Tenth Day of Christmas: The Eyes of the Blind Shall Be Opened

Today’s guest-poster is my beloved brother-in-law, who is also our family’s resident computer genius and all-around nice guy. He and my sister are the ones who gave me my own URL last year, which still makes me feel all fancy-schmancy here at Toddled Dredge. Brother-in-law has a tender heart, and I’m sure many of you can relate to what he wrote here.

Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing. (Isaiah 35:5-6)

The problem of evil, pain, and suffering was introduced to me during my first philosophy class in college. My mind focused from the moment my professor forcefully challenged us to defend God’s existence, or rather His character, in the light of such terrible things. It was not the intellectual argument that weighed on me, but the personal, emotional aspect. How can God truly love me, and yet force me to endure future trials? As an unscarred teenager, I could see no way to reconcile God’s love with our suffering.

Time brought many new experiences into my life. There were many wonderful blessings, but also the first real scars. The deepest of these involved my child who died in utero. I watched as my wife passed the child suddenly in the night, and took both to the hospital where physicians decided that surgery was necessary. Despite the horror of the previous night, the Lord didn’t rest the next day, but brought even more trials to my family. He brought everything from the mundane – flat tires and being stopped by the police – to the terrifying: complications in surgery that could take my wife. He did not, however, leave us alone.

The Lord had blessed us with good friends, and they came quickly to comfort us. But something struck me deeply about their caring. The friends that touched us the most were the ones that said, “We have also lost a child.” When these friends wept with us, their tears contained the memory of their own experiences. And those tears were a balm for my wife and me. We grew closer to those friends, just as we grew closer to each other for having endured this pain together.

There was another to whom I grew closer through my suffering: the God who also lost a child. In some real sense, I knew God had drawn me closer to Him through our suffering. The tears that really healed me were the tears of the one that held me. And it was in the comforting arms of God in the midst of tragedy that I lost all my emotional and intellectual objections surrounding the problem of evil, pain, and suffering. I began to realize that there was something binding, something permanent about enduring pain and suffering together.

God desired to bind us to Him in a way that could not be broken. So He sent His son to suffer greatly with us and then to suffer for us. Jesus brought sight out of the blind, hearing from the deaf, leaping from the lame, and singing from the dumb. And in His physical transformations of suffering into blessing, He shows us the spiritual reality of a life bound to Him. It wasn’t until I suffered that I could truly appreciate the suffering of my Savior, and the binding of God to us that resulted from it.

The New Testament frequently uses the language of being “with Christ”. We are baptized into Christ (Galatians 3:27), suffer with Christ (Romans 8:17), are crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20), and even die with Christ (Romans 6:8). But out of such suffering with our God comes a binding that can never be separated (Romans 8:35-39), a life that can never end (Romans 6:8-10), and a kingdom that we co-heir with Christ (Romans 8:17). It is out of our suffering, that God brings unimaginable blessing. This is something that only an all powerful, all wise, all good God alone could possibly do. Through the greatest evil, the crucifixion of God Himself, the Lord brings about the greatest good: the salvation of His people.

In having an appreciation of this born through suffering, I can now see and hear, leap and sing.

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