Sacred Sorrow

I rise today against the heresy that says God won’t bring sorrow into your life.
Bad things happen. Without any moral or spiritual consciousness, you are left to rationalize cause and effect as best you can. The possibilities range between some variations on Aristotelian cold logic all the way out to animism and abject fear. If you cling to God’s moral revelation and if your spirit is alive in Christ, then you have some hope of understanding. Not that you will be able to connect cause and effect in your sorrows, but you will understand how sorrow in your life reflects the love of the Father.
What did God reveal to Abraham regarding the nation that would descend from him? The torch and the pot of coals made it pretty clear they would not be ready for God’s covenant until they had passed through magnificent suffering. What did God reveal to Isaiah as Judah declined into idolatry yet again? They must pass through the sorrow of Babylonian captivity in order to break the bad habit.
Men understand this instinctively. It takes very little maturity before they realize pushing the limits, of falling and getting hurt only to try again, is what makes them more of a man in some way. Yes, fallen men do have a cruel streak, but the instinct to push the limits of endurance and pain is the hand of God. We might flee suffering we didn’t choose, but we know it’s necessary on some level, and we find whiners repulsive.
God gives good things because they suit His purpose of enhancing His own glory. He gives bad things for the same reason. However, He made clear in His revelation that bad things were His way of driving us back to Him. Yes, the demons themselves serve God’s will, because their mission is to cause suffering to anything that falls into their domain. We are born in their domain, but we are also born with a consciousness that there has to be a way out of it. Bash the consciousness enough times and it quits working properly. We then begin to cling to stuff we like without understanding the bigger picture. We lose sight of what it all means.
Did your baby daughter die in some horrific crime? God took her to a better place. Are you going to meet her there sometime in your future? Did thousands of people die in a flood or earthquake? That’s a little more complex, but He is still in charge and those things don’t happen without His express permission. He never bothered to reveal the whole formula, but He did reveal enough for us to walk in His justice and serve His glory. It’s our damnable cultural bias that blinds us to His hand. We think somehow God’s “holiness” can’t include bad things, so we get awfully confused and come up with all kinds of damnable heresies contrary to His revelation. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not in your best interest. Your silly logical categories are a pitiful excuse against His revelation.
Losing this life is not a bad thing. If we could simply get that through our thick heads, we have solved the majority of our stupidity. Even taking someone’s life is not inherently evil. Our silly human logic struggles with how something like nuclear war can be the work of God’s hand, but God said He wouldn’t let us do anything He didn’t want for us. How He relates individual good and evil against national good and evil is beyond our comprehension, not because He didn’t explain any of it, but because we have embraced so many lies of human logic. Nations can sin and reap His wrath, too. Not everything in this realm of existence is based on the individual.
When you finally throw your Western rational bias in the trash and commit yourself to studying ancient Hebrew logic, then you will understand what God has said.