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RESPONDING TO TRAGEDY
- A sermon by Amy's husband, Rev. Ed Hartman,
- following her passing
"All this also comes from the Lord Almighty, wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom." - Isaiah 28:29
I want to begin our study of this passage with a simple question, a question that grows out of the title of this morning's study (which is very similar, you may notice, to the title of last Sunday's sermon). Last Sunday you heard a man describing his processing of what he perceived of as a tragedy among us. Yet the question I want to begin with this morning is very simple: was Amy's death a tragedy? As we answer that question, you will be able to understand what the Lord is doing among us, and in your own life as an individual. To answer the question we first need to look at what a tragedy is. This is how the dictionary defines the word "tragedy": "A terrible and unexpected event with disastrous consequences, resulting in profound disappointment and ruin." A terrible and unexpected event with disastrous consequences, resulting in profound disappointment and ruin: is that what has happened here?
I. GOD IS THE SOURCE OF WHAT HAS HAPPENED
Well, in the first place, how can it truly be a tragedy when it comes from the Lord? Look at what is in this chapter. In verses 16 through 28, the prophet speaks of all the difficult things God was going bring to bear upon His people. Having listed those calamities, he says, "All this--all these difficult things--comes from the Lord Almighty, wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom." I want you to think with me this morning of the Source from whom all this comes, because it is so very clearly identified and described for us. The prophet begins by saying, "All this comes from the Lord Almighty."
God fights our battles
Now, don't skip over that too quickly, because this is an unusual term that the prophet uses to describe God. In the Hebrew the title is, "The Lord of hosts." It is a military title--the Divine Warrior, the Captain of the armies of heaven. Isaiah uses this title 62 times. Note that Isaiah does not say that "all this comes from the Divine Shepherd," but "from the Divine Warrior." Think about this. When you are faced with that which appears to crush you, when you are faced with overwhelming grief and anxiety, when the forces of darkness seem arrayed against you and you don't know what to do, whom do you want standing beside you, the Divine Shepherd or the Divine Warrior, who fights our battles for us? They are one and the same, of course, but in my greatest anxiety I want to know that the One who stands with me and holds my hand is the Divine Warrior, the Captain of the armies of heaven. That's the source from whom all this comes.
God is working out His perfect plan
The passage doesn't stop there. You see, normally a powerful warrior is arbitrary he chooses to fight. If he doesn't stand to gain anything personally from a particular battle, he is not going to be inclined to participate. Not so with our Divine Warrior who fights on our behalf. For the passage goes on to describe Him as the One who is "wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom." I want to break down that description for you. First, He is "wonderful in counsel." Normally when we use the word "counsel" we refer to advice. You go to get marriage counsel, because you want to avoid or to solve marital conflict. You go to get legal counsel because you want advice to know how to interpret and apply the law. But that is not at all what is being referred to here. It is not God's "advice" that drives His working, it is His counsel, His eternal, sovereign ruling and overruling purpose and plan, so powerful that he nullifies and frustrates the plans of men while advancing His own. This is what the Psalmist is referring to in Psalm 33:10: "The Lord foils the plans (the counsel) of the nations, He thwarts the purposes of the peoples, but the counsel of the Lord stands firm forever, the purposes of His heart throughout all generations." This is God's counsel, His eternal design.
Paul talks about it in Ephesians 1:11 where he says, "In Him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works everything according to the counsel of His will." God has an eternal design by which He moves and drives and works in everything, and the Divine Warrior, the Captain of the armies of Heaven, is driven by this counsel. Again it is not an arbitrary counsel or plan, for the prophet writes that He is "wonderful in counsel." Normally we use the word "wonderful" as an adjective. We talk about a wonderful dessert, meaning that it was delicious, or a wonderful vacation, meaning that it was enjoyable, or a new outfit that you may have, meaning that it is attractive. That is not the way it is used in this passage. Here wonderful is a verb. What is deliberately being described is this--the working of God's counsel is so amazing that he leaves us filled with wonder and astonishment, and with deep satisfaction. That's why His counsel is "wonderful"--it causes us to wonder and stand amazed at what He has done.
