"No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it." [1 Corinthians 10:13]
There's a lot in here, both of really powerful promises and really tempting ways to mis-read this verse. And a lot of well-meaning Respectable Religious people have done an awful lot of damage by casually slinging around sloppy paraphrases of this verse like, "God won't ever give you any more than you can handle," and end up just breaking the spirits of people who are feeling overwhelmed and hear that line as a pious way of saying, "Suck it up and tough it out." So, both because of the ways this verse can get misused, because there is still such deep and powerful hope to be heard in it, let's give it a closer look together.
First off, even though there's some pretty dense theology in here, at the center is a very simple point on which everything else is built: God is faithful. That by itself is a place worth spending some time in. When we get to the big Questions about God and life, and we find ourselves asking, "What is God like?" Paul would tell us that at the top of our list of answers is "faithful." God is supremely faithful--the maker of durable promises.
That
doesn't necessarily mean we will always (or even often) know how God will turn out
to keep the promises made to us. Lots of folks in the first century were
pretty sure that a Messiah was promised to them, but then again, nobody was
expecting him to show up as a peasant baby who would grow up into a carpenter-rabbi
and save the world by getting nailed to a cross. In hindsight, the eyes
of faith can see that God was being faithful to ancient promises, but wow, it
sure came in a surprising way. Theologian Douglas John Hall offers a good
point about that. He writes: “The
disciple community believes that God reigns, all contrary evidence
notwithstanding. But God, as God is depicted in the continuity of the
Testaments, is never quite predictable—or rather, only this is predictable
about God: that God will be faithful.”
Faithful
and predictable are not the same. We step into this day assured of the
first, but never the second. We step into this day, perhaps with a Plan A
of what will happen, and what we think we expect God to do in our day. We
pray petitions seeking to help us keep our routines in place--"Dear God,
give me strength for this next task that is on my list," and "Lord,
help me get through the day until I can rest and put my feet up
tonight..." And those are fine and appropriate prayers for us to
offer. But God reserves the right to be at work among us in ways we could
have scheduled or rehearsed or planned for. And yet the who of God--what God is like, and God's
character--remains faithful, true, and constant.
We
are not promised, in other words, that we Christians can know what is coming
our way in a day. We get no secret knowledge or inside track. We
don't get to know the what,
but we are assured of who
it is that goes with us through whatever it is that
comes our way. God is faithful. Always has been, always will
be.
So
then, we need to get ourselves clear on what is, and is not, being promised to
us. On a first read, our minds mind latch onto "he will provide the
way out" and assume that Paul is now committing God to helping us avoid trouble in this
life. We might well imagine that God has a secret shortcut to skip
through the trials we face, and that Christians need only show their membership
cards or perform the secret handshake, at which point God will pull back a
curtain and show us a discrete back exit that will take us straight to sunny
days. Or maybe the more science-fiction-minded among us picture this as a
promise to "beam us up," Star
Trek style, out of trouble--whether we imagine the
"beaming" is to heaven or to let us retreat away from the concerns of
others in the world and to stay tucked away in our our insulated lives.
But
none of those are the way the God of the Scriptures--the God of the wilderness
wanderings and the God of the cross, too, mind you--operates in the
world. There is no back door shortcut hidden behind the curtain.
There is no magic prayer by which we can be "beamed out" of life so
that we don't have to face... well, whatever it is we are afraid to face.
Rather, the pictures we get in Scripture are of a God who meets us in the face
of trouble and stays with us--to bring us through
it, rather than without facing it at all. We tell the stories of the God
who went with the
wandering Israelites, even though it was a forty-year journey; the God who met
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fire and preserved them in it, rather than
snatching them out
of the flames; the God whose way of salvation was not to beam saints out but to
come into our world and our lives in the human flesh of Jesus, and to die here
with us. Easter, in other words, is only possible after coming through death; you cannot
get to an empty tomb without a cross, and there is no shortcut given to Jesus
to avoid that.
Our
God, then, has made of a point of being faithful by being with us. God is indeed
faithful, as Paul insists. But that
faithfulness might not look like what we expect. I might pray, "Dear
God, please let me not have to have this difficult conversation with
so-and-so..." or "Dear God, please just keep everyone I know healthy
forever so that none of us ever has to deal with the pain of sickness or
grief." But God's way of being faithful might not be to spare us those troubles--but
rather, it is much more like our God to go through them with us. God doesn't
keep us out of
pain, but--according to Paul--makes it possible for us to endure.
So
as we start this day, we do not have to waste time or nourish false hopes and
keep our eyes peeled for where there might be a back door hidden behind a
curtain. The way of our God--God's modus
operandi, if you will--is not to give club members the secret
shortcuts, but to be with us making it possible to endure. That will
change how we pray, today, too--so that we will perhaps no longer selfishly
pray to be spared any inconveniences, but instead will ask for God to abide
with those who are hurting today, and to give us the strength to be used for
their sakes, too. And it might even change the way we see the world this
day--no longer as a place to be escaped, but as a creation God is so faithfully
committed to redeeming that he sticks it out with us here, even for all its
slings and arrows.
Today,
let us get our prepositions correct: we are not an "out-of"
kind of people; because of Christ, we are "through" people.
O
Living God, bring us through this day. Give
us what we need to live where you placed us, and give us the faith to trust
that you will meet us here in our wilderness days, in the fire, and wherever
else the day finds us. And grant, Lord, that as others see us, no longer
afraid to stay in the world with all its brokenness, they will come to know
something of your abiding and faithful love that sticks it out with us.
This we ask in the name of Jesus, the one who came to be with us, and who went through death into resurrection
for us.
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