Have you ever wondered why the trials we must endure are so intense. In
that God knows how we end, why do we need to go through trials. By faith
we are to develop spiritual perspective through embracing trials. Trials
produce maturity in God’s people. Trials help us to recognize God’s gracious
and passionate power. We learn to persevere through trials that threaten our
faith. Our suffering is never meaningless, and it is not accidental. For such a
time as this, God is purposing extreme circumstances to develop our faith
and trust in Him. God knows what is necessary for His people to find joy in
suffering. We know trials are part of the believer’s life, and God would have
us handle each one in a way that glorifies Him. Even though we should
expect trials, we do not know when they will take place, which makes them
unpredictable. But we count it all joy when we fall into various trials. The word
communicates these unexpected nature of trials in a way that we face, meet,
and encounter them as being from the Lord. Before trials reach us, they first
pass through the throne of God.
It is our most holy faith that prepares us for every trial. This faith is a great
blessing given to us from God, of God, and even with God. When this faith
comes into us, it comes with God, with all that God is, with all that God has
passed through, with all that God has accomplished in Christ and through
the Spirit, and with all that God has obtained and attained. We prayerfully
build this faith by praying in the Holy Spirit, staying right at the center of God's
love, keeping our arms open and outstretched, ready for the mercy of our
Jesus Christ. This is the unending life, the real life! The second most extreme
consequence of a trial is death. The first is failing in the trial and missing
eternity with God. The nature of trial is that it is personal and unique. There
are times, and will be times, we experience suffering that could be
considered life changing. There also are the trials that take place daily and
can even become unrecognizable because of their regularity. We need a
strong foundation to endure the trials that can lead to the collapse of our
lives. That foundation is obedience to Christ.
There is a difference between trial and discipline. God wants to reveal
Himself through trials and use them for our good, but we do not have to
wonder if we did something wrong. We learned that a trial does not
necessarily indicate wrongdoing, but sometimes we do bring on our own
suffering. What happens if we suffer because we did something wrong? That
is not a trial. That is discipline. Suffering is part of God’s perfect and wise
plan for His people even when they do good. If we do sin, we should expect
consequences. Death is due but God may choose to discipline. David
committed adultery. Moses struck the rock. These men suffered because of
their sins. It would be incorrect to say they experienced trials in these cases.
It would be correct to say God disciplined them because they sinned. The
same is true of the negative consequences of foolish decisions. There are
consequences for poor judgment. Sometimes people sin, are disciplined,
and then say, “why am I suffering?” If friends love them enough to be honest,
they will answer, “because of your disobedience.
”If we are Christ’s, we humbly accept our punishment. If we sin and God
disciplines us, we can be encouraged that He does so because He loves us.
We want to be confident in our salvation, and experiencing discipline allows
us to say, “God is my Father. I am His child.” Sometimes people sin and it looks
like they are getting away with it. Either God is giving them time to repent, or they
are not His children.
The bible was written with this realistic perspective, that life in this fallen
world is often dreadfully unjust and painful. Again, God’s purpose in allowing
us to experience trials is to bring us to maturity. God wants to produce
individuals who are mature - who look like His Son Jesus, who are resilient,
who have grit, who aren’t fragile, who can bear up without giving up. God
wants to produce people who show up well in all kinds of situations - happy
situations, sad situations, easy situations, and hard situations. We need to
ask God for wisdom when encountering trials. Wisdom is faith in relating to
God, wisdom is skill in relating to all kinds of people, and wisdom is aptitude
in relating to all kinds of situations. A trial is something that happens in life
that has the potential to teach us something. God will allow trials; a testing
of our faith. God is more interested in our character than our comfort. He is
developing something inside us. Trials are part of God’s work. Trials put
God’s power on display. Trials causes us to depend on God. Our enduring
trials is God preparing us for His promise. He teaches us things. He grows
our character, our faith, and our ability to do what we are called to do. There
is divine design in each of our lives and that we have rendezvous to keep,
individually. Remember that cry on the cross, “my God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me”? That cry on the cross is an indication that the very best
of our Father’s children found the trial so real, the test so exquisite and so
severe, that he cried out - not in doubt of his Father’s reality, but wondering
“why” at that moment of agony, for Jesus felt so alone. God withdrew His
immediate presence from the Son so that Jesus Christ’s triumph might be
truly complete. We must never doubt that sublime reality that God is always
there because at times God will not be able to let us pass by a trial or a
challenge. If we were allowed to bypass certain trials, everything that had
gone on up to that moment in our lives would have been to no avail. It is
because God loves us that, at times, He will not intercede as we may ask Him
to. This, we learn from Gethsemane and from Calvary.
