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‘God’s Grace and Your Suffering’
0 CommentsI want to point you to a great resource related to this month’s hymn, “How Firm a Foundation.” (Thanks to Susan Jansen for e-mailing about this.) It’s a chapter that David Powlison contributed to the book “Suffering and the Sovereignty of God,” edited by Justin Taylor and John Piper. The book consists of chapters from seven different authors, most of whom gave talks at the 2005 Desiring God National Conference and agreed to convert their oral presentations into written form.
Powlison’s chapter, “God’s Grace and Your Suffering,” (pp. 145-173) explores each stanza of “How Firm a Foundation” in depth with the goal of helping readers to think and act biblically in the midst of suffering and trials.
Photocopies of the chapter will be available at the Welcome Center each Sunday in July, and the entire book is available as a free download from the Desiring God site.
To whet your appetite, here’s a section where Powlison looks at the hymn’s third verse:
“When through the deep waters I call you to go,
the rivers of sorrow shall not overflow;
for I will be with you, your troubles to bless,
and sanctify to you your deepest distress.”Words from Isaiah 43:2 weave through this stanza. Your troubles are envisioned as “deep waters” and “rivers.” Isaiah alludes to when God’s people faced the Red Sea with enemies at their back, and to when they faced the Jordan River at flood stage. No human being could carve a path through such difficulties. God restates his core promise with an eye to the future: “I will be with you.” That itself is significant, because the effects of most significant sufferings extend into an indeterminate future. We need much more than help in the present moment. What exactly does it mean that God will be “with” you amid destructive forces?
In promising this, God explicitly does not mean that he will give you mere comfort, warm feelings because a friend is standing at your side through tough times. God plays a much more active and powerful role.
This stanza fills in the meaning with four vast truths:
• God himself calls you into the deep waters in your life.
• God sets a limit on the sorrows.
• God is with you actively bringing good from your troubles.
• In the context of distressing events, God changes you to become like him.This is heady stuff. High and purposeful sovereignty. A big God—who comes close to speak tenderly, work personally, make you different, finish what he begins.
In other words, your significant sufferings don’t happen by accident. No random chance. No purposeless misery. No bad luck. Not even (and understand this the right way) a tragedy. Tragedy means ruin, destruction, downfall, an unhappy ending with no redemption. Your life story may contain a great deal of misery and heartache along the way. But in the end, in Christ, your life story will prove to be a “comedy” in the good old sense of the word, a story with a happy ending. You play a part in the Divine Comedy, as Dante called it, with the happiest ending of any story ever written. Death, mourning, tears, and pain will be no more (Rev. 21:4). Life, joy, and love get last say. High sovereignty is going somewhere. People miss that when they make “the sovereignty of God” sound as if it implied fatalism, like Islamic kismet, like que sera sera, like being realistic and resigned to life’s hardships. God’s sovereign purposes don’t include the goal of getting you to just accept your troubles. He’s not interested in offering you some perspective to just help get you through a rough patch.
This stanza expresses the kind purposes of the most high God. But it does not make light of your hardships. There is no chilly objectivity in God’s words. He carefully refers to the pain of deep sufferings in every line. He speaks poignantly, not matter-of-factly: “deep waters, rivers of sorrow, troubles, deepest distress.” In fact, the original hymn (with “thee and thou”) put the second line even more graphically: “The rivers of woe shall not thee overflow.” Woe is the keenest edge of anguish, the extremity of distress, sorrow raised to the highest degree of pain.
Those rivers of woe sweep many good things away. Your deepest distress is deeply distressing. But the God who loves you is master of your significant sorrow. He calls you to go through even this hard thing. Though it feels impossible and devastates earthly hopes, he sets a boundary (not where we would set it). He convinces you that this hard thing will come out good beyond all you can ask, imagine, see, hear, or conceive in your heart (Eph. 3:20; 1 Cor. 2:9). You will pass through the valley of the shadow of death filled with evils, but you will say that goodness and mercy followed you all the days of your life.
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