Praises from the Furnace: Faith in the Midst of Pain and Suffering

It's been a little over a month since my first born son entered and then left this world. My wife had been pregnant for twenty-two weeks when we received a call that one of the tests had come back positive and we made the long drive to Danville to discover that there were multiple issues with the baby boy growing inside her. The doctors told us that it was very unlikely that our son would survive the remainder of the pregnancy, and that even if he did survive the pregnancy, it was almost impossible that he would survive the birth and, if by some grace of God, he managed to be delivered alive, he wouldn't survive longer than a few hours. The prognosis was accurate, Josiah Emmanuel managed to survive until Hannah, my wife, and I could meet him. Both of us got to hold him in our arms before he left us. My first born child. My son.

Today we had a memorial for him. As part of the memorial service I got to share a little bit of what I felt like God was doing in my heart. I know that I haven't blogged in a while but I felt like I should share it with you all.

When Josiah died, I was angry. I had prayed and begged God to heal my son, but from the beginning both Hannah and I heard God say that he wouldn’t heal him. But I kept praying for it and I kept hoping that we were misunderstanding God but we weren’t and we knew we weren’t. But all that warning God gave us didn’t really take the sting out of losing Josiah. And so I was angry with God that he wouldn’t give me my fifty or sixty years with my son, and instead I had to fit those years into ninety-five minutes. So in the rawness of those emotions I was feeling, I was angry. But as those emotions callused over and the rational part of my brain regained control, I remembered that God was not a giant child with a magnifying glass just burning ants for fun. That I could trust him that this pain that he was giving me was for “the good of those who love him” and not because God was just some mean spirited deity that wanted to mess with weaker creatures. I could trust him because he allows himself to feel pain and suffering. In the book Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, Tim Keller writes,

“… God is sovereign and uses suffering as part of his inscrutable purpose. Yes, He is Lord of history, but he is also the vulnerable one who entered that history and became subject to its darkest forces. Yes, God often seems to be absent, but Jesus himself experienced the searing pain of that absence when he cried, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Yes, God is king, but is a king who came to earth and went not to a throne but to a cross. Yes, God is glorious but there is no greater glory than this – that he laid his glory and power aside and became weak and mortal.” 

 As Tim Keller said, God chooses to suffer. We have no control over our suffering, but God does, and he chose to suffer and to what end? Ours. Again Keller writes, 

“We all know heart involvement leads to suffering. The more you love someone, the more that person’s grief and pain becomes yours. And so even in the first chapter of Genesis, we see God is suffering because of our suffering, because of the misery of the world. Here, we have no abstract deity, no ‘divine principle,’ no ‘rational structure behind the universe.’ This is a transcendent but personal God who loves us so much that his heart is filled with pain over us.” 

You see, God allows himself to suffer for our benefit. Because of his suffering he chooses to send his Son to us.

Matt Chandler points to this in a sermon (you can hear the sermon here) he delivered the sermon shortly after getting a phone call about a little girl who the doctors had basically stopped treating her cancer because there was nothing left for them to do and he’s just torn up inside over it. He’s angry, he’s sad and he’s trying to work through it all and preach a sermon and he says, 

“Now follow me here because there are some things looking at the life of Christ that don’t add up. Like, if you look at His life He lived really hard, man. I mean, He lived really hard. I mean, He’s betrayed, He’s hated. He feels alone at times. He lives this very difficult life. And then it’s consummated in this brutal death. And it doesn’t add up because He could’ve been born into the manger, lived an easy life, died on the cross and it’s done. And it’s done. So why? Why does He have to be betrayed? Why does He have to taste loss? Why does He have to feel hate? Why does He have to walk in that? Why does He have to be tempted? Hebrews 2 says that He endured those things so that when my telephone rang on Friday, and what was going so well started to go so bad, that He could say, “I know, I know.” And as my heart grew frustrated He could go, “I know.” And as I’m lost and wonder about where He is and what He’s doing here, He’s not going, “Oh, come on Chandler, haven’t I shown you enough? Haven’t I done enough for you to trust me on this one?” No, He just sits there and goes, “I know, I know, I know. I know this stings and I know it doesn’t make any sense. I know and I remember. I lost. I lost, ok?”

               So as I stood in the hospital, looking at my wife who had just come through major surgery and I held my dead son in my arms and tears rolled down my cheeks I remembered that God had watched his son die. I remembered that Jesus lived a hard life and that he wasn’t giving out pain lightly because he knows pain more perfectly than this fallen body I walk around in could ever imagine. And I remembered that I had hope. That even when we put Josiah’s remains in the earth yesterday, that it wasn’t Good bye and those fifty or sixty years that I was angry about missing, would pale in comparison to the eternity that I would get with him. And while it doesn’t quite completely cover the pain my wife and I are feeling right now, it does give us hope, and Romans 5 reminds us that "hope does not lead us to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us."