We are going to be tried in all things. That is a hard doctrine. God chooses
to teach us the things we most need to learn because He loves us, and if He
seeks to discipline our souls and temper us in the way we most need to be
disciplined and most need to be tempered, it follows that He will customize
the challenges He gives us and individualize them so that we will be prepared
for life in the eternity by His refusal to take us out of this world, even though
we are not of it. The trials we are to go through, though they be sharp and fiery,
yet they are designed only to try us, not to destroy us, to try our sincerity, strength, patience, and our trust in God. They are for the same cause that
Christ suffered. Remember, we are forewarned of these things.
The path of righteousness that God’s election must travel includes diverse
trials. Consisting of a period of adversity caused by a contrast between our
current earthly reality and the promises the Lord has given us. Enduring the
test compels us to confront ourselves and decide not only who we are but
who we choose to follow. The enemy will try us. Words loaded with
insinuation that are calculated to cause doubts and misgivings will try us.
Vanity and pride will try us. Out-and-out deceit will try us. We will be tried by
thoughts that cause us to question our basic beliefs and values.
We may want to pause in our investigation of truth and consider the absolute
realism of the bible. Are we truly ready to reason and accept how candid and
open and blunt and even gory the bible is in presenting God’s judgments
upon the world, especially His own people in this final time that we are in.
The bible does not shrink back from any truth that witnesses what God
ordains. The trials, the tests, the temptations, the agonies, the sufferings that
we learn of, that we experience, have meaning and eventual righteous
resolution only if we come to embrace the biblical reality that sin against an
infinitely wise and just and good God is a moral outrage greater than the
physical outrage of centuries of global suffering. Let me say that again,
because it is the heart of the matter, and it is very difficult for people without
the Holy Spirit’s massive work to embrace: the physical horrors of suffering
in this world can make sense to us and have meaning and eventual righteous
resolution only if we come to embrace the biblical reality that sin against an
infinitely wise and just and good God is a moral outrage greater than the
physical outrage of centuries of global suffering. Each experience does not
necessarily correspond to a sin. Biblical truth does not correlate between the
extent of an individual’s suffering in this world and the extent of their guilt.
Read Romans chapter eight, verses twenty through twenty-three. It talks to
our universal groaning. Our agonizing in suffering. The sin that came into the
world through Adam and spread to all people is a moral outrage greater than
the physical outrage of suffering, which means that seeing and believing the
goodness and justice of God assumes a self-denying revolution of our mind
and heart. If we’re going to see God as good and just and wise, we have to
undergo such a profound mental and spiritual revolution of mind and heart
so that God ceases to be just a deity that circles humanity. He is that
massively holy, blazing, glorious S-O-N at the center of the all that is creation.
God becomes supreme reality. His being becomes the supreme worth and
treasure of the universe. Trials are the pronouncement that all human
suffering is a screaming witness to the greater dreadfulness of human sin.
This is how and why our faith keeps reasoning with the truth of the revelation
that God sent His Son into this world, sent His very self, to suffer a moral
outrage, greater than the outrage against his Father by all his people in their
sin. For the infinitely pure and good and wise and strong and holy Son of
God to descend to the degradation and torture of a crucifixion is enough
suffering, enough indignity, to cover all the outrage of all the sins of all who
believe. This is not a simple faith…it is a gift that shows God’s love for sinners
is unconditional, for He loves even when there is no reciprocity.
The presence of trials and suffering in this world must not be a stumbling
block to the sincereness of our worship for God, our witness to the world,
and our testimony to those who overcome. Jesus could have healed Lazarus
before he died. His purpose was to affect the faith of circumstances for the
sisters. It’s not that their suffering or our suffering doesn’t matter: it matters
enough to bring tears to the eyes of the Son of God! He purposed a
relationship formed through suffering as much as through joy. Suffering at
the death of a brother, joy in the resurrection of Jesus. The man blind from
birth was not due to his sin nor the sin of his parents. This was purposed to
show the works of God. If the goal of our existence is relationship with him,
finding him in our suffering is the point. Jesus’s power over death is absolute.
