9/11: Gaining a Biblical Perspective: Grace Math
Note: This is Part 2 of a blog mini-series on a biblical perspective on 9/11. Read Part 1, Joseph’s Story. These posts are developed from God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting.
Grace Math: Divine Calculations
Healing wounds requires grace narratives and grace math. Grace math teaches us that present suffering plus God’s character equals future glory. The equation we use is the Divine perspective.
From a Divine faith perspective on life, we erect a platform to respond to suffering. How we view life makes all the difference in how we respond to life’s losses. Martin Luther understood this. “The Holy Spirit knows that a thing only has such value and meaning to a man as he assigns it in his thoughts.”
We must reshape our interpretation of life by contemplating suffering from a new, grace perspective. Through God’s Word we nurture alternative ways to view life’s losses.
The spiritual consolation offered by Scripture is a new vision, the power of faith to see suffering and death from the viewpoint of our crucified and risen Lord. It renews our sight and turns our common human view of matters upside down. This does not eradicate the pain or the fear of misery; it robs it of its hopelessness.
Our earth-bound, non-faith human story of suffering must yield to God’s narrative of life and suffering—to God’s grace narrative and grace math. Luther beautifully portrays the God-perspective that prompts healing.
“If only a man could see his God in such a light of love . . . how happy, how calm, how safe he would be! He would then truly have a God from whom he would know with certainty that all his fortunes—whatever they might be—had come to him and were still coming to him under the guidance of God’s most gracious will.”
As you respond to your loss, are you struggling to believe that God has a good heart? Look to the Cross. The Cross forever settles all questions about God’s heart for us. According to Luther, without faith in God’s grace through Christ’s death, we are tone-deaf to God-reality.
“He who does not believe that he is forgiven by the inexhaustible riches of Christ’s righteousness is like a deaf man hearing a story. If we consider it properly and with an attentive heart, this one image—even if there were no other—would suffice to fill us with such comfort that we should not only not grieve over our evils, but should also glory in our tribulations, scarcely feeling them for the joy that we have in Christ.”
The Christ of the Cross is the only One who makes sense of life when suffering bombards us.
On the Road to Hope
Weaving is the next choice point you encounter on the road to hope. You can look at your losses with “eyeballs only”—with the world’s narrative and the world’s math. But in doing so, you’ll crop Christ out of the picture. And whenever you crop out Christ, you crop out hope. Despair and doubt then reign.
Or, approaching this fork in the road, you can crop Christ back into the picture. You can do some spiritual mathematics through grace narratives and grace math. With spiritual eyes you can trust God’s good heart. Jeremiah’s conviction (and consider all the suffering he endured) can become yours.
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11).
Join the Conversation
As you ponder the horrors of 9/11, and as you face your own loses and suffering, how can weaving in God’s grace math provide healing hope?
