Pleasure and Pain
Sep 10, 2009
2 Corinthians 4:17-18: For this slight 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.
Hebrews 10:34-35: For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one. Therefore do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward.
Hebrews 12.2: For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross, scorning its shame.
July 1, 2008—Jubilation turned to despair, joy turned to tears, and excitement turned to sadness. I lay in my bed, still half sick from an internal virus but mainly wondering and crying over tragedy. My wife had called from the doctor’s office to tell me that the baby we had so prayed and hoped for, the baby who had been formed by God Himself in her womb, the baby who just weeks earlier we were praising God for, the baby who was the cause of all our jubilation had died in the womb—“miscarriage” is the euphemistic way to communicate death in that situation.
I have been arguing that the true vision of Christianity commands us to pursue our pleasure. But our world has been cursed by God Himself (Genesis 3, Romans 8) and contains much misery, sorrow, and tragedy, much beyond what I described above. So then, how is a Christian to pursue pleasure in those situations? No vision of the Christian life can be complete without taking into account the enormous issue of pain and suffering.
However, I believe that God must be our greatest delight if we are to endure suffering well. I say that mainly because the fight of faith, it seems to me, in times of hardship, depression, suffering, and loss is a fight to gain true satisfaction in God, i.e. more satisfaction that you had in the keeping or attaining of that which was lost. So, my struggle in our miscarriage and loss of our second child was to find God more satisfying than having another child. It is what Tozer calls "The blessedness of possessing nothing." The greatest thing the world can see in our suffering is a foundational satisfaction in God-we grieve the loss openly but we also are fighting to see and to show God as bigger, better, and ultimately more satisfying than the thing we lost. I think we see this pretty clearly in Hebrews 10.34 when the author is talking about the suffering they endured: "You joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one." So their satisfaction in God's provision allowed them to suffer joyfully or as Paul says it, “we are sorrowful yet always rejoicing.”
You can only be joyful when someone is plundering your property if you take joy at the thought of having a “better possession and an abiding one…a great reward,” namely a place where you and everything else is secure and happy in God for eternity. Another way to put it is to say that God must be our end and not simply a means to an end. He must be foundational, not instrumental. In other words, that which is most valued is our god so we must not use God as an instrument to get what we really want; rather we must see everything else as sacrificable to get what is really best and most delightful—God Himself. With that in mind we can enter into any period of suffering like Jesus did—for the joy set before Him (Hebrews 12.2). In my case, as I worked through the sadness that surrounded our miscarriage, I found God to be more sufficient, more enjoyable, and more real than I ever had before. I have been a little better prepared, equipped, and suited for the “eternal weight of glory” God offers.
I want to close these four weeks with a quote from Lewis’ Screwtape Letters where Lewis imagines a conversation between an older experience demon named Screwtape with his young protégé. Listen to his advice and take seriously the way Satan wages spiritual warfare in our lives:
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s [God’s] ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His Invention, not ours. He makes the pleasures; all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy [God] has produced, at times, or ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden…An ever-increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula…To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return—that is what really gladdens our Father’s [Satan’s] heart.