Triumph Over TroubleSample

God is our example: No one suffers more than God

Christians insist that God can be trusted during suffering because God Himself has firsthand experience in suffering. God is sovereign over suffering, yet He has made Himself vulnerable and subject to suffering. This is amazing because God is all-powerful, sovereign, holy, absolutely self-sufficient, infinite, and eternal. He doesn’t need anything and doesn’t depend on anyone. He does not need our love and worship, but He chose to love us first and enter our suffering. The more you love someone, the more that person’s grief and pain become yours, and no one loves more than God.

In Genesis 6:5-6, when the Lord saw how great man’s wickedness had become, He was grieved, and His heart was filled with pain. Scripture after Scripture describes God’s pain and sorrow over our sin. Listen to the “if only” sorrow in God’s heart in Isaiah 48:17-18: “‘I am the Lord your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go. If only you had paid attention to my commands, your peace would have been like a river, your well-being like the waves of the sea.”

Jesus, when He came to earth, emptied Himself of all His divine privileges; took the form of a servant and became a man. He then humbled Himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8). He experienced weariness and thirst, distress, grief, and His suffering was such that He offered up prayers “with loud cries and tears” (Hebrews 5:7; Luke 22:44). He was misunderstood and rejected by His own family (John 7:3-5). Hebrews 5:8 tells us that Jesus “learned” from what He suffered. The God we rely on knows what suffering is all about, not merely in the way that God knows everything, but by experience.

In the crucifixion, Jesus was abandoned, denied, and betrayed by all the people He had poured His life into. God the Father suffered with Jesus as He offered up His own Son to carry the world’s sins. He had to look away as His Son became sin and hear the heart-wrenching cry from Jesus, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?” Jesus took the punishment that we deserved, and God the Father took into His self, His own heart, an infinite agony – out of love for us.

Dan McCartney writes: “Christ learned humanhood from his suffering and therefore we learn Christhood from our suffering.” (from ‘Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering’ by Timothy Keller, pg 152) Just as Jesus assumed human likeness through suffering (Hebrews 2:18), so we can grow into Christ’s likeness through it if we face it in faith and patience.

Is this not a great cause for comfort, knowing that whatever we experience – our God who is all-powerful and sufficient, has already experienced it in far greater measure than we ever will and has overcome it?!! Rest in His power and authority. He can sustain you.