I cannot help but think about the way we have prayed for Amy over this past year. August 28, 1995, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The news of that diagnosis spread like wildfire. Two days later, after a biopsy, she was diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme, the most virulent form of brain cancer. The prognosis medically was set on that day. We thought, "How wonderful. God has established an absolutely impossible situation, and He has designed to glorify Himself by healing her in such a way that no doctor can claim credit." We prayed, "God, we plead with You to heal her. We know you are going to do it." We looked with anticipation to that day when Amy would be healed.
But over time our prayers matured and deepened, as we began to pray what Jesus prayed in the Garden, what Janet sang so beautifully at the memorial service: "Father, let this cup pass from me--I really wish You would heal, but more than that--Thy will, not mine be done."
Then our prayers began to mature even more, and we began to say, "Father, don't let us merely be resigned to Your will, but teach us to find our deepest and greatest satisfaction in Your will." We prayed that over and over again. I began to hear some of you pray in that way. What a tremendous thing, to ask God not to do what we demand of Him, but to do what He knows we will ultimately find our deepest satisfaction in." I remember standing at this pulpit on numerous occasions and saying to you, "I know exactly how God will answer our prayers. Because I know God will heal Amy of her cancer - or - He will do something even more excellent." The result of all of those prayers is that God in His infinite wisdom and mercy, for His glory and our good, to pursue that more excellent thing. He has already initiated perfecting that more excellent thing.
I want to ask you a question. If we asked God to do this, and if He answered our prayers exactly as we asked Him to answer them, then where is there room for anger? What right does any of us have to be angry in the face of what we have seen God do? We said, "God we want You to heal her. But more than that we want You to teach us to be satisfied with Your will." Let me tell you what. There is really only one ground for anger in all this, and that is unbelief. And unbelief is sin, from which, if you are struggling with anger, you need to repent. There really is no ground for anger, because God has answered our prayers as we have asked Him to answer.
God is at work, and the only right response from you and from me today, is to begin looking forward with eager anticipation to that more excellent thing which God has initiated and which He has bound Himself to complete, because that is coming, and it will be perfected. I firmly believe that it will be perfected in our own lifetime, and we will stand with mouths open and arms at our sides, saying, "Wow. Can you believe what God has done?"
I am not here to make excuses for God or to justify His actions. That is not my roll. I am simply here to remind you of what you already know to be true. God is at work, and the outworking of His sovereign counsel is so amazing that He will leave us with wonder and astonishment and deep satisfaction as we observe His hand at work.
God will astound us with the good He is going to accomplish
Do you want to know why I know this is true? It's in that second phrase in the last verse of Isaiah 28. God is not only wonderful in counsel, He is also magnificent in wisdom. The word the prophet uses for wisdom is not the ordinary word you might expect. It is more than the accumulation of knowledge and understanding. Here it is productive, gain-producing, success-affecting, good-resulting wisdom, wisdom that goes way beyond our expectation. It is what Job refers to in a negative way in Job 6:13 where he says, "do I have any power to help myself now that success has been driven from me?" That word translated "success" is the same word which is translated "wisdom" in Isaiah 28. Job threw up his hands and said, "I don't have what it takes. I can no longer affect good, I can no longer produce profit or benefit for me or my family." But God possesses this good-producing wisdom, a wisdom which nothing escapes.
The prophet goes on to say that God not only possesses this wisdom, but that He is "magnificent in wisdom." Again that word "magnificent" is not an adjective, but a verb. It says that God will magnify, He will intensify, He will display the glory of His wisdom before our very eyes. It's what the prophet Ezekiel says as he records God's words: "So I will show My greatness. I will magnify My greatness and My holiness, and I will make Myself known, and they will know that I am the Lord." God has bound Himself to display this wisdom in an incredible way. It is this wisdom which drives this counsel which is wonder-producing and awe-inspiring. That is why God can say in Jeremiah 29:11, "I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a future and hope." It is all because His wisdom that is magnificent that drives His counsel that will cause us to wonder and s stand in amazement. All this comes from the Lord Almighty, who is wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom," Did you catch the first word? "Most of this comes from the Lord Almighty." Right? No! "ALL of this comes from Him."
Back to the earlier question: was Amy's death really a tragedy? Did this catch God unaware? Will it lead to our ruin? This is not to say that we do not grieve. I see it in your faces. I feel it in my heart. I grieve beyond words. But we are not ruined, we are not crushed, we are not destroyed in the process. "ALL this comes form the Lord Almighty who is wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom." No, this is no tragedy.
