There are some people that come into our lives to
the sound of explosions; i.e. they don’t sneak in quietly. They
burst on to the pages of your story and disturb the comparitively quiet
simplicity of your reality. I met someone like that this past year. She
refused to take life sitting down. She asked the hard questions and refused to
settle for surface level answers. And as is so often true of these individuals,
the depth of their thoughts finds its reasons in some of the darkest trials and
pain to plague our sin-cursed race.
Pondering the answers to her questions and the
purpose of her sufferings forced me to re-evaluate the very nature of what I
believed. These and so many other seeming injustices forced me wonder about the
truth of God’s trustworthiness, of His goodness. When distance kills
relationships. When the ocean drowns a city. When the doctors give a death
sentence. When parents bury children. When planes crash into buildings. When
the cancer is stage four. When innocence is stolen from children before they
even understand the meaning of the word. When following Jesus feels like
a never-ending suicide mission.
How can God ask us to endure so much and still be
called good? Dare I even ask, what gives Him the right to demand that we
bear such heaviness?
This summer I rediscovered the greatness that is
Milton Vincent’s sermon series on forgiveness.[i]
Inevitably when we broach the subject of forgiveness we find ourselves studying
the cross of Christ, and here Pastor Vincent made a point that I’d never
considered before.
In Isaiah 53:5 it says: “But He was pierced through
for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for
our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed.” We know this
verse well, the one that tells us Christ died for our sins. But in the
overwhelming implications of verse 5 we often forget verse 4, which says:
“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows…”
Am I the only one who never actually processed that
verse? It had never occurred to me that Christ died for my hurts
and pain; part of him defeating sin necessitated him bearing not only
our individual sins, but also the consequences we bear as a result of living in
a sin cursed world: like sorrow and pain and grief. Christ’s care for our
aching souls goes so far beyond empathy!
He is personally and intimately acquainted with my hurts. In his death he took even that on Himself; He bore even the torrents of
my sin-tainted emotions unto death. Pondering this overwhelms me. And it
occurs to me that that (at least in part) is what gives Him the right.
Christ didn’t balk when faced with the weight of
all of humanity's sins and sorrows; He carried it all. It killed him.
Literally. He knows exactly what He asks of us when he allows trials roll into
our lives like tsunamis, leaving devastation & death in their wake. He gets
it. When He calls us to die to ourselves, to our comforts, and hopes, and
desires he knows the depth of what he asks and shares our heartbreak in
choosing obedience. He understands, because He himself died in obedience.
I’m coming to realize that my mind is not right,
that my perceptions of life and death and their definitions are somehow
off. My reasoning is tampered by the sinful state I was born into.
Slowly, but surely I trust that God is eradicating that sin in me as he
sanctifies me through these ever-present griefs and sorrows – these incessant
internal suicides – these "severe mercies."
I have longed to drown the torrents of my wild emotions – my pains and sorrows - in His truth. To be quieted by His love. To know Him
and to trust Him so unshakingly that when He asks me to die I do so
willingly knowing that because He said so: death will be better than what I have
called life.
And even as I write those words I am reminded of
the promise of Christ’s resurrection: that this thing that I have called death,
will surely end in life.
How marvelous that Christ rose again! He defied
death and conquered sin and sorrows so that our death, in Him, might also bring
about life. And that life will be far beyond what our earthly minds can fathom.
How comforting to know that because of Him, our death will result in life! He
didn’t have to give us that assurance. We actually deserve to die. He could
have just commanded us to die. But instead He takes our death and whispers the
promise of His resurrection to our broken souls, “you will live.”
[i] You
can listen to this sermon series here: http://www.cornerstonebible.org/resources/sermons/series/forgiveness
I promise it’s worth it. ALSO Vincent’s book, The
Gospel Primer, is probably the most influential book I’ve ever read on the
Gospel/Christian living. Seriously. As in, second only to the Bible. Read it.
