Benefiting from Affliction ⁽¹⁾
3. Sent for Instruction
James Buchanan

In the day of adversity you should consider the design and end of affliction, or the uses which it is intended to serve. As it proceeds neither from blind necessity nor from casual accident, but from the hand of your omniscient Governor and Judge, nothing can be more certain than that it is designed for the accomplishment of some great and useful purpose. Now the design of affliction is expressly revealed in the Word of God. He has condescended to explain the reasons of His dealings with you, and it is alike your duty and your privilege to consider and to concur in His declared design. The general end of affliction, as it is explained in God's Word, is the moral and spiritual improvement of believers - in other words, their progressive sanctification and their preparation for glory. O how important must the right use of affliction be if it is intended to terminate in such a result! It stands connected with our everlasting welfare - with all that we can enjoy on earth and all that we hope for in heaven.

But, more particularly, the day of adversity is intended for our instruction. The Lord's rod has a voice which speaks to us lessons of heavenly wisdom; and therefore we are required "to hear . . . the rod, and who hath appointed it" (Mic 6:8). "The rod and reproof give wisdom" (Prov 29:15). It presents to our minds many of the same great truths which are declared in Scripture but which we may have overlooked or failed rightly to understand till they were pressed on our attention and made the matter of our personal experience in the day of trouble. Thus it teaches most impressively that great scriptural truth, the vanity of the world, and its insufficiency as the portion of rational and immortal beings. This is a truth which might almost be regarded as self-evident; yet it is very slowly and reluctantly admitted by the young disciple, and can only be effectually impressed on his mind and unfolded in all its extent by the experience of disappointment and sorrow.

In the case of unrenewed men, the world is the only portion which is valued; it is the object of their supreme affections, the source of their highest enjoyments. When the day of adversity arrives, even they are made to feel that the world is a poor and empty thing - a broken cistern "which can hold no water". But so long as they know nothing of a better portion, they are fain to cling to it, notwithstanding all their experience of its worthlessness. If, however, at such a season they have their attention directed to the better portion that is provided for sinners in the gospel, their experience of the uncertain and unsatisfying nature of all earthly good is fitted to awaken their desires after that higher happiness and those enduring riches which belong to the people of God. Thus many an individual has been brought by the discipline of sickness - and many a family by bankruptcy or bereavements - to relinquish the world and to seek God as their chief good. No new truth has been revealed to them, for they had often read in the Scripture, and heard from the pulpit, of the vanity of the world. But what was then addressed to their understandings is now impressed with power on their hearts; their own experience has confirmed and strengthened the testimony of God.

On the same subject, the day of adversity administers a wholesome lesson even to God's own people, who in some prosperous season are too apt to attempt a compromise between God and the world and to seek only a part - and perhaps a small one - of their happiness in Him. In such circumstances they are ready to settle "on their lees" and, because their mountain stands strong or because "they have [had] no changes", they have become more familiar with the world, less conversant with God, and more wedded to temporal enjoyments than befits the candidates for heavenly glory. But the day of adversity comes and dispels at once the fond illusions by which they had been deceived. It reveals the world to their view in its true light, and they awaken, as from a dream, to the thorough conviction that all is vanity. Poverty, disease and death are employed to teach them a lesson which they were slow to understand or believe when they read it in the Bible or heard it declared from the pulpit, while as yet they had no experience of its truth. And so soon as they are thus thoroughly impressed with this practical conviction, they are prepared to rise above all worldly influences and to seek, with greater earnestness than ever, the enjoyment of God's favour, which is life, and His loving-kindness, which is better than life.

In like manner, the day of adversity teaches us the great lesson of our entire and constant dependence on God. Only a little while before, we were rejoicing in the midst of prosperity. Our health was sound, our business prosperous, our families entire; but the sudden stroke has come which has smitten our persons with disease, our business with embarrassment, or our families with death, and that stroke has come from the Lord's hand. In such circumstances we are impressively taught that we are absolutely in God's power, that all we have is at His sovereign disposal, that we depend on Him day by day continually for our personal preservation, our worldly prosperity, our domestic comfort - in short, for all that we desire or love on earth. We are taught that it becomes us never for one moment to forget our obligations to Him in whom we now feel, more sensibly than we ever felt before, that "we live, and move, and have our being" And, finally, our experience of present suffering exhibits to us, in a most impressive and convincing light, some of the great leading principles of God's moral government; it demonstrates His holy determination that sin shall not pass by unpunished and makes it as certain as any other fact in human history that man, as a sinner, is exposed to the righteous judgements of God.

Endnotes:
1. Taken, slightly edited, from Buchanan's book The Improvement of Affliction. The previous article appeared last month.