Difficulties and troubles can be very useful. Often they strip away the frivolity of our living and thinking and instead make us think seriously and search for meaning and truth that will help us stand in the storms of life. God intends trials to bring us back to Him. In our pain we are more able to recognize our weakness, our inadequacy, our dependency, and our great need for God. Trials make us grapple with questions like, "What do I really believe about God? And what in the world is He doing?"
Today I was reading J.I. Packer's classic book Knowing God. In it (Chapter 9, God Only Wise), I found a quote that gives a great answer to that question, "God, what are you doing?", and will help us align our lives with his great purposes for us, even in trials.
"God's almighty wisdom is always active, and never fails. All his works of creation and providence and grace display it, and until we can see it in them we just are not seeing them straight. But we cannot recognize God's wisdom unless we know the end for which he is working. Here many go wrong. Misunderstanding what the Bible means when it says that God is love (see 1 John 4:8-10), they think that God intends a trouble-free life for all, irrespective of their moral and spiritual state, and hence they conclude that anything painful and upsetting (illness, accident, injury, loss of job, the suffering of a loved one) indicates either that God's wisdom, or power, or both, have broken down, or that God, after all, does not exist.
But this idea of God's intention is a complete mistake: God's wisdom is not, and never was, pledged to keep a fallen world happy, or to make ungodliness comfortable. Not even to Christians has he promised a trouble-free life; rather the reverse. He has other ends in view for life in this world than simply to make it easy for everyone.
What is he after, then? What is his goal? What does he aim at? When he made us, his purpose was that we should love and honor him, praising him for the wonderfully ordered complexity and variety of his world, using it according to his will, and so enjoying both it and him. And though we have fallen, God has not abandoned his first purpose. Still he plans that a great host of humankind should come to love and honor him. His ultimate objective is to bring them to a state in which he is all in all to them, and he and they rejoice continually in the knowledge of each other's love--people rejoicing in the saving love of God, set upon them from all eternity, and God rejoicing in the responsive love of people, drawn out of them by grace through the gospel.
This will be God's glory, and our glory too, in every sense which that weighty word can bear. But it will only be fully realized in the next world, in the context of a transformation of the whole created order. Meanwhile, however, God works steadily toward it. His immediate objectives are to draw individual men and women into a relationship of faith, hope, and love toward himself, delivering them from sin and showing forth in their lives the power of his grace; to defend his people against the forces of evil; and to spread throughout the world the gospel by means of which he saves.
In the fulfillment of each part of this purpose the Lord Jesus Christ is central, for God has set him forth both as Savior from sin, whom we must trust, and as Lord of the church, whom we must obey."
Yes, the last line is in bold type because it reminds me that Christ is at the very center of all God is doing. Through him we have been saved from the impending wrath that was ours because of our sin, and on this side of the cross we need him every single day as we receive the grace to respond to life in a way that acknowledges the wisdom and love of our heavenly Father, who is behind it all. What a comfort to know that we are in good hands.
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