God Wounds Those He Loves
“Our Heavenly Healer often has to hurt us in order to heal us. We sometimes fail to recognize His mighty love in this, yet we are firmly held always in the Everlasting Arms.” -Elisabeth Elliot
I have experienced some painful wounding from the Lord this year. However, as I reflect–I realize that it’s the kind of pain that comes from listening to the deep notes of the cello or the kind which is experienced during the uncomfortable strides of a morning run. This kind of God-ordained pain simultaneously breaks things into tiny pieces and then binds up again. There’s nothing that the Lord has taken from me this year which was not already His to begin with. Everything I have is His and therefore, He may do what he pleases with me. I only ask that He be merciful.
“Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge; in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, till the storms of destruction pass by.” -Psalm 57:1 (ESV)
There will be wounding for faithful Christians—this is promised to us in the Holy Scriptures when Jesus said that in this world, we will have trouble. But He also said to take heart because He’s overcome the world (John 16:33). I’ve heard it said before that Christ is the wave and that He’s also the shore. Charles Spurgeon said it best when he said, “I have learned to kiss the wave that throws me against the Rock of Ages.”
Though God is not the author of evil, He is absolutely sovereign over it. In fact, the Bible reminds us in the story of Joseph and his brothers that what man meant for evil, God meant for good (Genesis 50:20). Say no mention of Job. Job’s story is perhaps the clearest example of God ordaining trials in a person’s life. The Almighty Sovereign God of the Universe is always working out 10,000 things that we can’t see behind the scenes through any and every trial that we experience in this world. And to be sure—He will wound those he loves, but we can be confident that his wounding is for our good.
Pastor and writer Ray Ortlund puts it this way:
“Only men with scars can preach a Savior with scars to sinners with scars. So, in addition to the many insights and skills God will impart to you, he also will wound you. …At some point in your life, God will injure you so extremely that the self-reliance you aren’t even aware of, the self-reliance you’ve been navigating so consistently by that it feels natural and innocent, will collapse under the loss and anguish. You will start realizing, ‘Oh, so this is what it means to trust the Lord.’” 1
I firmly believe that trials are not something that we should be surprised by, but in them–we need our eyes set on truth to endure any such suffering the Lord might call us to. I long to be unshakeable in my faith, but that generally only occurs when that very faith is tested. As John Piper put is,
“Strange as it may seem, one of the primary purposes of being shaken by suffering is to make our faith more unshakable. Faith is like muscle tissue: if you stress it to the limit, it gets stronger, not weaker…When your faith is threatened and tested and stretched to the breaking point, the result is greater capacity to endure…God loves faith so much that he will test it to the breaking point so as to keep it pure and strong.” 2
So, will God wound us in this life? You bet He will. And we must have the right understanding of how He works so that when that wounding comes, we don’t shrivel up and die spiritually. We must remember that our God is always working things for good (Romans 8:28) and will not abandon us in the hour of suffering (Matthew 28:20). He is faithful to His own.
"Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for He hath torn, and He will heal us; He hath smitten, and He will bind us up" (Hosea 6:1).
“It is the LORD's way to tear before He heals. This is the honest love of His heart and the sure surgery of His hand. He also bruises before He binds up, or else it would be uncertain work. The law comes before the gospel, the sense of need before the supply of it. Is the reader now under the convincing, crushing hand of the Spirit? Has he received the spirit of bondage again to fear? This is a salutary preliminary to real gospel healing and binding up. Do not despair, dear heart, but come to the LORD with all thy jagged wounds, black bruises, and running sores. He alone can heal, and He delights to do it. It is our LORD's office to bind up the brokenhearted, and He is gloriously at home at it. Let us not linger but at once return unto the LORD from whom we have gone astray. Let us show Him our gaping wounds and beseech him to know His own work and complete it. Will a surgeon make an incision and then leave his patient to bleed to death? Will the LORD pull down our old house and then refuse to build us a better one? Dost Thou ever wantonly increase the misery of poor anxious souls? That be far from Thee, O LORD.”
-Charles H. Spurgeon, Cheque Book of the Bank of Faith, May 14, page 135
https://www.epm.org/resources/2020/Mar/16/ortlund-time-trials-purpose/
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/suffering-that-strengthens-faith
