AFFLICTIONS OF BELIEF: PART 3 -- WHAT'S BUGGING YOU?

THAT’S BAD!  NO, THAT’S GOOD!

There is a joke format called: That's Good, That's Bad or sometimes the reverse, That's Bad, That's Good. Here is a short example culled from The Simpsons: 

Old man: Take this doll, but beware; it carries a terrible curse.

Homer: Ooo, that's bad.

Old man: But it comes with a free serving of frozen yogurt

Homer: That's good!

Old man: The frozen yogurt is also cursed.

Homer: That's bad.

Old man: But it comes with your choice of toppings!

Homer: That's good!

Old man: The toppings contain potassium benzoate…

Homer: (confused look)

Old man: That's bad. Homer: Can I go now?

Here is a short, more traditional example:
"Did ya hear I got married?"
"Oh, that's good."

"No, that's bad! She's ugly!"
"Oh, that's bad."
"No, that's good! She's rich."
"Oh, that's good!" 

"No, that's bad! She won't give me a cent."

"Oh, that's bad."
"No, that's good! She bought me servants and a big house"
"Oh, that's good."

"No, that's bad! The house burnt down." 

"Oh, that's bad."
"No, that's good! She was in it."

         Probably could do a whole sermon on priorities, relationships and commitments among other issues based on that joke, but we won't. It is just here for illustration. If you chuckled at it... never mind.

Such jokes get me thinking about life and how events really fool us. Something happens that makes us happy and we believe that's good. Something else happens that makes us sad and we believe that's bad. But is that actually how life is. Are happy things that happen to us always good and sad things always bad? When we are healthy and prosperous is that always good? And when we suffer sickness, loss or disaster, is that always bad?

Something else to think about. 

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9.

SO WHAT’S BUGGING YOU

So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD and afflicted Job with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. Then Job took a piece of broken pottery and scraped  himself with it as he sat among the ashes.

His wife said to him, "Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!"

He replied, "You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?"
In all this, Job did not sin in what he said. Job 2:7-10

There you will worship man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or eat or smell. But if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul. When you are in distress and all these things have happened to you, then in later days you will return to the LORD your God and obey him. For the LORD your God is a merciful God; he will not abandon or destroy you or forget the covenant with your forefathers, which he confirmed to them by oath. Deuteronomy 4:28-31

[I realize that last quote from Deuteronomy was made by God through Moses specifically to the Jews. But all Scripture is given for enlightenment [2 Timothy 3:16] and I believe those words also apply to Christians and fit what I am about to say.]

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!

O Lord, hear my voice!

Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!

If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?

But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning. Psalm 130:1-6

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” Luke 19:10

When I say I came to believe in God from listening to the struggling last heartbeats of my doomed child, some say how? When they learn this was the seventh child my wife and I lost, they ask how can you believe in a God who would allow this? When I say the child lived briefly and died before the eyes of his mother, they ask how I find any good in this?

How?

Because I trust God has a purpose and uses all things to accomplish His purpose. I find nothing but good in what happened.  We did not abort any of these babies. We wanted them to be born and did all doctors instructed to accomplish their birth; therefore, we did not commit the sin of cutting short God's purpose for these beings. It was God who counted the seconds of their lives to his purpose and plan and I believe it was fulfilled even in their short existence in the womb and in this world.

How can I find any bad in this is the real question. Any bad I would find would simply be selfishness. I believe when babies and young children die, they go straight to the outstretched arms of Jesus, not into some limbo and certainly not to Hell. These babies were simply spared the grief and troubles of this world. They were given a "Get Out of Jail Card, Do not pass Go, do not collect $200", but instead come gain a greater treasure, eternal life in Heaven. My babies did not enter this world (at least not for very long), they were taken and they did not die, they live.

But what if one of them, or any of them, or all of them, had made it? What kind of life would they have had? They wouldn't have been abused, that was not my wife or my nature. However, they would have been subjected to a different set of values and beliefs, exposed to Atheism and even much superstition and the occult.  They would have lived with someone who was a stumbling stone to their salvation. If they had lived they may have lost their soul.

And if they had lived I may have never gained mine. So where is the bad?

Because of that long line of loss, I came to Christ and I changed. My father, seeing the change in me, came to Christ, and I am sure the change in him influenced others to seek the Lord. So where is the bad?

Then when all medical science said it was impossible, God allowed my wife to have three children, the second (again although totally impossible according to men) with no pre-birth medical attention. This presented a testimony to the Grace and Mercy of Our Lord, His power and also the power of prayer, for a whole church spent hours over months praying for that first living child as well as the second. So where is the bad?

We see things through a glass darkly here, don't we? We think because some suffering comes into our life, great or small, it is bad and how often to we blame God or question Him? Oh, sometimes we blame that other guy. We say, the Devil made me do it. But you know what, we aren't really giving the Devil his due. We're trying to escape our own failure and passing the blame to someone else.

And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will. And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:27-28

But often suffering and pain has a purpose we cannot see with human eyes. Sometimes we find out the purpose later, sometimes we never know the real reason on this earth. Let me give a couple of examples:

 Perhaps you have heard of a Dutch woman named Corrie Ten

Boom. She was a member of a Christian family in Holland who began hiding Jews from the Nazis, until someone ratted them out and they were arrested and thrown into concentration camps themselves, where most of the family died.

