The journey// My God is God and my God is good

If you’ve been a follower of Jesus for any amount of time, it is inevitable that when suffering comes, a divine wrestling would come – is God God, is God good?

That was a waffle full of words, so let me explain that. When we face suffering and when we know there is a God, its easy to try to explain away the suffering by thinking that either God is not sovereign or God is not kind and good.

Ok another waffle full of words. Let me explain again in simpler terms – when we go through pain we wonder why. We wonder why God didn’t stop the pain. Was He not able? Did he not love me?

I’ve been on that journey. That journey of questioning whether the source of the pain was my sin or was it God’s will. Whether God was not able or willing to stop it. Many characters in the bible have gone through that. In my wrestling, I want to share with you my view on things.

Firstly, I’ve got to break the bad news to you – I haven’t found the answer. I probably won’t be able to find out so soon, at least not to the fullest degree in this life.

But I’ve got better news for you, and that is there is another way of addressing the pain of the questioning.

To not have the answers, and to get stuck in trying to find the answers is a path of excruciatingly painful. It spirals you down away from this God you do not understand and leads you to seek comfort in trying to know. A plan that often ends in despair as with every effort to get all the answers often never leads us with something we are fully satisfied with. And it doesn’t heal me. Knowing the person who raped me may give me some vindication and sense of justice, but it doesn’t help me heal from the excruciating pain of the incident, in fact it may add to it. (and I say this tenderly as I know some reading this may have experienced such horrors)

I have found instead that embracing the God I don’t understand is a less painful way. That while it is still painful to embrace the reality that I don’t know, it is a lesser pain than wrestling with the unknown. In fact, at times, I am surprised at the joy and healing God brings when I take a step of faith amidst the pain, and the answers that I do get that heals me.

Ultimately, I find strange comfort in gazing on Jesus of the Bible, one who is often misrepresented even by the church, but the One who Himself suffered and cried out in lament ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.’

Slowly on this path, I can testify that God is God and God is good. Even with lingering pain.

It takes defiance to believe that. But it is a higher, better way. And for me, its the way forward.

Much love.

Here I leave a blessing from Arthur Burk’s website which helped me wrestle through the questions to take the nobler option.

Blessing of Job : Sovereignty or Sin

(“BJ CD01.07 Sovereignty or Sin” from Blessings of Job by Arthur Burk. Released: 2012.)