Assurance

“The Christian, when faced by the inexplicable, holds to this assurance: that however things may appear, it is for some loving reasons which may be partly hidden from us, that God allows us to suffer. He remembers the Scripture, ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’ (Is. lv. 9). He believes unshakably that love is around God’s people always, in all circumstances. Whether he feels it or not, he has the assured word of Paul written under the inspiration of God’s Spirit, and borne out in the daily experiences of his very disturbed career, that nothing in heaven or earth can separate us from the love of God (Rom. viii. 35‐39). Because God demonstrated on the cross the intensity and extensiveness of His love to mankind, no sufferer has any right to say, nor any excuse for saying, ‘God can’t love me or He would not let me suffer like this.’ Whatever explanation there may be for the existence of suffering, one thing will always, in light of the cross, remain a blasphemy: and that is to deny the love of God, for if God cared enough to suffer on our behalf and win us thereby from our sins to His side, then He must love us indeed.” (The Mystery of Suffering by Hugh Evan Hopkins, p 112)