A Cage Match with God
Have you ever felt like God was against you? I certainly have. There have been seasons of my life when I wasn’t sure God cared at all about what was going on with me. Even worse, there have been many times when it seemed like God was actually creating the problems in my life. When he seemed to be more my adversary than friend. I clearly must have been wrong, right? It must have all been the devil because God is never responsible when things go wrong in our lives. He is only responsible when things are going well, when I’m feeling good and happy. When things are hard and difficult or when it seems like everything in my life is crumbling all around me, it must be my fault or it must be the devil and evil doing it, right?
This a very common line of thought in our world, and it’s not limited to Christians or people of faith. It is simply human. Others may call it fate or karma or the universe instead of God, but the basic idea is still there. It is what many have called being theologians of glory. Now a theologian is just someone who thinks about God, which makes us all theologians on some level. We all have our thoughts about God, whether we believe in God or not. And a theologian of glory is someone who wants all the glory and none of the pain. When I say “glory” in this context I mean success and happiness and good feelings. It’s like living in a Bob Marley song. No worries, mon! Or at Disney World: “The happiest place on earth.” Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? I want to be happy. I want to feel good. The problem is that this thirst for what we would call good blinds us to what glory actually is.
Theologians of glory, aka human beings, cannot fathom a God who works through suffering…a God who works through difficulty and opposition. We just don’t have the framework for it. We reject it and say it’s bad. Think of the very famous question posed by so many of us when we consider the state of our world, “How can a good God allow all of this suffering to happen?” It is the original skepticism (read more about that here). How can any of this be good? How can there be a God, especially a good God, when the world around us is in conflict and dying? There is a fundamental inability in us to recognize anything good coming through suffering and pain.
We can’t reconcile God’s goodness with the suffering in the world, so we bail God out. We bail him out of responsibility for anything that we label as bad. We say he’s not in this. The pain you’re experiencing is not God’s will. He’s not responsible for the conflict in your life. To be sure, from a Christian perspective, sin, death, and the devil are the anomalies in the order of the universe, but they are not in any way more powerful than God. They do not dictate the course of existence, God alone does.
While it’s an understandable move to make, there are drastic consequences. By bailing God out for all of the “bad” things in the world we unwittingly sabotage a key aspect about him, his sovereignty. We undermine him being in control. We are saying that God is actually not fully in control over everything. He is not the supreme power in the universe. He is not sovereign. There are things, namely all of the bad things in the world, that are outside of his control. Our view of God begins to weaken, albeit with good intentions.
The result for us then when we are operating as theologians of glory is that we “call the good thing bad and the bad thing good” (Martin Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, Thesis 21). We see suffering, and we say that’s bad. But we see Beyoncé and Jay-Z and we say that’s good. Success, wealth, basically winning become our definition of glory. Losing could never be good especially in America because we are winners. We call the good thing bad and the bad thing good, and in so doing we end up invalidating all of our suffering in the process. Your losses in life have no value, no importance, no point. They are just you messing up or evil winning, or whatever. But they are certainly not worth anything because then they would be good in some sense, they would have some value. But we have deemed them as bad and so not good at all, no value. We live in a world of meaningless pain. No wonder everyone is on anti-depressants these days!
BUT then there is Jesus and the cross. The primary way that God moves to save in this world is in fact through suffering, through death. We think the small, lowly, weak thing cannot be of any value let alone the source of salvation for all of humanity. The common carpenter from Nazareth cannot be the Savior of the world. It is even the response of one of Jesus’ disciples when they hear where he’s from, “What good can come from Nazareth?” (John 1:46) We want our Savior to come from Jerusalem or New York City, somewhere big and impressive. He can’t come from a no-nothing-town like Nazareth. He is nothing but a teacher who got himself into trouble with the authorities and died a criminal’s death. He most certainly is not God. This is where a theology of glory leads. And it is dead wrong.
