Deep Sea Diving

Luke 6: 20-23

20 And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said:"Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. 21 Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. 22 Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! 23 Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.

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This teaching, and its parallel in Matthew has always spoken to me of the blessings of suffering. Such a concept is simply opaque to the worldly mind. It takes a gracious act of God to reveal that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike - but that the same rain that turns the unbeliever to complaining bitterness is the rain that the saint, receiving by faith from His Saviour’s hand, is the very stuff of his salvation. Philip Schaff, in his book "The History of the Christian Church" said:

"The same sun gives light and heat to the living, and hastens the decay of the dead."

This is how we can live in the world and not be of it. We receive everything that all of mankind receives and yet we, dwelling in the kingdom of God through faith, receive it all differently. You can’t make people see this. God must reveal it. It is revealed in Christ who lived it all to the Nth degree, in plain view, for the whole of humanity to see - if they would but look. But they will not. They will not unless God, by the Holy Spirit, opens their eyes and draws them to Christ. But He draws them to Christ preached. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. (or, as the RSV says, "by the preaching of Christ").

So embrace the truth! Run into its arms! For Christ IS the Truth. God blesses his children with poverty, hunger, mourning, persecution, rejection and even death. The active word is "blesses". Don’t miss it. It’s not a quaint use of language from a bygone era. Your troubles ARE blessings from the God Who loves you. They ought to make you happy. Not happy like the world is happy - with a short-lived sense of satisfaction for the cravings of the flesh. God forbid! In the kingdom it is possible to labour and weep and struggle and hurt and still be happy. Heavenly happiness is joy. Joy is not a mood that accompanies the absence of temporal troubles. It is abiding in God in the midst of troubles. That is joy. And that is the happiness spoken of here, not worldly happiness.

Faith alone can fully apprehend this. And faith is God’s gift to His people in Christ. So we must not judge the world when they are poor and hungry and miserable and bereft and forlorn and dying. That is God’s judgment at work. It is His judgment on all flesh, including the flesh of believers. But we died to the flesh with Christ, who took our judgment for us so that we may live by the Spirit in a world that is under God’s judgment - a judgment we richly deserved, and from which we have been graciously delivered forever. This is what led the suffering William Cowper to write:

The path of sorrow and that path alone
Leads to the place where sorrow is unknown.

He was a Christian. A very troubled man who was subject to long, deep, debilitating bouts of depression. Not really much of a Christian to look at by some people's standards. His life was forlorn and meandering. John Newton befriended him and walked with him, but Cowper still had to go through it all. Yet who knows what insights into His Lord he found in the depths where Christ first came and sought him, and then upheld him to the end. This single couplet is the distillation of years of struggle to abide in Christ in the midst of suffering - and you can sense its power and tried truth.

Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. It is exasperating to watch a Christianity unfolding in some sectors that thinks Jesus’ suffering means that we must never suffer, if only we can work up enough faith to believe it. It is demonic, apostate, twisted and wicked teaching. And I don’t like it either.

The saved are called to share in the suffering of Christ. Not that we can achieve anything by it in the sense of adding to His work, or making His work more effective. That is yet more rubbish. Our sharing in His sufferings is simply the exercise of our God-given faith (given in just such a degree that it is enough for our present circumstance so that, by exercising it now we will grow in faith and be made ready to share in more suffering later). Hallelujah! Well, can you at least manage an "Amen"?

There is a picture in my mind of Christ plummeting to the depths of my soul - down, down, down into the inky blackness, like a deep sea submersible descending into the abyss. In that lightless well of sin lies all of my own suffering, all of the effects of my sins and the sins of others upon me, all of the trespasses I have done to others - a writhing mass of confused, living death, wrapped in unassuagable guilt and denial. He has done this not only in me, but in all of His people. He has plumbed the depths and returned. He has suffered the judgment of those deep, dark places, as well as the hurt and injury to myself and others. The sting is gone.

The pressure of those depths can no longer crush me. When I go there, I go in the uncrushable hull of Christ who went before me. I see by His light, for I am carried in He Who is the light, as He sheds it upon the dreadful monsters that lurk in the perpetual darkness of my soul. They are still there. They still bring suffering to me. But they cannot harm a hair of my head. In Christ I am a new creation.

This is why both internal and external sources of suffering are now blessings to the beloved. Christ has been there and can carry us through the fiery furnace untouched, without even the smell of smoke on our clothes. We must go through it, but He has made it into a blessing that we can embrace through faith. And, if we can accept it, it is a blessings planned for us in Christ from before the foundation of the world.