Why do Christians suffer? I’m not talking about a little bit here and a little bit there. I’m talking about the kind of suffering that almost causes a person to lose their minds. I’m talking about suffering that makes you question why you were even born in the first place. Many of you know exactly what I mean because you’ve been there, and so have I. It’s a sorrow that forces a person to ask some questions they have never thought about. It makes you wonder what you could have possibly done in your life that such a pain of affliction could come upon you. The topper comes when you think you’ve made it through the worst of it, only to find that something else has gone terribly wrong. This is the kind of shock to the system occurrence that either incites fear in a believer’s heart or causes them to breach a spiritual dimension that they never in their wildest dreams could have known was possible.
My vote is for the latter. This is because it has been my personal experience that the greater the affliction, the greater the victory; and I’m talking about victory that exceeds our grandest expectations. Many of us can’t yet stretch to this level of expectancy when it comes to what we believe God will do for us, but there’s some medicine that we can take for this ailment. This medicine is in the form of both knowledge and experience. The more we know about God the richer our experience of Him, His righteousness, and His blessings will be.
The delivery of this medicine narrows the treatment down to just you and God. That’s it! Whatever it is that is going on in your life is going to be ultimately defined and resolved by how you, as the recipient of God’s care, will view the Caregiver, our Eternal God.
El Olam means God Eternal. Heavenly Father is sharing with us the infinite and everlasting character and existence of His being. He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. The Prophet Isaiah said in Isaiah 40:28 (NIV), “Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.” Friends will come and go, relationships will disappoint us, and the people we love most will not be with us always, but the Everlasting and Eternal God will never leave us or forsake us.
If you’ve never endured abandonment or you’ve not been out on a limb without the comfort of anyone who’s got your back, then you might not be able to relate. However, if you’ve been in a position where only God could rescue you, only He could turn your darkness to blue skies, then the eternal nature of God will become very real for you. When you’ve faced the greatest challenge of your life, and it cannot be denied that only the Lord has brought you through, you cannot help but come face to face with the reality of God’s infinite and unfailing nature.
Again, God wants us to know His eternal nature. It must be seared upon our consciousness. Our minds must be increased to the point of making room for the reality of an infinite—everlasting God; because just as He lives forever, because of His love for us, through Jesus Christ we will live an eternity as well.
The unfulfilling quality of life that some of us experience and the conditions we often face prompt us to sometimes panic, because life wheels some pretty crushing blows. Many of us suffer in our conditions for longer than we’d like. This suffering can potentially block a person from appreciating and basking in the euphoria of El Olam the way that the Prophet Isaiah did. The thing that the believer has to understand is that God will allow us to be pushed until the point that our brain cells are swollen with unyielding believing power. We are pressed until the motor of our human spirit is switched on, and this is the thing that kicks us in alignment with God’s Will and Plan for our individual lives.
Ephesians 1:11(NIV) tells us, “In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will,” This is an enormous, life-defining truth. You have been chosen by God, and He has predetermined your part in His plan. He has worked it out to such a magnificent degree that it snuggly fits into His plan for the entire universe. Just like a puzzle piece fits perfectly into an intricately vast puzzle, you are tailor made to continuously add something wonderful to the earth. In other words, God has showered your life with destiny and is patiently waiting for your faith to catch up with it.
You need to catch this revelation of infinite, overflowing magnificence that God has brought to your table. Without it, you will view yourself through a lens of ‘not enough’ instead of ‘never ending’. You’ll stop short of pouring out of a heart that is continuously filled. You’ll be fearful always of not having enough, and your offerings will be puny and small, rather than ample and strong. This kind of limited thinking will cut down your fruitfulness and diminish your capacity needlessly.
You cannot grow beyond what you know, and you cannot go higher than what you believe. This is why God is challenging us and doing so in a way that does not intercept our own free-will choice. We cannot grow in our believing unless we grow in our understanding and realization of who God is. He’s challenging us to stretch as much as humanly possible to grasp the totality of His being. He’s continually helping us to do this and for many of us this takes quite a bit of time.
Matthew 6:32 affirms that God is all-knowing, and He knows what we have need of before we ask. Matthew 6:33 (KJV) then tells us, “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” We cannot fathom God’s understanding. Our minds cannot hold the details of all of His plans, that is why we must trust Him, and this trust must be as limitless and unyielding as His eternal nature. It is our responsibility to use our time wisely. The distance between our suffering and our deliverance should be spent seeking God, seeking His perfect Will for our lives.
He’s not going to usurp our thoughts to get us to go along with His plan. We are divinely instructed to seek God FIRST, and to seek the enduring quality of His righteousness. God’s righteousness is holy, perfect, pure, kind, peaceful, loving, glorious, generous, magnificent, majestic, patient, truthful, just, faithful, all-knowing, and all-powerful. We must seek God’s righteousness in every situation, and not our own. He is in control and He knows exactly what to do with respect to our circumstances and conditions.
Jesus Christ made it very clear that we are going to endure persecution and suffering on this earth. The world hates us because we love him, but El Olam, God Eternal, is our deliverer in any and every situation. Heavenly doesn’t cause our affliction, but through it we are learning to build within our own eternal quality a trust in God that will take us from one dimension to the next. We are His spiritual children, and the cultivation of our faith in this life is preparing us to dwell with Him forever.■