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?

9/11: Gaining a Biblical Perspective—Joseph’s Story

In the insanity of 9/11, is there any way to make sense of life? As we approach the tenth anniversary of that horrible day when not only the skies grew dark, but also our spiritual eyes, we need grace-eyes. We need to weave in another way of looking at life.

In God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting, I describe biblical weaving as entrusting myself to God’s larger purposes, good plans, and eternal perspective. I see life with spiritual eyes instead of eyeballs only. I look at tragedy, suffering, and loss not with rose colored glasses, but with faith eyes, with Cross-eyes, with 20/20 spiritual vision.

Life Is Bad, But God Is God: Joseph’s Story

During a time of both personal and national tragedy, Joseph’s words to his fearful family in Genesis 50:19-20 provide wisdom for living.

“Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

Joseph uses “intended” both for his brothers’ plans and God’s purposes. The Hebrew word has a very tangible sense of to weave, to plait, to interpenetrate as in the weaving together of fabric to fashion a robe, perhaps even Joseph’s coat of many colors.

The Old Testament also used the word in a negative, metaphorical sense to suggest a malicious plot, the devising of a cruel scheme. Other times the Jews used “intended” to picture symbolically the creation of some new and beautiful purpose or result through the weaving together of seemingly haphazard, miscellaneous, or malicious events.

“Life is bad,” Joseph admits. “You plotted against me for evil. You intended to spoil or ruin something wonderful.”

“God is good,” Joseph insists. “God wove good out of evil,” choosing a word for “good” that is the superlative of pleasant, beautiful. That is, God intended to create amazing beauty from seemingly worthless ashes for those who grieve (Isaiah 61:3).

Grace Narratives: Weaving Truth into Life

Joseph discovers healing through God’s grace narrative. Further, he offers his brothers tastes of grace.

“And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. For two years now there has been a famine in the land, and for the next five years there will not be plowing and reaping. But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt” (Genesis 45:5-8).

Amazing! I hope you caught the words. “To save lives,” “to preserve,” “by a great deliverance.” That’s a grace narrative, a salvation narrative. Had God not preserved a remnant of Abraham’s descendants, then Jesus would never have been born.

Joseph uses his spiritual eyes to see God’s great grace purposes in saving not only Israel and Egypt, but also the entire world.

I hope you also caught Joseph’s repetition. “God sent me.” “God sent me ahead of you.” “It was not you who sent me here, but God.” Joseph sees the smaller story of human scheming for ruin. However, he also perceives that God trumps that smaller scheme with His larger purpose by weaving beauty out of ugly.

Life hurts. Wounds penetrate. Without grace narratives, hopelessness and bitterness flourish. With a grace narrative, hope and forgiveness flow and perspective grows.

Instead of our perspective shrinking, suffering is the exact time when we must listen most closely, when we must lean over to hear the whisper of God. True, God shouts to us in our pain, but His answers, as with Elijah, often come to us in whispered still small voices amid the thunders of the world.

In weaving, God heals our wounds as we envision a future even while all seems lost in the present. Through hope we remember the future; we move from Good Friday to Easter Sunday while living on Saturday. Grace narratives point the way to God’s larger story, assuring us that our Savior is worth our wait.

The Rest of the Story

In tomorrow’s post, we’ll move from grace narratives to grace math: the divine calculation.

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 narrative provide healing hope?

You Can Hope Again!

Note: You’re reading Part Two of a two-part blog mini-series on hope. Read Part One: Is It Possible to Hope Again? These two posts are summarized from chapter eight of God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting.  

When life crushes the dreams we dream, is it possible to hope again? Yes, if we will weave in God’s larger story. Biblical weaving is entrusting myself to God’s larger purposes, good plans, and eternal perspective. I see life with spiritual eyes instead of eyeballs only. I look at suffering, not with rose colored glasses, but with faith eyes, with Cross-eyes, with 20/20 spiritual vision.

