STATION 17: THE TEMPORAL NATURE OF SUFFERINGThrough Gautama Buddha, 500 years before Jesus, we find all of life consisted of suffering. Whether you are currently thinking you are experiencing pleasure or your actually currently experiencing pain, all of life is suffering. Even the tiniest pleasure you know will be followed by greater suffering. This is not the Christian message. The Christian message is actually the opposite. Even though you may currently be suffering, just around the corner there is healing, there is blessing. God causes all things to work together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. Sometimes we don't see it that way. In fact, usually we don't. Sometimes our suffering and pain are immense. Sometimes they become more then we can bare, and we eliminate the pain through mind numbing drugs, or ultimately, suicide. Sometimes things can hurt so much, that we simply cannot bare them. The Cross of Christ has something to say to that--suffering does not last forever. Jesus was a prophet. He was a priest; He was a king; He was a healer; He was the lover of mankind. And with all of His goodness and all of His purity and love, He was, as we have said so many times before, rejected by the people and strung upon the Cross. He was beaten. He was whipped. He was made to bleed. He hung upon the torture rack of a crucifix with huge spikes through His hands and His feet. This was, most assuredly, not a pleasant experience. The Biblical record is that He hung upon that cross for approximately three hours, but the Biblical record is, also, that He did not stay there. No, He died, was placed into the ground and was resurrected. He has spent the rest of these two thousand years dwelling at the right hand of God, living in a celestial kingdom of infinite peace, bliss and love, having ascended to the highest realms of Heaven. Now one of the things that the Cross is trying to teach us is that suffering, no matter how bad it is, is not eternal. It is temporal It has a limit to it. This is a very heartening message for us. Even if it comes to the point of death through cancer or some other horrid disease, there is a cessation of suffering. Pain is not eternal. Even, if the patient winds up dying, on the other side, there is healing. There is soothing; there is warmth; there is goodness; there is pleasure. But, we need not die, usually, in order to experience that. Sometimes the current situations seem to be insurmountable, compounding our pain physically and psychologically. If we dwell upon the Cross, we can see that this suffering is not forever. No, suffering would be. Suffering always leads us into green pastures. Therefore, we can have the strength and the courage to know that the simple axiom, "this too will pass," is, in fact, true. Knowing that it will pass can enable us to have strength and patience to know that we will not be stuck in this forever. There is something more here--the complete insignificance of suffering and pain in the grand scheme of things. It is through this, that we see most clearly that Gautama Buddha was, in this context, wrong. For you see, taken as a percentage of Jesus' life, that three hours upon the Cross was almost immeasurably small. Taken as a percentage of the eternity which He lives in, those three hours on the Cross cannot even be measured. God is saying that there is a special country club. This country club is open to all people. This club enables you to dwell in infinite eternal peace, to have all of the powers of Heaven at your disposal to sit at the right hand of God's very throne, to watch the galaxies whirl and dance in the eternal celestial paradise, forever and ever and ever. The price of admission to this country club is that you must be crucified and hang upon the Cross for three hours. If we had faith that that country club really existed, I don't believe there's a one of us who would not gladly pay that price. So not only is the Cross telling us that your suffering will stop, but the Cross is telling us that, in the grand scheme of things, the suffering and pain which you must go through on this Earth are absolutely minuscule compared to the grand scope of bliss, goodness and pleasure that God has planned for you throughout eternity. God knows that there is suffering. He knows this very well.
But, that suffering will stop, and that suffering ultimately
becomes an insignificant meaningless part of your life, a blip, a
hiccup in the scheme of eternity. |
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