Consider Jacob, one of the fathers of Israel, and his famous wrestling match in Genesis 32. Jacob’s situation when this happens is not one that we would call good. He is terrified of his older brother, Esau, and on the run. If you’ve never heard this story, Jacob bribed Esau to sell him his birthright as first born. And later Jacob posed as Esau to trick their father, Issac (blind from old age) in to giving him the blessing intended for Esau. Can you see Jacob’s thirst for glory here? To say that Esau did not like Jacob is an understatement. Right before Jacob’s cage match with God, Esau was coming to get revenge with 400 men in tow. Jacob then does everything he can to protect his family and possessions from Esau and prays earnestly for God to remember his promise to him (Genesis 28:11-22) that he would prosper him and that his offspring would be more numerous than the sands on the shore. And the Lord shows up, but not the way we expect him to.
He comes as Jacob’s adversary, as a man who wrestles with Jacob the whole night. They literally fight! At first, we are not sure that Jacob knows who this guy is. What an odd thing to have some dude show up and just start wrestling with you. Some commentators speculate that Jacob must have thought this was Esau sneaking up on him in the night, which is why Jacob fights so hard. He is fighting for his life. He thinks this guy has come to kill him. But then the Lord puts Jacob’s hip out of joint with just a touch, and it is pretty clear that this is no normal dude. He was more than human. And God asks Jacob to let him go and Jacob says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” He knows that this is God in the flesh (foreshadowing to Jesus), and he needs God to bless him and protect him in the face of his vengeful brother. And God does.
Here we get an insight into the brilliance of a God who works through difficulty and suffering, a God who comes as our adversary at first, a God who is in the obstacles of life. You see, God knows us better than we know ourselves, and he knows exactly what is going to get through to us. When our backs are up against it, when our lives are not a Bob Marley song, when we are not happy and successful…we get desperate. We get like Jacob. When Jacob realized with whom he was wrestling he would not let him go because he knew he needed God to bless him and intervene in his situation. He knew nothing else would cut it. He held tight to God to make sure that he and his family were going to be okay.
One of my late dear friends, The Rev. Martha Giltinan, used to say: “The truth is that we don’t do theology until we have to.” Meaning we don’t care about truth and salvation and Jesus or God until things get messy enough in our lives that we need bigger answers than the ones we can muster in ourselves. We need a word from outside. We need help. This is why God works through pain and suffering in our lives. This is why God is found in the obstacle. He puts it there to get our attention, to wake us up to what we really need, which is him. C.S. Lewis wrote in his book The Problem of Pain, “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our consciences, but shouts in our pains: Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” He wrestles with us and puts our limbs out of socket so that we recognize who is actually in control; the One we actually need to save us.
This is what is called being theologians of the cross. People who recognize that the Christian God is so powerful that he can work through the things that the world around us sees as bad to bring about redemption, true glory. No one ever anticipated God destroying death through death. We never anticipated God overturning all of the brokenness in the world by becoming broken himself for us. As Paul rightly says, “the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.” (1 Corinthians 1:18) It doesn’t make any sense to our inner glory-seeker. But it is the exact way the true glory of God is revealed to the world.
And it was the way God’s glory was revealed to Jacob too. In the face of his brother’s pursuit Jacob has an encounter with the Lord of the universe who has the true power and authority over him. Esau is put into context for Jacob, and he realizes that Esau is not the one he should have been worried about. He recognizes that he was not really victorious in this wrestling match, rather he was spared. He comes to grips with God’s mercy in the face of God’s initial opposition to him. After receiving the Lord’s blessing Jacob says, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered” (Genesis 32:30). He, a lying, cheating, hurting human being, was not destroyed in the presence of God, but was delivered.
A life of faith is one that develops through the struggle, through the obstacle, through the cross to recognize and experience God as he truly is, a God of mercy and grace. The God who created us, with all authority over us, with the ability to cripple us with a touch, who could have destroyed Jacob with only a word, enters into our world and wrestles with us so that we might see he is indeed a good God whose character is always to have mercy. He takes the brokenness of the world around us and in us and uses it for his purposes of redemption. In the process, he validates our pain, my pain and your pain, and makes our sufferings the most meaningful and transformative experiences in our lives. They become signposts of his faithfulness to us. God is in the obstacle in your life. He is the One who redeems your pain because he is the one who suffered the ultimate pain of the cross so that you would not have to.
Recommended Reading