He is not a means to an end, he is the end. He is the only hope we have in
the face of our inevitable end. Through the enduring of trial and suffering we
are brought closest to God’s heart. Those who are chosen and beloved by
God will be tried. Here is where we see the divine purpose of reasoning. It is
that we may expose the fault lines between our natural assumptions and the
biblical narrative of truth. You can read the letter of the words, yet unless you
reason in the spirit of the word, the truth will evade your understanding. God
could have used the flood to move us from Genesis to Revelation. But we
would have missed out on that wonderful developing relationship with Jesus
Christ. We would have missed the course of the covenant relationship where
the faith of Abraham was tried. We would have missed the forming of Israel
in the four hundred years of suffering and trials for the disciplining of a
people. We would have missed the divine relationship between the man
Moses and God and the trials of the wilderness experience which prompted
that coming of Jesus displayed in the teaching of the sanctuary. The
beginning of the bible paints a picture of paradise: two human beings in
relationship with God and with each other, unstained by sin or trial or
suffering or death. God could just have stopped Adam and Eve from sinning
in the first place. And even if there were reasons to allow sin - granting human
free will, perhaps - one can imagine a much shorter, straighter line to draw
between the beginning and the end than the scriptures describe. But the
purposed “new creation” is not just a return to the idyllic old. It is far better.
In the early Genesis narrative, Adam and Eve knew God as Creator and
Lord, perhaps, even, as friend. But we know Jesus far more intimately: as
Savior, Brother, Fellow Sufferer, our resurrection and our Life. The first
humans could have this intimacy with God. It was an intimacy glimpsed in
their experience of each other before they turned from their Maker. The
original vision of humanity was very good. But it was not the best. The best,
from a biblical perspective, was yet to come. And the way to get there would
be through trial and suffering. Follow the spiritual script that is played out on
the cosmic stage of creation down to our day. Note the journey of all the
central characters in Christ is through darkness, to some even death, but to
all the hope of the better end.
For the true believer, all trials and tribulations have a divine purpose. God’s
ultimate purpose for us is to grow more and more into the image of His Son.
Everything in life, including the trials and tribulations, is designed to get us to
this perfection. Trials are intended to set us apart for God’s purposes and to
fit us to live for His glory. This is the trial of our faith tried by fire. The true
believer’s faith will be made sure by the trials we experience so that we can
rest in the knowledge that it is real and will last forever. Trials develop godly
character, and that enables us to rejoice in our trials, in our sufferings,
because we know that these produce perseverance. And that proves our
faith. But our trials, our tribulations must not be the result of any wrongdoing.
God uses our trials and tribulations to give us both purpose and a reward
that we may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. Let the trials reveal
who is in us. It is God’s way of transforming us in the maturing of our faith.
In our responding to trials with God’s grace, we experience the power of
God’s Spirit manifested in the life. Our response makes all the difference in
our spiritual growth. Instead of despairing, we glory in the power of Christ
resting upon us. We engage in this spiritual warfare by proclaiming truth in
the face of tests, trials, and temptations. The greatest reason God takes us
through trials in life is to bring us to the firm conclusion that we need Him. So
we cry out to God. He alone must become our source of strength. Trials
strengthen our dependence upon Him. We must trust that God has the ability
to protect us from every trial or distress. But we know that He chooses
instead to deliver, strengthen, and preserve us in the midst of trials. We
overcome the enemy in God’s strength for we know that God is faithful and
He will not allow us to be tried above that we are able. And this is not based
on any resource of our own. We are made able by faith in divine assistance,
and that God knows what He Himself will give us by grace in enabling us to
handle what He gives us. God will never let us so stumble or so fail that we
don’t recover and repent and are restored. In other words, He will never let
us sin our way away from Him. He will enable us to bear the fruits of genuine
faith and perseverance to the end. The good work He has begun, He will
perform. Those He has predestined, He called, He justified, He glorified. He
has prayed that our faith fail not.
There are realities of God’s love for us. He will particularly suit the course for
each of us in order to teach us the things we most need to know. He will set
before us in life what we need, not always what we like. And this will require
us to accept with all our hearts - the truth that there is divine design in each
of our lives and that we have rendezvous to keep, individually and
collectively. Our trials are temporary. Our trials are not about us. They are for
the fulfilling of the purposes of God.
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