When There Is Just No Way to Understand

What do we do when we just can't understand?

When things  make no sense and there is no way it can be alright what do we do?

Many of us are asking that and it's not the first time we've asked it.

We've had times like this before, times when something so bad happens that we question all we know. or thought we knew.

We can look at the facts.

The facts are God created the earth and all that's in it.

He made man and he wanted things to be perfect for him so he put him in paradise.

God loved the people he made, and he wanted them to love him in return, not a robot, they had no choice type of love, but a real because they wanted to kind of love.

So while he did put them in a perfect world, a world with no disease, no dying, no tragic death or prolonged illness, no abandoned children or abused wives or left husbands, the potential for all those things existed.

As you can imagine this paradise was filled with trees of every kind.

God told Adam he was free to eat from any tree in the whole garden except for one.

It was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

God said when they ate from it they would die.

What he was saying is, this opens a door to everything you don't want.

If you reach up and take a hold of this fruit and you bit into it then in one fell swoop death and sorrow will come over the earth.

Satan comes along and he asks her if God really said they couldn't eat from that tree.

She said, God said we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden but we must not eat any fruit from the tree in the middle or we will die.

Well at this point Satan goes into a full attack and calls God a liar.

He said you will not die you will become like God knowing good and evil, God knows when you eat it you will be like him, you will be like God.

So what happened?

Satan at first cast doubt on what God said, he said, "Did God really say?

He made Eve question.

Then he got bolder and said what God said, wasn't true.

He made it sound like God was holding out on her.

Like she could have more, and be more and God just didn't want her to to.

So she exchanged the truth of God for a lie of Satan.

It's so easy to read over that story or teach it in Sunday school and to miss what happened, oh it's bigger and deeper than my explanation but in a nutshell this is what went down.

Adam and Eve sold their souls to the devil.

They sold it for a piece of fruit.

Now they were going to die, oh not right that moment, but they were going to grow old, their bodies would stop working right, and they would die.

Death and heartache entered the world at that moment.

Now they had themselves a situation.

You could say they belonged to the Devil and had been separated from God.

You know the rest of the story, God comes to the Garden and he talks to them and Satan, he tells all three of them what the consequences of what they did are, and he tells Adam and Eve he is going to have to send them from the garden.

But he doesn't send them out with no hope.

He tells them he has a plan.

He makes a promise in Genesis chapter three that he will send them a redeemer, he will send someone to "buy " them back.

Because of what they have done things are going to get rough.

It's not what God wanted but it's what it is and so he does what he always does for us, he steps in and fixes up what we did.

The die was cast, there was no getting death out of the world, it's going to come as long as time endures, it will come early for some and prolonged for others, some will linger in pain and some will be gone in an instant, others will go ready and full of age.

There is going to be grief and sorrow.

Hearts and homes are going to be broken.

Questions will be asked.

People will be angry and confused.

It's all part of death.

There is no understanding it this side of Heaven, oh we can read  the facts of life and death like we just did, we can see how death came into the world and what the result is but we won't like it.

It will sound hollow when our hearts are broken into a thousand pieces and the one we love is gone and the one we thought we could pray to seems to have turned away from us.

That's what Satan wanted.

He wanted to bring death to the world.

It's our biggest fear, our own death or the death of the ones we love.

Nothing on this earth is as bad as that.

Satan is still doing what he did in the garden, when bad things happen he makes us question God.

He asks us things like,  "Does God really love you?"

"How can a good God let this happen?"

He tells us we can't trust God.

Don't listen to the lie.

Whatever you do don't listen to the lie.

Have you ever heard of the verse in  1 Corinthians,  the one that asks, "Oh death where is your victory? Where is your sting?

You now why that was said?
 It's said because the sting is no more, the victory is no more.

Because of the Redeemer God sent, death can no longer hurt us forever.

There is another verse and it's in 1 Thessalonians 4:13 and that verse tells us that God doesn't want us to be uninformed.  He doesn't want us to grieve like those who have no hope.

He wants us to know that while death does come and it does take our loved one we are not without hope.

That's what Satan wanted but God stepped in and said, "Stop, no more."

When it seems God didn't come through, when it seems he could have stepped in and did something, but he didn't,  it's not that he doesn't care...its because he already did.

We have to let this sink deep in our hearts before we need it.

We have to build our faith before we need it.

When we are in the midst of grief something like all the above might not sound good enough, it might even make us mad.

God knows that, he can handle our questions, our anger and even our doubt.

The Bible tells us he is close to the broken hearted and so he is by our side, when we are ready to cry out to him he will be right there.

Contrary to what Satan whispers in our ear, God does care, and he did do something.

He knows we are going to grieve, and that's okay, grief knows no time schedule.

It physically hurts.

It isn't alright to lose a loved one, it's not like one day we will wake up and go, "Oh, so that's why that happened, I see now, that makes it all okay."

This side of heaven we aren't going to ever say that.

But what we can say is that when our enemy went on the attack against us and tried to take our lives forever, our loving God stepped in and said, "Oh no you don't" and he sent his Son to take away the sting or the victory from death.

That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt, it doesn't mean we don't scream and stomp and kick and cry  and want to fight against it.

We do, it's part of the process but in the end, we settle down, like a child that has exhausted it's self from crying.

Then their father picks them up and they collapse on his shoulder, they take those deep breaths like'we all heard little ones do after they have been so upset and begin to quieten down.
The father strokes their hair and rocks them gently.

He holds them until they are strong enough to get down and go again.

They will never go the same, they will go in a new way but they will go again because he made sure of it.

He sent his Son to take the sting of death, to takes it's power over us and we can live forever, together with him.












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