anything else. The books of 2 Corinthians, 1 Peter, and Revelation are dominated by the subject. The cross of Jesus, the high point of suffering and divine revelation, looks all the way back to the fall in Genesis and forward to the day when finally there will be no more tears.
We who believe in Jesus must resist the temptation to deny the jaggedness of the journey. American advertising bombards us with drugs, creams, injections, and cosmetic surgeries to alleviate our discomforts, improve our looks, and delay and finally mask death itself. We must resist embracing faith in ways that promise exemption from suffering—God supposedly guaranteeing health and prosperity to faithful people.
The true way of Jesus is through and not around suffering. Following and representing the man of sorrows in this troubled world can’t happen by being successful and comfortable in worldly terms. We must not desire acceptance and applause and seek to avoid conflict with the principalities and powers opposing God’s will and ways. That would be the irony of disciples directly denying their Master. So what is the biblical way of living faithfully?
One expression of this pot-holed but still possible pathway of suffering faith is found in 2 Corinthians 12:8–10. It forms the structure of this book (see the Table of Contents). It’s the 8-9-10 path that travels from stability to despairing to rejoicing. It follows the pattern of the treacherous trail from gentle green grass to the valley of death and on to the home fold where the Shepherd cares for all things (Ps 23).
This 8-9-10 path is embedded in the whole book of Psalms. It jerks back and forth while always heading in the desired upward direction. One celebrated Bible scholar has called it the O-D-R path of faith, organizing the many psalms into three groups, Orientation, Disorientation, and Reorientation.14
The O-D-R path of the Psalms goes like this. First, things are as they should be, orientation. Then things go wrong, disorientation. But even when confusion and suffering are at their most intense, there arrives the grace and guidance of God to set our bleeding feet on higher ground than we had known before. We grow through the experience of being disoriented. We are graciously reoriented. Again, the path of the faith journey leads from comfortable stability to near despairing and on to fresh rejoicing.15
We don’t find in the Bible a flurry of divine executive orders guaranteeing that God’s will is always done precisely as planned.
O-D-R is another way of looking at Paul’s experience seen in 2 Corinthians 12:8–10. Our response to the suffering that comes along the jagged path of faith first tends (1) to either deny the pain or at least hope that somehow it will go away soon. Then it goes on (2) to a realization of the sufficiency of God in all circumstances, even the worst ones. Finally, it leads (3) to the amazing truth that even in our human weakness we can be increasingly strong. In fact, the weakness itself can become an instrument of growth and ministry.
It’s along this jagged path that we learn the difficult reality of suffering and the amazing grace of God at work in its midst. Sometimes the faith walk can be a painful pilgrimage from life at risk to eternal life that transcends its many enemies by a healing power from beyond. The journey has its jaggedness and its joys.
Joining the psalmists, the Apostle Paul is our faithful guide. His testimony of the 8-9-10 trajectory was once offered to the Corinthians as a dependable map of finding the way to spiritual victory in a world of pain. It was Paul’s personal history of ministry and misery and miracle. He had been given insight into “extravagant revelations” (2 Cor 12:7) while being subjected to numerous and painful set backs.
After Paul’s great illumination on the road to Damascus came the beatings, escapes, floggings, shipwrecks, betrayals, and anxieties involved in assisting immature and even wayward churches. There were many long and sleepless nights. But somehow all of it became secondary to the dramatically positive side of Paul’s overall growing experience. He’d been seized by Christ in a spiritual ecstasy, “hijacked into paradise.” There, he reports, he had heard the unspeakable actually spoken.
Paul reports that he dared not brag about such amazing things. Actually, there was little danger of his “walking around high and mighty.” He determines to say nothing more about himself than reporting his humiliations and a particular handicap. What that problem was we aren’t told, and it doesn’t matter. It was an ongoing suffering given “to keep me in constant touch with my limitations” (2 Cor 12:7). This grateful apostle traveled on through all the jaggedness with increasing gratitude and joy.
Suffering certainly will keep one humble. At first Paul begged God to remove the problem, likely malaria or epilepsy. He’d heard back only that God’s grace is sufficient and the strength of God eventually would shine through his weakness and always be adequate for his need. Once he accepted this, Paul actually began to almost appreciate his problem. “It was a case of Christ’s strength moving in on my weakness. Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size” (2 Cor 12:9).
Paul’s 8-9-10 path went from resistance and maybe even denial to the heights of faith, then to near despair and finally, strangely, surprisingly, to ultimate rejoicing. To use the O-D-R imagery, there are seasons of orienting satisfaction, periods of disorienting suffering, and resurrection surprises. The trip is anything but pure vacation, but it’s survivable and even a source of unexpected joy and fresh life. Eventually, amazingly, wonderfully, the path leads to spiritual maturity and to our eternal home. It’s much like tracking the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We learn from his life and teachings, we are shocked by his brutal death, and then we rejoice in the wonderful news of his resurrection. We get oriented, disoriented, and reoriented.
Our days with the Lord alternate among (1) being settled in and stabilized by faith, (2) being shocked, confused, and disoriented by negative events, and finally (3) being newly assured of the adequacy of God’s goodness and grace in any circumstance, even the worst. Is there an easier way? No. Can money or connections avoid pain by purchasing pleasures? Maybe, momentarily. Can the journey of faith, jagged as it is, be completed successfully? Yes!
There’s plenty of biblical help available. The psalms of the ancient Jews probe every possible pitfall and point to the best way through to our final home. They “correspond to seasons of human life and bring those seasons to speech . . . . They affirm that if we try to keep our lives we will lose them, and that when lost for the gospel, we will be given life (Mark 8:35).”16
The Jews, although God’s own people, surely knew well the jagged journey. They were enslaved in Egypt, exiled in Babylon, and embattled and occupied by one alien empire after another. And then the Jew of all Jews, Jesus the gentle Lamb of God, was brutally executed by the Romans although guilty of nothing except bringing loving good news to this world.
On the subject of suffering, then, Jesus and his fellow Jews may be our greatest teachers of all. We have to read carefully their stories, however. The Bible can be seen as sending mixed messages about the source and meaning of suffering and the action or inaction of God in relation to it.
Mixed Messages
I wrote these lines during a two-week journey from Rome to Florida by sea. My wife and I were cruising on the beautiful Royal Princess with a consistent message directed our way—luxury. Another message was never far away. The captain would come on the communication system at noon each day and remind us of the depth of the water below our hull—sometimes approaching 20,000 feet! Twice in the Atlantic Ocean we had to be careful to skirt hurricanes. The ocean floor far beneath is riddled with vessels and lives lost from the ravages of past weather, accidents, and wars.
If only life and even the Bible didn’t give us mixed messages! Death and life, perishing and cruising, poverty and luxury, pain and joy, heights of insight and depths of danger. Paul said, “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Cor 4:16). But here’s
