Skip to main content

God’s Wisdom in our Suffering

God exercises wisdom in permitting afflictions  and in removing afflictions. He is wise to suit his medicine to the condition of our disease. He cannot mistake the nature of our disease, or the  virtue of his remedy. Like a skilful Doctor, God sometimes prescribes bitter potions, and sometimes cheering cordials, according to the strength of the malady, and necessity of the patient, to bring him to health. Everything that comes from God is for our good. He does not do anything in a rash and reckless way. His wisdom is as infinite as his goodness, and as exact in managing as his goodness is plentiful in streaming out to us. God understands our griefs, weighs our necessities, and no remedies are beyond the reach of his skilful planning. When our feeble intelligences are bewildered in a maze, and at the end of their line for a rescue, the remedies unknown to us are not unknown to God. When we do not know how to prevent a danger, the wise God has a thousand blocks to lay in the way. When we do not know how to free ourselves from an oppressive evil, God has a thousand ways of relief. He knows how to time our afflictions, and his own blessings…How comforting it is to know that our distresses, as well as our deliverances are the fruits of infinite wisdom! Nothing is done by him too soon or too slow, but in the true point of time, with all its due circumstances, most conveniently for his glory and our good. How wise is God, to bring the glory of our salvation out of the depths of a seeming ruin, and make the evils of affliction subservient to the good of the afflicted!

STEPHEN CHARNOCK 

(Source: Works of Stephen Charnock, Volume II)


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I am what I am by Gloria Gaynor

Beverly Knight closed the opening ceremony of the Paralympics with what has been dubbed the signature tune of the Paralympics. I had no idea Ms Knight is still in the singing business. And clearly going by the raving reviews she will continue to be around. One media source says her performance was so electric that "there wasn’t a dry eye to be seen as she sang the lyrics to the song and people even watching at home felt the passion in her words" . The song was Gloria Gaynor's I am what I am . Clearly not written by Gloria Gaynor but certainly musically owned and popularized by her. It opens triumphantly: I am what I am / I am my own special creation / So come take a look / Give me the hook or the ovation / It's my world that I want to have a little pride in / My world and it's not a place I have to hide in / Life's not worth a damn till you can say I am what I am The words “I am what I am” echo over ten times in the song. A bold declaration that she ...

The Humility of Newton

Thou hast honoured me. Thou hast given me a tongue and a pen, many friends; (Thou] hast made me extensively known among thy people and I have reason to hope, useful to many by my preaching and writings... It is of thine own that I can serve thee. And if others speak well of me, I have no cause to speak or think well of myself. They see only my outward walk; to thee I appear as I am. In thy sight I am a poor, unworthy, unfaithful inconsistent creature. And I may well wonder that Thou hast not long ago taken thy word utterly out of my mouth and forbidden me to make mention of thy Name any more! JOHN NEWTON ( Source : Wise Counsel) Newton wrote these words addressed to God in his diary in 1789. In that year, Newton’s fame had grown significantly because of his publishing ‘ Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade’ and his appearance before Her Majesty’s Privy Council appointed to investigate the slave trade.  I find Newton’s words quite challenging. The words reveal a heart truly sh...

Incarnation and Modernity

[The Bible] resituate modernity's prejudices within a wider context from which they were originally wrenched, showing them to be reductive heresies of a more complex biblical reality. So whereas modernity privileges an unchanging a-historicity, in the incarnation God enters history at a particular moment to gather a people to be with him not in a Greck eternity of unchanging timelessness, but in a biblical eternity of never-ending and ever-renewed intimacy and relational richness. Whereas modernity subordinates the particular to the universal, the Bible perfectly marries the universal "image of the invisible God" together with a particular first-century Palestinian Jewish man. Whereas modernity seeks the abstract over the material and finds itself painfully akimbo between the twin idols of materialism and immaterialism, in the same gesture the incarnate Christ validates material reality and prevents his followers from ever worshipping it. Finally, whereas modernity secks ...