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 a 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

How could you look at your suffering not with rose-colored glasses, but with faith eyes, with Cross-eyes, with 20/20 spiritual vision—grace narratives and grace math?

Is It Possible to Hope Again?

When life crushes the dreams we dream, is it possible to hope again? Hope is about perspective. As I often say, “when life stinks, our perspective shrinks.” We can learn to hope again by weaving in another way of looking at life.

Biblical weaving is entrusting myself to God’s larger purposes, good plans, and eternal perspective. I see life with spiritual eyes instead of eyeballs only. I look at suffering, not with rose colored glasses, but with faith eyes, with Cross-eyes, with 20/20 spiritual vision.

Joseph’s Story: “Life Is Bad, But God Is Good” 

Recall Joseph’s words to his fearful family in Genesis 50:19-20.

Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.

Joseph uses “intended” both for his brothers’ plans and God’s purposes. The Hebrew word has a very tangible sense of to weave, to plait, to interpenetrate as in the weaving together of fabric to fashion a robe, perhaps even Joseph’s coat of many colors.

The Old Testament also used the word in a negative, metaphorical sense to suggest a malicious plot, the devising of a cruel scheme. Other times the Jews used “intended” to picture symbolically the creation of some new and beautiful purpose or result through the weaving together of seemingly haphazard, miscellaneous, or malicious events.

“Life is bad,” Joseph admits. “You plotted against me for evil. You intended to spoil or ruin something wonderful.”

“God is good,” Joseph insists. “God wove good out of evil,” choosing a word for “good” that is the superlative of pleasant, beautiful. That is, God intended to create amazing beauty from seemingly worthless ashes for those who grieve (Isaiah 61:3).

Grace Narratives: Weaving Truth into Life

Joseph discovers healing through God’s grace narrative. Further, he offers his brothers tastes of grace.

And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. For two years now there has been a famine in the land, and for the next five years there will not be plowing and reaping. But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt (Genesis 45:5-8).

Amazing! I hope you caught the words. “To save lives,” “to preserve,” “by a great deliverance.” That’s a grace narrative, a salvation narrative. Had God not preserved a remnant of Abraham’s descendants, then Jesus would never have been born.

Joseph uses his spiritual eyes to see God’s great grace purposes in saving not only Israel and Egypt, but also the entire world.

I hope you also caught Joseph’s repetition. “God sent me.” “God sent me ahead of you.” “It was not you who sent me here, but God.” Joseph sees the smaller story of human scheming for ruin. However, he also perceives that God trumps that smaller scheme with His larger purpose by weaving beauty out of ugly.

Life hurts. Wounds penetrate. Without grace narratives, hopelessness and bitterness flourish. With a grace narrative, hope and forgiveness flow and perspective grows.

Instead of our perspective shrinking, suffering is the exact time when we must listen most closely, when we must lean over to hear the whisper of God. True, God shouts to us in our pain, but His answers, as with Elijah, often come to us in whispered still small voices amid the thunders of the world.

The Rest of the Story

Return for the second half of the story of hope when we move from Grace Narratives to Grace Math: Divine Calculations.

Join the Conversation

How could you look at your suffering not with rose-colored glasses, but with faith eyes, with Cross-eyes, with 20/20 spiritual vision?

Note: This post is summarized from chapter eight of God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting.

A Lament for Your Loss

This week I’ve been explaining why it is unbiblical to try to forget our past. In Ask the Counselor, I noted that we should reflect on our past. Yesterday, in Blessed Are Those Who Mourn, I described the first part of reflection: candor—being honest with ourselves.

Today we’ll look at a second aspect of reflection: lament—being honest with God. I develop this material further in God’s Healing for Life’s Losses. Here’s an excerpt from chapter three: “A Lament for Your Loss Mourn.”

Biblical Lament: Telling God the Truth

Numerically, there are more Psalms of complaint and lament than Psalms of praise and thanksgiving. Lament is vulnerable frankness about life to God in which I express my pain and confusion over how a good God allows evil and suffering.

