In A.D. 41, while in an unrecorded ministry, or stage of his life, the apostle Paul had a life-altering experience. He wrote about it in II Corinthians 12:1-10 in the winter of A.D. 55. Passing what we can't know for sure—the identity of his thorn; and can't personally duplicate—his rapture to Paradise, we study what we can understand and apply to our personal lives.
That's the content of 12:7-10. Paul desperately wanted, and repeatedly sought, removal of the thorn. After the third unsuccessful effort God told him NO! "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." The divine refusal gave the apostle a spiritual growth experience. For while he boasted of his sufferings—11:22ff; and boasted of his visions—12:1-6; in the end, he wanted to boast only in his weaknesses and Christ's gracious strength 12:9-10. Job suffered a much greater affliction than Paul's thorn. And his responses, particularly after the taunting charges of men who should have been his pastors, found him lacking in spiritual growth. Job 38:1-2 began God's sermon prompting Job's spiritual growth that his suffering hadn't produced. He finally admitted, "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know....Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes" 42:3c-d. Paul's positive response to his suffering simply proves the difference in covenants: the lesser light of patriarch Job compared to the greater apostolic illumination Paul enjoyed. Either being different would create textual problems, but not as written. In 5:8-13 Job wished to die so he could appear before God with his previous Faith intact. Like us in sorrow, we know God sees, God cares, God provides, but we feel deserted and harmed when experiencing sorrow through no known fault or sin of our own. In his book A Grief Observed C.S. Lewis chronicled his journey through horrifying estrangement from God to pleasurable reconciliation with God after losing wife Joy to unexpected death. He marveled that he had allowed personal adversity to diminish all the powerful truth he had previously urged his readers to believe and practice. He ruefully admitted that all his doubts about God had been merely garbage unworthy of a man who KNEW SO MUCH about God, but let a negative life-experience corrupt his thinking. With Job we learn; with Paul we learn; with C.S. Lewis we learn: we aren't always granted relief from adversities that test our faith in God. But if we look beyond the affliction, and its accompanying unrest, to GOD's Presence, we learn to rejoice in our sufferings, Romans 5:3, not merely after the suffering. IN...as we experience it...because God's Greater Power becomes our joy more than the unwanted load our vexation.
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