Resurrection Year

Soul Snack 93/14 ... Is it wise to believe ill of God or blindly accuse good of being evil?

My mind had danced around consuming themes, while my heart was stirred by the author's visible soul as I read Resurrection Year.

Sheridan Voysey, a man who is as articulate as I am inarticulate, bared his wounds and peeled back his marriage to a public scrutiny that would leave me not in shudders, but death throes should I mimic.

Suffering was a stream flowing from His pen.

This public personality had networks into Christendom's royalty. One evening on his radio show he interviewed the Christian canon of a painful life and the reason why suffering is sensible - Joni Earekson Tada. As I read the following short paragraph where he quoted her my heart thumped me from within:

Christians sometimes want to erase suffering out of the dictionary. If you read the Bible you will see that it is often God's best tool to make us more like Jesus. The choice is simply ours to yield to it ... we've got all kinds of solutions for suffering except to embrace it as God's will for our life. #

With a then pounding heart, pummelling my soul I instantly scribbled in the margin a bold NO.

Can suffering be the will of any good God, any doting father upon his child? NO - can only ever be the reasoned answer, BUT the seasoned answer remains, it is God's will.

It is time to rethink suffering.

Suffering is not God's will for human existence. It was expelled from heaven, absent in Eden, and will never be found in the new heaven.

Suffering may well be God's tool, but it is not His intentions. Choose to believe well of God constantly, He did not invent suffering and has acted permanently to remove it.

In the meantime resurrect your year too - please write on your forehead Lamentations 3:33,

For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to the children of men.

Today's Soul Snippet:

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, and prolonged uncertainty withers one away." ~ Sheridan Voysey

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# Sheridan Voysey, Resurrection Year (Nashville Tennessee, Thomas Nelson Publications 2013) 43