The Challenge of Choosing Between Bitter and Better
The hard part about picking between bitter and better is not the words. The hard part is believing them. The hard part is looking at a landscape of pain that sometimes stretches out as far as our eyes can see and still believing that this path that says “better” can actually, really, truly bring us to a better reality somewhere beyond the horizon of our sight.
There may only be one letter between bitter and better, but like street signs on the same post, the two words point us in opposite directions. And these signposts are planted firmly, with the same two arrows, at every difficult junction we face on the road of life. No matter how well we may have chosen in the past, or how poorly, the same choice always presents itself all over again: will we let the difficulties of life make us better? Or bitter?
It’s obvious, isn’t it? One choice is literally named “better.” So that’s clearly the choice we’ll always make. Right? Why would we willingly choose to travel a bitter road when a better option is always available to us? The answer is this: we don’t always believe the signposts.
Sometimes our lives become so difficult or our relationships get so messy that we think bitter is the better road. We become convinced that we are entitled to bitterness, that our sufferings have earned us a right to travel where others dare not tread. We may even feel that we must travel that road—
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“Why Have You Forsaken Me?” Understanding Jesus’s Cry on the Cross
Written by Matthew Y. Emerson and Brandon D. Smith |
Monday, September 16, 2024
Jesus’s lament comes in a covenantal context, a context in which he is the messianic Son chosen by Yahweh to deliver his people Israel by suffering on their behalf. God pours out his wrath on Jesus, yes, but as his anointed Son who suffers in his people’s place. Further, if we consider the other crucifixion scenes where different portions of Psalm 22 are either quoted or alluded to (e.g., Matt. 27; Mark 15; Luke 23; John 19), we see that they record various ways Jesus fulfills this psalm, pointing us back to the point that Jesus likely had the whole psalm in mind.“The Father Turned His Face Away”?
The crucifixion is a good case study in showing how a careful Trinitarian framework can help work through thorny issues related to the Trinity and salvation. Not only does it bring to the surface the difficult question of what the Father was “doing” (or not doing) while Jesus hung on the cross, but it also raises the question of the Spirit’s seeming absence during the event.
When Jesus quotes Psalm 22 on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34), what does this mean? Thomas McCall helpfully frames the issue surrounding this “cry of dereliction”:
Such a question surely comes from someone who has been unfaithful—and who now blames God for their abandonment. . . . But this question, of course, does not come from someone who has been unfaithful. It does not come from a pious person who simply isn’t theologically astute enough to know better. It comes from the lips of none other than Jesus Christ. It comes from the one who has been utterly faithful. It comes from the one of whom the Father said, “This is my beloved Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). It comes from the one who is the eternal Logos (John 1:1), the second person of the Trinity. So these words ring out like a thunderbolt.1
Did the Father turn his face away? Put another way, was there some sort of break or rupture between the persons of the Trinity on that fateful day on Golgotha? These answers require carefully handling the biblical text and retrieving sound theological method from the early church. Unfortunately, though a beautiful hymn, lyrics from “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” have perhaps shaped our view of this verse as much as or more than the biblical text and Christian history.
In popular Christianity, lyrics such as those found in this contemporary hymn are often taken to confirm what many already suspect about the cross, that it is a moment of separation between the Father and the Son. The cry of dereliction in such songs is Jesus’s cry of abandonment, meant to communicate an existential angst, a torment of soul rooted in some kind of spiritual distance between the incarnate Son and his heavenly Father due to the latter’s wrath being poured out. To say it a bit differently, many view the cross as a moment in which the Father pours out his personal wrath on the Son, and this is felt by the Son at a spiritual level and communicated via the cry of dereliction. Let’s briefly work through the issues with the ultimate goal of understanding the unity and distinction in the Godhead. Three considerations help us.
First, there is a Trinitarian consideration: anything we say about the cry of dereliction needs to retain the oneness of the Godhead, both with respect to rejecting any ontological or relational division between Father and Son and with respect to affirming inseparable operations. The cross does not produce division between Father and Son, and it is not only the Father who acts in the crucifixion. It is appropriate to talk about the Father pouring out his wrath, but according to the doctrine of appropriations, ascribing an action to one person of the Trinity does not deny that the other persons are acting inseparably. It is not only the Father that pours out wrath; the Son and the Spirit, as the other two persons of the one God, also pour out the one wrath of the one God. It is, after all, God’s wrath against sin spoken of all throughout Scripture.
On the other hand, we also remember that the Father sent the Son; he did not send himself. The Spirit was active in the incarnation at conception but did not himself put on flesh. So we need to dispel any notions of other Trinitarian persons dying on the cross. This helps us avoid the ancient heresy of patripassianism—the teaching that the Father himself became incarnate and suffered on the cross. Moreover, since we know that God is immutable and incapable of change (Mal. 3:6; Heb. 13:8), it would certainly jeopardize fundamental affirmations about the doctrine of God to assert that the cross initiated a complete three-day (or even a one-millisecond) loss of Trinitarian relations.
One Person, Two Natures
Second, there is a Christological consideration: anything we say about the cry of dereliction needs to retain the oneness of the person of Jesus Christ. He is one person with two natures, divine and human, and he goes to the cross as one person. He is not half God and half man, but rather fully God and fully man.
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Could Paul Have Been Ashamed of the Gospel?