Lament is a faith-based act of persistent trust. Lament is one of the many moods of faith. Psalm 91’s exuberant trust is one faith mood while Psalm 88’s dark despair is another faith mood. A mood of faith trusts God enough to bring everything about us to Him. In lamewnt we hide nothing from God because we trust His good heart and because we know He knows our hearts.

My Personal Lament Journey

In the weeks and months after my 22nd birthday, I engaged in passionate lament. What made my struggle with my father’s death even more difficult was my lack of assurance that my father was a believer. I had witnessed to him, prayed for him, and he even began attending church with me. Yet even on his deathbed, he made no verbal commitment of faith in Christ.

So I shared with God. I told God, “What’s the use? Why did I pray, witness, and share? Why should I ever pray again? Why should I ever try again, trust again?”

I shared my confusion and my doubt with God. “Why does everyone else’s parent accept Christ in a glorious deathbed conversion? Why can’t I have assurance of my Dad’s presence with You?”

Were my expressions of lament biblical? Can lament be biblically supported? Does God truly prize lament?

Biblical Lament Samplers: With Christ in the School of Suffering

According to Psalm 62:8, if we truly trust God, then we’ll share everything with God. “Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.”

The biblical genre of lament expresses frankness about the reality of life that seems inconsistent with the character of God. Lament is an act of truth-telling faith, not unfaith. Lament is a rehearsal of the bad allowed by the Good.

When we lament, we live in the real world honestly, refusing to ignore what is occurring. Lament is our expression of our radical trust in God’s reliability in the midst of real life.

Psalm 73 is a prime example of Lament. Asaph begins, “Surely God is good to Israel” (73:1). He then continues with a litany of apparent evidence to the contrary, such as the prosperity of the wicked and the suffering of the godly (73:2-15). When he tries to make sense of all this, it’s oppressive to him (73:16). He then verbalizes to God the fact that his heart is grieved and his spirit embittered (73:21).

His lament, his complaint, drew him nearer to God. It did not push him away from God. “Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand” (73:23). He concludes, “But as for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the Sovereign LORD my refuge.” (73:28).

It was Asaph’s intense relationship with God that enlightened him to the goodness of God even during the badness of life. “Till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny. . . . As a dream when one awakes, so when you arise, O LORD, you will despise them as a fantasy” (73:17, 20). Spiritual friendship with God results in 20/20 spiritual vision from God.

Asaph illustrates that in lament we come to God with a sense of abandonment and confusion (Isaiah 49:14; Jeremiah 20:7; Lamentations 5:20). We then exercise a courageous, yet humble cross-examination. Not a cross-examination of God, but a cross-examination and a refuting of earth-bound reality with spiritual reality.

That’s exactly what occurs in Jeremiah 20:7; Lamentations 5:20; and Psalm 88:18. In all three passages, it appears by reason alone that life is bad and so is God. Yet in each passage, God responds positively to a believer’s rehearsal of life’s inconsistencies.

In Job 3, and much of Job for that matter, Job forcefully and even violently expresses his lament.

What’s the point of life when it doesn’t make sense, when God blocks all the roads to meaning? Instead of bread I get groans for my supper, then leave the table and vomit my anguish. The worst of my fears has come true, what I’ve dreaded most has happened. My repose is shattered, my peace destroyed. No rest for me, ever—death has invaded life.

In Job 42:7-8, God honors Job’s lament saying that Job spoke right of life and right of God. God prizes lament and rejects all deceiving denial and simplistic closure, preferring candid complexity.

To deny or diminish suffering is to refuse arrogantly to be humbled. It is to reject dependence upon God. Moses chastises God’s people in Deuteronomy 8:1-10 for forgetting their past suffering. God wants us to make use of our suffering, to remember our suffering, to admit our need for Him in our suffering, and to rehearse our suffering (external and internal) before Him.

