"Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth"--let Israel now say--"Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth, yet they have not prevailed against me. The plowers plowed upon my back; they made long furrows." (Verses 1-2)
We are afflicted in every way but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. 2 Corinthians 4
I've heard people say all my life, "What doesn't kill me makes me better." Afflictions come in all shapes and sizes. Affliction: a state of pain, distress or grief; misery; a cause of mental or bodily pain, as a sickness, a loss, calamity or persecution.
Meriam Ibrahim was recently convicted in court in Khartoum on charges of adultery and apostasy. She is a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two. Her second child, a daughter, was born in a Sudanese prison while Meriam was chained to the floor of her concrete cell as her twenty-month-old son looked on. Her crime? She is a Christian. Married to an American engineer. For this crime, she has been sentenced to 100 lashes and death. She lay for two days in the bloody afterbirth of her labor, and wasn't allowed even a shower until a human rights committee visited. It is her brother who brought the charges against her. A devout Muslim, he claims, since their father was Muslim, she is Muslim and her Christianity is apostasy. The father has been absent since they were small, and their mother raised them both as Christians. Meriam refuses to deny her faith in Christ. That is affliction.
Pastor Saeed Abedini has been languishing in Rajai Shahr Prison for helping to build schools in Iran. Abedini converted to Christianity from Islam in 2000. By 2002, Saeed and his new wife, an American citizen, became prominent in the legal house church movement in Iran. Abedini established some one hundred house churches in thirty Iranian cities. By 2005, with the rise of Ahmedinejad to power, the Iranian government cracked down on house churches and the couple fled to the U.S. He became an American citizen and an ordained minister and settled with his family in Boise, Idaho, where his wife grew up. From 2009 up until his arrest in 2012, Abedini made nine trips back to his family in Iran to help build orphanages in the city of Rasht. On his last trip, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps confiscated his passports and placed the pastor under house arrest. Charged with compromising national security, he was sentenced to eight years in prison. Since November of 2013, Abedini has been in the harshest possible prison where the worst criminals and the most inhumane treatment exist. He has been beaten, starved and isolated. The more specific charges: undermining the Iranian government by creating a network of Christian house churches and attempting to sway Iranian youth away from Islam. Saeed suffers from the effects of multiple life-threatening beatings, is in dire need of medical help and refuses still to renounce Jesus. I cannot imagine.
I have a precious friend with stage four cancer. A young Christian mother of three lies in her home not far from mine, hospice workers tending to her needs as she languishes with brain cancer. Other friends have children very far away from God and from them, homeless, drug addicted or incarcerated. It starts to feel like you've been pushed down in a field as someone plows over your back with a tractor. Ripped to shreds. Not as punishment for a crime you've committed. Not sick as some might say because of sinfulness. The afflicted feel like arbitrary targets of some ill-fated arrows flying their way. The young mother couldn't possibly deserve the death that steals her future from her. So what do we make of affliction?
That it won't win. That's what we who know our God can make of it. It may corner us. It may kill us. But we live forever. In glory unspeakably beautiful and worth the prize. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4). If it doesn't kill us, we prevail, also. We aren't crushed or driven to despair, struck down or destroyed. Why? Because we know that all things have purpose for us. That the Savior for Whom we might be suffering or the God Who allows it, has birthed us into a kingdom of power and purpose. That in the darkest hours, the most heinous of circumstances, the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead can empower us to endure to the end. And when we ask Why? we know there really is an answer even if we can't possibly conceive of it this side of heaven. The death of Jesus, cruel and bloody, seemed the end. It was only the beginning. The seed falling to the ground and dying for our eventual fruitfulness. Peter had an answer for this. And he was crucified upside down for the God he refused to deny. Since, therefore, Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions, but for the will of God. 1 Peter 4.
Affliction burns away everything but Him. Survival in His will. It bonds us to the One Who knows what human suffering is all about. The One Who came to save us out of it and into forever with Him. I've often thought about the psalmists and the great despair they inked onto holy papyrus. Death, lies, hatred, beatings, desertion, sieges, famine, drought, pestilence, betrayal and war. In their moment of anxious pleadings to the God of their psalms, I'm sure it was as horrifying to them as the same circumstances are to us. That in the moment, when no solution is forthcoming, when the loved one is dying or the disease progressing, or the jail cell damp and the beatings deadly, that they were afraid and crying. My thought, though, is that their crucibles seemed to crush them centuries ago. In the scope of all time, their pain wasn't forever. They now see His face and nothing else matters. It ends. Somehow. Sometime. For all of us. It ends. So what we do with what is on our plate today matters for all eternity. Our God prevails in affliction and brings us to His throne room to say, "Well done. Well done" at the same time He says, "Never again. Never again."
So we move on in our perplexity and persecution, not giving in to hopelessness because "hope" lives in our mortal bodies. He is our hope. For God, Who said, "Let light shine out in darkness," has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 2 Corinthians 4:6 Oh, Jesus, in this hour, for those whose lives are wracked with unspeakable afflictions, be present as only You can be, filling your children with the hope that is You. Amen.
