“Many are the woes of the wicked, but the Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in him.” (Psalm 32:10 NIV)
“The wicked will have to suffer, but those who trust in the Lord are protected by his constant love.” (Psalm 32:10 TEV).
One of the greatest tragedies of sin is that the sinner does not recognize either the extent of their sin nor do they comprehend the consequences of such sin. In an episode of the Simpson’s (this is not an endorsement), Bart becomes a part of Lisa’s science experiment. Every time he touches her project he gets a shock. The mouse has learned after one shock not to touch the ball, but Bart stands there, touches it, gets shocked, yells “Ow, quit it,” and immediately reaches out and touches it again and again, each time getting the same result (shocked), and each time yelling “Ow, quit it.” That clip is a graphic illustration of the gracious truth of the first part of this Psalm, “The wicked will have to suffer.”
In the cartoon, Bart cannot see the correlation between his pain and his actions. Like those caught in sin’s grasp, he keeps doing the thing that keeps hurting him, but his response, “Ow, Quit it!” reveals that he associates the pain not with his action but with Lisa’s actions (she’s doing nothing). Those caught in the grip of sin suffer, but like Bart, instead of comprehending that their suffering is due to their own actions, instead they think their suffering is due to the correction of another. The sinner keeps getting shocked as it were because of their sin, but their rage is against the one (a person) or The One (God), who points out the cause of their pain! The Bible says in Proverbs 19:3, “Some people ruin themselves by their own stupid actions and then blame the Lord.” (TEV).
There is another side to this verse, it is the side of the person who “trusts in Him (the Lord).” The person who trusts God is the person who listens to Him; the person who obeys His Word. That person finds the protection of God’s love surrounding them. So, the question is, will you be like Bart, suffering repeatedly because of your insistence on doing it your way, or will you be blessed by God because of your submission to doing it His way?
One final thought. Above I referred to suffering as a “gracious truth.” Why? C.S. Lewis put it this way, “The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be will with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are a masked evil. Pain is unmasked unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt . . . And pain is not only immediately recognizable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities . . . we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." (Lewis: The Problem of Pain).
Even suffering is the gift of a loving God. Were it not for suffering all of us would be like Bart Simpson. We’d never learn.
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