Friday, October 21, 2022

 

Friday, October 21, 2022


Psalms 121; 122; 123

Ezra 10:1-19

1 Peter 4:12-19


But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when His glory is revealed.


What does it mean to suffer? Is it a presence, the presence of evil? Peter had his share of suffering; writing in the time of the first wave of official Roman persecutions of Christians, he had a lot of encouragement to share with the first generation of believers. Hearing a knock on the door and loud voices in Latin would have meant the arrival of evil at the doorstop.


I would argue that suffering is not an active presence, but an absence of that which is good. God created all things, and He is light, in whom there is no darkness. God does not “create” suffering. Therefore, suffering is not a thing. The natural order is marked by blessing and love. Suffering is where God’s blessings and love are not received as much as at other times.


Since we live in a fallen and broken world, this conclusion would suggest that all existence is suffering. The question is merely where on the scale a particular moment of suffering lies. I am not inventing this thought; King Solomon suggests something similar in the book of Ecclesiastes.


What, then, does Peter mean when he talks about “sharing Christ’s sufferings”? Nietzsche and Buddha also noticed that life was suffering, but as scoffers and false teachers, they are under the judgement of God, of whom Peter wonders aloud “what will become of the ungodly and the sinners?”


Our Christian experience of suffering means to share in Christ’s suffering. It is at least twofold: we suffer because we live in the world, but are not of the world, and therefore our spirit is at war with the material universe and all it’s pusillanimous and capricious moral standards. We also suffer because as God’s representatives, such is the authority with which we are endued that when we depart from God’s will, the natural world breaks. (There is no such thing is “amoral” or “neutral” evil and suffering.) Such are two of the types of suffering Christ endured on our behalf. Our point of departure from the philosophers of death (such as Buddha or Nietzsche) is that we know suffering eventually ends. God takes the empty absence which is suffering and fills it with blessings of love, peace, joy, hope, faith and so on. God’s nature is one of activity: continuous action which fills up, presses down, shakes together, overflows (Luke 6:38). We rejoice when we suffer as Christ did, because we know that not only is sharing Christ’s sufferings the path to shameless hope (Rom 5:3-5), but it eventually ends, not going back to where we were before the suffering began, but to the ever-increasing height of the glory of the Lord Jesus.







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