Those of you who have seen the classic movie Fiddler on the Roof remember the scene where Tevye, the main character, is walking on a dusty road, pulling both a milk cart and a lame horse. He says: “Ah, dear God, was that necessary? Did you have to make him lame just before the Sabbath? That wasn’t nice. It’s enough you pick on me — you bless me with five daughters and a life of poverty. That’s all right, but what have you got against my horse?” He continues: “Really, sometimes I think when things are too quiet up there, you say to yourself, ‘Let’s see what kind of mischief can I play on my friend Tevye.’” In another scene, Tevye seems to take special offense because the righteous seem to suffer as much as anyone else — some even suffer more than those who could care less about God. During one particularly bad day, he mutters: “I know, I know, we are the chosen people. But, once in a while, can’t you choose somebody else?”
Tevye discovered what we have all learned at one time or another: Life is hard, and much of the time it is difficult to understand and confusing. Evil seems to flourish and triumph, and good seems to get run over. We, like the prophet Jeremiah, raise the complaint: “You are always righteous, O Lord, when I bring a case before you. Yet I would speak with you about your justice: Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?” (Jeremiah 12:1).
How do we trust God when it seems like life is crushing us? If we are going to survive those times, there are some foundational truths to which we must commit ourselves. The first belief we must continue to commit ourselves to when facing suffering is this: God is good, even when life is bad. Habakkuk was a prophet during of the darkest days of Judah. King Josiah’s glorious reign and religious reform had ended. There was a moral decline in the nation. Babylon was rising to power and was an eminent threat to Judah. Like Jeremiah, Habakkuk complained: “How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted” (Habakkuk 1:2-4). Habakkuk is honest and transparent about his feelings toward God and how he is feeling about the evil and inequity in the world. He was confused. How can a righteous God seemingly overlook evil? How can a good God allow such evil to happen? How can a loving God allow his people to suffer? He questioned and he brooded, but when he came to the end of all his quarreling with God, he ultimately said, “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights” (Habakkuk 3:17-19).
At some point you have to come to the place where you stop demanding that you understand what God is doing and why. After airing your complaints and asking God to act, you ultimately have to trust God, even though you don’t understand and nothing make sense to you. You have to say with Habakkuk, “Even if everything continues to go wrong, I am going to trust you. Even if the basic needs of my life are not being met, I place my trust in you.” What is the alternative? Anger and despair. You can be bitter at God and angry at life, or in your hurt and confusion make a conscious decision to trust God, even though it doesn’t make sense right now.
Jill Briscoe tells the story of her lifelong friend Ann who married a Belfast policeman. She writes, “The first seven young men killed in those troubles long ago were brother Christians of Ann’s husband. I met one of their widows on this trip, and I wanted to say to her, ‘Well, where was God? Was he standing in the comer with his hands in his pockets? Why didn’t he look after his own?’” But rather than being bitter, she said, “What a blessing that it was our boys who were killed. They knew the Lord. Just imagine if it had been young policemen who didn’t know Christ.”
It didn’t hurt any less because they believed that. Their sense of loss was just as great. The confusion and grief were enormous. It was a needless tragedy, but they had an overriding faith that saw them through it. They trusted the goodness of God even in a bad situation. Ann herself had experienced pain and loss in her childhood. Briscoe says, “I think of Ann as a 15-year-old, an only child just losing her mother. She came into my youth group in Liverpool straight from the funeral. I said to her, ‘You all right, Ann?’ ‘Uh huh,’ she said. ‘Wrote a poem.’ And she handed me this:
I’m leading my child to the heavenly land
and guiding her day by day.
And I ask her now as I take her hand
to come home by a rugged way.
‘Tis not a way she herself would choose,
for its beauty she cannot see.
But she knows not what her soul would lose
if she trod not that path with me.
That is the choice: to choose to trust the goodness and love of God and live in hope, or turn from him in bitterness and live in despair.
The second belief we continually need to commit ourselves to when facing suffering is this: God can redeem the evil that comes into our lives. The cross is certainly the most vivid example of this truth. Seen by the disciples and others who loved Jesus, it was the most evil thing that could have happened. If ever there was a time when it seemed like God was not in control, this was the time. If ever they questioned God and wondered about his powerlessness and failure to act, this was the time. It was impossible for them to understand what God was doing. If you would have asked them, they would have stated with firmness and finality that no good could come of this crucifixion. Everything seemed to be in ruins. But God would have the final say. It wasn’t until Pentecost that Peter finally got it and proclaimed to the very ones who had plotted the crucifixion: “This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. . . . Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:23-24, 26).
