“Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), so that the thoughts from many hearts may be revealed. ”
Last Sunday we heard Simeon prophecy, “a sword will pierce through your own soul,” to Mary. In my sermon, I spoke about God piercing the hearts of his children and even causing them to fall when we begin to trust in the wrong things or walk down the wrong paths. This chastening is painful, yet is intended to draw us back to the place of putting our hope in God and God alone. We frequently pursue something other than God, and God is faithful to keep correcting us, because he knows that only in him will we find the anchor of our souls.
Yet this raises difficult questions. Is everything bad that happens to me God’s chastening? Is God the author of evil? Is my suffering his fault? These questions seem to follow from the idea that God pierces the hearts of his children. Yet even though these questions seem to follow, the Bible testifies that God does not cause evil and he does not seek to harm or destroy. Much of the suffering we experience is not his chastening; it is instead the result of our sinful actions, the natural product of a sinful world, the effect of other’s sin, or the direct assaults of the devil. In other words, God does not harm us; his chastening is not the same thing as the evil we suffer.
Yet in the mercy and wisdom of God, even those evil things that God has not authored are captured by God and turned into instruments of his mercy, correction, and faithfulness. The early church was so convinced of this that they proclaimed, “O blessed fall, that gained for us so great a Redeemer!” We see this most magnificently in the cross, where Satan sought to destroy God himself, and yet God used Satan’s attack to accomplish the redemption of the world.
And so, as we look at the pain in our own lives - broken families, lost jobs, loved ones who die, sin that causes shame - we do not say, “God did that.” He is not the author of evil and suffering. But even as we declare that he did not cause the evil, we can always say, “Yet he will take this evil, and transform it into mercy and goodness!” The greatest attacks of the devil can become those tools that God uses to pierce us, so that our hearts would rest in him and him alone. When confronted with suffering, we may not be able to say why it happened (other than the basic explanation that the world is fallen), but we can always say that God will use it to bring our hearts to a place of rest in him. And so we are left with a question: Am I allowing suffering to harden my heart, or I am clinging all the harder to Jesus because of it? When suffering becomes something that causes us to cling to Jesus, it loses its power, even if it still hurts deeply.