Two Gardens and Sufferingنموونە

Two Gardens

The Garden of Eden and the Garden of Gethsemane. In the first garden, we see the love of God as He prepared a perfect place for Adam and Eve to live. And we see the wrath of God as He judged their sin and disobedience. In the second garden, we see the love of God as He suffered and prepared to die to satisfy His own requirement for the atonement of sin. And we see God’s wrath as He prepared to lay all our sins on Jesus.

These two gardens have taught me two very important lessons that have colored and seasoned how I view suffering in my own life. They remind me that my Lord knows something about suffering. He knows deeply about suffering, because His whole earthly life was wrapped up in suffering. After He began His ministry He had no place to call His home. He was rejected by the people He came to save and betrayed by the ones He chose as His disciples. He suffered an agonizing death on the cross for my sins. He knows about suffering.

When I watched the movie The Passion of the Christ, I flinched every time the whip lashed His back. I couldn’t bear to watch them nail the spikes into His feet and hands. He knows. He knows suffering. He sees our suffering and He rushes to us. I love that song “No, Never Alone.” It reminds me of His promise to never leave me alone. I need to remember that He is with me when I suffer. And I take comfort in knowing that He knows just how much I can bear.

Some people think that 1 Corinthians 10:13 means that  God won’t put more on you than you can endure. I’m not sure I agree with that. I believe that He does put more on us than we can handle. If I could handle it all on my own I wouldn’t need Him. But because the burden is so heavy, it makes me cry out to Him. And when I cry out to Him, He meets me right there in the place of my pain. And He feels what I feel. He hurts when I hurt. I believe that.

And these two gardens teach me something else. They teach me that He loves me. He loved me enough to die for me. I don’t know any other person who would do that. He died for me. He loves me. Suffering has a way of making you forget this one important truth. You can spend a lot of time in sorrow’s valley feeling like God has forgotten about you and doesn’t care. I love the words of J. I. Packer in Knowing God: “What matters supremely . . . is not . . . the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—that He knows me. I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out of His mind. . . . He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when His eye is off me, or His attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when His care falters. There is unspeakable comfort . . . in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good.” Oh, how I need to remember that when I’m in sorrow’s valley.