When God Is Not Enough

God has shown from the beginning of time that it is not an easy road. In fact, so bad was the start that He could save only eight and destroyed the rest in a flood. Still again, God had to then confuse the people’s languages – again to curtail the effects of evil and propagate the blessing – or else risk man’s irrevocable commitment to self. After some time, God called a man from Ur who had to leave his family and his homeland and go to a place unknown – following a relatively unknown God. Despite his dysfunctional family life (and his age), this man Abraham and his descendants nonetheless had faith – and this faith saved them. Abraham believed God to go – and Abraham believed God that His life would be multiplied. Abraham believed in God and in the blessing of God.

Throughout history this paradigm has been challenged, threatened, and put to the test. Jacob’s family, and so the future of salvation history, rested on one young man’s arrogance and the hatred of his brothers. Yet God was able to take these circumstances and completely turn them around – though at a tremendous cost to Joseph himself. Joseph’s character was forged in the crucible of suffering. The result: the immediate and later lasting salvation of the world – albeit through several hundred years of subsequent slavery, wilderness walking, and countless raging battles.

When Israel demanded a king “like all the other nations” (we must never desire to be like all the other nations), God relented and gave such a king – to Israel’s demise. When God raised up David in his stead, he too would suffer tremendous loss, humiliation, and grief. Yet David – a man after God’s own heart – though not without sin, acted with tremendous humility and restraint when confronted from above by King Saul or from below by his dear son Absalom. David’s consistent choice: to commit his life to God through all the rejection and suffering just as his descendant Jesus did.

Perhaps no one in history demonstrated this life of “undeserved” hardship and suffering as a mere man than did Job. Yet in all of this, Job did not sin.

Finally, as if Old Testament history were not enough to demonstrate God’s love and sovereignty in the midst of tremendous confusion, wrongdoing, and suffering, God sent His own Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross at the hands of sinful man, having called 12 others among him to do the same. He called these twelve his disciples – and he called them to be with Him that they too might make disciples and multiply after their own kind. Jesus destroyed sin and death and the consequences of the law and in-so-doing set men and women completely free to live by faith – to live in loving communion once again with God and with all He had made. But a servant is not greater than his master – nor are we greater than Christ. If God throughout history curtailed the effects of evil and propagated the blessing through suffering – ultimately, His own suffering on the cross – then His disciples would also have to partake of the same. So in order for them to be successful, God effectively placed them “back in the Garden” to reap all its benefits, to be fruitful and multiply, and to once again rule over all He had made – yet (like in the Garden before the Fall), with the presence of evil and the need to overcome temptation.

So God has equipped His disciples with everything they need. We need only follow Him. We need only follow Him to the cross. For only on this path will we experience strength over temptation and freedom from sin. If we will do so, we will find what Jesus found – indeed, that which He (and we) already have: life without end. But this requires both discipline and a commitment above all else to live for love – love for God and love for others. And it requires from us one other commitment: to die to ourselves.

So when is God enough? It really comes down to this: God will be enough for us when we are committed to what God has in store for us: His resurrection life manifested through our lives in-as-much-as His death works in us. He has called you and I to live a life of dying to ourselves. Only in dying can we find life. This is how Jesus found it every moment of every day until He found His way to the cross: total surrender. If we claim to be Jesus’ followers, this is the only way we will find life as well. This is what it means to be a “disciple.” This is what it means to be a Christian. Unfortunately, (or perhaps, fortunately), I didn’t make the rules.

As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be: Order comes through chaos, life through death. We have been given everything we need.