Adversity & Deliverance
David Ousley on the Christian Life
Like non-Christians, Christians usually deal with adversity—cancer, unemployment, temptation, an intractable husband, eating too much—by trying to get rid of it. Christians may do this by asking God to remove the adversity. (If a wife were particularly generous, she might ask God to make her intractable husband tractable rather than removing him.)
But what happens if God does not act forthrightly to remove the adversity? Christians may give up on God, or go on to the “try harder” approach. Pray more. Try different ways of praying. Ask other Christians to intercede for us. The assumption is that if the Christian gets his part right, God should come through. God’s part is to relieve Christians when they ask him.
The Christian life, in other words, operates like a fairy tale.
Two Models
In the fairy tale, a good person encounters adversity, usually not of his own making, is wondrously delivered, and lives happily ever after. The miller’s daughter is delivered from certain death, brought upon her by her father’s boasting and ambition, when by wondrous circumstance a strange little man appears to spin the straw into gold. The promise to him of her first child seems a reasonable price to pay in the circumstances.
But when she has married the king and borne a son, and the little man appears again to claim his promised reward, she faces a terrible prospect indeed. She is so upset that the little man offers to let her off if she can tell him his name—cruelly, of course, for he knows she has no chance of guessing it. Again by wondrous circumstance, her huntsman overhears the little man at his camp in the woods, and she is delivered from Rumpelstiltskin. He is never heard from again, and she lives happily ever after with her royal family (with her remarkably uncurious husband none the wiser).
Everyone likes the fairy-tale model. It promises deliverance from adversities. The good guys always win in the end. This appeals to Christians, since they quite naturally think of themselves as the good guys, the more or less innocent victims of adversity.
But the scriptural model is different. Think of the Exodus, which is the pattern of God’s delivering his people in the Old Testament, and the type of his mercy on Christian souls as well. At the beginning of the story, Israel is enslaved in Egypt. Life is hard: living in exile oppressed by strangers, having no freedom, unable to worship as they would like, subjected to harsh labor and poor living conditions, suffering even the murder of their children by the Egyptians.
Moses appears and proclaims the Lord’s mercy, and their freedom. They rejoice—until the first result of Moses’ intervention is that life gets harder: They must provide their own straw for the bricks. The Israelites cool in their appreciation for Moses’ work. This isn’t deliverance at all.
During the plagues, all the Israelites have to do is watch, until the last one. Then they must actively obey, in slaying the paschal lambs, and smearing the blood on their doorposts. Their obedience and sacrifice are essential to their deliverance from the angel of death. Since they have seen something of God’s power in the plagues he sent the Egyptians, they trust enough to do as they’re told, and that trust is the key to their freedom. (The pattern is also that of Good Friday.)
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