth, as we’d expect such a good man to have in light of God’s promises to bless those who follow Him. And then something happened.
Unbeknownst to Job, he becomes the central figure in a wager between Yahweh (God’s proper name, see Ex. 3:14-15) and Satan (which means adversary). The “god of this world,” who actively opposes all Yahweh’s plans, comes before Yahweh and issues a challenge in response to a question.
Yahweh said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant, Job? For there is no one like him in the earth, a blameless and an upright man, one who fears God, and turns away from evil.”
Then Satan answered Yahweh, and said, “Does Job fear God for nothing? Haven’t you made a hedge around him, and around his house, and around all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will renounce you to your face.” (Job 1:8-11)
God holds up Job as an example of a faithful person. Satan challenges that Job only follows God because he gets something out of it. This begins what Yancey calls “a cosmic drama in heaven — the contest over Job’s faith” (p. 49). Satan has attacked God’s character, alleging that He basically bribes people to follow Him. God gives Job the opportunity to prove otherwise (p. 52). Read more →
I recently reread one of my favorite books, Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. And I found that he spends quite a bit of time talking about the theme of my blog—finding our true selves in the people God created us to be. I didn’t purposefully have Lewis in mind when I wrote that tagline, but I’d read Mere Christianity before and I’m sure that’s partly where the idea came from.
Yesterday, I was struggling to come up with an idea for today’s post. It’s hard to go wrong talking about C.S. Lewis, so I thought I’d share some of what he has to say about finding the truest versions of ourselves. Of course, given the sort of man that he was, it is impossible for him to talk about such a topic without pointing readers to God.
“The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs,’ all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented—as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. … I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.”
Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
It’s an interesting concept to think that that no matter how hard we might try on our own to be an individual, authentic self we will actually be moving away from our real personalities if we are not moving toward God. As the inventor of personality, God is the one best qualified to tell us what we are meant to be. It’s the potter and clay analogy—that God is the potter who decides what sort of vessel He is making us to be (Is. 29:15-16; Jer. 18:1-6).
Perhaps the idea of needing to turn to God to find ourselves sounds like it goes against free will. It does not. The very fact that we can reject God and try to be something other than what He intends attests to Him giving us a choice. But choosing anything other than Him just means we’re crippling our self-expression and rejecting the greatest path to personal growth. Finding ourselves shouldn’t be our focus, though. In fact, getting too caught-up in the self is a good way to lose track of our truest personality.
“At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most ‘natural’ men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.”
Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
There’s so much fullness in Christ that becoming like Him does not mean we all turn into little carbon-copies of each other. He made us to be gloriously different, and we learn exactly how to do that when we lose ourselves in Him. As Jesus said, “He who seeks his life will lose it; and he who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 10:39, WEB).
“But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away ‘blindly’ so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality; but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.”
One of the points that Lewis makes quite eloquently is that the work Jesus is doing in us involves a whole lot more than simply making us better people. A lot of us come to Jesus and think we can basically stay as we are. We try to become “good” (well, good-ish) when in fact God as a much higher plan for us. He wants us to be perfect, and that means a deeper change.
“The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call ‘ourselves,’ to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be ‘good.’ We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way—centered on money or pleasure or ambition—and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.” — Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
This sounds drastic, and it is. It may also sound impossible, but don’t despair. God knows what raw material you’re working with and He’s not worried about how far you are from perfection when you first come to Him. In fact, He does some of His best work with the people who the world would describe as the most hopeless (though of course He can work with anyone who is willing to let Him).
If we try to do things on our own, we’re settling for less than the best. That includes settling for a version of ourselves that is missing something essential from our Creator. If we go through life focused on self, even if that simply means trying to be good apart from God, we will not find happiness. But, to quote the final line of Mere Christianity, “look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
The quotes I took from Mere Christianity are all found near the end of the book (several from the final chapter). If you’d like to read everything leading up to them, I highly recommend this book. Here’s a link where you can buy it. (Please not that this is an affiliate link, which means if you click and make a purchase I’ll receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.) If you’d like to read Mere Christianity without buying it, the full text is available online.
Do you ever feel stuck in the past and discouraged by how hard it is to move forward? You’re a Christian and you know that’s supposed to give you hope, but somehow that just doesn’t seem to be the case.
It’s disheartening to feel as if you can’t move forward from your past or that there is no way out of your present. Especially if you feel like you’ve done something so wrong or your circumstances are so hopeless that there’s no point trying to fix things. These sorts of worries weigh us down emotionally and spiritually. They can make us feel heavy, foggy, and hopeless (and may lead to other symptoms of depression as well).
Jesus never promised that life as a Christian would be without trials. He only promised to help us through those trials, and since He has all power and authority in heaven and earth this is an incredible promise (Matt. 28:18). It can be easy, though, to lose sight of the big picture and get distracted by all sorts of nasty things that cling to us, weighing us down and making it hard to keep moving forward. We might wonder how to get unstuck, or even if it’s possible.
