The Most Avoided Subject, Suffering

[HKHaugan]

Every year we celebrate Good Friday and Easter, the Cross and the Resurrection. The first is about suffering and the second about the victory over suffering. Let’s look into suffering first.

Suffering began when Adam and Eve chose to break spiritual and relational ties with their Creator. The result was aloneness, the ultimate suffering, and the proof of sin, its ultimate cause. Sin is the spiritual collapse of our connection with God and others. Sin is the spiritual distancing of ourselves from God and one another. Sin is personal dislocation into self-centeredness. Our personal aloneness is the conscious realization that there is no one with whom we can be completely at one, no one who understands what’s going on in our mind, feels what’s going on in our heart and discerns what’s going on in our spirit. Mankind’s frenzied religious, economic, philosophical and social activities are his furtive attempts to overcome aloneness. The fact is, if we are willing to face it, there is no one who can climb inside our head, heart or spirit nor we theirs. Every human being is born into this condition of sin, its relational separation, its aloneness, its fear and its pride.

In a prior posting we named and described the initiator of sin, the devil, who was the first sinner and beguiled Adam and Eve to be the first human sinners (1Jn.3:8). He is the first to have alienated himself from God (Luke 10:18) and whose career is to personally pillage the images of God through temptation. His goal is to replicate himself by seducing images of God to be like him. The devil’s temptations are all designed to exploit our aloneness by applying pressure through what he knows magnifies our inner perceived needs and our personal fears. He applies pressure on our pride through the things he knows will keep us defensive. Why? His weakness is that he fears the Father, he fears Jesus and he fears the Holy Spirit. With fear comes anger and as a fallen angel of God he is all anger, rage and hostility ready to spring into action through us. The strategy he uses the most is to hide in the background, in the shadows of our choices and decisions and in getting us to believe and act like we are in control. His is a will desiring to replace God, a totally corrupted heart to control a kingdom apart from God and a completely devious spirit of sin with its fear and pride to take God’s place and activate evil in the world. The devil is the ultimate lonely individual and he knows his doom is impending. He knows ultimately God is in control and he is that much angrier. Cain’s murder of Abel in self-justifying jealousy and anger is a clear indication of where he was headed at that time (Gen.4).

How all we have said plays itself out is in our aloneness, the foundation for the strongholds, the defensive attitudes, we build to handle ourselves in every next moment. Even Shakespeare caught the truth about fear, "Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once (from his play Julius Caesar)” and Scripture about pride “A man’s pride brings him low (Pr.29:23).” This is the condition of every single human being since Adam and Eve. The death they experienced, spiritual death, separated them from God and one another.
While they still had biological life the real death, aloneness, crept into their experience.

Life in this world is a biologically limited course we call time and time is the measure we use to gauge its imitations to make sense out of our aloneness. Our time is spent surviving aloneness which engulfs us all forever unless we find that there is more than me, the world and its complicated fury. How true the Bible is when these words come alive within, “This only have I found: God made man upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes (Eccl.7:29).” Those schemes are the specifics of sin called sins. The sins the Bible spells out are all attempts to overcome our aloneness apart from God which is what makes them sins. What He counsels us to do is the way we overcome our aloneness beginning with receiving Jesus as the Savior and Lord of every next moment and being guided by the Scripture in the Holy Spirit every next moment.

How do we know that this is all possible, that the devil, sin and evil are really temporary and defeatable? It was the willingness of Jesus, God the Son, to experience our aloneness with all the devil’s forces and world power arrayed against Him. It was captured in that moment when Jesus uttered those soulful words, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani --- My God, my God why hast Thou forsaken me?” What He did on the Cross was to identify completely with our sin-drenched aloneness, our self-conscious isolation and alienation from God and one another by becoming sin for us and bearing it into death. That’s why Paul told the Corinthians that “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God (2Cor.5:21).”

The Cross of Jesus is the beginning of our recovery from sin-induced aloneness. He came into a human body so that we could experience Him. That experience was demonstrated by the faith He had in His Father especially when He died alone uttering, “Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit (Lk.23:46).” His death accepted in faith that we could be restored through faith is the key to understanding why Jesus went to the Cross. Now we can see why Jesus uses the Cross to make this point, that faith becomes our cross to take up each day. Our cross is to live every next moment by faith in the presence of Jesus. Our cross is to take the pet self-help techniques, our spiritual strongholds, our attitudinal schemes, we have developed since childhood and crucify them, die to them, eliminate their use from moment to moment until they disappear. Now it’s true that some may hang on but we learn the power of the Holy Spirit Jesus provides to continue resisting them. Take for instance the alcoholic’s desire for a drink that doesn’t stop. What he does is resist by the power of God until that resistance becomes a habit and he can count the momentary victories and build around them. This is true of any addictive personality regardless of the addiction. Sin is addictive. Jesus is the cure.

There is something else in the process, the need for another person or persons to share the struggle. While we look up to Jesus and find Him, the ultimate person of persons on our side, having someone we can share our hearts with, someone to help keep us accountable, is part of the healing process. Notice how we look up to Jesus and then to someone on our level, that is the shape of the Cross, the visible reality of the daily crucifixion Jesus calls for to put our past behind and forge ahead renewed by His Spirit. It is a picture of the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus localized in us. This is what it means to be part of the Body of Christ where we live with Him as our focus and one another as our support as we reach out and offer Jesus to the hearts of others to be part of the truth we have discovered in Him.

But now something else happened through the Cross Jesus bore in our place. Remember when Jesus said in John’s Gospel, “It is finished”? John then recorded these words, “With that, He bowed His head and gave up His Spirit (Jn.19:30).” It was the Holy Spirit that filled Jesus’ faith, His words, His actions, His whole life from birth through death and giving up the Spirit was the visible fact that now the Spirit was available to all who would receive Jesus by the same faith. So faith is the means by which each of us renews our relationship with God. It means we are no longer alone. God is our Father, Jesus is our elder brother and the Spirit the third Person of God who re-spiritualizes us and re-spiritualizes us into eternity. Add to this remarkable spiritualization the fact that everyone who receives Jesus personally is spiritually connected to every other person who does the same thing making us spiritual brothers and sisters for eternity. This is how Jesus has started a new family where everyone belongs to God and to each other.