I know, Yahweh, that your laws are righteous, and that in faithfulness You have afflicted me – Psalm 119:75.

Today in the modern affluent West there are many churches that will teach a gospel of health and wealth.  According to teachers like Joel Osteen, Steve Furtik, Kenneth Copeland, and countless others God wants us prosperous in every worldly sense and not suffer deprivation; God, for these people, cares about us being comfortable.  Others like the late Norman Vincent Peale taught that our best is not being saved from sin but having our dreams met in a sea of endless possibility.  For these preachers, Satan sends calamity rather than God and he sends it not to destroy our faith (as he did in Job 1-3) but to prevent us from being happy in our own eyes.  Affliction, as such, is not something that God ordains, for how could God ever do such a thing if He just wants us to be happy?

Yes, Satan does afflict people in the Bible like, but one must remember that God Himself permitted Satan to do this.  God did this not because He hated Job but to 1) test him; and 2) to grow his faith.  Job passed the test and was rewarded with flying colours (Job 42).  Yet we read in Scripture that at other times God is Himself the author of man’s affliction.  In Lamentations 1:12 the mourner over Jerusalem’s destruction says, Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow … which Yahweh inflicted on the day of his fierce anger (ESV).  Notice that Yahweh inflicts the disaster and that it originates from God’s anger at Judah’s sin.  Israel’s northern kingdom, Ephraim, was for years guilty of relentless pride, sin, and idolatry.  God says what He personally will do about it in Hosea 13:7-8, So I am to them like a lion; like a leopard I will lurk beside the way.  I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs; I will tear open their breast, and there I will devour them like a lion, as a wild beast would rip them open.  The language is vivid, terrifying, and gruesome.  Yet who is behind it all?  God is.  God Himself.  Not Satan.  The irony of God’s afflictions in these chapters is that the Israelites had been ‘living their dream’ by running away from God; and yet God brought them to their knees through drought, plagues, poverty, barrenness, foreign occupation and exile.

The psalter in Psalm 119:75 experienced this in his own personal circumstances.  We do not know what the affliction was (such as illness) or what the cause of it was (such as sexual immorality).  But he acknowledged that God was faithful by allowing him to be afflicted!  How though?  Because the rod of affliction had kept him close to his Shepherd (v. 67).  They had taught Him God’s ways so that they were not merely facts in his head but truths living in his soul (v. 71).

Perhaps you are experiencing affliction.  I certainly have been.  In recent years I have lost my job as a pastor, doing the job I loved best, and have been spiritually abused by many people who purport to be ‘Christian’.  I also have great anxiety about my financial future, among other things.  They are not pleasant experiences and when they occur is all too easy to blame God and ask, “Where are You?!  How dare you let me go through all this!  Ease my anguish!” But such petitions are borne out of selfishness and self-comfort on my part.  They also entirely miss the point of what God is doing through hardship, for God-appointed afflictions indicate that God is on our side.  How?  Because if He did not care about us, He would let us do whatever we want.  Yet because He loves us, He allows us to go through hardship in order to bring us to our knees and the end of ourselves.  In them we starkly see where we are straying from God, which is always confronting, to humble us and bring us to repentance.  From then we can receive God’s presence and blessings.  Afflictions also prove that we are God’s legitimate offspring and puts us in the good company of our Lord and Saviour, who Himself learned obedience through suffering.

If you are a child of God and experiencing hardships my heart truly goes out to you.  But please remember that God does not willingly afflict (Lamentations 3:33); it grieves Him to have to do it but He does so because He wants us to be holy like Him.  He desperately wants us to know Him deeper and walk more closely with Him and that is far more rewarding and pleasing than living in accordance with our own dreams.  In your afflictions humble yourself before God’s throne and have the Holy Spirit search out your heart.  Pay careful attention to the sin He exposes in you and instead of defending yourself, allow the surgeon’s knife to go deep and repent of it.  Admit that you are the problem and your own worse enemy.  Then pay attention to the deep things that He teaches you about Himself and His ways and enter into your Father’s joy and into a new season of blessing.

God bless, Nahum.

***

For more information on how to read the Bible for devotional purposes you can read here about my Bible reading method named FLAGON.