In line at the store this week I was talking with someone I know about the way he's doing his job very differently than he did before the COVID-19 virus shutdown. He mentioned how the huge amounts of time at home had made a difference for his family. "We were doing OK before," he said. "But this let us build some things together and do things we wouldn't have known to do otherwise." The viral shutdown and the widespread illness were not good things, but he believed that he and his family had let God bring some good things from them.
When we read Peter about how the "various trials" we undergo are a part of testing the genuineness of our faith, we're ready to ask right away if God causes the hard times we endure in order to build our faith or achieve some other purpose. That question, of course, is like a theological hand grenade with the pin pulled -- if you don't keep a tight and precise grip on it you will learn why Mr. Hand Grenade is no longer your friend. Some people have no real issue asserting that God brings hard times on people in order to teach them or strengthen them, or serve some other purpose. But some people -- who may have dealt with some serious hard times of their own or known people who did -- aren't willing to accept that. With a literal infinite list of ways he can bring things about, it seems to them very strange at best to say that God might bring cancer or disease or harm into people's lives.
Now one reason we ask this question about why did hard times come to us is because most of the time we don't have to deal with them. Most of us, especially in the nations of the developed world like the United States, live lives that have few hard times when we compare them to the way people have lived for most of human existence and the way many people around the world live today.
For most of human history and for developing nations today, the goal of the work people do is survival. They don't work to build a nest egg or save up for a new car. They work, sometimes pretty dadgum hard, in order to make sure that they can live through that day and maybe a little bit of the next. "Hard times" are the norm.
So they don't ask why hard times come. Hard times are how they live. Peter recognizes this -- remember he was a fisherman before Jesus called him, so he knows what earning your bread by the sweat of your brow means. The new perspective he brings is that the hard times can actually be redeemed by God into a stronger faith that will bring glory to God when Jesus comes and the world changed.
Many religions in Peter's time promised success and prosperity in return for devotion to a particular god or goddess. It's not an unknown idea in our time, either. But the gospel Peter heard, saw and later preached himself made no such promises. With his own eyes he had seen the arrest of his Teacher and he was probably among the crowds watching from a distance as Jesus died. But then came the glory of Easter and he saw Jesus transform the obvious defeat of his crucifixion into the tools God would use to redeem humanity.
Maybe one of the clearest examples of the difference is the way some people pray. This isn't a hard and fast rule, but comfortable people in pretty good circumstances tend to pray for protection from hard times, or that the hard times miraculously halt. Nothing wrong with that, but we often forget to add the part of the prayer that people in less comfortable circumstances fall back on more often: To ask for God's presence and for the strength to endure the hard times that have come. Peter's readers lived hard times most of their lives and the idea that they would end before death came to them would have been a little odd.
I like to think of it this way; I've used this example a lot in my preaching. Let's say it rains, because after all Jesus promised that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Yes, farmers and ranchers are glad of it, and we like it when it ends a drought. But I'm talking about when we get caught out in the rain ourselves. If you were certain that you could pray and God would immediately give you what you asked him for, how would you pray? Would you pray for an umbrella, for protection from the rain and a way to keep it from getting you wet and affecting your life?
Or would you pray for shampoo? If I've read Peter right, he was encouraging his readers to perform the lifestyle equivalent of praying for shampoo. Passages like this aren't much use to folks who want to say that following Jesus means blessings, benefits and bounty in this life. But they can lead us to be people who say along with the Christians who listened to and believed Peter, "Life is hard. But God is good."
And that has the distinct advantage of being true.
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