Editorial
From the Newsletter of Revesby Presbyterian Church
August 2008
Rev Dr Peter Barnes
I sometimes get asked impossible questions from people who want to know exactly what God is doing in a particular situation. They may have to decide about a business venture, for example, and they want to know the mind of God. They tend to think along the lines of ‘This venture is not going well at the moment. This must mean that I should never have gone into this business. God must be displeased with me for some reason.’ Or perhaps they have fallen sick, and they want to know if God is angry with them. All this seems to be a Protestant version of William George Ward’s desire in the 19th century to have an infallible papal pronouncement delivered to his breakfast table every morning with the Times newspaper. Life on this earth just can never be lived with that kind of day-to-day, even moment-by-moment, certainty.
Usually one finds that there are two problems with this whole approach. First, people ask for more revelation than God has actually given. Secondly, they usually link this with some kind of blessing for guessing God’s ‘extra revelation’ and cursing for failing to guess this.
When something goes wrong in our lives, we invariably – and rightly – want to link this to the issue of sin. So, for example, the disciples asked Jesus whether the man born blind had sinned in his mother’s womb or his parents had sinned (John 9:2). When Pilate killed some Galileans who were making sacrifices and when a tower in Siloam fell over and killed 18 people, the issue of the connection between sin and suffering was again raised (see Luke 13:1-5). The extensive debates in the book of Job likewise deal with this same subject. Overall, the Bible’s teaching is that without sin, there would have been no suffering in the world, but that we are not guaranteed a certain amount of suffering because of a certain amount of sinning.
However, all suffering should remind us of the Fall, and of God’s judgment. Jesus denied that the Galileans whom Pilate killed and those who perished under the tower of Siloam were the worst offenders in Galilee or Jerusalem but He did add: ‘unless you repent you will all likewise perish’ (Luke 13:3, 5). You and I may not always know why we are suffering in a particular instance, but we can know the purpose of that suffering. We may not be certain why God sent a certain providence in our direction, but we do know how He expects us to respond to it. As John Calvin put it: ‘In short, all the miseries which we endure are a profitable invitation to repentance.’
Some suffering is directly related to sin. When David’s first son born to Bathsheba died, that was God’s chastening of David for his sin. When Saul was removed from the kingship, that was God’s punishment on Israel’s first king because of his disobedience. On the other hand, when Paul lists his sufferings – five times he received 39 lashes, three times he was beaten with rods, once he was almost stoned to death, three times he was shipwrecked (see 2 Cor.11:23-27) – we are not meant to see those afflictions as simply chastisements for his many sins. Even more obvious is the suffering of Christ. The one who knew no sin suffered in a way that we can barely fathom as the just dying for the unjust.
God’s providence is not totally mysterious but it is mysterious. God shows His goodness and kindness to those who do not worship Him truly (Matt.5:45-46; Acts 14:17). The righteous suffer and the unrighteous know some blessing. There are some things that we cannot understand entirely in this life. God told Moses: ‘The secret things belong to the Ord our God but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law’ (Deut.29:29). There is no ‘extra revelation’ that we are meant to detect by some strange means. In the Bible we have the full revelation of God in the sense that we have all that we are going to receive in this life. But we do not have the full will of God. We do not know – and cannot know – what will happen tomorrow (James 4:14).
This does not mean that we wander completely in the dark. There is meaning in every act of providence, but we cannot plumb its depths. To cite Augustine: ‘if punishment were obviously inflicted on every wrongdoing in this life, it would be supposed that nothing was reserved for the last judgment; on the other hand, if God’s power never openly punished any sin in this world, there would be an end to belief in providence.’ God speaks with a kind of dim clarity in His providences; He speaks with perfect yet incomplete clarity in His Word; and in the new heaven and the new earth He will speak with perfect and complete clarity. And we will understand fully (1 Cor.13:12).
With warmest regards in Christ,
Peter Barnes