The Adventure of Adversity

The following is taken from Norman Grubb's booklet Touching the Invisible.  It goes a long way toward answering the ubiquitous question:  "If God is all powerful, and all-good, why does He permit evil to exist?"  Once we see how God uses evil for His good purposes the question is largely answered.  Although the answers are individual rather than one general answer, we have the key that makes all of life meaningful:

"Another of the great principles of victorious Christian service which God has been teaching us in our [Worldwide Evangelization Crusade Mission] Headquarters meeting is the true method of facing, handling and using for good all forms of adversity, all experiences of what we call evil -- shocks, suffering, difficulty, disasters, unjust treatments.

"The first key, put in a sentence, has been this: that our 'evils' are never the happenings in themselves, but the effect we allow them to have on us. No matter whether objectively an experience is apparently good or evil; subjectively, to the one who fears and doubts, all is evil; to the one who trusts, all is good.

"The supreme example of this is Calvary. At Gethsemane, at the entrance to the darkest valley ever trodden by man, the Savior faced the most devilish of outward experiences, but dissolved their evil effects upon Himself by an inward attitude of faith which declared them to be good. He rejected the temptation to regard them as evil, when He said, 'Not My will'. He declared all that was coming to be inherently good, when He said, 'Thy will be done'. His predominant thoughts and words during His last hours with His disciples were of fullness of joy, of cheerfulness, of a peace unknown to the world, of glory present and future. When the author of evil was mentioned, He dismissed him with the mere passing reference, 'The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me'. Note the preposition 'in'. Satan could make a fierce enough attack upon His outward frame, but faith made it impossible for him to touch the true man within. To all appearances Calvary was totally evil, and the Scriptures themselves say that Calvary was Satan-engineered; but Peter later confirmed his Master's attitude by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, when he declared that He had been delivered unto death 'by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God'. So then the believer also can say, 'All that happens to me, no matter how evil in itself, I declare as good to me, and nothing evil'.

"But the adventure of adversity goes deeper than this. When seen in its true perspective, it is found to be the doorway into God's most transcendent secret--that adversities and sufferings, which in their origin are the effects of sin and instruments of the devil, in the grasp of faith become redemptive. They are transfigured from the realm of merely something to be endured as an opposition of Satan, to something to be used to conquer their author and redeem his victims. Faith in time of adversity makes the serpent swallow itself! Once again the supreme proof of this is that when Satan made his fiercest attack in history on the person of Christ, God used that attack, through the faith and endurance of the Sufferer, to bring about the world's salvation. God uses evil to bring about good--not causing it, but using it.

"The consequence of a clear grasp of this fact, that Satan and all evil circumstances in our lives are God's most useful instruments for the fulfillment of His purposes, is obvious. All attacks of Satan are seen to be our blessings. We 'count them all joy'. We 'rejoice in tribulation'. We use them as special opportunities to see the manifestation of God's power, instead of merely enduring them with a struggle as 'judgments' or 'tests'. This truth, indeed, transmutes into strength one of the weakest joints in the armor of God's people, a tendency to look upon trials and adversities merely as means by which God satisfies Himself as to our fidelity; instead of realizing that sufferings are the fulfillment of an inevitable law in the working out of God's purposes, and that the most highly honored and trusted of His servants are those who are counted worthy to 'fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ for His body's sake'.

 "The truth is that by no other way than by Christ's sufferings could a fallen world return to God. In the first Adam and his seed there was a dying to God and a rising to sin. In the last Adam and His seed there must be a dying to sin and a rising to God. Christ the Captain of our salvation was made perfect as a Savior through sufferings. Faith transformed the contradiction of sinners into the  means of their salvation. We follow in His steps, not to gain our salvation which is His free gift, but by transmuting our trials into victories of faith we co-operate with the Great Victor in bringing His victory to a defeated and enslaved world.

"Thus to Christ's followers, who glimpse the glorious purpose and triumph in and through evils and sufferings, the acceptance and endurance of them becomes an adventure of faith. Thus and thus alone does the Christian warrior laugh the laugh of faith. If God's gifts are our blessings, and the devil's assaults are also our blessings, what remains to harm or depress us? If good is good, and evil is equally good to the enlightened, then a realm of life is entered where we rejoice always, in everything give thanks, and in all things are more than conquerors."