When we suffer, we pray for God to intervene. We ask for the Lord to help and to heal, to remove and to restore. But what if our suffering is itself God’s intervention?
God’s Intervention
In our small group at church, we have been studying John Calvin’s little book On the Christian Life. The chapter on “Bearing the Cross” relentlessly emphasized the goodness of suffering.
At one point, Calvin mentioned God’s intervention in our lives:
Yes, God’s kindness ought to have allured us into pondering and deeply loving his goodness. But because our malice is such that, instead, we are continually spoiled by his pampering, some kind of discipline is absolutely necessary to keep us from diving into such wild behavior. Thus, to keep us from acting wildly due to excessive wealth, to keep us from becoming prideful due to exalted honors, to keep us from becoming arrogant due to being bloated with the rest of the advantages of mind, body, or fortune, the Lord himself, as he foresees it to be appropriate, intervenes and subdues and bridles the wildness of our flesh through the remedy of the cross.1
We typically think of—and pray for—God to intervene in our lives to remove trials, pain, difficulties, and hardships. Calvin’s view is the opposite: God intervenes in our lives by placing trials, pain, difficulties, and hardships in our lives. Whatever ails us in our spiritual lives, the remedy, Calvin says, is the blessing of a cross to bear.
Not a few members of our small group struggled with this idea. Particularly those who were experiencing real, present, pervasive, life-altering, dream-shattering, soul-crushing, inescapable suffering.
The intellectual answer is simple: God ordains trials in our lives for our good (see James 1:2-4 and Romans 8:28-29).
The experiential answer is much more revealing because the real, present, pervasive, life-altering, dream-shattering, soul-crushing inescapable experience of suffering digs down to our deepest desires: What do you hope for in this life?
Suffering Produces Hope
Paul tells us that the goal of suffering is to produce joyful, God-glorifying hope.
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Romans 5:1-5
These few verses should completely change how we view suffering. Paul’s argument is that joyful, God-glorifying hope comes from character, which is produced by endurance, which in turn is produced by suffering.
For Paul, suffering directs the outlook and object of our hope. He says, “We rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:2). We have the right outlook (rejoicing in hope) when we have the right object for our hope (the glory of God). Suffering, therefore, is the controlling factor for our hope.
This raises an important question: Why does God use suffering to generate biblical hope?
Let’s look at it this way: When we don’t suffer—and therefore don’t produce endurance or character—what is the controlling factor in our hope?
- If we don’t suffer, we don’t get endurance, and our hope is directed by laziness. Laziness is a failure in endurance. Lazy hope has a self-centered outlook, dreaming up ways to avoid dealing with problems so that we can continuing doing what we want to do. The mature person may also want to avoid trouble (who doesn’t!), but has the mental fortitude to press on towards a more worthwhile goal than whatever reward comes from escaping pain and difficulty.
- If we don’t suffer, we don’t get character, and our hope is directed by immaturity. Immaturity is a failure in character. Immature hope has a childish object, wishing for pizza every night and disappointed by homemade bone-broth chicken noodle soup. The mature person might crave pizza night (who doesn’t!), but has the character capacity to lay aside that hope and be satisfied with the healthy, affordable, home-cooked meal.
The answer to the question of where hope comes from when we don’t suffer is this: Apart from suffering, our hope is directed by our own desires. And that kind of hope is a pitiful thing.
We all hope in something. The immature person loves and hopes for spiritually immature things, like wealth or pleasure or affirmation from others. The lazy person loves and hopes with a spiritually selfish perspective, which can only fathom what pleases me rather than what pleases God (2 Corinthians 5:9).
Paul is reminding us that we should rejoice in suffering because suffering liberates us from selfish hopes and foolish treasures. Suffering refines our character to build in us a durable strength that has the capacity to love and treasure the glory of God more than whatever else might tempt us.
Another way to say this is that suffering exposes the idols of our hearts and forces us to choose our idols or our God.
Our Real-World Application
Several members of our small group face genuinely debilitating health issues, including my wife who suffers from several chronic autoimmune conditions that cause physical pain, fatigue, and much more.
The morning after we discussed this chapter in our group, my wife woke up to a severe immune reaction. She has experienced quite a few symptoms over the years, but this was completely new to her. We went to the local urgent care facility, and they quickly called an ambulance and took her to the ER because of the severity of her condition. At the ER they treated her with medications that would maintain the symptoms for two weeks and released her. By the end of the day the symptoms had returned and worsened—despite the amount of medicine they had pumped into her. Doctor and specialist visits followed, along with labs and more medications. The cause is still unknown.
Her suffering is immense, and seemingly without purpose: Why must she endure such pain? Why must her body be so agitated that she cannot focus, serve, bless, and encourage? Why must she bear the burden of what this does to our family, keeping me from work, keeping our family from fellowship and fun, investing our finances in hospital bills and insurance copays rather than in the kingdom?
I want you to see my idols in that list as well. We both love to read and study, keep an organized home, serve and minister, have a happy family, enjoy fun, work hard, save and invest, bless and give to others. We want to be healthy, wealthy, and pain-free so that we can do all these things. So, ever-so-subtly, we find our hope is set on our own ability to do good things.
But no. God has something better in mind for us. And on Monday, he intervened through the remedy of the cross.
God intervened to provide the remedy to our selfish hope set in a pain-free, cross-hating life. He intervened to provide the remedy to our selfish hope in being lauded for our ministry, our hospitality, our counsel, our work for the kingdom. God intervened to provide the remedy to our selfish hope in having the perfect family, the retirement nest egg, the fun and adventure, the idol of being the superior who blesses the inferior with our generosity (Hebrews 7:7).
God intervened to teach us how to endure trials, so that we would have the character to say, “Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15). We could continue on in health and ease, carrying our selfish idols discreetly in zippered Bible covers embossed with a cross and our names in gold lettering.
But God had something better in mind. Our hope will not, cannot be in ourselves, our health, or our achievements.
Our hope is in the glory of God alone.
And in this we rejoice.
Notes
- Calvin, On the Christian Life, p. 36-37. ↩︎
