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Privilege of Human Sorrow
The Privilege of Human Sorrow
Paul speaks in 2 Cor 5:1-4 about our groaning, our burden as we live in this tabernacle. We suffer and toil and endure hardship along with the whole creation, which Paul pictures as groaning and travailing [Rom 8:22]. There is nothing so obvious as we look around us that suffering and pain and hardship abounds in the whole of the creation. It is inevitable that if we live in this world, we partake in this pain to a greater or lesser degree. We may have more or less than our share, but we all have it, and sooner or later, as sensitive people, we are aware of our own suffering and that of others around us, and that the whole of our world suffers great pain, tragedy, loss, sickness, dying, killing.
And yet while the whole creation suffers, and knows pain, there is something unique about man. Not only does he suffer, but he is conscious of his suffering. Animals may experience pain or loss, but to reflect on its meaning, to be conscious of the loss, and to reason from it to its result – THIS is the prerogative of man. The mental anguish of this consciousness of suffering in the world, and of our own suffering, is given to men. Man can reflect and realize within him that things are out of harmony, that things are not right; to not only suffer the pain or loss, but to have a consciousness of the broken harmony, to reflect on the discontent in our souls, to realize that something is amiss in our constitution, or in the constitution of all the creation. In a word, man alone has the capacity to SORROW.
What a blessed gift is sorrow! It is that within us which testifies to the disharmony in which we live, and cannot rest in. We know that things are not well, that things are not what they ought to be, that life as we see it right now, is not the life that we were destined for. The necessary conditions of this world cannot satisfy our own constitution. Sorrow is a testimony that we are out of joint with our own nature – that we realize there is something higher – an ideal to which we aspire. It comes from the one who made us. “In the image of God created He them.” It is a testimony that we are fallen below ourselves as God intended! Even in our fallen state, we retain this little spark of the divine image – that we sorrow over the disharmony of ourselves with our universe. What a glorious privilege and dignity that we can sorrow! It is an eternal witness to our high estate – that we are made in the image of God.
So, do we cry out against sorrow and pain? Complain about it? How unfair it is, how wretched it is? Do we pray fervently to God to take it away from us? Thankfully he does not grant every foolish prayer. Can you imagine how blighted and blasted our souls would be if we were insulated from sorrow? Can you imagine how spoiled, how content we would be to just enjoy this material life like animals, if he did not remind us “this world is not our home”? Is the capacity for sorrow not a very fundamental blessing from God? “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted”, Mt. 5
But if sorrow is to work to bless us, HOW? Pain and suffering alone are not enough; we see some cases where pain only hardens a person, and may even drive him to blasphemy. Something else is needed for the blessing that comes from pain.
My response, my attitude toward pain and suffering is everything. The bodily suffering may be severe, and prolonged – even unto death, but the changes in the soul depend on something else – the mental outlook, the conditions of heart that allow sorrow to have its proper result. Think of the blessedness of simple acceptance of suffering as my “duty”. As long as I rebel against sorrow and pain, they have no transforming power. But as soon as I accept them, conforming my will to the will of heaven, the transformation begins. Not grudgingly accepting them, in sullenness or anger, but embracing the will of heaven and making it my own. When Jesus prayed in the garden, it was not an exercise aimed at escaping suffering – it was the conscious bringing of his own human will into concert with the Father’s!
The Father has either brought this pain and suffering or at least he has, in his wisdom, allowed these sorrows to come to me. In bending my will to conform to His, embracing these sorrows as his vehicle to bless, I make them a part of my soul’s free will and choice. In the acceptance of suffering with a view toward my Father, I can transform my sorrow into godly sorrow, rather than the deadly sorrow of the world [2 Cor 7:10]. This godly sorrow works repentance, and repentance works to salvation. Think how Jesus led us in repentance. He had no sin to repent of, but if we see repentance as a turning of our own human will toward the will of the Father, this is exactly what Jesus did. “He who knew no sin was made to BE sin for us…”
So here is another great secret from the mind of God, a gift of his grace: that in the dutiful acceptance of pain and suffering, conforming my will to the will of heaven, and denying self, I can in sorrow be refined and perfected by the cross of His Son, and so come to the realization of the deepest joy and fulfillment.
Larry Walker
August 16, 2008
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