Suffering
Here in the sermon, “The Voice of Job,” MacDonald takes on the difficult subject of suffering. There are no easy answers to understanding the created pathway to becoming actual participants in the joy and beauty of the Divine Life we are to share. So, “If God is good, why is there so much human suffering”? God, however, does not answer Job’s questions or ours directly in the story, but indirectly. So, MacDonald gives us some helpful perspectives on the subject of suffering. First, God has an obligation to His creatures by the way He made us. Secondly, there is a larger context through which to view circumstances other than the pain of the moment.
Our design is with needs, thousands of necessities, for which They alone are the supply. For the most part, we are unaware of this as we move through our lives, recognizing only our wants. What we call life is in disharmony with our design. Therefore, our right to claim our inheritance, our birthright as children of God, goes unclaimed. This awareness and awakening will seem anything but good as they use life’s circumstances to move us from wants to needs. They will, for our good, use life’s sufferings as the means to bring us to claim our fundamental rights and relationship from Them!
Claims
Therefore, we have a right to claim suffering as a means to the end. The end of living in The Divine Life for which we are to live! There are no claims on God that originate from us. They all arise from Them.
But, for the unchildlike souls who might in ignorance or arrogance, think they can stand before God in their rights and demand of Him this or that from the self-will of their flesh, I will put before you the things to which you have rights. Yes, perhaps the root of all rights, given by God Himself, from the beginning, is the Divine seed that is in us. This seed is our divine claim to any want, pain, disappointment, or misery that would awaken us to ourselves like the fools that we are. We have a right to be punished and not spared a single painful emotion that would push us towards repentance. Yes, we have a right to be sent out into outer darkness, what we call hell or even worse, if nothing less will do. We have a right to be pushed into repentance. A right to be hedged in on every side, to have one after another of the hounds of heaven thwart our desires, disrupt our plans, and frustrate our hopes until we come to see in the end that nothing will ease the pain or make life worth living but the presence of God Himself! That nothing is good but the will of God, nothing noble enough for the desire of the heart but oneness with the Eternal, God must, for our good, bring us to yield our very being, that He can enter in and dwell with us!
Love’s Kind
“There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing to its consummation when love will fill and inspire the universe, imperishable and divine!
Therefore, all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that separates and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed.
‘Our God is a consuming fire!'” (The Consuming Fire)
Suffering of Job is the introductory blog for the Sermon below: