“ How is it that ye do not understand?
”
God will not force any door to enter in. He may send a tempest about the house; yea, shake the house to its foundations. The door must be opened by the willing hand, ere the foot of Love will cross the threshold. Every tempest is but an assault in the siege of love. The terror of God is but the other side of his love; it is love outside the house, that would be inside—love that knows the house is no home, is but a tent, until the Eternal dwells there. Things must be cast out to make room for their souls—the eternal truths which in things find shape and show.
But who is sufficient to cast them out? If a man take courage and encounter the army of bats and demon-snakes that infests the place of the Holy, it is but to find the task too great for him; that the temple of God will not be cleansed by him; that the very dust he raises in sweeping is full of corruptive forces. Let such as would do what they must yet cannot, be what they must yet cannot, remember, with hope and courage, that he who knows all about our being, once spake a parable to the end that they ought always to pray, and not to faint.
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Commentary
We sometimes resist and think we are too good to suffer, too good to be thrown into the fires of trial. We do not yet see what evil lies within us. And this is also what suffering does for us, it shows us our true nature. It reveals our heart to us. How we perform during trials tells us quite a bit about ourselves. It should move us to open the door and call for help, but sometimes we are stubborn and slow to answer the knock of God. What we fail to see is that the deceptive work of evil is slowly killing us by degrees, we find ourselves slowly losing our enthusiasm for life. That is because the life is slowly being drained from us and suffering is the wake up call. “Awake sleeper, arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” (Eph. 14) This waking is what Paul alludes to in 2 Corinthians 4, “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves, we are afflicted in ever way, but not crushed, perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh....Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison.” What amazing words and what a theology of suffering. It is “producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison.” Those are good words to meditate upon, as C.S. Lewis did, and soon you will discover what God has been up to.
A dear relative, a good man, who had seen suffering himself and was a part of a national tragedy, asked me, as we were debating about God, “Why would a good God let little children suffer?” I replied to him, “Because God knows that there is something more important than their suffering at stake here.” To which he replied, “What could be more important than their suffering?” To which I replied, “That they should become evil.” He sat silent after that. Hitler was some mother's little son, so was Attila the Hun, Jeffery Dahmer, Stalin and a host of others. Some people say, “I wonder what they suffered that made them so.” I often wonder what suffering they were spared that made them so, and what stubborn selfishness kept them from reaching with a willing hand to open the door to God and let him in.