The Cage Door Is Open
One thing I’ve realized is that most of the things that are holding onto me are also, at least to some extent, things that I’m holding onto right back. Jesus promises to make us free and to wash us clean of any sin. If we stay in a cage or keep rolling in the dirt, then it’s not because He has failed in some way. It’s because we’re still susceptible to the attacks of the enemy and the pulls of the world.
I don’t say this to make us feel guilty or ashamed (that’s another thing that weighs us down, and shame is not a productive emotion). I want to encourage you to shift your perspective. Instead of seeing yourself as a victim trapped in a locked cage made from whatever’s holding on to you (fear, past sins, personal shortcomings, etc), you can picture yourself as someone in an open cage where God is holding the door and asking you to come out. He knows it’s hard. He knows it’s frightening. He knows there are often circumstances outside your control that keep pulling you backwards. But He isn’t giving up and He’ll be there patiently helping you for as long as it takes. Read more →
What sort of thing makes God pay attention to a human being? Is it loud shouting from morning to evening, as the prophets of Baal did in 1 Kings 18? or putting yourself in danger so He’ll save you, as Satan counseled Christ to do in Matthew 4? Or wearing Bible quotes on your clothes and making sure people know how much money you give to the church, much like the Pharisees did in Matthew 23?
Clearly, those are all horrible examples. The first comes from people who turned their backs on the one true God, the second from the adversary himself, and the third from religious leaders Christ condemned for their legalism. But do we ever try anything similar, thinking that we need to sing longer, preach louder, or do more in order to make God notice us?
It’s easy to fall into this trap, especially in a culture where we’re constantly told we need to stand out to get ahead. However, the things that make us stand out to the world aren’t necessarily the same things that catch God’s eye. There are several places in the Bible where God describes what type of person He will pay attention to, and it’s not always what we might think.
Sigh and Cry
I’ve talked about the practice of lament quite a bit in the past few weeks, so it makes sense to start there (see “Learning How To Lament” and “Trusting God When You’re Confused By Him: A Study of Lamentations 3“). Lament is a prayer of painful complaint, where you bring complicated emotions to God and re-affirm that you trust Him even when you’re hurt and confused. It’s most likely what these people Ezekiel writes of were doing:
and he called to the man clothed in linen, who had the writer’s inkhorn by his side. Yahweh said to him, “Go through the middle of the city, through the middle of Jerusalem, and set a mark on the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry over all the abominations that are done within it.”
To the others he said in my hearing, “Go through the city after him, and strike. Don’t let your eye spare, neither have pity. Kill utterly the old man, the young man, the virgin, little children and women; but don’t come near any man on whom is the mark. Begin at my sanctuary.” (Ezk. 9:3-6, all quotes from WEB translation)
You can read the context for this in Ezekiel 8 through 11. Ancient Israel had once again departed from God and He intended to punish them, but a certain group of people caught his eye. He marked the people who recognized and lamented the abominations done within their nation and even within the Lord’s sanctuary.
God tells us that He is unchanging, the same yesterday today and forever. If in the past He was looking for people who cared deeply about His ways and were heartbroken when others do evil, then we can assume He is still looking for the same today. One way to get God’s attention is to join Him in grieving over the abominable things done in the world around us.
Yahweh says, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build to me? Where will I rest? For my hand has made all these things, and so all these things came to be,” says Yahweh: “but I will look to this man, even to he who is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at my word.” (Isaiah 66:1-2)
God is not impressed with wealth, pride, and power. He doesn’t need us to build more impressive temples and churches, or give more impressive offerings. He just wants us to be the kind of people He can work with; the sort who will listen to Him and recognize how much we need Him.
Humans tend to think that we need to do something impressive to be noticed, but that’s not how God operates. Instead, He chooses people wise enough to know that they are foolish, weak, lowly, and nothing without Him (see “Growing In The Wisdom From God” and 1 Corinthians 1:25-29). He gives the kingdom of heaven to those who are “poor in spirit” (Matt. 5:3). Those who fear the Lord and honor His name are treated as His own special possession (Mal. 3:16-17). If you want to get His attention, then you have to get out of your own way and be vulnerable with Him.
There’s a verse in Proverbs that says, “Yahweh’s eyes are everywhere, keeping watch on the evil and the good” (Prov. 15:3). There’s nothing hidden to Him, even what’s inside us (Jer. 16:17; 17:10). He is able to see everything, and He’s looking for something specific.
For Yahweh’s eyes run back and forth throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him. (2 Chr. 16:9)
The Hebrew word for heart can refer to our whole inner man, and “perfect” means complete, whole, safe, and at peace (lebab, H3824, and shalem, H8003). God is far more concerned with our inner man than the outer appearance (1 Sam. 16:7), and it catches His eye when we’re whole-heartedly seeking Him.
He doesn’t just take notice for no reason, either. He looks for these sorts of people so that He can act powerfully on their behalf. It would be more than enough just to have the Creator of the universe notice us but He goes several steps further. He enters into our lives and shows Himself strong for us when we’re seeking a relationship with Him.