We are afflicted in every way but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. 2 Corinthians 4
I've heard people say all my life, "What doesn't kill me makes me better." Afflictions come in all shapes and sizes. Affliction: a state of pain, distress or grief; misery; a cause of mental or bodily pain, as a sickness, a loss, calamity or persecution.
Meriam Ibrahim was recently convicted in court in Khartoum on charges of adultery and apostasy. She is a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two. Her second child, a daughter, was born in a Sudanese prison while Meriam was chained to the floor of her concrete cell as her twenty-month-old son looked on. Her crime? She is a Christian. Married to an American engineer. For this crime, she has been sentenced to 100 lashes and death. She lay for two days in the bloody afterbirth of her labor, and wasn't allowed even a shower until a human rights committee visited. It is her brother who brought the charges against her. A devout Muslim, he claims, since their father was Muslim, she is Muslim and her Christianity is apostasy. The father has been absent since they were small, and their mother raised them both as Christians. Meriam refuses to deny her faith in Christ. That is affliction.
Pastor Saeed Abedini has been languishing in Rajai Shahr Prison for helping to build schools in Iran. Abedini converted to Christianity from Islam in 2000. By 2002, Saeed and his new wife, an American citizen, became prominent in the legal house church movement in Iran. Abedini established some one hundred house churches in thirty Iranian cities. By 2005, with the rise of Ahmedinejad to power, the Iranian government cracked down on house churches and the couple fled to the U.S. He became an American citizen and an ordained minister and settled with his family in Boise, Idaho, where his wife grew up. From 2009 up until his arrest in 2012, Abedini made nine trips back to his family in Iran to help build orphanages in the city of Rasht. On his last trip, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps confiscated his passports and placed the pastor under house arrest. Charged with compromising national security, he was sentenced to eight years in prison. Since November of 2013, Abedini has been in the harshest possible prison where the worst criminals and the most inhumane treatment exist. He has been beaten, starved and isolated. The more specific charges: undermining the Iranian government by creating a network of Christian house churches and attempting to sway Iranian youth away from Islam. Saeed suffers from the effects of multiple life-threatening beatings, is in dire need of medical help and refuses still to renounce Jesus. I cannot imagine.
I have a precious friend with stage four cancer. A young Christian mother of three lies in her home not far from mine, hospice workers tending to her needs as she languishes with brain cancer. Other friends have children very far away from God and from them, homeless, drug addicted or incarcerated. It starts to feel like you've been pushed down in a field as someone plows over your back with a tractor. Ripped to shreds. Not as punishment for a crime you've committed. Not sick as some might say because of sinfulness. The afflicted feel like arbitrary targets of some ill-fated arrows flying their way. The young mother couldn't possibly deserve the death that steals her future from her. So what do we make of affliction?
That it won't win. That's what we who know our God can make of it. It may corner us. It may kill us. But we live forever. In glory unspeakably beautiful and worth the prize. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4). If it doesn't kill us, we prevail, also. We aren't crushed or driven to despair, struck down or destroyed. Why? Because we know that all things have purpose for us. That the Savior for Whom we might be suffering or the God Who allows it, has birthed us into a kingdom of power and purpose. That in the darkest hours, the most heinous of circumstances, the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead can empower us to endure to the end. And when we ask Why? we know there really is an answer even if we can't possibly conceive of it this side of heaven. The death of Jesus, cruel and bloody, seemed the end. It was only the beginning. The seed falling to the ground and dying for our eventual fruitfulness. Peter had an answer for this. And he was crucified upside down for the God he refused to deny. Since, therefore, Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions, but for the will of God. 1 Peter 4.
Affliction burns away everything but Him. Survival in His will. It bonds us to the One Who knows what human suffering is all about. The One Who came to save us out of it and into forever with Him. I've often thought about the psalmists and the great despair they inked onto holy papyrus. Death, lies, hatred, beatings, desertion, sieges, famine, drought, pestilence, betrayal and war. In their moment of anxious pleadings to the God of their psalms, I'm sure it was as horrifying to them as the same circumstances are to us. That in the moment, when no solution is forthcoming, when the loved one is dying or the disease progressing, or the jail cell damp and the beatings deadly, that they were afraid and crying. My thought, though, is that their crucibles seemed to crush them centuries ago. In the scope of all time, their pain wasn't forever. They now see His face and nothing else matters. It ends. Somehow. Sometime. For all of us. It ends. So what we do with what is on our plate today matters for all eternity. Our God prevails in affliction and brings us to His throne room to say, "Well done. Well done" at the same time He says, "Never again. Never again."
So we move on in our perplexity and persecution, not giving in to hopelessness because "hope" lives in our mortal bodies. He is our hope. For God, Who said, "Let light shine out in darkness," has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 2 Corinthians 4:6 Oh, Jesus, in this hour, for those whose lives are wracked with unspeakable afflictions, be present as only You can be, filling your children with the hope that is You. Amen.
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