BLESSED BROKEN GIVENSample

The Brokenness of Suffering

How does Jesus deal with the brokenness of the world? When sickness or death occurs, when tragedies happen, we hear the creaking and cracking of the world, things coming apart from the seams. 

After their brother Lazarus’s death, both Martha and Mary said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”. It’s the thing that when suffering is the result not of guilt but of the brokenness of the world. Couldn’t you have prevented this, God?

What we often hope for from God is prevention. In the face of the brokenness of the world, we want to be spared. Yet for reasons beyond our grasp, God chooses not to major in prevention. God opts for something stronger than prevention: redemption.

Redemption looks like resurrection. Even though Lazarus was raised only to die again, what Lazarus experienced was a sign of the resurrection to come. Jesus would be raised with a perfected and glorified body that is incorruptible. Resurrection is what awaits all who are in Christ. Resurrection breaks death’s power. It is the reversal and undoing of death.

Imagine a chess player, unafraid of his opponent’s strategy. It is a certain kind of genius for a chess player to block the moves his opponent wishes to make; it’s a different order of brilliance altogether to say, “Whatever your move, I will still put you in checkmate.” It is one kind of power to say, “You shall not harm me!” It is a wholly other kind of power to say, “Do your worst; I will prevail.”

On the cross, Jesus absorbed the full weight of evil and God’s judgment against it. Jesus became the curse that infects God’s world. He drained the venom from the serpent and drank the poison to the last. And on the third day, the Father raised Him up from the dead. Because of His resurrection, one day death will be swallowed up in victory. 

God’s redemption makes even the broken become blessed. In Jesus, the blessed God became the broken human so that broken humans might become God-blessed. The world that God created, the world that He blessed, He will redeem. Only God can take brokenness and bring blessedness from it.