Category: Worst Things

“Faith can make use of the waters of affliction to swim faster to Christ” (Watson 31)

This phrase, with its natural-world imagery and its Christocentricity sounds like it could have come from a sermon by C. H. Spurgeon a couple of centuries after Watson’s time. What is interesting to me is the modality in that first clause: ‘Faith can make use…’ which suggests that equally, faith could not make use of the afflictions of life. And of course, it is not faith in an abstract or impersonal sense; faith is exercised in personal trust. It is the person of faith who is in view.

The thing at stake in affliction is still a choice for the person of faith as to which way they will swim. To extend the image, the current created by the affliction is Divinely intended to aid the sufferer in swimming to Christ. Conversely, there is still the possibility of swimming away from Christ in the waters of affliction but for the Christian, despite the disorientation occasioned by the ‘affliction’, this is actually harder to do. In effect it is a swimming against the flow, and against the actual purpose in the suffering. So the motion is not enforced but it is logical; the pain is supposed to draw you near, not push you away, and you can choose whether or not you go with it.

The aforementioned Charles Spurgeon speaks about this force of direction as the ‘blessed hurricane*’

“In seasons of severe trial, the Christian has nothing on earth that he can trust to, and is therefore compelled to cast himself on his God alone. When his vessel is on its beam-ends, and no human deliverance can avail, he must simply and entirely trust himself to the providence and care of God. Happy storm that wrecks a man on such a rock as this! O blessed hurricane that drives the soul to God and God alone!”

(Charles Haddon Spurgeon – Morning and Evening – Morning reading for August 31st)

It is this being ‘compelled’ which Watson is talking about too. My point is that, here at least, compelled is different in strength to forced. Despite the powerful working which Spurgeon portrays, I can’t imagine him exchanging those terms. It is the right and natural course that trouble should send the believer to God, and something to celebrate; as Spurgeon says “it is a happy trouble that drives you to your Father!”

* In searching for this quote, I found the top result returned was actually a song on the theme by a friend of mine.

“What politician or moralist ever placed happiness in the cross?” (Watson 30)

I like this glib little phrase. I like glib little phrases generally, but this one jumped off the page at me: First thought – ‘There must be a backstory!’. I don’t know enough about his life and times to opine upon who Watson had in his crosshairs here but, regardless of that, there is a principle lurking beneath the rhetorical barb here. ‘Politicians’ and ‘moralists’ seems to be his shorthand for those whose ultimate concern is the present and whose purview of life stops at death’s door. Plenty of past cultures have placed their hopes in an ‘afterlife’ which consists solely of living on through their progeny. That it is so common in our days to live without even that kind of ambition should strike as strange. We are the anomaly.

And that is what Watson is getting at here: the modern person considers their happiness to be bound up squarely in individual well-being, avoiding harm at all costs even when that harm is really the path to their happiness. Watson cites Job 5:17 How happy is the one whom God corrects. Job is the classic example of the man who lost everything – at the hands of God – and yet lives to prove the truth of the verse above.

But is it clear how affliction is supposed to make us happy? It seems a knotty and contradictory idea. Watson says “The moon in the full is furthest off from the sun: so are many further off from God in the full-moon of prosperity; afflictions bring them nearer to God. The magnet of mercy does not draw us so near to God as the cords of affliction.” The paradox is that we are creatures made to relate with others and finally with our Creator. Creature comforts – the full-moon of prosperity – auger against the happiness which we are built for in our most basic being. I doubt very much that anyone particularly likes being corrected; it carries connotations of exposure of ignorance and the shame of failure. Yet, if that correction comes from love, and holds at least the promise of restoration, perhaps it will begin to be easier to be happy in the moment.

It’s a lesson which is nigh on impossible to learn in peacetime: Knowing yourself. How can you see yourself as you actually are? The ‘you’ of peace, health, vitality, popularity, usefulness, respect and friendship is always something of a caricature. Happy times are not generally conducive to serious self-reflection (“we are for the most part strangers to ourselves”). This is more forthcoming when the celebration stops. Watson calls us to see the Divine hand in this. When you lie in the bed ill, or heartbroken, or angry, or bereaved God is giving you an opportunity. An opportunity to get to know yourself. Now, a normal sane reaction to this is scorn: ‘Thanks very much! I get to endure all this pain and the reward is to get more familiar with myself; the embittered soul battling underneath this misery.’ 

