In His Name Devotionals
GOD'S CONCERN vs MY COMFORT
In His Name Devotionals
GOD'S CONCERN vs MY COMFORT
There is a strange but predictable thing that happens in the human mind during hard times and crises. It is something of a spiritual calculus that seeks to measure the ratio of Divine love to human suffering. By all human calculation, the greater my comfort for life, the greater my certainty that God knows and loves me; the greater my pain and struggle, the less reason I have to think that He is concerned about me.
That’s all wrong. Human circumstances have never been a reliable index either to a person’s spiritual status or to that individual’s value to God. For more than a dozen years, Joseph was either a slave or a prisoner in a country where he had no civil rights and no legal protection. By the calculus of my time and place, anything beyond a few days or weeks of suffering would be taken as solid proof that God had abandoned him.
Job lost his fortune, his health, and his friends. By the rule of inverse ratio of Divine love to human comfort, God had forgotten that good man. A faith-filled prayer should have healed him. That it didn’t would be taken as incontrovertible evidence for God’s failure in Job’s life, if not for his nonexistence.
Tamar was raped by Amnon. Samson was betrayed by a woman he desperately wanted to trust. Ruth’s husband died, and she had to fend for herself in a male-dominated culture. The unnamed man in John 9 was born blind. Prophets and martyrs of the church were put in dungeons, thrown to wild animals, and forced to watch their children be murdered.
If the relationship between Divine concern and human comfort really holds, not one person in the paragraph above was the object of God’s love.
For that matter, what would you think of a child born before his parents had been married nine months, shuttled from pillar to post during infancy, and forced to grow up under circumstances that would haunt him for his entire life? What if he died young—a victim of racial and religious bigotry?
If the alignment of God’s love and our good fortune are necessary to faith, the paragraph above means that Jesus should have renounced the whole spiritual “thing.”
What’s the point? The world’s calculus is wrong! And, you and I must be on guard against thinking like the world. Otherwise, we can easily find ourselves drawn into the trap of lending support to the false notion that woes justify unbelief.
