Good morning. Please take your Bibles and turn with me to the book of 2 Corinthians chapter 1. As you turn, let me say what a joy and privilege it is to be able to preach God’s Word to you this morning. I bring greetings from the saints at Pear Orchard Presbyterian Church. It is hard to believe that it’s been 20 years since I was an intern here. God has been good to this congregation. He has been good to me and my family. And again, it’s a joy to come and to bring God’s Word to you. Let me pray for us. With the Word of God open, let’s go to Him in prayer this morning.
O Lord our God, we thank You that You are the one who holds us in Your everlasting arms. We can lean upon You and know that You will not fall. You will not lean. O Lord our God, we come this morning confident that You are the one who causes all things to work together for our good and for Your glory. O Lord we ask, that like Jeremiah, we would come this morning seeking to find Your Word, to eat it, to have it be the joy and the delight of our heart because by Your grace we have been called by Your name. So be with us, O Lord, by Your Spirit. Teach us. May Your Word be to us a lamp for our feet, a light for our path. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Now hear God’s Word from 2 Corinthians chapter 1. Paul writes:
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother,
To the church of God that is at Corinth, with all the saints who are in the whole of Achaia:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.
For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.”
Amen. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever.
So I have been a pastor now for 20 years, and over that time I’ve had hundreds if not thousands of conversations with those who are inside and outside of the church. Unfortunately, I do not have a photographic or a phonographic memory and so I don’t remember the content of many of those conversations. But there is one conversation that sticks out in my mind so clearly because of the raw honesty that was expressed by the lady to whom I was speaking. She was 85 years old. Something had happened – I think she had just received news from a doctor that was not good; that’s the part of the conversation that’s foggy – but what she said is crystal clear. She said this to me. “What did I ever do to deserve this? What did I ever do to deserve this?”
That question is a variation on a theme that pastors get asked a lot. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” And of course the answer is that bad things do not happen to good people because there are no good people! Bad things always happen to bad people because all of us are evil. What did you do to deserve this? Everything! Even your good deeds are unrighteous, are filthy rags in the sight of God. Now yes it may not be that what you are suffering is sort of a one-to-one correspondence with your sorrow – you’re suffering this particular sorrow because of your particular sin. But what we suffer is because of Adam’s rebellion in the Garden of Eden. It’s because of our own sinfulness, our own sinful thoughts and deeds and words. Because of what we have done, we deserve far more than we actually get. Remember the words of Jeremiah in Lamentations 3 verse 39 – “Why should any man offer complaint in view of his sins?” So the real mystery isn’t why bad things happen to good people, it’s why good things happen to bad people.
But keeping Jeremiah’s question in mind, it is not inappropriate to seek to find an answer to that question, “Why?” when we ask it in this way – “Why do bad things happen to God’s people?” You see, as we read the Scriptures, we see the people of God wrestling with that question throughout the Bible. Here are a few examples. Psalm 10 verse 1 – “Why do you stand afar off, O Lord? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” Or Jeremiah in Lamentations chapter 5 verse 20 – “Why do you forget us forever? Why do you forsake us so long?” Or Habakkuk chapter 1 verse 13, “Why are you silent, Lord, when the wicked swallow up those more righteous than they?” So you hear the people of God asking the question, “Why?” and it’s not wrong for them to do so. All of you have at one point have or will wonder why the sovereign God who works all things after the counsel of His will, who decrees and declares the end from the beginning, “Why has He ordained suffering? Why has He ordained pain to be my lot?”
Pastors aren’t God, we don’t know the exact answer to that question, but we do know that in the pages of the Bible God does give answers to that question. You heard a couple of them a couple of weeks ago when Pastor Charlie Wingard preached from Romans chapter 5. This morning, what I want us to do is look at 2 Corinthians chapter 1, verses 1 to 11, and I want us to consider three more answers that the apostle Paul gives us. And if these were the only answers that he gave us to that question, “Why do bad things happen to God’s people?” these are all the answers we had, they would be sufficient.
God Ordains our Affliction for the Sake of People Around Us
First, “Why do bad things happen to God’s people?” – God ordains our affliction for the sake of people around us. God ordains our affliction for the sake of the people around us. Here Paul begins his second letter to the Corinthians by telling them about all the afflictions and sufferings that he and his coworkers had experienced in Asia. Not the Asia we think of – China, Japan, Korea – but Asia Minor, the modern-day Turkey; especially the coastal city of Ephesus where Paul had been ministering when he wrote 1 and 2 Corinthians. And we don’t know exactly the situation to which Paul is referring, but from chapters 11 and 12, we read that Paul’s apostolic sufferings were intense. There were imprisonments and beatings; there were lashings and stonings and shipwrecks. There was hunger and thirst and danger and hardship and distress, persecutions and insults. Whatever Paul is speaking of here, you see there in verse 8 that Paul can say, “We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death,” Paul says. In this external affliction, Paul is staring death in the face and it’s creating this internal anguish of heart, even despair.
