Does God Strike Low Blows?
Veneetha Rendall Risner had undergone twenty-one separate surgeries by the time she was 13 years old.
She had contracted polio as an infant and spent years of her childhood in and out of hospitals. Struggling through the trauma of her illness and the abuse of her peers, Vaneetha began to define herself by both the physical and emotional scars her life had erected.
And then at the age of 16, she met Jesus.
Perhaps, in this new found joy, life would be different for her. Perhaps God had had her suffer in this intense way to drive her to Himself, and now that she had found Him, her pain would find relief. Perhaps at last, through college, through marriage, through the birth of her two beautiful daughters, life could concede some vague semblance to the normal she had always wanted.
But over the course of the next dozen years, that hope slowly unraveled.
“I buried an infant son due to a doctor’s foolish mistake. Then debilitating pain led to a diagnosis of post-polio syndrome that will eventually put me in a wheelchair, with ever diminishing use of my limbs. And then my husband left us and moved away, leaving me to care for our two adolescent daughters by myself. Losing my child, my health, and my marriage almost made me lose my mind. It was crushing. After each catastrophic event, I wondered if life would ever be good again. If I’d ever laugh again. If I’d ever adjust to this new normal.”
Recently, Vaneetha published an article on her blog* entitled Is God Low-Key Savage? In it, she describes a conversation she overheard her daughter having with a friend who was struggling. Her daughter said, “Sometimes I think God is low-key savage. It seems like he wants to take away the things that we don’t even realize we rely on…”
When I read these words, two thoughts instantly sprung to my mind.
I can’t believe someone would say that about God
and
I have thought that before.
When God Sinks Christians
Low-key savage is one of those new phrases that is more clearly defined by its implication than its etymology. As Vaneetha’s daughter described it, low-key savage refers to an action or event that is subtly ruthless, with a touch of irony.
The example her daughter used was the Titanic: A ship believed to be unsinkable plummets to the depths on her maiden voyage because the warnings of ice are repeatedly ignored by the very ones who believe the ship invincible.
Over 1,500 people died.
Low-key savage is one of the most euphemistic terms that could be used to describe such an event, but the implication on a cosmic level is clear.
Certain pains, at the hand of our sovereign God, feel like a low-blow. Unnecessary brutality. Meaningless violence committed simply because it can be done, or because God has the right to do it. The irony makes it worse.
Familiar scriptural passages of “heroes of the faith” could just as easily be touted as divine beating bags by the suspicions of our own sinful hearts.
For example:
Joseph is hated by his brothers and he gets sold into slavery. He is a good slave who serves and honors his master, and he is thrown into prison for a false accusation of attempted rape. He is a good prisoner, who leads and aids those around him with compassion and integrity, and he is forgotten by the one man in the world who promised never to forget him.
Job is a righteous and upright man, and God sets him up as a target. Job loses his wealth, his livestock, and his children in one day and does not sin, and God takes away his health. Job is sitting on an ash heap scraping his wounds and in desperate need of compassion and hope, and his wife tells him to curse God and die and his friends accuse him of upsetting his Maker.
One broken man, struggling through the trauma of losing his wife to cancer, even wrote about this attempted “savagery” in the life of Christ.
He said:
“How if (Christ) were mistaken? Almost His last words may have a perfectly clear meaning. He had found that the Being He called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had expected. The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited, was at last sprung, on the cross. The vile practical joke had succeeded.”
When God Breaks the Broken
That man was C.S. Lewis.
Lewis is known for his intellectual prowess in Christianity, for his worldwide influence in defending the faith, for his stout defense of theology, Christian doctrine, and the practice of apologetics.
He is seldom remembered for the screams he wrote in his journal following the death of his wife.
Lewis continued:
“What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers (Helen) and I offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking, hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by false diagnoses, by X-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we were ‘led up the garden path.’ Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture.”
The Christian who trusts the doctor with the bitter tasting medicine only to find it was poison after all, may wonder at the cruelty of a great physician who would offer hope with a remedy that seems to lead only to a greater execution.
With Lewis, we cry out against this seeming cosmic injustice. Is God good after all? Then comes the subtle ploy, rising from the subconscious again and again as every stitch that is painfully planted seems more painfully torn out – perhaps this is not love after all, but a low blow, an unnecessary evil, and the tattered shreds of our existence are but the banner of a cosmic swagger.
Christians keep this secret.
This is the dark part of ourselves – the hidden suspicions that cry out against God. Say what you will of faith, of perseverance, of sovereign love, of divine fatherhood, and good purpose. All of that is good. All of that is true. All of that does speak to the doubts and fears that cry out against us, which we desperately try to submerge and hide away.
But the pain still hurts. The house of cards is knocked down again and again. The peg is kicked out from underneath us. The wound is reopened by the physician’s own knife. The hope is given, pulls you from the depths, and then the thread on which you clung to breaks again.
You go to God with your pain, plead for relief, for healing, for rest, for joy. Life seems to get better. And then He plunges the knife once more and your cries are met with silence.
So where do you go with pain like that?
You go to God.
Remember This World Is Broken
This seems a strange place to begin a conversation of comfort, yet, in a way, the conversation must begin here.
This is not the way the world was supposed to be. This is not the original, created reality. This is the broken, distorted echo of a past we were made for and that we have lost.
