God Allows Evil to Expose Evil
Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada with a thought for the day.
And it’s a thought, an idea, that helps you deal with that trial you’re facing today. Because we all have them (trials, that is). And we all tend to think that they are nothing more than rude interruptions. Like, if we could just dig out from underneath this disappointment or push our way through this dilemma or shove aside this hurt. If we could just quickly deal with the irksome thing (whatever that irksome thing is) and get ourselves back on the spiritual track, we’d be okay. Everything would be fine. We could get on with life. That, my friend, is how so many of us deal with tough trials. They are just irksome burrs under our saddle, and if we ignore them long enough, maybe it’ll just go away or hopefully, get better.
That’s the way I used to look at chronic pain. Yes, it’s a tough trial that I often look at as a rude interruption, and yes, I try to ignore it, medicate it, or push through it, hoping that it will just go away. And when I do that, I’m leaving God entirely out of the picture. The trial—the painful hip—gets all the attention, not the Lord. The result? I end up missing the very point God was trying to make through my pain. Through the trial, He was trying to show me or tell me something, and I wasn’t listening. And so next time, He may well have to use a megaphone to get my attention—you know, pain that’s even worse! Yikes! And I don’t want to go down that path. So Lord, help me listen to you in my trials!
Because friend, when I do, I see that my chronic pain is like a lemon that God will “squeeze,” revealing my cranky, crabby spirit, and tendency to complain or grumble. God squeezes the lemon of my pain and out flows anxiety and worry, doubts and fears of the future. And all of it—the crabbiness and the complaining—all of it is nothing more than sin. Had God not used my pain to expose my sin, I might not be aware of the rebellion of which I’m capable. But we are not the paragons of virtue that we’d all like to think we are, and so, to shatter that myth, God uses suffering to expose the stuff of which we are actually made. It’s why Romans Chapter 5, says, “Rejoice in suffering.” Why rejoice? Because suffering is the textbook that will teach you who you really are, not who you think you are, but who you really are, and best of all, who you can be in Christ. And hey, I don’t want to be a crabby, cranky person. I don’t want to be fearful or anxious. And so, when God uses the megaphone of pain, I not only listen, I get rid of any sin which that pain might expose, might bring to the surface.
This is a great illustration of something you’ll often hear me say. And that is: God will use one form of evil—our suffering—in order to defeat another form of evil, and that is our sin. We already know it happened at the cross, but it happens in the lives of Christians every day. Again, God uses one form of evil (your suffering), in order to defeat another form of evil, and that is the sins of complaining, resentment, bitterness, fear; you name it, suffering will reveal it!
Now I just bet you have a few questions about this topic, and if you do, I say a lot more about it in my booklet “When God Seems Unjust.” Believe me, the insights will help you hear God more clearly in your trials. In your suffering, you will hear His voice. So get your free copy today, would you, by just contacting us at joniandfriends.org. And when you read it, learn to listen to God when he speaks through your pain. How about it?
© Joni and Friends