On the Road to Hope

Will we be disappointed with God or disappointed without God? We can either lament with and to God, or we can complain without and about God.

If facing suffering is wrestling face-to-face with God, then complaint is our decision to grapple with God about life hand-to-hand, eye-to-eye. Will you?

Join the Conversation

How would you compare your response to your suffering to Job’s? Jeremiah’s? Jacob’s? David’s? Paul’s? Jesus in the Garden?

Blessed Are Those Who Mourn 

In a recent Ask the Counselor post, I addressed the question, “Should I try to forget my past?” I said a hearty, biblical “No!”

I also said that one biblical response to our past is “reflection”: honestly facing our past face-to-face with Christ. In God’s Healing for Life’s Losses, I call that “candor.” Here’s an excerpt from chapter two: “Candor: Blessed Are Those Who Mourn.” 

Candor: Telling Your Self the Truth

The world has its way of grieving. But, when our fallen world falls on us, when suffering crushes us, we need much more than research. We need revelation—we need God’s inspired truth about how to grieve as those who have hope.

God’s Word offers us profound practical wisdom for moving from denial to candor. What exactly is biblical candor? Candor is courageous truth telling to myself about life in which I come face-to-face with the reality of my external and internal suffering. In candor, I admit what is happening to me and I feel what is going on inside me.

My Personal Candor Journey

I had to move from denial to candor after the death of my father on my 21st birthday. In fact, it was not until my 22nd birthday that the process truly began. I had been handling my loss like a good Bible college graduate and seminary student—I was pretending!

On my 22nd birthday, one year to the day after my father’s death, I went for a long walk around the outskirts of the seminary campus. That day I started facing my loss of my Dad. The reality that I would never know him in an adult-to-adult relationship. The fact that my future children would never know their grandfather.

As I faced some of these external loses, the tears came. Then I began to face some of the internal crosses—what was happening in me. I felt like a loner. Fatherless. Orphaned. Unprotected. On my own. The tears flowed. The process of candor began. The floodgate of emotions erupted. I was being honest with myself.

Biblical Candor Samplers: Fearlessly Facing the Facts

But was it biblical? Does God really allow and even invite His children to be brutally honest about life? Can we support candor biblically?

David practices candor in Psalm 42:3-5.

My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, “Where is your God?” These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng. Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?

Notice that David is honest about his external suffering. He describes his losses—the loss of fellowship, leadership, and worship. He also is candid about his internal suffering. He depicts his crosses—accurately labeling his soul as downcast and disturbed within him.

Job consistently models candor throughout his response to his losses.

What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me. I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil (Job 3:25-26).

Again we witness brutal frankness both about external losses and internal crosses.

We could profitably examine the accounts of other biblical characters who practiced candor—Jeremiah, Solomon, Asaph (Psalm 73), Heman (Psalm 88), Jesus, Paul, and so many more. They all convey the same inspired message: it’s normal to hurt and necessary to grieve.

The Apostle Paul does not tell us not to grieve; he tells us not to grieve without hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). He chooses a Greek word meaning to feel sorrow, distress, and grief, and to experience pain, heaviness, and inner affliction.

Paul is teaching that grief is the grace of recovery because mourning slows us down to face life. No grieving; no healing. Know grieving; know healing.

The only person who can truly dare to grieve, bear to grieve, is the person with a future hope that things will eventually be better. When we trust God’s good heart, then we trust Him no matter what. We need not pretend. We can face and embrace the mysteries of life.

On the Road to Hope

Candor or denial. The choice is a turning point. It is a line drawn in the sand of life, a hurdle to confront.

Faith crosses the line. Trust leaps the hurdle. We face reality and embrace truth, sad as it is. If facing suffering is wrestling face-to-face with God, then candor is our decision to step on the mat. Will you?

Join the Conversation

True faith faces all of life face-to-face with Christ. Where would you put yourself on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being total denial and 10 being facing all of life—internal and external suffering?