Why God Performs Acts of Grace in This Life
When I think about the reason we live, I often come back to the purpose for the Christian life. I, and a lot of others, boil it down to a simple statement: to know Christ and make Him known. Let’s be honest with ourselves: we must all think about why God continues to have us live, especially through suffering, on this earth after we’re saved, right? I don’t think it’s just me. And I know I’ve been on a suffering kick in my blog posts since I relaunched, but, well, when God gives you lemons, you praise Him with lemonade.
Anyway, I think we’d all consider it the highest act of grace and mercy to be saved and immediately be with the Father in heaven that very instant, but it’s just not the case for most believers. Those of us who feel that way also recognize that God has us here to make Him known. Furthermore, He has us remain so that we can praise Him and hope in His name.
Let me be bluntly honest here: I don’t actually want to go to heaven yet. Perhaps it’s my own immaturity, but there are a lot of things we can do in this life that we can’t do in eternity, and I’d personally like to experience those things. According to Scripture, there will not be marriage nor, presumably, childbirth or child-rearing in heaven. Neither will there be the ocean. There will be wonders galore and a life with Christ to explore for all time, but I would like to enjoy the life I’ve been given here, too. It’s still a beautiful world God created, even with sin running rampant. There are still beautiful things to experience in it, and though I know there will be no disappointment in the life to come, I get a bit bummed if I think about living this life without experiencing some of the things only it can offer.
Hezekiah’s Sickness and Recovery
I say all this to bring us to a point of knowledge King Hezekiah describes in the book of Isaiah. This king suffered an illness and begged God for more time, and God granted him another fifteen years. When God saved him, he wrote a poem in Isaiah 38:10-20. Hezekiah is known as the king who made reforms to Judah’s worship. He brought the kingdom back to the God they abandoned by destroying Asherah poles and other pagan places of worship and sacrifice. According to 2 Kings 18, Hezekiah did what was right in God’s sight just like David. He is also the king who broke the bronze snake Moses built for the Israelites when they were in the wilderness in Numbers 21:4-8 because they were sacrificing to it.
In fact, in 2 Kings 18:5-6, Hezekiah is declared totally separate from all other kings of Judah: “Hezekiah relied on the Lord God of Israel; not one of the kings of Judah was like him, either before him or after him. He remained faithful to the Lord and did not turn from following him but kept the commands the Lord had commanded Moses.” That’s incredibly high praise; it proves him a man of integrity like David, who, though a sinful man, served God faithfully insofar as God made him capable, proving him as one whose opinion matters in the way of the faith.
To Never Again See God on Earth
You’ll have to read the poem for yourself since I’m only going to quote a few verses to make my points, starting with Isaiah 38:10-11, which says, “I said: in the prime of my life I must go to the gates of Sheol; I am deprived of the rest of my years. I said: I will never see the Lord in the land of the living; I will not look on humanity any longer with the inhabitants of what is passing away.” Something that fascinates me about theology is that angels are curious about us and the way we get to understand and experience grace. Imagine that, for a moment. Angels, the beings always doing God’s will and practically constantly with Him, are fascinated by what we experience (1 Peter 1:10-12). This should bring perspective to Hezekiah’s statement.
First, he laments about his death, which sounds weird to current Christian culture. We celebrate life and the place our dead brothers and sisters go, and we tend to promote a lack of lamenting. But Old Testament people lamented death quite often. Yes, they didn’t have Christ, but those who lamented still knew they had the promise of eternal life with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, so we shouldn’t disregard this lamenting. Death sucks, and the angels’ curiosity in pair with Hezekiah’s statement tells us why: we are no longer blessed to see the work of God here, to look on God’s prized creation of humanity, which is a devastating thing even though it is “what is passing away.” God’s presence and work take on a special context here that it does not have in perfect living in heaven or in the new heavens and the new earth. Grace, mercy, and sanctification are unique to this time and this world. It’s good and okay to lament no longer being privy to that, and it’s also good to rejoice in the work.
Rejoicing in Bitterness and Delivering Love
Isaiah 38:15-17 says, “What can I say? He has spoken to me, and he himself has done it. I walk along slowly all my years because of the bitterness of my soul. Lord, by such things people live, and in every one of them my spirit finds life; you have restored me to health and let me live. Indeed, it was for my own well-being that I had such intense bitterness; but your love has delivered me from the Pit of destruction, for you have thrown all my sins behind your back.”
The most profoundly visible statement here is Hezekiah’s declaration that his bitterness was for his own good. He was a faithful man; how could it be good for him to be bitter? (Whether toward God or life or his sickness we don’t know, but it could be safe to assume it was all of it.) The next, more invisible statement is that his slow walk of bitterness in his soul, his march toward death is a thing by which many live. The despair and bitterness Hezekiah felt is the bitterness of those without God, yet people subsist in it and by it. Yet, in every one of those things, Hezekiah’s spirit found life.
That found life is the substance of difference: angels don’t get it, and the lost don’t experience it. But for Hezekiah, it was everything: God delivered him from death by His love and thrown his sins away, redeeming the bitterness of his soul.
Only the Living can Praise God’s Faithfulness
In Ecclesiastes 6, Solomon laments that it is better for a child to be stillborn than to live all his days without good things and a proper death. These good things Solomon defines as the gifts of God, which are His grace, mercy, forgiveness, and love. The Scriptures tell us that the angels surround God constantly singing “Holy, holy holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come” in Revelation 4. That is the proclamation of the dead; we will forever claim God is holy as we live in eternity. But there is something that can only be proclaimed in a fallen world by imperfect humans saved by grace.
Hezekiah tells us this in Isaiah 38:18-19, “For Sheol cannot thank you; Death cannot praise you. Those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness. The living, only the living can thank you, as I do today; a father will make your faithfulness known to children.” We will forever remark on God’s separation from evil, His holiness, one day. But only in a world that isn’t perfect can we thank Him for His awesome works because they’re only needed here. Salvation is only required if there is something we need to be saved from. We only need His faithfulness when the world around us is terrifyingly unfaithful. We can thank Him only while we are alive because it is only by making us live that He enables us to be thankful for grace, mercy, and hope. And it is only while we are alive that we can make God’s faithfulness to us known to others.
1 Corinthians 13 tells us that what remains is faith, hope, and love. Take everything else in this world away, and these three subsist. And it is only here that they can exist at all because it is only here that we could ever grow to comprehend a lack of faith, hope, and love. It is only in the bitterness that we can come to understand the true sweetness of God. The angels know God’s status as set apart, holy. They know His timelessness. We alone know, can comprehend, and can receive grace and mercy by faith, hope, and love. We alone can repent. We alone can be brought near. And we alone are recipients of the heart of the one true God. Do you want to know why suffering exists? Because only by suffering can we grasp the magnitude of grace.