The Gospel is not something for us to be ashamed of, whatever shame the world may heap upon it, because by faith we can see God’s power at work in it to bring new birth and sanctification. Many today will try to dress up the Gospel in modern thinking to suit contemporary tastes. But we don’t need to exercise all our energy trying to create the right kind of context for the Gospel or trying to make the Gospel look a little better. What we need is confidence in the power of the Gospel itself and the God to whom it draws us.
At the beginning of his correspondence to the Roman church, in Romans 1:16, Paul says something that is surprising in its implications: “I am not ashamed of the gospel.”
Paul the apostle, ashamed of the Gospel? It hardly seems possible! In fact, many preachers and commentators will say that what Paul means is “I’m passionately excited about the Gospel,” with the same understatement with which John Lennon might have been able to say, “I’ve written a song or two.” Could such a man as Paul really have faced the temptation of being ashamed of the Gospel?
But we shouldn’t treat Paul like an angel among men, free from the temptations that assail us. The reason Paul denied feeling ashamed of the Gospel is because shame was a real possibility he faced. And we face it too.
The Bold Apostle, a Timid Man
Paul knew what it was to be fearful. Indeed, he describes his entry into Corinth like this: “I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling” (1 Cor. 2:3).
Paul probably didn’t get up in the morning, look at himself in the mirror, and say, “Corinth, here I come! I’m sure you can’t wait to see me and to hear from me.” No, his attitude might have been something closer to “I don’t know if I can do this.” He may have thought about his retreat from Damascus (Acts 9:23–25), or about his years of silence (Gal. 1:16–17), or his beatings and imprisonments and shipwrecks (2 Cor. 11:21–27). Paul had much to look back on with fear from a human perspective.
Alongside his own background was Paul’s keen awareness of what the Gospel was to outsiders: “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23), a dangerous superstition to be mocked and persecuted rather than a serious idea to consider. Whether to be ashamed of the Gospel was a real question because people really treated it as something shameful.
Yet in God’s eyes, things are different. Far from being shameful, the Gospel, Paul wrote elsewhere, is “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24).
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The Privilege of Pain
Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, September 3, 2022
We also learn by hearing the struggles of people who are still in the pit, describe the nightmares they’re living through, and tell us how on earth they’re continuing to worship God despite it making no sense at all. I learn as much, if not more, from these gnarled saints. Their struggles teach, and you don’t have to be out of the other side of your struggles to have learned wisdom. You see, treasure lives at the bottom of the pit, and like the inverse of Plato’s cave, those who have suffered much and still love the Lord can teach the rest of us how to live. Which shouldn’t surprise us, the Christian life is one of death and resurrection, after all.When Christians suffer, when we experience pain, it often gives rise to doubt. We begin to wonder if it’s meant to be like this. One of the most quoted reasons to disbelieve in God is what’s usually called ‘the problem of evil.’ For most of us though it’s not the existence of conspicuous evil that’s the problem, it’s the pain in our lives and the lives of those we love. There’s a reason that C. S. Lewis formulated the challenge as The Problem of Pain.
Why does it make us doubt? I’m sure there are as many variations as there are sufferers, but broadly because if we truly believe that we are the beloved children of the most high God it raises some questions when, as best we can tell, he could improve our lot but hasn’t done so.
These questions are then painfully pressed on in many churches Sunday by Sunday as we preach a Christian life that sounds remarkably pain-free—this is certainly true in my charismatic tradition, but I’ve seen it much more broadly across evangelicalism in the UK. We preach what amounts to a prosperity gospel, where Christians are promised nice middle-classed lives.
Some readers might want to object that they haven’t heard this sort of preaching in their church, and thank the Lord if that’s the case, but for clarity I don’t mean that this is explicitly taught in the sermon, though that can happen. It’s often preached through the stories we share, through those we platform and those we don’t, through the questions our preaching does and doesn’t address, through the words of the songs we pick to sing, through so-called vulnerability that sufferers see right through, and through the reactions to those who are in acute pain.
We speak like the grand plan is that we’re all free from pain right now. Which, dear friends, it is not. You can quote Psalm 27 all you like but that isn’t what it means. There will be no more pain after the resurrection of the dead (Revelation 21), and that is a promise worth gripping to until your hands bleed. One day every ounce of existential dread, every lash of life’s cruel calumny, and every private howl you flung into the uncaring heavens, will melt in the face of the Lord Jesus as he smiles and embraces you, his little brother or sister.
And when I say it will melt, I don’t mean that as a nice verb to describe ‘going away.’ When the eyes of Jesus the consuming fire (Hebrews 12) look upon you tenderly, they will look on the root of Hell that has afflicted you with the force of a thousand suns and it will die.
One day our pain will go. But not yet. We aren’t promised that. In fact, the Bible tells us that our pain still has work to do—for suffering produces character (Romans 5). But even that can be a weight to bear, we are not responsible for ensuring we have achieved anyone’s definition of ‘adequate growth’ through our trials than the Lord’s.
Pain is required for growth. Ask any athlete. We immediately might have questions about how that death or that vile sting will cause us to grow, and it’s important to face them. They do not have clear and simple answers. Our struggles teach us.
I think I could be misread here. We often hear stories of challenge in our churches, and invariably they are told once those challenges are over, the people involved aren’t feeling the rawest edge of the pain, and it all sounds a bit neat and tidy.
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