But notice what Paul says in verses 3 to 7. In the midst of this affliction, Paul praises the God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ as the Father of mercies, as the God of all comfort; the one who had comforted them in all their affliction. And why has He done this? Well not just so that Paul would be comforted, “but,” he writes, “so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” Think about this. Without the suffering, Paul would not have experienced the comfort of God, and without experiencing God’s comfort, Paul would not have been able to comfort others with that comfort. But Paul had known affliction and he had known comfort and so he was in just the right place, in just the right posture, to be able to comfort others. So he can write in verses 6 and 7, “If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation. If we are comforted, it is for your comfort which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken,” he says, “for we know that as you share in our sufferings you will also share in our comfort.”
The point is this. Your affliction coupled with God’s comfort to you in the midst of that affliction is actually a nursery, it’s a greenhouse, it’s growing you, it’s preparing you to comfort others, to give to others what you have received in a way that you could not have done if you had not gone through that affliction. God afflicts you in order that He might comfort you in order that you might comfort others. The more we suffer, the more sympathetic and compassionate we become. Our eyes are open to the suffering of others. You are made a more merciful, more compassionate person. We are able more and more to sympathize with them in their weaknesses. We now know what it’s like to walk through sorrow or anguish or affliction or pain or despair or fear so we are able to bring that same comfort to others. Do you believe this? Of course, in the midst of our affliction it’s hard to believe this. It’s hard to believe that God is using our affliction for the sake of the people around us. Yet Paul is clear that is the case.
And we see it, don’t we, throughout the pages of the Bible. Naomi, the famine she experienced, losing her husband, losing her sons, one of the reasons why is for the sake of Ruth being brought into the kingdom of God. Joseph, being sold into slavery by his brothers, being falsely accused of sexual morality, being forgotten in the jail – why? What the brothers meant for evil, God meant for good. What? “To bring about this present result.” To preserve many people alive. Or think of Peter when Jesus says to him, “Simon, Simon, Satan has demanded to sift you as wheat.” And Jesus doesn’t say, “But we didn’t let him.” Jesus says, “But I have prayed for you, and when you turn, strengthen the brothers.” You’re going to be tempted, you’re going to succumb to that temptation, but through that affliction, through that trial, the comfort that you received as a result of going through that experience, you are going to be able to comfort and strengthen others.
I think to my own life and the one thing that has stuck out now for some 30 years or more is going through my own parents’ divorce. And I look back on that experience and see all the ways that God has comforted me to make me a comfort to others through that. What is it for you? Maybe it’s the loss of a loved one. Maybe it’s a health scare, either of you or of someone that you love. Perhaps it is watching a child turn away from the Lord. Perhaps it is going through a financial downturn or losing a job. Perhaps it is falling into a grievous sin. Why has God allowed this? Why has God ordained this? Paul is saying one reason is for the sake of the people around you – your family, your friends, your coworkers, your neighbors – that you might be an instrument of God’s comfort, of God’s compassion, even an instrument of their salvation in the midst of their affliction. So that’s the first reason that Paul gives us.
God ordains affliction to Break Our Grip on False Trusts
The second is this – God ordains affliction to break your grip on false trust, to break your grip on false trust. You see it there in verse 9. Paul says that he was “utterly burdened beyond his strength and despaired of life itself.” And he writes that this happened “to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raised the dead.” You see, Paul’s suffering wasn’t just for the sake of other people; it was for the sake of his own sanctification. God wanted to break Paul’s grip on this false trust of self-reliance. He wanted to cause Paul to be God reliant; to put his heart’s trust in the only true refuge. And the tool for this heart surgery is the scalpel of affliction.
What is it that you trust in, that you hope in, that you look to for strength and provision, the thing that you cannot live without, the thing that you think you have to have? If you lose this, perhaps life is not even worth living. Often, it’s a good thing; it’s not necessarily a wicked thing. Perhaps it’s your intellect. Perhaps it’s your physical ability. Perhaps it’s your mental or intellectual gifts. Perhaps it is your wealth, the resources God has blessed you with. Maybe it’s the relationship that He has blessed you with. Whatever it is, God knows that these things are prone to ultimately vie for supremacy with Him and the only way to break our grip of false trust is through the crucible of affliction. C.S. Lewis in his book, The Problem of Pain, puts it like this. “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, He speaks in our consciences, but He shouts in our pains. Pain is the megaphone of God to rouse a deaf world.” In light of what Paul says here, we might say pain is God’s megaphone to rouse us from our self-reliance and to make us take refuge in Him only, alone.
