Читать книгу Hear the Ancient Wisdom - Charles Ringma - Страница 36

January 29

The God who Wounds and Heals

God is no favorite teddy bear or Father Christmas. God is the sovereign Lord of the universe whose ways with us, bathed in both mystery and revelation, will always challenge us.

One wonders whether the God of contemporary Western Christianity has anything very much to do with the God of the biblical story. It seems we have made God into a benign and convenient figure who is there to support us in our needs. Instead of God as Lord, we have made God the divine butler simply there for our own wants.

Gone is the sense that God is sovereign and that we are invited into both the joy and journey of a life of worship, prayer and obedience. When God is seen as central, rather than ourselves, then the focus of our lives is not how we can “use” God, but how we can be drawn more fully into God’s purposes. These purposes are not according to our agenda. They may be strange and difficult.

The desert father Abbot Apollo speaks of a God who “makes the sore and bindeth up: . . . woundeth and His hands make whole . . . bringeth low and lifteth up . . .”29

The way of God with us is one of correction and blessing. It is the way of the cross and the resurrection. But one can’t have one without the other. So with us—sorrow and blessing are part of the tapestry of the Christian life. We are, after all, the cruciform people of God. The purposes of God to bring shalom to the world will call us into both suffering and service and our own ongoing purgation will invite us into confession and healing.

Thought

We are healed through wounding and in a little dying lies the gateway to life.