Do you ever feel like there is a disconnect between what we read in the Bible about God and what we experience in daily life?
I do. Some days it’s hard to believe that God is love. When I get word that a friend of mine came down with an incurable illness, or when I hear that my kids have been bullied, or when I am criticized in ministry (all true realities right now for me), I tend to push back from God rather than embrace him. I think the reason that is difficult to square the theology that “God is love” with my reality is because I have to discover God’s love in the context of evil.
God told Adam and Eve that death would come if they ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. We, like them, think the knowledge of evil is harmless…but it is deadly. The Biblical understanding of knowing is more than an intellectual grasping of the concept. It has more to do with experiencing evil in your life. This personal experience of evil that we all suffer from tends to make us hesitant to accept God’s love for us personally. We can kinda fake it at church or in Bible studies, but when we are in the grind of our own personal suffering from evil, it transforms the simple theology of “God is love” into an olympic effort to embrace it.
Yet there are three things that help me understand God’s love in the context of my personal suffering from the evil I experience this side of heaven.
Last week I posted the first part of my encouragement to embrace God’s love for me is in knowing that God Pursues me. I am encouraged to receive God’s love because the whole Bible reveals a God who pursues me with the sole purpose of experiencing his love for me. He is singularly focused on me entering a relationship with him for my benefit.
This week, I want to share the second thing that helps me embrace God’s love: The God of Love suffers.
2. God Suffers: God’s gift of the cross reminds me that God is willing to suffer immeasurably to reveal his passionate love for me. I wouldn’t give one of my daughters for anyone. I couldn’t do it. But God did. He is no stranger to suffering. He is a God of long suffering for the people he loves. The answer to seeing and experiencing God’s love for me in the midst of my suffering is not in demanding God prevent my suffering from happening or gaining psychological knowledge about the pathology of human suffering. It’s in recognizing that the suffering I undergo because of the evil I experience in the world has been addressed by the suffering of God’s Son on the cross. For me, the focus then shifts from, “Why me?” to “How can it be?” How is it that you loved me like that? Seeing God’s suffering helps me to focus on the wonder and mystery of God’s infinite love for me.
So what about you? How does being in relationship with a God who suffers for you encourage you to embrace his love?
