You should not be surprised if you get wet in a pool. You are not allowed to complain about crowds if you decide to do New Years in Times Square. My indignation would be terribly misinformed if I complained about spicy food at my new favourite restaurant (which includes the two words “Curry House” in the name). In each case you would simply ask the complainer: “Well what did you expect?” and this is a line of reasoning I keep hearing Thomas Brooks use as he answers these ten objections.
For example, his third answer to the person who says that they cannot be silent because their good name is being tarnished is to essentially say, “What did you expect? This is what has happened to the saints throughout history.” Read #3 back here and remember that even if it is bad with you, “it is no worse with you than it was with them, ‘of whom this world was not worthy’” (I-381). Then if you keep reading #4 you will see he takes it to the next logical step to remind us that we are not greater than our Master who was “sadly reproached and falsely accused” (I-381).
If you have been following along on these more recent posts as Brooks deals with objections this should sound familiar. One of his best tactics is again and again to remind us that we should not be surprised that we get wet when we jump in the pool. If it goes bad with us, it goes as it has gone for scores of God’s people before us. When you want to complain because God has withdrawn Himself from us he says that this has been the “common lot, portion, and condition of the choicest saints” and that if “God deals no worse with thee than he hath dealt with his most bosom friends…thou hast no reason to complain” (I-372). When we murmur that we are tempted as well as tried Brooks’ first response is that “those that God loves best are usually tempted most” and he calls to mind David, Job, Joshua, Peter, Paul and even Christ (I-365). When we say our afflictions have gone on too long he says they “are not so long as the afflictions of other saints” (I-354) and when we protest that our suffering is to a greater degree than others he asks us if we have “reckoned up the afflictions that befell Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Job, Asaph, Haman, the prophets and apostles?” (I-360). Then if we would still and say that it is so much worse with us than it has been for others he gently suggests that we may be “under some present distemper, that disenables thee to make a right judgment of the different dealings of God with thyself and others” (I-364).
To any of us who would complain about our trials Brooks would say, “What did you expect?” It is a good question because it gets to the heart of why we react poorly or just plain wrong under suffering. The problem is that our expectations of life as creatures on a groaning planet and especially as citizens of heaven marching toward home as aliens and pilgrims are way off. There are enough explicit statements to tell us to expect suffering (start at I Thessalonians 3:3 and follow your Bible’s cross references) that we should get this, but I know it is a constant battle. We can ponder a longing for Eden in our hearts but it is likely most helpful to acknowledge a cultural influence in this.
I just finished reading Book 2 John Piper’s The Swans Are Not Silent series and I would like to close with one of his summary paragraphs on John Bunyan.
“Bunyan’s life and labour call us to live like Pilgrim on the way to the Celestial City. His suffering and his story summon us, in the prosperous and pleasure-addicted West, to see the Christian life in a radically different way than we ordinarily do. There is a great gulf between the Christianity that wrestles with whether to worship at the cost of imprisonment and death, and the Christianity that wrestles with whether the kids should play soccer on Sunday morning. The full title of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ shows the essence of the pilgrim path: ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World, to that Which is to Come: Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream wherein Is Discovered, the Manner of His Setting out, his Dangerous Journey, and Safe Arrival at the Desired Country.” For Bunyan, in fact and fiction, the Christian life is a ‘Dangerous Journey’.” (John Piper, The Hidden Smile of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001) 164.
So what do you expect in life?
Me and Brooks 