Dear Friends,

Does God love us? Well, God decided to come down here and suffer our nonsense for 3 1/2 years (and then was brutally killed). So, despite our deepest traumas and those burning, unanswered questions, I believe the answer is yes!

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Suffering nonsense for love 

Jesus could have remained on His great and glorious judgment seat for all eternity. He could have decided to do the Judgment Day thing and simply send everyone to hell. That would have been fair…and every time we sing Amazing Grace, that’s what we’re affirming, is it not? Salvation is an undeserved gift, not a debt owed by God.

Yes, instead of being fair and tossing me into the lake of fire, He chose to come down here and suffer me and my nonsense.

I talked about the mouth abuse, the physical suffering prior to the cross, the ostracism, the abandonment, the betrayal, and His temptations in previous posts. Today, with God’s blessing, I want to talk about the agony suffered by God incarnate as He ministered to a stubborn, rebellious, perverse and unbelieving people–like me–year after year.

Have you seen His tenderness? His incredible forbearance? His undying, unfailing, never-ending, inexplicable love for me and you? Let me show you!!!

Suffering hard hearts for love

It hit me like a ton of bricks…using almost exclusively the events in a mere two chapters in Matthew, I can give a decent illustration of the aggravation we put Jesus through. Not only that, but the aggravation is easier to understand the more you go with the narrative flow.

Matthew 16 begins with the Pharisees asking for signs…annoying, yes, but I talked about that last time. But then Jesus has a huddle with His inner circle and gets a moment of peace, right? Wrong!

[Mat 16:5-12 KJV] 5 And when his disciples were come to the other side, they had forgotten to take bread. 6 Then Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees. 7 And they reasoned among themselves, saying, [It is] because we have taken no bread. 8 [Which] when Jesus perceived, he said unto them, ***O ye of little faith***, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought no bread? 9 ***Do ye not yet understand***, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? 10 Neither the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? 11 How is it that ye do not understand that I spake [it] not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees? 12 Then understood they how that he bade [them] not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.

As you can see, the disciples themselves add to His aggravation. In this passage, Jesus diagnoses their problem as a scarcity of faith…and in a parallel passage in Mark 8, He also asks them if they are being hard-hearted. It wasn’t just that they were faithlessly obsessing over the bread shortage while standing next to the hands-down, all-time, undisputed champion of Dinner: Impossible…it may also be that they were hard-heartedly envisioning the Savior as a nag Who was hassling them over an innocent oversight (further study: Mark 16:14 is another example where Jesus rebukes them for both unbelief and hardness of heart…it sounds like there might be a connection here!).

Did he know He was going to have this problem with His disciples and me? Yes, of course!

But He decided to suffer it anyway…because He loves us.

Suffering the offence of Satan for love

The very next exchange in Matthew 16 is the epic confession of Peter, followed by Jesus’s equally epic prophecy that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church…but in the very next conversation, in the same chapter, we see a startling turn of events. Jesus tells them about His coming crucifixion, Peter pushes back, and then:

[Mat 16:23 KJV] 23 But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. 

Part of the reason I use this an example of His suffering is because I know what Jesus says next…”If any [man] will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross”…and I know that Peter fell far short of this admonition on the night of Jesus’s arrest. Despite Jesus’s very stern rebuke “Get thee behind me, Satan” and subsequent teaching on the concept of sacrifice, Peter still whips out his sword and attacks the officers. That’s not taking up your cross. Jesus rebukes him again, in the garden, but he then bounces to the other extreme and pretends not to know Jesus during the trial. That’s not taking up your cross either.

The point, my friends, is that Jesus came down here knowing that even His inner circle would fail Him…and I don’t just mean one failure and then perfect performance after being reprimanded. That wasn’t Peter’s life, my dear friend…and it’s not mine either.

Did he know He was going to have this problem with His disciples and me? Yes, of course!

But He decided to suffer it anyway…because He loves us.

Suffering a faithless and perverse generation for love

Chapter 17 tells the story of Jesus’s transfiguration [note to self after reading the parallel account in Mark 9: If I am not sure what to say, just be quiet!], and then the encounter with the boy possessed with a dumb spirit. Unbelief was an ongoing problem during Jesus’s ministry, and no, I am not talking about the wicked holier-than-thous who plotted His death! This encounter demonstrates the unbelief of His own disciples…and the fact that it was a very real component of His suffering:

[Mat 17:17-20 KJV] 17 Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I ***suffer*** you? bring him hither to me. 18 And Jesus rebuked the devil; and he departed out of him: and the child was cured from that very hour. 19 Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out? 20 And Jesus said unto them, ***because of your unbelief***: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.

So, what was so bad about the disciples’ unbelief that Jesus described His experience with them as suffering? The two main reasons that come to my mind:

1. He just told them in the prior chapter that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church
2. In a historical narrative that the disciples should have been very familiar with, God sentenced Israeli adults to 40 years of wilderness wandering, followed by death, for the very same sin of not conquering enemy territory due to unbelief

Not much had changed between the time of wilderness wandering and the time of Jesus…and not much has changed since then. There’s no giant, no demon, or any other foe that can stand against the Lord of hosts…and yet I often remain on the outskirts of the Promised Land due to unbelief.

Did he know He was going to have this problem with His disciples and me? Yes, of course!

But He decided to suffer it anyway…because He loves us.

The God Who Is There

I didn’t even get to the part where the disciples start arguing about which one was the uber-disciple, but we need to close out this post.

In light of all the disciples’ nonsense that Jesus came down here knowing He was going to suffer, I don’t HAVE to know exactly why God would suffer a madman to rise to power and murder millions of people. I don’t HAVE to know why some horrible thing happened to me before I can trust Him.

I already know that He left the gleaming halls of eternity, came down to this dirty, violent place, and built a ministry of healing, teaching and feeding.

I already know that, in addition to the many other things He suffered from the hostiles, which I discussed in previous posts, He also suffered from His inner circle. He suffered their hard hearts, their susceptibility to Satanic thinking, their unbelief, and other faults that I didn’t have time to get into.

Isn’t that enough, my friend, for us to trust Him? Stop blaming God for asking us to give Him a little credit!

But I haven’t even gotten to the crucifixion. Oh my God, the crucifixion. Please pray for me.

God bless,

TFOTF