And we know this, don’t we? Things are going along just great, we’re going about life, everything is going well, and we realize that we’re not spending as much time in the Word, not spending as much time in prayer; we’re leaning on ourselves, we’re trusting in our own abilities, whatever false trust has captured your heart. We think we can manage just fine on our own. What does God do? As we lean on our crutch, He knocks one crutch away, He knocks the other crutch away, and all of a sudden, we are splayed out on the ground, desperately in need, realizing finally how weak we are. God is pulling one finger, then another, then another off of our grasp of these false trusts so that we might put our refuge in Him and in Him alone. You’ve perhaps heard people say, or maybe you’ve said it yourself, “God will never give you more than you can bear.” Now when people say that they probably are thinking of 1 Corinthians chapter 10 verse 13 when God says that, “God will not tempt us beyond our ability, but with the temptation will provide a way of escape.” But notice what Paul says. Yes, that is true about temptation, but notice what Paul says here in this passage, how he describes his afflictions. He says, “We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength. We were utterly burdened beyond our strength.” He’s saying God gives us more suffering than we can bear in and of ourselves. Why? So that we will stop depending on our own strength and we will depend upon Him, we will rely upon Him and Him alone. This is what God was doing in Paul’s affliction. This is what Paul learned, isn’t it, from his thorn in the flesh that we read about later in this book – that God’s grace was sufficient for him; God’s power was perfected in Paul’s weakness.
So, this morning if you are walking through some deep affliction, some deep trial, I encourage you to examine your heart. Notice if there is something within you that you are leaning on, that you are relying on instead of the Lord your God. Is it yourself? Is it some other created thing other than the Creator? It is more than possible that God is violently but lovingly weaning your hearts off of that thing so that you might take refuge in Him and in Him alone.
God Ordains Afflictions for His Own Glory
So, we’ve seen that afflictions come for the sake of the people around us, they come to break our grip on false trusts, but finally, I want you to see in this text that God ordains afflictions for His own glory. Paul speaks to this in verses 10 and 11. He tells them how God has delivered them from the deadly peril and how Paul’s hope is now confidently in the Lord for future deliverance. But now look at verse 11. He says, “You also must help us by prayer so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.” Now do the math here. Paul is saying that through his affliction, through his deliverance brought about through prayer, God is being thanked; God is receiving the glory. Paul is saying that, “As you pray for us and as we are delivered from this trial and affliction, then thanks will abound to God because of what He has done.”
And in some ways, isn’t this the only reason we should need? That if nothing else but that God receives glory in our affliction it is sufficient. And here’s the thing, you may never be able to figure out why God has led you through this affliction and this trial. You’ve heard the saying that, “God’s providences are best read backward,” when we have the perspective and the vantage point from which to look at our trials from a distance and to turn around and say, “Okay so that’s what God was doing.” But sometimes – and maybe we experience this – sometimes, even backward, you’re still puzzled, you’re still confused, you still don’t understand – “Why did God do that? Why was that the path God led me through?”
I’ve always loved the illustration of the tapestry, right, that God is orchestrating our life and weaving our life together. It’s like a tapestry in which all we see is the underneath side of that tapestry, all the strings and all the knots and everything looks like a jumbled mess. We don’t see the beauty on the other side that God is weaving together. Sometimes, yes, God allows us to catch a glimpse of that beauty and of the work that He is engaged in, but most of the time, our experience is Psalm 77 verse 19 which says this – “Your way was in the sea, your path in the mighty waters, and your footprints might not be known.” We don’t see what God is doing, but even if all that you feel you do see is that mangled underneath of the tapestry, you can know, says Paul, that God is doing what He is doing for His name’s sake. He is doing what He is doing so that He might receive the glory. And since He is the only one in the whole universe who is worthy of glory and thanks and praise, if what I am going through is going to bring Him more of that, then it is enough. Even in the midst of sorrow I will rejoice that God’s name is being glorified.
And isn’t Paul even doing that right now? He is like Job who said, “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Paul is doing that here. “Blessed be God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, the God of all comfort.” He is praising the Lord. He is declaring that God is the object of His hope, that God is the one who raises the dead, God is the deliverer. God is the one worthy of all our worship, even in affliction.
Do you see the directions that God is working and wants you to look in the midst of your affliction? He wants you to look around. He has ordained your affliction for the sake of the people around you. He wants you to look within. He has ordained your affliction to break your grip on false trust. He wants you to look up. He has ordained your affliction for His sake, for His glory. That’s just a few of the things that God is up to in your trials.
And if these three reasons are true – and I want to suggest that they are, based upon the Word of God – let me give you a few practical things that you can do in response this morning. The first is this. Remember this sermon; remember these three points. I’ll be honest, I’m a preacher – I don’t remember what I preached last week! Right? I’ve preached a lot of sermons. I don’t remember the content of all my sermons! Brothers and sisters, remember this sermon. Remember this passage. Come back to this passage again and again and again. When you are downcast and depressed, when you are anxious and afraid, when you are hurting and in pain, remember 2 Corinthian chapter 1, 1 through 11.
