¹⁶ So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. ¹⁷ For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, ¹⁸ 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. –II Corinthians 4

I am continuing to process my grief at the loss of my dad. My dad suffered like Job in many ways. Although much, if not most of my dad’s suffering was brought on by the [bad] choices he made. Nonetheless, he suffered immensely, and he did so as a child of the living God. He struggled with prescription drug addiction; deep doubts about his salvation (which actually led to the drug addiction); he endured unending sense of loss; he went through a divorce from my mom after 36 years of marriage that he never recovered from; he lost many close to him, the last was his cousin, Tommy, who was like a brother to him (Tommy wasn’t a Christian when he killed himself approx 3 years ago). My dad suffered immensely, and in ways that my short list does not adequately capture (I didn’t even mention all the physical stuff he dealt with). But in this all there was redemption. You see, my dad is the type of person that Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, came for. Jesus came for the bruised reed, the smoldering wick, the downcast and broken; my dad qualified. The wisdom of God, a staurological wisdom, is of the sort that assumes sinful humanity all the way down. In this assumption the Son ensarkos takes all the blights, even our unbelief and disobediences, and puts these many deaths to death in His singular death for us. The Son of God, the Christ penetrates so deeply into the warp and woof of our sinful beings that he captures our bone marrow itself and redeems it. He did this for my dad. Even in, especially in my dad’s broken and tattered status, the Son of God, who is the Christ, vanquished all the dark nights of the soul at their very fountainhead, and brought eternal life as a well-spring that flows throughout all the ages. My dad’s sinful and battered status was assumed by the Son of God in the incarnation, and redeemed from the inside/out. And yet, and this is the Wisdom, God was able to use all of the suffering, even of the self-inflicted sort that my dad suffered from, and bring new creation through the resurrected and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man. There is no loss where Jesus Christ sets His foot, there is only always gain. My dad experienced this gain in seedling form in 1970, and now in penultimate blossomed form in his currently intermediate status now.

Samuel Rutherford (1600 – 1661), Scottish theologian and pastor, wrote the following with reference to trial and tribulation vis-à-vis eternity:

For your afflictions are not eternal; time will end them, and so shall you at length see the Lord’s salvation. His love sleepeth not, but is still working for you. His salvation will not tarry or linger; and suffering for Him is the noblest cross that is out of Heaven. . . and this is the fruit, the flower and bloom growing out of your cross, that ye be a dead man to time, to clay, to gold, to country, to friends, wife, children, and all pieces of created nothings; for in them there is not a seat nor bottom for soul’s love. Oh, what room is for your love (if it were as broad as the sea) up in heaven, and in God!

We may indeed think, Cannot God bring us to heaven with ease and prosperity? Who doubteth but He can? But His infinite wisdom thinketh and decreeth the contrary; and we cannot see a reason of it, yet He hath a most just reason. We never with our eyes saw our own soul; yet we have a soul. We see many rivers, but we know not their first spring and original fountain; yet they have a beginning. Madam, when ye are come to the other side of the water, and have set down your foot on the shore of glorious eternity, and look back again to the waters and to your wearisome journey, and shall see, in that clear glass of endless glory, nearer to the bottom of God’s wisdom, ye shall then be forced to say, “If God had done otherwise with me than He hath done, I had never come to the enjoying of this crown of glory.”[1]

Don’t lose hope. God in Christ is hope. No matter what our plights in this vanquished life Christ is its end; and if He is its end He is its beginning too. Jesus is, indeed, the Alpha and Omega of God for the world; Jesus is this world’s telos, and only reason for existence. It is as we are participatio Christi that we begin to experience what this existence is all about. Unfortunately, since we still inhabit these bodies of death, our experience is shaped by bouts of death. But as Christians, even as we are constantly being given over to the death of Christ, it is only so that His life might be made manifest through the mortal members of our bodies; our bodies of death. This is what Rutherford is on about; he understood that this life isn’t our life at all, but Christ’s! Our lives, according to the Apostle Paul, aren’t ours, they are Christ’s. This means, once we are born again of the imperishable seed of baby Jesus’s life that no matter what sort of peril or trauma enters our lives, it isn’t ours, and it belongs to Christ. The Christian understands that we never live in abstraction from Christ; the Christian knows that the ground of their human being is Christ’s human being for them. The Christian recognizes that there is a correspondence between our lives and Christ’s, and this precisely because the Son freely chose to make His all circumscribing life correspond to ours; that by His poverty for us we might be made rich through the election of His resurrected humanity pro nobis.

My dad knows this hope. He travailed and kicked in suffering such that I could hardly bear it. There is a paradox in his loss. I miss him in ways that are hard to articulate. But when I think of his suffering, and the state he would be in right now, if he had survived, I find great joy in knowing that he has finally been released from the surely bonds that his body of death shrouded him in. Thankfully, those bonds were Christ’s, and Christ shrugged them off once and for all in the resurrection. My dad lives in the resurrection fully now. Maranatha!

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[1] Samuel Rutherford, Selections from His Letters, cited by Nick Needham, 2000 Years Of Christ’s Power: Volume 4: The Age Of Religious Conflict (London: Christian Focus Publications, LTD, 2017), 440.