When God Weeps

by Joni Eareckson Tada

  The world was no party. They were waiting for the party.

  It was clear to them that although the King had begun to set up his kingdom, he hadn’t finished. Jesus himself asked his Father, “May Thy kingdom come…as it is in heaven.” He had begun to reverse the effects of sin and its results—pain, death, and disease—but it was just that, a beginning. When the Savior ascended to heaven, no lambs were nuzzling lions yet, no swords were being beaten into plowshares. A few could recall fondly the time Jesus touched their blind eyes and gave them sight, but the eyes of all the blind weren’t opened yet, the ears of all the deaf weren’t unstopped, and most of the lame were a far cry from leaping like deer.

  New Testament writers realized that the final brick had not been cemented into the kingdom building (Ephesians 2:20). Successive generations knew this. Saints—who through the ages would see persecution and pestilence, holocaust and heartache—realized they were living stones being trowelled into the kingdom building (1 Peter 2:5). They understood that suffering was, at times, sickening, but life was worth living if it meant more time granted for the world to hear the Good News. They knew the biting reality of their suffering; but they also remembered the enormously high price Jesus placed on a soul—suffering is bad, but a soul lost is worse (Matthew 16:26). And so, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient…not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Past generations realized God was permitting something he hated (their pain and persecution) so that something he prized (more souls salvaged) could be achieved. “Now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me [imprisonment] has really served to advance the gospel” (Philippians 1:12).

  Our generation is standing on their shoulders. We hate hell, and because we don’t want to see our loved ones go there, we persevere through the pain, not wanting anyone to perish. Our generation shares their same hope: “We…groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons…For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently” (Romans 8:23-25).

  The hope we wait for means more than splendorous bodies. It involves more than sorrow and sighing fleeing away. And it certainly encompasses more than the cataclysmic end-of-the-world clashes of Armageddon.

  COMING FULL CIRCLE

  The hope we wait for is what this book has been about.

  Remember when we peered into the heavenly whirlwind of joy and pleasure between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Theirs was—or is—a river of joy splashing over heaven’s walls onto us. And remember how suffering sandblasts us to the core, removing sin and impurities so that intimacy with Jesus is possible? Do you recall the suffering and the sacrifice Jesus offered that we might know this intimacy and his joy? It was the Savior’s mission: “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you” (John 15:11).

  Misery may love company, but joy craves a crowd. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’s plan to rescue humans was not only for man’s sake. It is for God’s sake. The Father is gathering a crowd—an inheritance, pure and blameless—to worship his Son in the joy of the Holy Spirit. “God is love” (John 4:16), and the wish of love is to drench with delight those for whom God has suffered.

  Soon the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit will get their wish.

  Soon, perhaps sooner than we think, “the day of our Lord Jesus Christ” will arrive and “all who have longed for his appearing” will be stripped of the last vestige of sin. God will close the curtain on sin, Satan, and suffering, and we will step into the waterfall of the joy and pleasure that is the Trinity.

  Better yet, we will become part of a Niagara Falls of thunderous joy as “God is all and in all” for “when he appears we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is.” God in us and we in him. No longer will we be “hidden with Christ.” “Now we see but a poor reflection; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12)—the apostle Paul who wrote this, who ached to know Christ through sharing in the fellowship of his sufferings, will finally get his wish, or has his wish now. He is perfectly bonded. Completely united. He not only knows God, he knows God in that deep, personal union, that utter euphoria of experiencing him. Paul tasted it in the pain of earth, but now he “eats of the tree of life” in the pleasure of heaven (Revelation 22:2).

  Our hope is not a “what,” but a “Who.” The hope we wait for, our only hope, is the “blessed hope—the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Heaven is not a place we are waiting to see; we wait for a Person. It is Jesus we’ve travailed through all this suffering for. Our hope is for the Desire of the Nations, the Healer of Broken Hearts, the Friend of Sinners. True, we are waiting for the party. But more accurately, we are waiting for the Person who will make it a party.

  HOW MUCH PLEASURE?

  Can heaven’s joy, can eternal intimacy with God be that pleasurable? It’s human to think this way. The pursuit of pleasure is an earthly fixation. But pleasure is not earth’s invention; God invented every delight, every delectable sensual experience, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights” (James 1:17). It is natural to whine and wonder whether or not our cravings will be satisfied (earth is the culprit that keeps itching, tickling, and teasing our desires, all the while diminishing the possibilities of fulfillment). Sin always gets worse because it never finds satisfaction. As the song goes, “Kicks just keep getting harder to find.”

  Will heaven be different?

  Consider this unusual but excellent analogy by C. S. Lewis:

  I think our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest bodily pleasure, should immediately ask whether you ate chocolates at the same time. On receiving the answer “no,” he might regard absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In vain would you tell him that the reasons why lovers in their carnal raptures don’t bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate: He does not know the positive thing that excludes it.

  We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it. Hence where fulness awaits us we anticipate [loss].3

  Earth has conditioned us to think heaven is a place of less, not more.

  But enraptured in heaven’s joy, we won’t think about carnal raptures because we will have something better, something far more pleasurable to consume us. The delight I experience with my husband Ken is merely a hint, a whisper—a bite of chocolate—compared to the resounding joy that, in heaven, will sweep me away in a deluge of ecstasy. “There is scarce anything that can be conceived or expressed about the degree of the happiness of the saints in heaven,” asserts Jonathan Edwards.4 It’s a matter of faith, and I believe the Bible when it says: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

  Every good pleasure on earth is but a shadow of its fulfillment in heaven. The best of friendships are embryonic on earth, snatching only a few short years to mature. There’s never enough time. Words can never convey what overflows our hearts. I experience this bittersweet sadness with intimate friends. I love them so much that I want to pass through them, reach the other side, to know them fully, be one with them. Not to possess but to meld with them. I can’t on earth. I’m on the outside of their heart’s door, always wanting to get in, get closer, even while relishing in their company. My longings are eased knowing that in heaven I will “get in.” Jesus has deigned it: “Holy Father, protect them…so that they may be one as we are one” (John 17:11).