Secondly, I would encourage you to patiently endure your trials while they last. Did you see that in verse 6? Paul says that we experience comfort “as we patiently endure suffering.” Anyone who has ever been to a physical therapist knows there is no comfort except through the pathway of pain. Acts 14 verse 22, “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of heaven,” Paul says. So we entrust ourselves to our faithful Creator in doing what is right. We rejoice in our suffering. We endure with an unshakable hope.
Third though, I would encourage you to pray. Pray for the Lord to deliver you out of affliction and to comfort you in the midst of it. To say that we must patiently endure doesn’t mean that it’s unspiritual to pray for deliverance. Even here, Paul is praying and he is asking for the Corinthians to pray for him. Just because the sovereign God delights to work through the means of prayer to accomplish His will, for that very reason Paul is saying, “Pray in the midst of affliction.” He doesn’t say, “Look, our hope is in God, so you don’t have to pray for us.” No, he says, “Our hope is in God and we are desperately in need of your prayers.” Prayer is not a denial of trust, not a denial of hope, but it is the supreme manifestation of our hope in God and it is the opportunity for you to thank the Lord even in the midst of affliction.
Fourth, I would encourage you, in light of what you have seen from the text this day, be on the lookout for people who are suffering. If God is indeed bringing you through the waters of affliction in order that you might be a blessing to others, that you might comfort other people with the comfort you have received from the Lord, then every trial is an opportunity to ask, “Lord, who are you going to use me to minister to, to bless, to encourage, to comfort?” Take your eyes off of yourself and be on the lookout for those who are suffering.
Finally, fix your eyes on Jesus Christ. Fix your eyes on your Savior. Do not miss – this is really a sermon for another day – but do not miss that Paul in verse 5 calls his afflictions, “sharing in Christ’s sufferings.” The Holy Spirit is conforming us to the likeness of a suffering Savior; a man of sorrows who “learned obedience through the things that he suffered,” the author to the Hebrews says. And Jesus calls us to suffer with Him in order that we might be glorified with Him. It’s because Jesus suffered when He was tempted that He is able to come to our aid as a sympathetic High Priest, bringing to us the comfort and the encouragement and the strength that He Himself received from His holy Father. And it is because Jesus Christ has suffered, has suffered the wrath of God as our substitute on the cross, that we are confident that our afflictions, our suffering is not God punishing us. Hear this. Your trials are not an expression of the wrath of God but of the love of God, both to you, to the people around you, and to His own glory. First Corinthians chapter 11, Paul says that when we are judged we are not condemned along with the world but we are disciplined by the hand of a loving heavenly Father.
And this helps us to see that there is a deeper problem with that question that I started with, isn’t there? The problem with the question, “What did I ever do to deserve this?” yes, it shows that we don’t know how great our sin is, but it also shows that we don’t understand how great the Gospel of Jesus Christ is, because when we fix our eyes on the suffering Savior, we are reminded that in our suffering we are not getting what we deserve because Jesus got what we deserve. Jesus is the one who has taken away all of our condemnation, all of God’s wrath, so that in our affliction we are suffering the loving discipline of a heavenly Father who will never let us go. But we know, don’t we, sound travels slower than light. We can see those words on a page, right, we can see our suffering much more quickly than we can hear the truth of these words in our heart.
Some of you perhaps may know that the end of the War of 1812 ended sort of in a strange way. Andrew Jackson fought the battle and won the battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815, but the formal ending of the War of 1812 happened in December of 1814 when the Treaty of Ghent was signed. Communication was so slow that it had not made its way back to America. And so the battle of New Orleans was fought between the British, between the Americans; they thought they were still at war. Isn’t that so often the way it is with us? In our affliction, in our suffering, we think that God is still angry at us. We think that we are still at war with Him. But if we are believing in Jesus Christ, if we are trusting in Jesus Christ, God is no longer angry with us, and so we fix our eyes on Christ. Isn’t that the reason why we come to the Lord’s Table time and time again? To remember the Gospel, to believe again that Jesus has taken all the wrath that we deserved so that now our suffering is God’s loving hand of discipline, making us more like His Son. Brothers and sisters, fix your eyes on Jesus who, for the joy set before Him, endured the cross for you and for your salvation.
Let’s pray together.
O Lord our God, we thank You that You have set forth these glorious truths in Your Word. Lord, I don’t know what everyone in this room is walking through, but You do. And so I pray that You would give them grace to believe Your Word, to trust in the Gospel, to know, Lord Jesus, that You have taken away all the wrath of God on their behalf as they put their trust in You. O Lord, help them, in light of the glorious Gospel, in light of the truth of Your Word, help them to walk by faith and not by sight. And we pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.