from ‘Making Peace with the Sovereignty of God’, Jerry Sitter continues:
That God works redemption through our suffering is foundational to Christian belief. Suffering never was the final word in a Christian’s life. This past year I read Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, a brilliant novel about a bitter and disabled historian, Lyman Ward, who is writing a biography of his grandmother and grandfather, Susan and Oliver Ward. He chronicles the sad deterioration of their marriage. There is hope that the marriage can be restored. But in 1890, tragedy strikes, forever changing their lives. The novel ends just a few pages later. Though both his grandmother and grandfather lived together for another forty years, Lyman says of their relationship, “It was all over in 1890.” In his mind there was no longer a story worth telling, no possibility of redemption. He wistfully concludes:
So they lived happily-unhappily ever after. Year after irrelevant year, half a century almost, through one world war and through the Jazz Age and through the Depression and the New Deal and all that; through Prohibition and Women’s Rights, through the automobile and radio and television and into the second world war. Through those changes and not a change in them.10
But life does not have to end that way, no matter how terrible our suffering is. The story is never done, not until God is telling it. And he will not be done until his redemptive purpose is accomplished. Sinfulness and tragedies and suffering and everything else never have the final word. God has the final word. The cross is irrefutable proof that God’s hidden will, mysterious and unfathomable is real and redemptive. God is sovereign. He is in control. He rules over time and history. Even our suffering serves his greater purpose, and that purpose has our ultimate benefit in mind. ~Jerry Sittser, “the Will of God as a Way of Life” (Grande Rapids, Michigan 49530: Zondervan, 2000, 2004) p.226
