A Devotion from James Stewart
In all these things we are more than conquerors.
-Romans 8:37
Why should a Roman gallows, and the strange Man who hung there, haunt the imagination and the conscience of our race?
It is because humankind, in the depths of the spirit, has always been conscious that in that Cross, God has spoken, and eternity has intersected history. We know that, past all our attempts to answer the problem of evil and suffering, here is God’s answer. Here, if anywhere, is the clue to solve the riddle [of life and the mystery of sorrow].
It is not the fact of suffering that baffles us, for we can see that we need it; it is the frightful excess of the thing that seems so cruel and senseless. If God intends human sanctification, why couldn’t he have thought out some kindlier way?
There is still another difficulty. We talk about suffering producing character. But it does not always have that effect. The beneficent influence of pain does not work automatically! In different lives, suffering produces different effects. One man loses his wife, and the loss makes him more tender and gentle. Another faces the same loss, and it makes him hard and sullen. One woman has a great sorrow, and it turns her to God. Another [has] a similar experience, and she is never seen inside a church again.
Trouble, in itself, is neither positive nor negative. It is neutral; whether it is going to become positive or negative depends on the human reaction. Some have the grace to use it creatively, forcing trouble to yield up its hidden blessing. But we do not always rise to that. How often our negative reaction balks even his will to bless!
This fact emerges—that our main concern with suffering is not to find an explanation; it is to find a victory. It is to lay hold on a power. Even if you possessed the answer to the riddle, had it written down to the last detail and could say, “There is the full and final explanation of the problem of pain,” that would not be enough, would it? For the pain itself would still have to be borne. That is the real demand of the human spirit—not the explaining of this thing, but grace and help to bear it. And that is why God gave us Christ.
On every page of your New Testament the living God comes toward you, and he holds in his hands not the answer to the questions of the mind but something better and diviner: a liberating, reinforcing power for the soul!