From Heavens perspective

I spent yesterday with a friend whose daughter is critically ill. My friend is also my prayer partner she and I have spent hours before God's throne together but we have also spent hours together in hospital waiting rooms grieving the suffering of her child. There is suffering in this world and simplistic answers  bring more insult than comfort. However, I have found deep comfort in God's Word.

When I began to study prophecy I felt like the curtains of Heaven  were pulled back and I was able to see life and history from an eternal perspective. It was painful to do an in depth study of  Jeremiah and Lamentations. I studied these books inductively using the Precept Bible studies. This meant that for an hour every morning I was studying the "Weeping Prophet". I also have the Bible on CD so while in my car I listened to the chapters again and again. Sometimes I found myself weeping with Jeremiah as I surveyed through Scripture the devastation brought by sin. I could see like Jeremiah how God had told in Deuteronomy the cause and effect of disobedience. Jeremiah not only prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem he experienced the pain and suffering personally.

How, you might ask, could there be any comfort in the study of Jeremiah's writings? I saw the heart of the Heavenly Father. The discipline for sin was not the end of the story. In the 29th chapter of Jeremiah   I find a letter to the Exiles who have been carried into Babylon. "This is what the Lord says:'When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,' declares the Lord..."

For me this message in Jeremiah not only shows the heart of the Heavenly Father grieving over the consequence of His children's sin but it also shows His plan of redemption. Isn't that the story of the whole Bible? There is love, there is disobedience, there are consequences, there is the sacrificial love of God, there is Redemption. Also in the last chapters of the Bible I read again and again that God will wipe away the tears from our eyes. His plan from the beginning of time was not to harm us but to give us hope and a future intimate fellowship with our Heavenly Father.

I sit in the waiting room with my friend our hearts are heavy with grief but not devoid of hope.