When God Says No

Today's Reading

Read Hebrews 11:32-40 — the long roll call. The first part lists triumphs: kingdoms conquered, mouths of lions stopped, fires quenched, the dead raised. Then, mid-sentence, the same list turns: "Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life." Both groups are commended. Both are "men of whom the world was not worthy." Both were "commended through their faith."

Read 2 Corinthians 1:8-11 — Paul on the season when he despaired of life. "We felt that we had received the sentence of death."

Read again 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 — the thorn passage from Day 1. Today read it as the New Testament's most concentrated theology of unhealed suffering.

Read John 11:1-44 — Lazarus. Note especially that Jesus, who could have prevented the death, allowed it. Note that he wept anyway. Note that the resurrection comes after the grief, not in place of it.

Reflection

Hebrews 11 is the New Testament's hall of faith. Most readers know the first half. Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, David. The chapter builds toward a crescendo of triumphs: faith that conquered kingdoms, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched fires, escaped the sword, became mighty in war, even raised the dead.

And then, at verse 35, the chapter does something extraordinary. Without warning, without breaking the sentence, the writer turns: "Women received back their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life." The same chapter. The same list. The same word "faith" applied to both. Some got their dead back; some were tortured to death. Some saw fires quenched; some were stoned, sawn in two, killed with the sword. Some "obtained promises"; others "did not receive what was promised."

Read the chapter again with this in mind, and the implications are staggering. The writer of Hebrews refuses to distinguish between the two groups by spiritual category. The faith that delivers and the faith that does not deliver are the same faith. Both groups receive the same verdict: "of whom the world was not worthy." Both are commended. The difference is not in their hearts. The difference is in what God did in their particular cases — and the writer does not pretend to know why.

This is the chapter the modern church most needs and most often skips. We love verses 1-35a. We quote them on calendar art. We preach them at graduations. We rarely sit with verses 35b-38 because they shatter the implicit theology that says faithful Christians get the miracle.

Some do. Many do not. Both are in the canon.

Paul lived inside this paradox. He was the apostle whose handkerchiefs healed at a distance (Acts 19:11-12), and he was the apostle whose own thorn was not removed. He raised the dead, and he despaired of life. Read 2 Corinthians 1:8 again carefully. "We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself." This is not a moment of poetic exaggeration. Paul is telling us about a season — possibly imprisonment, possibly illness, possibly the cumulative weight of his ministry — when he believed he was going to die and could not see how God would intervene. He "felt that we had received the sentence of death." The verb tense matters: this was prolonged. He did not have a quick answer. He sat in the no.

Then he says something that should reorient our reading: "But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead." The purpose of the unbearable burden, in retrospect, was to teach Paul a kind of dependence he could not have learned in lighter circumstances. Note what Paul does not say. He does not say the burden was sent to punish him. He does not say it was a sign of weak faith. He says it was used by God to push him into deeper trust. The mechanism God used was a no, sustained over time.

This is the Christian dignity of unhealed suffering. It is a vocation. The word means a calling, and we usually use it for ministry or marriage or specific kinds of work, but Christians have, for centuries, also used it for the calling some saints have received to live faithfully inside ongoing pain. Joni Eareckson Tada, paralyzed at seventeen and now in her seventies, has spoken often about this. Her ministry has not happened despite her wheelchair. It has been built from it. Decades of unhealed suffering have produced a witness that the easy life would never have produced. She does not romanticize the wheelchair. She has hated it for fifty years. She has also let God use it. Both are true.

Charles Spurgeon, near the end of his life, said something that captures this strange dual posture. He said the pain had done a work in him that the absence of pain could not have done. He had not chosen it. He could not retroactively endorse it. But he could, by grace, recognize that he was the man God had made him through the suffering, and that man belonged to Christ. There is a difference between choosing your suffering (you didn't) and recognizing that God has done something in it (he has). The first is a lie. The second is sometimes a slow, hard-won truth.

N. T. Wright says in Surprised by Hope that Christianity is not an alternative to suffering but the news that God has entered it. The cross is not a workaround. It is the road. Jesus does not bypass the no in Gethsemane. He drinks it. The cup does not pass. He drinks it for us, and from that drinking flows the resurrection. The pattern of the Christian life follows the pattern of Christ's life. Some Christians, like the saints in the first half of Hebrews 11, get the miracle and live to tell about it. Some, like the saints in the second half, live the cross more fully and the resurrection later. The faith is the same.

What does this mean for someone living inside a no?

It means you are not a second-class Christian. The writer of Hebrews refuses to make that distinction. If your prayer for healing has not been answered, you are not on the lower track of Christian discipleship. You are on a track that includes some of the bravest believers who have ever lived.

It means your suffering may have a vocational shape, even if you would never have chosen it. This does not mean you have to call it good. It means God is at work inside it, and his work is not invisible to him even when it is invisible to you.

It means John 11 is your story. Lazarus's resurrection comes only after the grief. Jesus weeps. He does not weep because he lacks faith. He weeps because death is real and the loss is real, and even the One who is about to undo it grieves it. If Christ wept at the tomb, you are allowed to weep at yours. Faith does not require you to skip the funeral.

It means, finally, that the unhealed have a particular witness to give. Some Christians' lives testify to God's power to deliver. Other Christians' lives testify to God's power to sustain. The world needs both witnesses. The hospitals and hospice rooms and chronic illness clinics and depression support groups need believers in them whose presence proves that following Christ does not require getting the cup taken away. Paul, who called his suffering grace; Joni, whose chair has preached for fifty years; the saints in Hebrews 11 who refused release and were sawn in two: these are your people. You are in their company.

The world is not worthy of them. It is not worthy of you, either.

Going Deeper

Read Hebrews 11:35b-38 aloud. Read it not as a list of horrors but as a list of names — even though most of the names are not given. Imagine each phrase as a person. Tortured. Mocked. Flogged. Imprisoned. Stoned. Sawn in two. Destitute. Afflicted. Mistreated. Wandering in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth. The writer of Hebrews stands at the end of this list and calls them "men of whom the world was not worthy." Sit with the question: what does it mean that Scripture honors them in the same breath as those who saw fires quenched? Try to put your own name, quietly, in the list. Not in pride. In sober company.