In my last post, I wrote about Zechariah 2:8. Listen to these words again. “He who touches you touches the apple of His eye.” I focused then on the fact that we are the apple of God’s eye. (I hope you haven’t gotten over that statement. I hope it still arrests you with the power of that truth.) Let me focus now on the other part of that statement.
God makes a point to say, “If anybody touches you, they are touching the apple of my eye.” If you have ever stood up for someone else, you understand this feeling. When one of my children is treated unfairly, I want to go to bat for them. I want to defend them. I want to fight that battle for them—and I have. “If you touch one of my kids, then you are touching the apple of my eye. Beware; you are messing with something that is very precious to me.” Now, take those feelings and multiply them by a hundred, a thousand, a billion. This is how God feels about you. He says, “If anybody messes with you, they are messing with the apple of my eye.” In other words, nobody messes with the apple of God’s eye!
So here’s the obvious question. How do we justify these words when tragic things happen to us, as God’s people, as the apple of his eye? Tragic things happen to us all the time. People misunderstand us. They use us. We are abused in relationships—by parents, by spouses, both emotionally and physically. Our bodies get diseases. Through no fault of our own, an accident disables us. A loved one dies too young, their life seemingly cut short. And this is not to mention the national tragedies that have been in the headlines recently—the Penn State scandal, the shootings in Aurora, CO. And when things like this happen, the phrase from Zechariah 2:8 seems more of a taunt than it does the truth. God seems to say one thing, but do his actions betray reality? How can he honestly say, “If anybody touches you, they are touching the apple of my eye,” while at the same time bring such sorrow into our lives? Do we just read this verse and smile a dutiful smile (or worse, a condescending smirk) and then move on to other verses that make more sense? Do we just gloss over these kinds of verses and simply look for ones that just tell us what God wants us to do? “If I can’t understand Him, maybe I can appease Him with my compliant obedience.” Or do we just carry on secretly believing that God really isn’t in control, or that he is really unconnected to our real-world lives? What do we do when God says he loves us, but allows pain and suffering and tragedy into our lives? Does he really love us, or is it that he just can’t stop the bad things from happening?
This is a real question, and if you don’t ask it, at least occasionally, then you’re missing out. If you don’t grapple with the mysterious synchrony of God’s love and his sovereignty, then you are either enjoying less of God or you are in denial. Let me tackle this issue by asking two questions. Does a parent make every effort to protect his/her child from harm? Yes. Does a parent make every effort to protect his/her child from pain? No. Do you see the difference? Let me give you an example. When Virginia was only about 6 weeks old, she got a fever and her temperature went up dangerously high and we could not reduce it with normal methods. So we took her to the Emergency Room, and because of her age, the physicians had to do a spinal tap to test for meningitis. A spinal tap is quite painful. Now, let me ask this. Did we do everything we could to protect Virginia from harm? Yes. We took her to the ER when her fever spiked up so high. Did we do everything we could to protect her from pain? No. We gave the doctors our permission to do something very painful to her, give her a spinal tap. In other words, sometimes it is harmful to be protected from pain.
No parent would protect his/her child from all pain. We can’t, and shouldn’t. Pain is part and parcel of living in this fallen world. [That’s why God says that he will wipe away every tear once we get to heaven. There will be tears up until that time, but none once we’re there. Nobody is sad in the presence of God. He won’t allow it.] We let our kids climb on the monkey bars, and then watch them fall down. We let them play baseball, and then watch them skin their knee sliding into second base. And the same is true for us. God’s goal for us is not to keep us from pain, but to cause us to worship and serve him in all things, whether pain or pleasure. He knows that there is something worse for us than pain—finding our life in something other than him, for instance. Could He stop painful things from happening to us? Yes. Will he? Probably not. Should He? No.
Pain and suffering cause our idols to rise to the surface. An idol is something besides God that you depend on to provide you with some degree of life, comfort, satisfaction, fulfillment. Pain and suffering cause us to see what we have depended on for life besides God. And an idol can be a very wonderful thing—a person, a job, a home, our health or the health of our loved ones. But a good thing can become an idol, if we gain more enjoyment from it than we do from God.
The glorious nature of God is worth enduring whatever pain it takes for us to fully enjoy Him. And we can’t fully enjoy Him if we are busy protecting ourselves from pain.