On the face of it, not a very enticing offer. But look again, and there really is a worthwhile gift to be discerned. That little word ‘corruption’, quoted above, is not one that we are used to using in its non-metaphorical sense. Metaphorically, we speak of ‘corrupt officials’ who may be bought with a bribe, or of ‘corrupt national systems’ where that same spirit manifests more broadly. In literal use, corruption is rottenness – and in Watson’s text above, the referent is your heart. To sensitively draw a friend’s attention to the cream cheese on their upper-lip without inadvertently shaming them is a tricky task. To highlight the darkness, the rottenness, of the selfish motives of their heart – and most painfully, where they supposed their motives to be pure – is quite another operation. It’s one that makes plain to us the “corruption in our hearts… which we would not believe was there“. The God of the Bible, the father of Jesus Christ, is committed to just that level of surgery on those who entrust themselves to him. That kind of determination, when personally applied, gives a serious hue to Philippians 1:6 where Paul says, “the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.” (my emphasis)

So how do these thoughts cash out for you and I? This year has offered a wider variety of afflictions to wider array of people than most years in living memory. I wonder what kinds of recent personal affliction you can call to mind now? Disappointment, unexpected isolation, illness, poverty – these things are real and part of me feels bad for rubbing them in our faces. I’m not trying to be a black cloud here, but neither am I advocating Oprah-esque positivity. Personally, this year has had elements that could genuinely make it either one of the worst or best years I have known. And this won’t be decided by a ‘pros and cons’ calculation in which obvious blessings tip the balance. I could stack up the unexpected benefits – the pleasure of seeing my family way more than I expected to, the gift of abundant time and space to think, study, create and play etc. – and then compare these to the pains of losing work, income, sense of value and direction. No, the outcome is more than a little dependent on the finality with which the afflictions are viewed and the traction that they are allowed to have in one’s self-reflections. Without making an exact parallel or being melodramatic, it puts me in mind of the semi-colon tattoos which some have – moments which could have put pay to the course of a life are instead (and non-trivially), translated into new beginnings. Scripturally, this is borne out in Hebrews 12:11 “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” especially that last clause, because it’s perfectly possible to endure hardship, discipline, affliction and not be trained by it. A critical and prayerful engagement with the pain through sincere and sustained asking of the ‘why?’ questions is required. Then being alert to the answers. If you do it right, you are led to see yourself, it hurts and reformation becomes possible. The way out is through, but getting out is not the primary aim.

With all the advantages of affliction being listed here and in the past few posts, perhaps it’s easy to forget (and here I am wildly overestimating my powers of persuasion), that these afflictions of life are in fact evils. Let’s hear it from Watson again: “Do not mistake me; I do not say that of their own nature the worst things are good… though they are naturally evil, yet the wise over-ruling hand of God disposing and sanctifying them, they are morally good.” (Watson 25) Perhaps I should have started with chapter one; Watson’s outline of how ‘The Best Things’ work to grow you. But we’ve just had 2020 so, you know, I stand by starting with the Worst Things.

“A sick-bed often teaches more than a sermon.” (Watson 27)

Yet again, Watson is on the money – and that is coming from one who has heard, written and preached a couple of decades worth of sermons. This is not to say that sermons don’t teach at all. In fact, they do even more than that. The purpose of a sermon is not only to teach the meaning and detail of Scripture but to facilitate live encounters with the living God. That’s the point of preaching, what’s supposed to happen. It’s the thing that makes it thrilling to hear and what sets it apart from any other type of speaking and hearing. The preacher, their life and their message are a conduit for the present speaking of God to his people. If that hasn’t been your experience, expectation or prayer when hearing a sermon, then let it be – there is a richer experience available! Sermons then, approached in faith by the hearers, communicate not just the scripture but the Person.

