One of the dangers in trying to blog about things like suffering or sanctification (i.e., the process of a Christian becoming more and more like Christ) is that given the very limited space there is a temptation either on my part to give a pithy post or for you, the reader, to think you will find a simple answer about things that do not by their nature lend themselves to simple or pithy approaches.
My pastor, Skip Ryan, used the following illustration last week in our order of worship, which I found very helpful in grasping some of the pathos and psychology involved in growing up in Christ.
As we grow in Christ, we become aware of two things with respect to our discussion here. First, we grow in our awareness of the holiness of our Triune God, it is a holiness that is full of awe for us. At the same time, we become increasingly aware that we are distinctly not like God in this respect. In fact, some of the most mature Christians are those who are painfully aware of the great incongruity that exists between God and us.
The thing that often happens is that as we grow in our awareness of God’s holiness and our sinfulness, our knowledge of Christ and the salvation that he brings us in Himself somehow stays stagnant, a stale proposition caught between the cogs of rationality and logic. While rationality and logic and propositions are absolutely essential to Christianity, they are easily exhausted and surpassed when the subject matter is the Triune God and His saving works on behalf of His people. To put it another way, our apprehension of Christ does not grow proportionately with the awareness of God’s holiness and our sinfulness.
So why does the Cross remain locked away, increasingly just a proposition of the mind? Part of the answer to this question would seem to lie in the fact that Christ beacons us to come and die with Him and we avoid suffering with all that we are. In other words, Christ will have himself found in suffering. When we avoid it, we should not be surprised that we do not find Christ, and that the Cross – the pinnacle of suffering and glory – is reduced and diminished into the void of propositions.
“Christ died for the sins of the world”. That is not only a proposition, but a redemptive historical matter of fact. He who bled the ground red at Gethsemane anticipating the blood he would finally shed upon the Cross outside Jerusalem is redeeming and has redeemed even suffering. That does not mean that you should just quote a Bible verse when all Hell breaks loose in your life. It does mean that the God who created and is recreating the world is in the midst of that chaos. The God whose Spirit hovered over this world when it lie formless and void in chaos, that One spoke and life and order emerged.
That God, our Lord Jesus, speaks now into the formlessness and voids of our own lives with the full undeniable purpose of transforming and renewing us into the unblemished likeness of our Maker. He is able, even to give us hope in hopelessness, light when our eyes would seem as though they were gouged from our heads. He loves this world that much. May we move towards Him as His people in the chaos to find that He wields not a battle-axe but a scalpel towards us.
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