God Determines, Not Permits
What would seem to the outward eye to be clearly contrary to the character of God as love, that whatever befalls me, or whatever apparent horrors are happening in the world, God sent those, God determined that–not just permitted them.
And I think we see the explanation clearly enough when we have got it clear that outer sufferings are not the real suffering, but inner sorrow is– in other words, the way we take a thing. We saw in the account of the Fall that suffering was to be humanity’s greatest blessing. Even before there was a human race, we are told in Hebrews 2:10 that the only way the Father could have a matured, perfected family of sons could be by His own Son, their Creator, becoming perfected as Leader-Savior and Elder Brother by sufferings. Why? Because only by opposites can a thing be known in its reality: only by a full experience of the wrong way can we be established in the right.
So sufferings cry out to us that something is dreadfully wrong with our condition, and compel us to find our release from them, and from the inner sorrow which is their effect on us. In our blindness, which attributes the suffering to the outward conditions which appear to make us suffer, we seek to escape by altering the outward conditions. But at last, by His merciful pressures on us by suffering, the Father compels us to face up to the truth: that our true sufferings are within and not without. They are because we are inwardly committing the one fundamental sin of “the evil heart of unbelief.’
Taken from: Who Am I?, By Norman Grubb
