The Power and the Weakness
On providence, power, and pain
This is a something I've been thinking about over the last couple of weeks and the thing that sparked it off for me was reading a post somewhere someone was writing about the idea of God's plan and goodness and providence. The point they were making was that we so often think, “Oh, this thing was not good for me in God's providence because he has something better for me in this life.” Their point was that that's not necessarily true. That is to say, the thing that might be good for us, the thing that is good according to God's purpose and plan, might still not be what we think of as good. It might be suffering, it might be difficulty, it might be pain.
As I thought about that, I reflected upon my own life and the things I struggle with and the things I find hard. It was a good reminder to me that things might not get better. In fact, in God's providence, things might never get better in this life. That is a sobering, difficult thought for me: that the difficulties I face, there might be in this earthly life no light at the end of the tunnel, no hope on the horizon, no riders of Rohan turning up to save the day.
At the same time, I was reflecting as I listened to a podcast, and it reminded me of a number of sermons I listened to in the last couple of years, really coming out of a preaching tradition that's not my own, which really kind of focused on the power of Jesus to transform people's lives. That's something I believe in, passionately believe in, though I think it needs careful framing. On the one hand, it needs framing in what I would say is a non-Pentecostal and non-prosperity sense. That is, I think there is a way of talking about the power of God to transform people's lives that holds out promises about earthly blessing which are inconsistent with the gospel promises, and I'm highly resistant to that kind of teaching.
But I want to also acknowledge that there really is power in Jesus. It is the power of God that raised Jesus from the dead. It's the power of God as Jesus walks around in his earthly ministry healing people, raising people from the dead, transforming people's lives. It's the power of God in the work of the apostles in the book of Acts that sees people delivered from bondage to evil forces, to sin, to Satan, to demons, and give their lives to Jesus and radically, from the root, transform them. God has power to change us.
I think there is a right way to proclaim that power for transformation, and it sells the gospel short when we don't. But I think there's definitely also a whole bunch of wrong ways to proclaim that power, ways that make God into our genie to fulfil our wishes, and make our ultimate good something other than God.
But how to reconcile the good news that Jesus is mighty to save, to deliver you from all sorts of things, including circumstantial suffering, alongside the stark providential truth that there may very well be things you never get delivered from? You might live out your days in poverty, or even slavery. You might die some horrible death. You might see some prayers never answered the way you want them to be. Loved ones may never come to Christ. Wayward ones might never come back. Cancer might not be healed. And we have to say both that Jesus has power to do all these things, and that he might not do them.
I think there's no easy resolution to this tension, nor is there meant to be. If there's no power, there's only despondency. God can't and doesn't do anything. The dead are not raised. But if there's power and no... sober recognition of suffering, then we are peddling pipe-dreams to ourselves and others, and when God doesn't come through on things we promised and He didn't, faith is shipwrecked.
And so we must learn and re-learn again and again the lessons of 2 Corinthians:
We have this treasure in earthenware vessels, that the super-abundance of power might be God's and not from us; in everything pressed but not crushed, at a loss but not totally at a loss, pursued but not forsake, cast down but not destroyed; always carrying around with us Jesus' death, so that Jesus' life might be manifested in our body. (2 Cor 4:7-10)
And again in chapter 12, where Paul describes his mysterious 'thorn in the flesh'; despite his prayers, the answer was not deliverance, but grace to endure. My grace suffices for you; for my power reaches its completion in weakness.
It’s the power and the weakness, and the power in the weakness. It’s being prepare to endure in weakness, to bear thorns in the flesh, tears in the soul; it’s the hope of a light that isn’t the dawn of tomorrow, but the dawn of a new creation.
