Does God Break Our Hearts?
If it's true as we believe that God came to us in and as
Jesus Christ and if it is true as we believe that God put him to grief
(Isaiah 53:10) then the answer's yes. In a garden one evening Jesus came
to three disciples and said to them (Matthew 26:38, REB), "My heart is
ready to break with grief." Will God break our hearts? Yes, if it suits
his gracious, generous and holy purpose.
But when we say God will break our hearts we're not to think of him
acting as in a vacuum or without purpose. He doesn't will us pain
because he takes pleasure in giving us pain nor does he act utterly
independent of the life and its relationships that he has given us.
Does God give us rain? Of course! The psalmists praised him for it,
Jeremiah saw it as one of the proofs of God's true divinity and Jesus
saw it as a mark of God's universal generosity. But they all knew he
didn't simply will rain to fall out of a cloudless sky. They knew about
winds, clouds, heat and the like. For all their knowledge of "secondary
agents" they knew that ultimately it rained because God said, Rain!
(Just as G.K. Chesterton knew the sun rose in the east each morning
because God said, Get up!) It makes no sense to say that because we can
trace the physical development of a rain shower (or anything else) that
God is not bringing it about. I can understand the non-believer being
satisfied with a merely mechanical explanation but one who takes the
Bible seriously won't go that direction.
The same is true with grief. God's grief-bringing instruments are surely numberless but the one behind them all is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Sometimes the grief has nothing to do with punishment or chastisement! Sometimes it has more to do with (for!)
others than with (for) us. Sometimes the grief arises because God has so shaped us that when we meet sin and entrenched evil we grieve profoundly at the loss of others. Sometimes our pain is because we are the body of Christ bearing the sins of the world and suffering for the world. Can you believe that?
The same is true with grief. God's grief-bringing instruments are surely numberless but the one behind them all is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Sometimes the grief has nothing to do with punishment or chastisement! Sometimes it has more to do with (for!)
others than with (for) us. Sometimes the grief arises because God has so shaped us that when we meet sin and entrenched evil we grieve profoundly at the loss of others. Sometimes our pain is because we are the body of Christ bearing the sins of the world and suffering for the world. Can you believe that?
And we need to bear this in mind as we reflect on suffering and loss:
if humanity hadn't brought sin to the table God would not have brought
pain and loss. God means to bring us fullness of life, in fellowship
with him, and if it means subjecting the human family to grief in order
to gain that purpose he's willing to do it. (See The Divine Paramedic.)
The "natural laws" God willed and sustains were made to bless us but in a
world of human sin God is perfectly willing to use the instruments of
blessing as instruments of redemption even when it involves pain and
loss.