Pain and joy pt. 5: Two roads

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”--Matthew 22:34-40

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.--Galatians 5:16-23

 Last time I ended with an example drawn upon the account of Jesus' crucifixion in Luke 23.  On either side of Jesus hung criminals; guilty of what is not known, but the incredible difference in their reaction to Jesus dying between them hangs as an incredible illustration of the two incredibly different ways that we react to pain and suffering in our lives.  Two men, both about to die, both right there with the one Man in all the universe that might do anything to help them.  One of the criminals yells at Jesus and demands that He do what He can to save his life, to let him down from the cross.  He does not want salvation in the sense that Christ offers it to anyone; he wants to use Jesus to get what he wants right now--in this case, avoidance of death and the end of this particular moment of pain.  He clings to his life, and so, he loses it and with it, hope.

The other criminal does the opposite: he admits his guilt and asks only that Jesus remember him when He comes into what will be His.  He humbles himself and lays his fate, as quickly as it is coming upon him, at the feet of a man who is dying just as painfully right next to him.  And Jesus' reaction is truly a moment of bittersweet triumph: this man, guilty of only God knows what at this point in history, would be with Jesus in heaven because he refused to cling to his life and his desires, but gave them up knowing that they were worthless.

I want to look at the incredible contrast in the second passage above, Galatians 5:16-23.  We see the fruit of the desires of our flesh laid against the fruit of the Spirit.  In other words, the result of pursuing what we naturally want in our state of being separated from God, versus the result of the Spirit's work in us to recreate us in the image of Jesus.  Left to our own devices, we run after things that bring us no life, no lasting joy, nothing resembling real happiness if viewed in the long term and in real life without blinders.  These are what the Bible calls idols, and they can take virtually any form, especially in modern society where literal idol worship is supplanted with the self.



Ancient societies (or even current less-advanced cultures elsewhere in the world) worshiped idols for the purpose of seeking to bring better harvests, fertility, riches, love, health, and so forth.  They believed that through the proscribed worship, they could influence these gods and get them to act on their behalf.  Of course, these tended to be gods who could not manage to feed themselves without a bunch of humans piling food on an altar, so exactly how such a god could be expected to influence something as complicated as weather patterns or the human reproduction system remains a mystery...but I digress.

Nowadays we have decided to cut out the middleman and make, if not literally ourselves, then our desires into our idols.  Some of those idols take forms that we have no trouble recognizing as destructive, like drug addiction and alcohol abuse, but there are plenty of forms that we are generally okay with or even encourage.  Everything from our jobs and the way we spend our money, to what and how we eat, and even our relationships, families, and sexuality are idols that possess our hearts and minds.  And we see the result of that in Paul's words: Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.  

Of course, we have no shortage of all these things in our society.  In certain cases it's become taboo to point to them as being negative--of course, one must be in full-throated support of teaching children that homosexuality, transexuality, etc. is good and fine and something to consider to avoid being called a hateful bigot, let alone the dreaded name "judgmental" coming down on anyone holding the behavior of the typical American against Scripture.  We like to view ourselves not in comparison to that, certainly not in comparison to a holy and righteous God who created us and is redeeming His creation, but in comparison to the weaknesses of others.  We cluck our tongues at those who are lost in the depths of addictions we can scarcely imagine, without realizing that we are just as dead in our sins and just as lost.  But those works of the flesh build as we close our ears to the Word and rage against a God that would set us free to taste real life, real joy.  

It's true enough that Proverbs says it twice: There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death. 

This is why God has allowed pain to exist in His rebellious creation: to show the folly of worshiping something other than Himself, to break our hands free of holding onto that which will end.  But how we react to it leads us either deeper into those works of the flesh, or into bearing the fruit of the Spirit.  Not that we are completely A or B (I certainly know that I have to deal with those "works" all the time), but you can't embrace your earthly desires unrepentantly and expect to find yourself a regenerated believer in Christ at the end of the day.  I've been fascinated by that turn of phrase, though: what people do in service to their sinful desires is "works," something they are doing, but what Christ does in them is "fruit," something they show because of what is done in them.  Active rebellion versus an actively loving, pruning, moving God.

In the face of pain, one big tendency we have is to embrace cynical hopelessness (if we've rejected the idea of God at all) or to become angry at God.  I would argue that even many who do reject the idea of God are, in reality, taking the "angry at God" position because if there is a God, He certainly isn't creating a universe to their liking.  "If God were good, He wouldn't let x happen."  But this belief makes God...well, not God.  It makes me God, and God into my servant, there to serve at my beck and call.  The Gospel is that we are sinful and rebellious, and deserving of death, and yet God has moved to restore us, to make us whole and happy and remind us that He is our Father and He loves us.  

