Adventure in Adversity
When the adventure of adversity is seen in its true perspective, it is found to be the doorway into God’s most transcendent secret–that adversities and sufferings, which in their origin are the effects of sin and instruments of the devil, in the grasp of faith become redemptive. They are transfigured from the realm of merely something to be endured as an opposition of Satan to something to be used to conquer their author and redeem his victims. Faith in time of adversity makes the serpent swallow itself! Once again the supreme proof of this is that when Satan made his fiercest attack in history on th eperson of Christ, God used that attack, through the faith and endurance of the Sufferer, to bring about the world’s salvation. God uses evil to bring about good–not causing it, but using it.
The consequence of a clear grasp of this fact, that Satan and all evil circumstances in our lives are God’s most useful instruments of the fulfillment of His purposes, is obvious. All attacks of Satan are seen to be our blessings. We "count them all joy." We "rejoice in tribulation." We use them as special opportunities to see the manifestation of God’s power, instead of merely enduring them with a struggle as "judgments" or "tests."
