It’s been a long haul and inevitable that I should be interested in the cancer stories of others. I have written about some of them in the past eight months. Obviously people of faith have featured most prominently but there have been others not believers but not to be ignored. Men and women who have coped with inspiring inner strength. The best of those stories are those in which you connect with a ‘voice’, a sense of the person behind the words, a person willing to be honest, open and vulnerable. The very best are those in which the person shares things they have learned about themselves and about God even while acknowledging the pain, disorientation, weakness and despair.
What have I learned about myself? Well, that might be the subject of future blogs. Maybe. What is most important is what I am learning about God. Even as I write this I want to correct that. Really it’s what I am experiencing about God that is most important. I’ve always known about God. It was in my head. And it would be wrong to say that I have never had profound experiences of God and the love He has shown for humankind in Jesus. (How I miss that experience in the preaching event that by the grace of God I have made a connection with His eternal truth and through His Spirit is enabling me to share that truth with His people!) It’s just that some things I feel I have discovered about God on a personal level in the past I have been reluctant to share and to preach. And these things have become more important, no vital to me in these cancer days. Yes I have sometimes preached and written about ‘the dark side of God’, His judgement, His mysterious providence, His discipline. (Discipline!? Careful boy.) But when you get down to it, I have been nervous, reluctant to go there.
So unlike Paul who in the face of breathtaking revelations from the Eternal World wrote :
‘To keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.’
(2 Corinthians 12: 7-10)
So unlike Peter who writes of all the blessings we receive in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus:
‘In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.’ (1 Peter 1: 6-9)
So unlike the unknown writer of the Letter to the Hebrews who without asking us to fasten tight our safety helmets and without a tremour of apology writes:
‘Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. “Make level paths for your feet,” so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.” (Hebrews 12: 7-13)
So unlike Jesus who knew that heavy almost soul-destroying darkness in Gethsemene such that His whole constitution - body, mind and spirit - threatened to come apart completely. And yet Luke tells us that an angel was sent, an emissary from the Eternal World, to strengthen Him, to assure Him that the ‘cup‘ was worth the tasting for herein lay the salvation of the whole Universe. Who sent the angel? His Heavenly Father, who loved Him. It’s what the Psalmist says:
‘If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.’ (Psalm 139: 11-12)
It may not be a perfect application for a man with cancer but it’s a truth that needs to be grasped. The Psalmist is celebrating the eternal presence of God in every circumstance. The darkness is not dark to Him. He is present in the darkness working out His perfect and loving will.
Even Gethsemene did not see the end of testing for Jesus. Many have been the attempts to soften the moment of Jesus’ dereliction, His anguish at the abandonment of God while He died on the Cross. He had read the Psalm. He had probably memorised it as a boy in the synagogue. God help us to understand, He even inspired it from all eternity as the second person of the Trinity. But now He experienced it, as one us, God in the flesh but still he cries out the most gut-wrenching words in the whole of human history:
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Psalm 22: 1)
In a preaching I heard from Professor Donald Macleod he once referred to the humanity of Jesus and how He identified with us completely even to the extent of knowing the loss of God. ‘Tis mystery all! The immortal dies,’ wrote Wesley in one of the greatest of all hymns. And although some people don’t like to sing it Stuart Townend is right to invite us to sing:
‘How deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure,
That He should give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure.
How great the pain of searing loss –
The Father turns His face away,
As wounds which mar the Chosen One
Bring many sons to glory.’
‘The Father turns His face away.’ He saw this moment from all eternity, the moment of redemption for the whole Universe, the moment of redemption for me, through the suffering of the Son He loved. And Father take away my nervous reluctance to go there, You not only saw it You willed it for the humanity You loved. A more courageous man than I, the Apostle John, said: ‘God loved the world so much that He gave His one and only son so that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.‘ (John 3: 16)
Another one, Paul:
‘He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (Romans 8: 32-39)
Out of his love for us he did not spare His Son and from this we can sing:
Nor death nor life, nor earth nor hell,
nor time's destroying sway,
can e'er efface us from his heart,
or make his love decay.
I understand the difficulty in going down this road but please stay with it. A minister made the headlines not too long ago when he said that believing that Jesus died for our sins on the cross is ‘ghastly theology’. In stating this he struck at the core of my faith. What sustains me at present is the assurance that God has loved me so much that He did not spare His only Son to deal with the darkness of sin that separates me from Him and assures me of a place in his Eternal Kingdom. So whatever darkness falls has not pushed God out or His love. The darkness is not dark to Him. The light of His loving purpose is at the core moving my life according to His pace towards the completion.
I don’t know ‘the reasons why’. Neither did that man I dare to call my brother, the Apostle Paul. He looked forward to the Day when all that was unclear would be made clear. It’s there in 1Corinthians 13. Read it. And not just the bit they read at weddings.
‘Now we see but a poor reflection in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.’ (verse 12).
I’m amazed that I’ve written so much recently and not mentioned Ron Dunn, an American pastor, who experienced much darkness in his life but was a powerful witness for his God revealed in Jesus. In his book When Heaven Is Silent he speaks about living with the question ‘why?’ He says something quite astonishing. With all he has gone through and it is more than most of us will ever be called upon to endure he believes that at the end of all things when he comes into God’s presence in all the wonder and the glory the questions will not matter. I’m with him.
The question for me and Patient Reader for you too is for this moment. How deeply do we really know this God revealed through Jesus? Oh and there is another question, how far do we trust Him? This God whose darkness is not dark, whose love will never efface us from His heart, whose love will never decay, whose good purpose is moving on through the worst. Ron wrote:
‘I confess I’m still trying to get an answer to my ‘why?’. And I’m still getting the silent treatment. But it’s all right. I trust Him.’
I’m with Ron.
