Today's reading: Exodus 13; 2 Corinthians 4
The end of 2 Cor. 4 is always refreshing and challenging at the same time:
So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
I have, by pretty much every standard, lived a very easy and blessed life. I have never suffered famine, destitution, or violence in a war-torn country. I have never suffered poverty or homelessness. I’ve never experienced a serious illness in myself or someone close to me. I’ve never experienced the loss of a child or spouse. There is a lot of evil and suffering in this world that I have, through no work of my own, been spared from.
But that said, there is no living in this world without suffering. In fact, the single worst, most difficult thing I have ever experienced came in the face of trying to follow Jesus faithfully. And even though that situation and that suffering are in the past, it permanently changed my life. It cost me the closest friendships I had, and there are decisions that my wife and I are literally in the midst of making today that are direct echoes of that situation.
So while my life has been comparatively easy and free of suffering, there are things even in my life which have permanently impacted the course of my and my family’s life, so how can Paul call our sufferings in this life, “light momentary affliction”??
The important thing to realize first is that Paul is not detached from the sufferings of this life. For all the privilege he experienced early in life, when he chose to give his life to following Jesus, he took on a life of incredible suffering. He actually outlines some of those sufferings later on in this same letter in chapter 11:
But whatever anyone else dares to boast of—I am speaking as a fool—I also dare to boast of that. Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they offspring of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one—I am talking like a madman—with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?
How can a man who was, at one point, dragged out of the city of Lystra and stoned to death (or so the people stoning him thought), look back on that and call it “light momentary affliction”?
The ability to call the sufferings of this life “light” and “momentary” is ultimately a question of perspective. This is why Paul continues on to say that this is in the context of looking not to the seen things which are transient, but to the unseen things that are eternal. If our eyes are fixed on this life, then our sufferings will be all-encompassing, but when our eyes are fixed on eternity, we are able to see them in a different light.
There are two ways I like to think about this to reorient my thinking when I being to focus more on the seen than the unseen.
The first thing I go back to is how much our perspective changes with age. I have three little kids, and a 2 minute timeout, losing a stuffed animal at nap time, or not getting a string cheese right before we sit down to dinner can be absolutely devastating bouts of suffering to them. I still remember, very vividly, my freshman year of high school when Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets came out and I was supposed to go see it at the theater with Dennis and Sam. I got in trouble and was not allowed to go, and I remember being so mentally flustered because I couldn’t understand how my mother could possibly do something that would so permanently destroy my life! What if I never got to see the movie at all? How would this impact my friendships??? HOW CAN LIFE BE SO AWFUL AND UNFAIR!?!?!?
Time, distance, maturity, and context can all show us just how “trivial” some of our sufferings can be. And I don’t say trivial here to make light of very real sufferings, but by way of comparison in context. And as much as that can happen in this life, how much more so when we are in eternity with God? How much more so, when we have every need met, when we enjoy perfect relationship with God Himself, as well as with those around us, when tears and suffering are a thing of the far distant past, and when we can see clearly how God may have used those sufferings to bring us, and maybe others, to that place in eternity where we (and they) get to spend it forever with God. At that point, any suffering we had to endure here in this life in order to end up there in a perfect and glorious eternity, will be counted as more than worth it.
That’s the first way I think about suffering in this context, but the second is in terms of reward. God promises to reward us in eternity for our faithfulness in this life. We don’t know what exactly those rewards look like, but it is a very real thing in Scripture that our faithfulness here impacts, in some way, how we will spend eternity. He who is faithful in a little will be entrusted with much.
This is the picture of it that I have in my head:
If I am walking down the street and an old lady calls to me from her porch and offers me $10 to weed her garden for an hour, I am going to politely decline and keep walking without giving it a second thought. Partially because I hate weeding gardens, and partially because an hour of my work is worth more than $10, and I don’t really need that $10. But if she instead offered me $10 an hour for the rest of my life if I weed her garden for one hour now, well, you better believe I’m going to put off whatever I need to and stop to weed her garden for an hour! And I’m going to do the best possible job I can for that hour too! And while this is obviously assuming that she’s good for it, that would be $87,600 a year that I don’t have to work for for the rest of my life. I mean, I did work for it once, but then, from that point forward, my life is going to look very different because I just have this guaranteed income.
This is how I think about heaven. One hour of work for a lifetime of reward doesn’t actually do the comparison justice. In light of eternity, the 80 or 90 years I might have in this life won’t even amount to a comparative hour of work, but the more faithfully I spend those 80 or 90 years for God, the greater the reward I reap for eternity to come.
The more real that truth is to me, the less I sit and stew in my sufferings in this life, and the more I am asking, “What more can I give now that I can receive even more then?” and the more I can look at this life and say with Paul that these momentary light afflictions are laying up for us in heaven an eternal weight of glory.
God, draw my eyes increasingly into eternity. Orient my perspective on you, and, in doing so, teach me to live my life more and more faithfully for you ever day, so I can enjoy the greater fullness of what you desire for me in eternity.
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