Corrie and her sister, Betsie, eventually landed in one of the worse of these places, called Ravensbruck.

At what seemed great risk, for guards stood outside the doors and could burst in at anytime, the sisters spent nights in the filthy barracks preaching the Gospel to the other women imprisoned with them, and bringing people to salvation. But in all the months and nights of doing this, for some odd reason, those guards never once came in and interrupted.

Each night, the sisters would pray out loud before going to sleep. Corrie would thank God for her shelter, for her food, for everything in her life, except one, until her sister said, "Corrie, aren't you going to thank God for the lice?"

She refused. She hated the lice, they tormented them all the time, itching, crawling and multiplying on their bodies. But her sister persisted and finally Corrie also began thanking God for the lice.

Later she discovered the reason those guards had never stopped their preaching and praying. There wasn't a single Nazi guard who was going to step inside those lice-infested cabins.

So, what's bugging you? What do you think God wouldn't allow if he were really a loving God with our best interest at heart? 

Let me give another:

Recently, because we had a newsworthy man with the conceit to compare himself to Lincoln, a TV network did a special on Lincoln saying they would answer questions such as "Was Lincoln an Atheist?" I didn't watch it, so I don't know what they said about the sixteenth President. But if they said he was an Atheist, they were wrong.   

 It is true Lincoln once said, "I am not a Christian. God knows I would be one." He explained he "did not read the Scriptures like

those clergymen in Springfield who opposed his election because of his skepticism".  Yet, Lincoln lived like he was Christian better than a lot who claimed to be. Still, he claimed he just couldn't understand the Gospel message. One of those closest to him, his law partner, Presidential secretary and long time bodyguard said: "the melancholy that dripped from him as he walked was due to his want of religious faith."

Then something happened one day that brought him the greatest sadness of his life. His son Willie got ill, lingered for some time and died. So ruined in spirit by this, Lincoln grieved every Thursday (the day of the week the boy died). Alone, seeing no one, he spent Thursdays in mourning, week after week, weeping and lamenting. What possible good can we see in this, the President so devastated by his child's death he is imprisoned by a shroud of depression?

The good was to come. The Rector of Trinity Church in New York, Dr. Frances Vinton, a family friend, came to visit. He was blunt when he was allowed to see Lincoln and found him slumped over lost in grief. He told Lincoln he had no right to this indulgence, but Lincoln was not hearing until the Doctor's next words: "Your son is alive in paradise with Christ, and you must not continue." 

Hardly moving, Lincoln said, "Alive? Alive? Surely, sir, you mock me."

Dr. Vinton replied, "No, Mr. President, it is a great doctrine of the church. Jesus himself said that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living."

Lincoln jumped to his feet, grabbed the Doctor in an embrace and through tears cried, "Alive! Alive! My boy is alive?" 

Something happened in Abraham Lincoln at that moment and he changed. 

Then in the midst of our bloodiest war, Lincoln stood at Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery to the fallen. What good could come of such somber events, I wonder? 

Preserved in the Ford Theater Museum is a letter from an Illinois Preacher who spoke to Lincoln shortly before his assassination. It reads: the clergyman said to Lincoln, "Mr. Lincoln, do you love Jesus?" Lincoln replied, "When I left Springfield I asked the people to pray for me. I was not a Christian. When I buried my son, the severest trial of my life, I was not a Christian. But when I went to Gettysburg and saw the graves of thousands of our soldiers, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ. Yes, I do love Jesus."

So what's bugging you? What sadness hides God's love from you?

Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you. If you suffer, it should not be as a murderer or thief or any other kind of criminal, or even as a meddler. However, if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name. For it is time for judgment to begin with the family of God; and if it begins with us, what will the outcome be for those who do not obey the gospel of God? And, "If it is hard for the righteous to be saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?"

So then, those who suffer according to God's will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good. 1 Peter 4:12-19

When you sit in a small room with two doctors and a nurse looking  intently at you like you are a bug pinned in an exhibit box, you wonder what is coming. Then the lead doctor (Dr. Goran

Rakocevic, right) touches you gently on the knee as he says you have an untreatable, incurable, progressive, ultimately fatal disease, it is something of a shock to the system, so to speak. Why in the world should I have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease. I was perfectly healthy, right? I exercised, ate right and lived clean. Now I was beginning a deterioration of my muscles, looking toward eventually being trapped in my own body and having something with an average life expectancy of 2 years. Hardly uplifting, right?

But oddly I felt no sorrow or apprehension about this. I had prayed to God a couple years for God to give me wisdom and insight into scripture. Now, my prayer was answered, for what more could I do now that physical abilities were diminished and failing but concentrate on reading the Bible? I doubt I would be here yakking away about the Word of God if I still had my body to indulge. This world is full of afflictions, do not let that deter you in your faith and belief.

The Photo at the top of this post is of my daughter Noelle's hands preparing a syringe during a medical mission in Ethiopia 2006 (Official U. S. Army Photo).