So, given that glowing endorsement, why on Earth recommend that a ‘sick-bed’ is probably, if not certainly, better than a sermon when it comes to teaching? Watson says “Affliction teaches what sin is.” And there it is; actual harm brings the reality of the failure and the tainted state of self and the world to bear not only upon our minds but on our very lives.

“In the word preached we hear what a dreadful thing sin is, that it is both defiling and damning, but we fear it no more than a painted lion; therefore God lets loose affliction, and then we feel sin bitter in the fruit of it.”

Thomas Watson

That we ‘feel sin’ this way through sickness is one of those peculiar blessings that we’re getting used to hearing about in this series. The sort of smack-in-the-mouth blessings which we might have thought we understood whilst it was all theoretical and we still had our teeth intact.

“He was more beholden to his iron chain, than to his golden crown; the one made him proud, the other made him humble.” (Watson 27)

The next example is that of King Manasseh of Judah (709-643BC). One of the accounts of his reign is 2 Chronicles 33 and there it explains how Manasseh begins that reign by studiously disobeying everything God had ever said to his people: “Manasseh misled Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so that they did more evil than the nations whom the Lord had destroyed before the people of Israel.” (2 Chronicles 33:9)

What happens next is the essence of this discussion of evil being worked for good: 

¹⁰ The Lord spoke to Manasseh and to his people, but they gave no heed. ¹¹ Therefore the Lord brought against them the commanders of the army of the king of Assyria, who took Manasseh captive in manacles, bound him with fetters, and brought him to Babylon. ¹² While he was in distress he entreated the favour of the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his ancestors. ¹³ He prayed to him, and God received his entreaty, heard his plea, and restored him again to Jerusalem and to his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord indeed was God. (2 Chronicles 33:10-13)

There is an interesting historical aspect running through this – Manasseh rejects the results of the past. He did the evil acts that had gotten nations destroyed earlier in the book. When he is eventually restored, it is because he ‘humbled himself greatly before the God of his ancestors’. That he prayed sincerely and was restored so quickly after leading vast swathes of people astray must at least give us hope that these kinds of sudden change are possible. This is both a personal and a societal encouragement. Consider what buried ways and rejected fidelities, things that fed and watered us culturally in past generations, could be retrieved by that kind of humiliation and repentance.

“Who would not be willing to have a bone out of joint , so that he might have a sight of God?” (Watson 26)

‘Afflictions’ (read ‘harm’) need to come to those who love God as much as to anyone else. This is a weird thought; shouldn’t it be the case that if God is ‘on your side’, you develop some kind of immunity or invulnerability to harm? At least, you might expect that things wouldn’t hurt as much because you’re being shielded somehow, or at least comforted by the thought that heaven cares… But if you actually read the Bible, it seems otherwise: God allows, permits, sends the trouble.

If that is so and there are no exemptions to being harmed, what advantage is there in putting your trust in God? In a word, meaning. Sometimes you will get to see the purpose of your pain and the good that arises. But even when you don’t, your suffering is not meaningless. Of course there is still the potential to disengage and ‘miss’ what is really going on but, fortunately, its working is independent of our attention. Jesus’s close friend Peter writing to the early church says “for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire – may be found to result in praise and glory and honour.” (1 Peter 1:6-7) and this idea is found throughout the Bible. In Genesis, Joseph addresses his brothers who betrayed him, acknowledging both the necessity of the personal harm they did him and the material good which came from it: “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” (Genesis 50:20)

The Psalmist says “It is good for me that I was humbled, so that I might learn your statutes.” (Psalm 119:71) basically saying to God – ‘Getting hurt shut me up, woke me up and brought me low enough to care about learning your ways’; this writer is thankful because they see that they wouldn’t have met with God any other way. They stood in their own way so to speak. And this brings us to the key quote above. Watson cites the story of Jacob fighting the Angel of the Lord from Genesis 32. “Jacob wrestled with the angel and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint. This was sad; but God turned it to good, for there he saw God’s face.” Hence Watson’s rhetoric, “Who would not be willing to have a bone out of joint , so that he might have a sight of God?”