How can it be if it comes from that kind of God?
II. ANOTHER APPARENT "TRAGEDY"
Furthermore, how can Amy's death be a tragedy when our God has turned what appeared to be the greatest of all tragedies into the most magnificent triumph. I want to take you to "the place of the skull," where almost 2,000 years ago, the disciples of the Lord Jesus stood with their mouths hanging open as they watched their sinless Master, the Man with whom they had spent the last three years, being brutally executed by Roman soldiers. What a tragedy. What an incredible tragedy!!
Or was it? What they perceived as a tragedy that day has become our only hope in facing death without fear. Most of us this morning have been around these things all of our lives. We have heard the Gospel again and again. We have sung the hymns, we have prayed the prayers, we have recited the creeds, we have heard the stories, we know them well. But some of us have been left unchanged by what we have been exposed to all of our lives, and the familiarity has, I fear, inoculated some of you against it. If there is a tragedy anywhere, it is there, because that can lead to eternal disappointment and ruin.
Two weeks ago today I held in my arms a beautiful young woman whom I loved deeply. I held her tightly as she breathed her final breaths. I got to see with my own eyes an incredible woman step from this life into eternity, and I will never be the same again. What I know to be true is that when Amy went from my arms into the arms of her glorious Lord, the first words she heard as He embraced her were, "Well done. Well done. Well done good and faithful servant. Well done."
Amy heard those words not because she was a good woman. She was that. Amy was one of the sharpest women you and I will ever have the privilege of knowing. But Amy heard those words because she had embraced for herself the reality of the cross. When the tragedy which the disciples perceived unfolded before their eyes, what was really happening was that the infinite, eternal and unchangeable God was releasing His undiminished wrath against your sin and mine, which he had placed upon His Son. His Son died a brutal death, so that we might come to our own death with no fear.
See, Amy had embraced that for her very own, and there was no part of her life that was not impacted by the reality of that cross. That enabled her to come to the end of her life with a sense of purpose and a sense of expectation. The last lucid conversation I had with her was in the middle of the night about two weeks before she died. I asked her, "Sweetheart, do you know what's happening to you?" She nodded her head and said, "I'm going home." I asked her how she felt about that and she said, "I'm o.k., because it's o.k. I know who I'm going to see." I told her I was going to miss her, and she said, "We will be together again very soon." There is a real sense of delight in knowing that Amy, with Paul, could say, "For me to live is Christ, to die is gain." That is not some plastic thing we say at funerals. That's reality, and that is our eternal hope. That's what gives meaning and purpose to the life that you and I still live today.
A challenge to the congregation
There are two concluding challenges I want to leave you with. The first is a challenge to us as a congregation. We are charged to look forward with eager anticipation to what God has initiated. He is at work, and He has bound Himself to complete the work which He has begun. He will finish what He started. It is my conviction that you and I will stand in amazement to see God do great and mighty things.
A challenge to the individual
There is also this individual challenge. What Amy had embraced for herself was a very real thing which went the core of her experience. You couldn 't be around Amy for long without knowing that this was her life, and the cross of Jesus Christ had impacted every part of who she was. I want to ask you this morning, when you come to the end of your life, having breathed your last breath, opening your eyes on he other side, are you convinced that the Lord will say to you, "Well done good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your reward." He is not going to say, "Enter into the joy of your reward," unless He can first say, "Well done, good and faithful servant." And He is not going to say that because you have been a good person and your intentions were right. He is going to say that only if you have made what happened on the cross your very own, and if it pervades your entire being, if it has become your very life.
Let us pray:
Father, You are the infinite, eternal and unchangeable God. The promises You have made are firm today. Nothing has changed. I bring before you each person whom You have brought to this place this morning, and I plead with You to speak to their hearts as I am unable to do. Give no rest to anyone, until they have found their rest, their eternal rest, in the confidence of right standing with you through Christ. We are unable to effect any change within ourselves apart from you, so we lift our gaze to You in worship and thanksgiving. Thank You for loving us. Thank You for holding us. We wait with expectation and eager, joyful anticipation to what lies ahead. These things we pray in Jesus' precious and holy name. Amen.
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