The interesting thing about people who take up this position is that generally they take the position of demanding some form of justice, the old "it's not fair" that any parent will recognize.  The foolishness of such a stance is a level beyond, and shows just how little we really understand about our relationship with God apart from the Word.  If the Gospel is true (and that is, after all, my presupposition), then there is only one thing that we are owed by God: hell.  It's Romans 6:23: For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.  The Father did not send the Son to die on the cross and rise again because He owed it to us.  He did it because He loves us.

In the book of Genesis, we see Joseph, Jacob's most favored son, sold off into slavery by his brothers.  He goes through a series of highs and lows until he ends up as second in command of the entire Egyptian empire, and eventually, face to face with his own brothers in a situation where he could have done essentially whatever he wanted to them without fear of earthly repercussion.  But he embraces them, weeps with them, gives them food and tells them to bring the rest of the family down.  He does great good to those who did him great evil, because he recognizes that God's purposes are working no matter what anyone else may try to do.  

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.--Genesis 50:20

But this is not how most people see their lives.  They regard themselves as generally good, but in reality they simply are satisfied for the moment and haven't found any reason to lash out beyond their day to day routines.  When those are disrupted, then things change.  And so people sink deeper into their depravities and sins and lustful desires.  I've always liked the way C.S. Lewis put it in The Weight of Glory:

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Thanks be to God, then, that He has graciously made a way out. 

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.--Ephesians 2:1-10

This is why it is absolutely crucial to understand pain not in the context of how it makes you uncomfortable or angry or disrupts your life, but in how pain is a demonstration of God's love for us.  Love is at the center of God's law--the greatest commandment, after all, is that we are to love God with all of our being, and the second one is that we are to love our neighbors the way we love ourselves. Indeed, in Jesus’ teachings we come to understand the deeper truth: the entire law, ultimately, is about love, and it does not work except in that we love God above all other things. A man who loves God with all his heart, soul and mind does not have to be told “Don’t steal from your neighbor” because that would damage that love. He doesn’t have to be told “Don’t lie” because he loves the Author of all truth, and the truth is a part of his being. He doesn’t have to be told “Hey, that guy over there, who just lost his house in a tornado and has no food or money and by the way he also got fired that morning? You should probably go help him” because his words and deeds seek after every way to love God, and he reflects that love towards those around him. In this sense, the law of the Old Testament can be understood not simply as a penal code where “if you do/don’t do thus and so, you will be punished,” but as a law in the sense of science: a governing principle that expresses the way something functions by its very nature. This is what the law was supposed to be, and yet, because we are born sinful, we rebel against it daily, and we require God’s intervention to turn us toward a new path.

This is why churches that teach “If you just believe hard enough, pray hard enough, give enough, etc., then God will give you money and health and good times” rub me the wrong way so thoroughly: it turns the relationship we have with God from one where are the one saved by the gift of God's grace through faith, that faith to believe itself being a gift, to one where we can perform certain actions in order to make God and the universe bend to our individual will.  Not only is that unbiblical, there is little difference between this and offering up a sacrifice to the village gods in hopes of a good rainy season.  It is the belief that we can generate a positive balance between us and God, where God owes us something.  I will repeat it for emphasis: the only thing God owes any man is death and hell.  His grace is a gift, one I am grateful for.

It is rather amazing to look at how God has used my relationship with my wife to show me pictures of my relationship with Him.  My wife recently had surgery, and the recovery has proven to be a difficult one for her.  My job as her husband is to love and strengthen her, to give her someone to lean on in these kinds of times, and yet she struggles in her pain to see anything but pure frustration.  As I help her through it, bring her medicine and help her find her strength, I feel the Spirit speaking gently to me that this is how God works in me through my own pain: He provides strength and gentle healing, He is patient even when I am not, He is always giving what I need every day to make it to the next.  Not because He owes it, but because He loves me.

And in this, that thin line between the frustration of pain and the joy of knowing the living God can be glimpsed and crossed: if pain serves to point out the folly of the world and the glory and love of my Father, then I will not fear it.  Not that I will embrace it either; Christianity is not a call to some sort of masochism.  In Acts when Jesus' apostles were scourged by the Sanhedrin, they rejoiced not simply at suffering, but that they were able to "suffer for the sake of the name."  That is, they endured a trial in such a way that it gave glory to Christ.  The Spirit empowered them to surrender to God's will in breaking them of their fearfulness, their attachment to worldly things and in strengthening them to give everything of themselves over to the ministry of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  It's why Jesus instructed them in John 12:25, "Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life will keep it for eternal life." 

It's why I'm writing this, and saying to those who read it: look to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, and find your real life, joy, and peace in Him.  Surrender to Him every aspect of your life, all the things that have been producing all those works of the flesh because all there is to find there is frustration, pain, and ultimately, death.  That fruit of the Spirit that comes in giving up our idols and addictions is life-giving and refreshing.  Let God's loving hands pry your grip on this world loose, because only in giving up our clinging to this life can we have true life.