This world screams and groans with birth pains in the hands of a loving God. Our profound revulsion to the atrocities of this world, the howl that reverberates within us at the problem of evil, our violent reaction to the reality of pain – our daily confrontations with cell-destroying cancer, life-ravaging hurricanes, brutal rape, fatal car wrecks, violent school shootings, the trafficking of the innocent, unrelenting disability, prolonged mourning after death, the darkness of depression, the loneliness of abuse, the agony of betrayal, the core despair of a suicide, the second-by-second murder of the weakest members of the human race – all this screams against a part of ourselves that is remnant of Eden: This is wrong. This is not the way it was supposed to be.
And this whisper is not a sin. It is not guilty. It is true.
But it must be a truth that points to the Gospel. This daily crucifixion must be met with the Cross.
Remember that God is Big Enough for Your Pain
It is not wrong to cry out with the Psalmist. It is not wrong to weep with Job. You may be in despair. You may be angry. You may even be angry at God.
That’s okay. God is big enough for your anger.
So lay your heart – with all your feelings of sadness, and bitterness, and anger, and fear, and the ugly relentlessness of your own broken heart – and lay it all at his feet. When you feel you must shake a fist at heaven, take that anger and hold it up with open hands.
And don’t forsake the channels of grace. They may feel dry at the touch – and we don’t know why. But though the channels seem dry for a night, his mercies are new every morning. The fountainhead is close, and it is sufficient – more than sufficient.
As Vaneetha wrote in a later article:
“What do we do when we feel drained and empty? When no one understands our suffering and no one seems to care? When we feel discouraged and tired and unbearably lonely?
Read the Bible and pray.
Read the Bible even when it feels like eating cardboard. And pray even when it feels like talking to a wall.”
Remember that God is Good
He is so good he uses the heart-wrenching evil of this world to accomplish Christ-exalting glory. He is so good he allows no pang of suffering in his children to be wasted.
He is so good he never relinquishes his grip on the physician’s knife, he never slices deeper than is needed, and he never causes a single ounce of pain that will not be turned on its head into eternal glory.
And he is so good he weeps as he slices, as he stitches, as he chisels away, spreading forth the eternal tapestry until he will declare as he did in the face of the greatest evil possible: It is finished.
Remember that God is Sovereign
There are times when a Christian may feel that to think of God as sovereign is to ascribe the flaw of brutality to his character in the midst of suffering.
Far from it.
To know God is sovereign is to know that your suffering is not wasted, it is to know that you are not forsaken, it is to know that you are not lost, it is to know that the promises may still reach you, that hope is still set before you.
It is to know that every ounce of pain is weighed and measured, every tear captured and precious, and every moment of tribulation put in a vial to be poured out in glory on your head.
Remember that God’s Love is Unfailing
It is eternal. It is faithful. And it is real.
More real than this passing age. More real than this fading world. More real than this brokenness. More real than this pain.
When grief overspreads all, remember that deeper, broader, fuller, God’s love has overspread that grief. It is not over, but it has been swallowed up, for on the Cross – the greatest of evils – came the culmination of that love which will end all evils.
Remember that God Has Entered Your Pain
Though we may not understand how God will use our pain for our good – even though we may not understand that it even can be done, God’s sufficient grace offers us the hope that it will be done, and that he has not made us endure anything he himself has not endured fully, exhaustively, ultimately, and purposefully.
Christ has tasted the bitterness of this evil world within the frailness of humanity.
He who has the power to calm the storms has endured the tossing of the waves. He who can heal all pains and diseases has endured the greatest physical suffering possible to men. He who reconciles us as children to a gracious Father was forsaken by that Father in our stead. He who could righteously condemn us to a greater pain than this world can ever offer has endured that pain himself to rescue us from it.
He does not rescue us from the pain here. Not yet. But he has endured that also. He knows what it is to weep, to cry out, to be in such emotional anguish that the only physical response possible in his body was to pour forth sweat as drops of blood.
And even now in Heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father – seated in eternal joy – even now, He yet weeps with us, holding up our broken pieces to a promised glory, with hands even now pierced with scars.
Remember that the Story is not Over
The same God who authored the story where He dies, authors the story where we live in Him. Pain is met with promise. Hurt is met with hope. In the midst of this present catastrophe, remember the eucatastrophe – the grand, glorious finish where evil is turned on its head – is yet to come.
We are but days away from home.
One day, the end will come, and with it, the scream This is not as it should be will be replaced with the realized promise: This is right. This is what we were made for.
We will see the nail-pierced hand of the Great Physician. We will see the final image that the chisel chipped away. We will behold the glorified vessel brought forth from the fire of affliction. We will see the beauty resurrected from the ashes of this world, and the tapestry woven with our sufferings and tears.
We will see the ten thousand things God was doing, with the prayers we thought unanswered.
Speak that to your pain. One day, it will meet its Maker.
Soli Deo Gloria,
*Veneetha Rendall Risner’s blog, Dance in the Rain, is absolutely amazing and full of hope in the midst of suffering. This quote on her homepage gives a tiny glimpse of this woman’s beautiful heart.
She writes: “You may wonder about my blog title. It seems crazy that I chose it but I did have a reason. My life has often felt like a raging storm. A hurricane without an end. And yet God has given me joy in the midst of it.”
Desiring God recently published a short film on her story which you can watch here:
Worth Every Second: Vaneetha’s Joy in Suffering.