The Value Of Sorrow

The Value Of Sorrow

But though He cause grief, yet will He have compassion according to the multitude of His mercies.
For He doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.”
Lamentations 3:32-33

Last week, my wife and I were present during the tragic death of a family’s five-year-old child. We saw doctors and nurses crushed as they realized that the best technology available could not save the child. We saw parents praying and crying out to God that the child might be spared. We saw deep sorrow, and that led me to think about the value of sorrow.

Sorrow helps us understand the value that God places on us. Jeremiah wrote: “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of His fierce anger” (Lam. 1:12). While Jeremiah was likely thinking of those who were passing by the destruction of Jerusalem and its sorrow, and while he might have been thinking of his own sorrow, most of us who read the passage are reminded of our Lord, the “Man of Sorrows who was acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3).

We are reminded that reproach broke His heart (Ps. 69:20) and that He bore our sins in His own body on the cross (1 Pet. 2:24). The sorrow of the cross helps us appreciate the depth of the love of God in sending His Son to die for us. Sorrow helps us learn to trust God for time as well as eternity. Jeremiah says in this passage that he had seen affliction. He says that God had shut out his prayer (Lam. 3:8). He seems to think that God had marked him for destruction and yet he began to think of the miracle of waking up every morning and realized that he would not wake up if it were not for the compassions of God that “fail not and are new every morning” (Lam. 3:22-23). Jeremiah had been unfairly treated by his own people because he was preaching a message from God that they did not want to hear. He told them not to fight the army that God had sent against them, but to surrender. Of course that was treason as far as the natives of Jerusalem were concerned, and since they didn’t like the message, they didn’t like the messenger. So Jeremiah suffered, and it seemed that God had forsaken him when, in fact, He had not. Instead He was trusting him to be faithful, and now Jeremiah was being reassured that God was faithful as well.

Sometimes in the middle of great sorrow we fail to realize that God is reminding those around us of a very true but unpopular message. The message, that we have sinned and that God judges sin, is considered harsh and cruel today (2 Pet. 2:9-10). However, it is not cruel to help people avoid diseases, and it is not cruel to remind people of the eternal consequences of sin so they can be saved. God does not willingly afflict us but sometimes that is how He gets our attention. Sometimes those who are afflicted are doing the speaking, but they are not the ones to whom God is speaking. God used Jeremiah and God used Christ to speak to people who had rebelled, because it is not His will that any should perish (2 Pet. 3:9).

God has a way of turning sorrow into joy (Jn. 16:20), and when He does, the preceding sorrow makes the joy much more enjoyable. He does that for a woman with birth pains, when a healthy baby is delivered (Jn. 16:21). He did that for His disciples when they saw the Lord after He was raised from the dead (Jn. 20:20). He does that for us when we realize that the sorrows and trials of life are being used to save those who are perishing. Our friends’ greatest joy would be to see the death of their five-year-old son be the means God uses to bring the assurance of salvation to their unsaved friends and relatives.

“Ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”
John 16:20

By Bruce Collins