The very plan of the evil one, which was to destroy God’s Christ, was turned back on him and used to redeem the human race and bring life to all. This is the same redemptive message we find in the book of Esther. One man in the Persian empire, named Haman, had a grudge against the Jews who were living there in exile. He brought charges against them to the king and asked for their annihilation. The king agreed, and Haman built a gallows on which to hang Mordecai, the one Jew whom he hated more than anyone else. But when Queen Esther heard of the plan, she went to the king to beg for her life and the lives of her people. The Bible says, “King Xerxes asked Queen Esther, ‘Who is he? Where is the man who has dared to do such a thing?’ Esther said, ‘The adversary and enemy is this vile Haman.’ Then Haman was terrified before the king and queen. . . . Then Harbona, one of the eunuchs attending the king, said, ‘A gallows seventy-five feet high stands by Haman’s house. He had it made for Mordecai, who spoke up to help the king. The king said, ‘Hang him on it!’ So they hanged Haman on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai” (Esther 7:5-10). Then it says, “Mordecai recorded these events, and he sent letters to all the Jews throughout the provinces of King Xerxes, near and far, to have them celebrate annually the fourteenth and fifteenth days of the month of Adar as the time when the Jews got relief from their enemies, and as the month when their sorrow was turned into joy and their mourning into a day of celebration. He wrote them to observe the days as days of feasting and joy and giving presents of food to one another and gifts to the poor” (Esther 9:20-22). It looked as though it was the darkest hour in their personal history. The entire race was on the verge of being destroyed, but Haman’s plan was turned back upon him. The feast to celebrate God’s reversal of fortunes was called the feast of Purim, and it is celebrated to this day among the Jewish people as they remember how God redeemed the evil which had been planned for them.
The third truth we need to commit ourselves to when facing suffering is: We must do the right thing, even when it does not seem to pay off. Obeying God when it is easy, and the results are visible and immediate is wonderful. But it means so much more when we are faithful and obedient even when nothing seems to come from it. The problem sometimes is that it might be that our obedience is the very thing that brings trouble and sorrow into our lives. Elizabeth Elliot is a woman who knows about pain and loss. As a young wife and mother, she was serving as a missionary in the Ecuadorean jungles. Her husband, Jim Elliot, and four other missionaries were trying to reach a remote tribe called the Aucas. They had worked long and hard to build a relationship of trust with them. But one sunny day on the bank of a river where their plane had landed, people from the tribe speared and killed all of the missionaries. It was an enormous tragedy, and one that could have left Elliot and the other wives wallowing in bitterness. But that was not the kind of person Elizabeth was. She was not simply resigned to her fate, she placed her trust in God and surrendered to God’s difficult will for her life. She lines out the difference between resignation to despair, and a surrender to God who is loving and good: “Resignation is surrender to fate; acceptance is surrender to God. Resignation lies down quietly in an empty universe. Acceptance rises up to meet the God who fills that universe with purpose and destiny. Resignation says, ‘I can’t,’ and God says, ‘I can.’ Resignation says, ‘It’s all over for me.’ Acceptance asks, ‘Now that I’m here, Lord, what’s next?’ Resignation says, ‘What a waste.’ Acceptance says, ‘In what redemptive way can you use this mess, Lord?’”
Elizabeth went on to faithfully serve the Lord and has seen the very people who killed her husband come to Christ. In fact, it was the death of her husband and the others that opened the way for the Gospel to be brought to the Auca tribe. Marge Saint also lost her husband Nate in that attack. The families returned to the tribe to share with them the good news of Jesus Christ. Marge Saint’s daughter Kathy was only an infant at the time. She shares her experience: “I remember at 15, I stood in the river where my father had died, and I was baptized by the man who killed him. That man is now the pastor of that tribe.”
Here were people who continued to do the right thing in an evil and painful circumstance. I’m sure it was the opposite of what they at times wanted to do at times. They did not know whether it would pay off or not, but they remained faithful to what God had called them to be.
Maybe you are in God’s waiting room right now. You don’t understand the situations that have brought you here. It doesn’t seem fair. You are wondering if God loves you or hates you. You’re not sure when you are going to get out of this waiting room. It is an unpleasant and unhappy place. You want this to be over and not have to wait any more. It is all you can do to obey the scripture that says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5). But this is not a time to just lay down and resign yourself to defeat and say, “It’s all over for me.” It is a time to rise up and say, “Now that I’m here, Lord, what’s next? In what redemptive way can you use this mess?”
Jill Briscoe says, “I remember a time when I was waiting for soon to become now. I went down in Oconomowoc to a little lake where we live, and I sat there very early in the morning, praying, pleading with God that my soon would become now. ‘God, I cannot see you working. What about all these prayers that people are praying? This is a terrible situation. What are you doing about it?’ God said to me, ‘Any fish in that lake?’ I looked at the lake, which was like glass, and I said, ‘Sure. Of course there are fish there.’ ‘How do you know? Do you have to see fish jump to believe they’re there, Jill?’ I remember sitting there for a long time until I could say to God, ‘If I never see a fish jump, I will believe they’re there and active. If I never see you answer a prayer, I will believe.’ We all have a choice when trouble comes knocking at our door. We can curse God and die, or we can trust God and grow.”
Rodney J. Buchanan
October 1, 2006
Mulberry St. UMC
Mount Vernon, OH
www.MulberryUMC.org
Rod.Buchanan@MulberryUMC.org