Sins separate us from God. Removal of sins is needed for us to have a close relationship with God, which is one reason Christ died to take away sin. When we “miss the mark” of righteousness, we can repent and ask for forgiveness, and Christ will keep cleansing us of sin so we can be in God’s presence. That does not, however, mean we shouldn’t try to do what God says is right. Jesus said that if we love Him, we will keep His commandments (John 14:15, 21; 15:10). And as we keep growing toward perfection and remain faithful to Him, He considers us righteous.
Yahweh’s eyes are toward the righteous. His ears listen to their cry. Yahweh’s face is against those who do evil, to cut off their memory from the earth. (Psalm 34:15-16)
Peter quotes this in his first epistle, leaving no doubt that these words are relevant for New Covenant Christians as well as the psalmist of old (1 Peter 3:8-12). Being righteous involves loving God and doing what He says. And that simple act of obedience and faith is enough to catch God’s seeing eye and listening ear.
If we want to draw closer to God, we can’t rely on our own way of doing things or on conventional human wisdom. We must do things God’s way. The things that catch His attention are the things that make us more like Him. He will respond when we humbly seek Him, when we’re heartbroken over what breaks His heart, when we’re whole-hearted before Him, and when we pursue righteousness so that we can fellowship with Him.
A couple of weeks ago, we talked about the practice of lament. It’s something we rarely discuss in modern Christianity, but it makes up more than 1/3 of the psalms and you can find lament throughout the rest of scripture as well. Instead of hiding their pain, people who lament take it to God in prayer. They turn to Him, bring their complaint in an honest, heartfelt way, ask boldly for help and then, equally boldly, choose to trust in God. I ended that first post about learning how to lament with a quote from my favorite passage in Lamentations:
This I recall to my mind; therefore I have hope. It is because of Yahweh’s loving kindnesses that we are not consumed, because his compassion doesn’t fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. “Yahweh is my portion,” says my soul. “Therefore I will hope in him.” (Lam. 3:21-24, all quotes from WEB translation)
This passage is lovely and hopeful, but it’s not the whole story of Jeremiah’s lament. It’s not even his concluding thought for this particular poem. Lament isn’t about convincing yourself to be happy. It’s about trusting God even when you’re not sure you want to. It’s about inviting Him to help you deal with hurt, loss, confusion, anger, and other complex, painful emotions. Hope is part of it, a key part, but there’s a lot more going on as well.
Feeling as If God Is Failing You
The third poem of Lamentations (each of the 5 chapters in this book is a separate poem) begins with the words, “I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.” Unlike other poems in Lamentations, Jeremiah doesn’t start by talking about all of the Lord’s people and how their sufferings affect them. This is about him and what God has done to him, personally. Jeremiah begins this poem talking about how it feels to believe that God is targeting him in particular for intense suffering. Read more →
I was reading Psalm 119 the other day and one of the verses that caught my eye reads, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I may learn your statutes” (Psalm 119:71, all quotes from WEB translation). Most of us don’t think it’s good when we’re depressed, chastened, weakened, oppressed, and bowed down (those are all meanings of the Hebrew word anah, H6031, which this translation renders “afflicted”). In fact, we’re pretty sure those things sound terrible, especially now that we’re all experiencing some of them as a result of the current pandemic. And yet, this psalmist said affliction was “good” because what they endured helped them learn the Lord’s statues (choq, H2706,could also be translated ordinance, limit, or law).
There’s no getting around it. Christianity is tough. When you think about it, though, it’s not any tougher than life outside the faith and if you’re inside you have God’s help so that balances things out in Christianity’s favor. Jesus promised us His help, presence, and protection but He also assured us that we would face trials, persecution, and suffering. Better teachers than I have tried to explain why — The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis and Where Is God When It Hurts? by Philip Yancey, for example — but one thing we can’t get around is the fact that pain is a part of life. And that’s true whether you’re a Christian or not.
One of the ways Christianity helps make sense of suffering is by saying it is a product of a world that has gone wrong. God didn’t want things to be this way, but they are now and until He comes back to set things right He’s going to find ways to make good come out of afflictions.
Delight in the Law
Psalm 119 is an acrostic psalm divided into 22 stanzas, one for each letter in the Hebrew alphabet. There are several verses within this psalm that talk about affliction, and we find the first in the zayin stanza.
Remember your word to your servant, because you gave me hope. This is my comfort in my affliction, for your word has revived me. (Psalm 119:49-50)
A later verse in the lamed stanza puts this idea even more strongly:
Unless your law had been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction. I will never forget your precepts, for with them, you have revived me. (Psalm 119:92-93)
It is not just knowing or obeying God’s law, but finding joy in it that helps get us through tough times. All the knowledge of His words we can gather won’t do us much good unless we really care about what He tells us. But when we hold fast to Him — and by extension His word and the things that He cares about — it’s possible to find comfort, joy, and help even in afflictions. The psalmists did, and we can too. Read more →
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