That is the contrast – the evil of a broken hip versus the pay-off of seeing the face of the God who made you. Whatever your level of subscription to the faith, the sense of this equation is plain: the harm is real, is painful, is enduring BUT the reward is sublime.

Watson wants you to know up front; although good might come out of evil, evil remains evil: “Do not mistake me; I do not say that of their own nature the worst things are good” (Watson 25) As to their origin, these things are “fruit of the curse”, meaning despite their antiquity, they are an imposition and not natural to humanity. So how are these invaders going to be set to fruitful labour? “though they are naturally evil, yet the wise over-ruling hand of God disposing and sanctifying them, they are morally good.”

On the face of it, and depending on one’s life experience, the assertion that the evils of life are working together for good may or may not ring true. Watson wants us to consider the complexity of the macro; he points to the contrary ‘elements’ in nature which have been divinely tempered for the good of the universe – “Or as in a watch, the wheels seem to move contrary one to another, but all carry on the motions of the watch: so things that seem to move cross to the godly, yet by the wonderful providence of God work for their good.”

But what sort of thing does he have in mind and for whom are they supposed to work? To the former point, Watson says “Among these worst things, there are four sad evils” which are Affliction (by which he means sickness, grief and the like), Temptation (towards selfish and immoral actions), Desertion (being abandoned or rejected) and Sin (personal failure committed by oneself or by others). These are the genres of evil which he will examine as to how they produce good.

To the latter question, we must remember here that he is building upon Saint Paul’s words in Romans 8:28 “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” So it is ‘those who love God’ (some translations say ‘the Godly’ but that’s probably a bit grandiose not to mention misleading – take it from one who loves God; loving God and being godly are not always synonymous) in whom he observes this ‘working of evil for good’ actually taking place. Now, that is not to say those who would not self-describe as those who ‘love God’ should find no wisdom in what he will go on to say: Perhaps one who would ‘love to love God’ or just recognises how others benefit from belief but has not, for whatever reason, developed those feelings themselves, will still benefit from eavesdropping upon Watson’s thoughts. You can suspend judgment. Like someone auditing a course, you can hear the reasoning for the thing, and forgo the final examination.

I don’t need to explain why it might be generally apt to consider the meaning of the ‘worst things’ at this particular point in time. I could say more about why it is personally apt, but I will bracket that for now. Times of pressure, removal, change and confusion afford rare opportunities to look at yourself in ways you wouldn’t normally consider. What are your true motives? Where does your security really lie? How do you see the future playing out? Those questions get thrown to the fore.

And that is not to say that they get resolved, but asking in a new way revives the question. Voices from the past often help and provoke in these circumstances, and perhaps it isn’t everyone who reaches for the Puritan divines when pressed, but it appears I do. These people lived hard lives and in their writings there is an unflinching, systematic clarity of expression, especially in the analysis of personal motives and desires, which undercuts the kind of self-deception characteristic of our age.

If there is a generic sin with these writers it’s their allergy to brevity. But this has been broadly expiated by Banner of Truth ‘Puritan Paperbacks’ with their discerning editorial scalpel. Thomas Watson’s (1620-1686) ‘A Divine Cordial’ (1663) appears on this imprint as ‘All Things for Good’. The blurb says Watson ‘believed he faced two great difficulties… The first was making the unbeliever sad, in the recognition of his need of God’s grace. The second was making the believer joyful in response to God’s grace.’ Which sounds about right.

Watson expounds, from various angles, Romans 8:28 “And we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” And in the following series I want to share my reflections on some quotations from one particular section of his text. Readers gravitate towards the most piquant chapters of a book and I am no exception: Watson’s first chapter is entitled ‘The Best things work for Good to the Godly’ and details how promises, mercies, graces of God etc. bring good to believers. Each a great theme, breathtakingly explained… But chapter two, entitled ‘The Worst Things work for Good to the Godly’, discusses how the evils of affliction, temptation, desertion and sin all work towards the same good. I hope it doesn’t impugn my character that I am immediately drawn to hear someone’s answers to how these bleak things might work out well, and I hope you will want to hear too.