  Do you recall the definition we’ve used for suffering? It’s wanting what you don’t have and having what you don’
t want. In heaven, you will finally possess what you’ve always wanted: fulfillment of your deepest desires. And you will always be satisfied with what you have: no boredom and no envy.

  Lewis once told a tale of a woman who, after she was thrown into a dungeon, bore and reared a son. The child grew up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, straw on the floor, and a little patch of sky through the grating above. His mother, an artist, tried to teach her son about the outside world by sketching for him pictures of fields, rivers, mountains, and cities. The boy did his best to believe his mother when she told him the outer world was far more interesting and glorious than her drawings. “What?” asked the boy. “No pencil marks out there?” His whole notion of the outer world became blank, for the pencil lines were not part of the real world. The boy believed the real world was somehow less visible than his mother’s pictures. But really, the world outside lacked lines because it was incomparably more visible.

  Lewis concluded, “So with us. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like penciled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape.”5

  Words don’t do heaven justice. Try as I may to talk of raptures and ecstasies, I fall short. “The most artful composition of words would be to darken and cloud it, to set forth very low shadows of the reality; and all we can say [about heaven] by our best rhetoric is really and truly vastly below the truth. If St. Paul who had seen [heaven] thought it but in vain to utter it, much less shall we pretend to do it,” sighed Edwards.6

  HOW MUCH TIME?

  Heaven will not only be more than we can imagine, the “more” will go on forever. It will be timeless. It has to be;joy flows from God, God is eternal; therefore, so is joy. You instinctively know this when you are gripped by a timeless moment, an experience so precious, so perfect you wish it would last forever.

  One early summer morning my sister Jay and I drove down to the little Maryland farming community of Sykesville to visit Grandma Clark. She wasn’t really my grandmother; she and Jay had become friends at their tiny stone church on top of the hill, and we had been invited to her big farmhouse for tea. I wheeled into the kitchen and was greeted by the aroma of hot cake from the oven. Grandma had placed white crisp linen on a table by an open window. A breeze lifted lace curtains and wafted in the scent of hydrangeas.

  Jay and I sipped tea from delicate cups. My eyes followed Grandma Clark. She leaned back, smoothed the tablecloth with her hand, and spoke of heaven in grand and wistful terms.

  A gust of wind suddenly whipped the curtains, tossing her gray hair; she held up her hand, smiling and squinting against the stiff breeze. Whoosh!—it eddied around the table, dizzying and lifting our spirits. The moment was delightfully strange; but as quickly as it came, it vanished, settling us back down and becoming timeless, leaving in its wake peace and joy. I can still taste the cakes and tea, inhale the spring flowers, see the curtains snap and dapples of sun on the tablecloth.

  Moments like these remind us of some other time or place. We say the same of childhood memories: lazy, late afternoons licking Popsicles on a back step, listening to a lawnmower up the street, and feeling a breeze cool our brow. Or running out the screen door after dinner to collect fireflies. Or by a campfire, hugging our knees, watching the sparks fly upward, becoming stars. If we could be transported back, we’d discover that even as children, we felt the same nostalgia, the “remembering” of another time or place.

  It’s that ancient longing I wrote of earlier. It’s a yearning to pass through and reach the other side, as C. S. Lewis said. These moments—whether having tea on a spring afternoon or licking Popsicles and feeling safe—are whispering, “One day you will bathe in peace like this…satisfaction will shower you…this joy will last forever.” This is what we as children feel. It’s another hint of heaven, like choosing the happiest point in your life and having time stand still. Lewis wrote:

  And in [heaven], we shall eat of the tree of life…The faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when he made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management.

  What would it be to taste at the fountain-head that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us [in heaven]. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy. In the light of our depraved appetites we cannot imagine this.7

  In the light of my depraved appetites, I can barely imagine ecstasy going on forever. It’s always something I want to grasp, but can’t. I hear inklings in Dvořák’s New World Symphony. I glimpse it in the soft gaze of someone I love. I smell it in the air at the ocean when the sky is gray and violent in the distance. I felt it once when I was nine years old, holding on to the guardrail by the Grand Canyon because if I let go, I was certain I would fly away across the wide expanse.

  If these are mere omens, what will the real thing be like?

  What’s more, the pleasure and the joy will continue to increase in heaven. The perfection of happiness does not mean idleness; on the contrary, it very much consists in action—“Man is rational and must, to be happy, be rationally active…In heaven, ‘tis the directly reverse of what ‘tis on earth; for in heaven, by length of time things become more and more youthful, that is, more vigorous, active, tender and beautiful,” Jonathan Edwards asserts.8 In heaven, we keep getting smarter, wiser, younger, and happier. We keep falling more in love. The unfolding of the story of redemption will have us taking one gasp after another, our joy and amazement ever increasing.

  IS SUFFERING WORTH IT?

  Is all the bleeding worth the benefit?

  More than we realize. “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Corinthians 4:17). Heaven knows its pleasures and joys, the ecstasy and elation. As far as heaven is concerned, our troubles are “light” in comparison. This is another verse written in end-time perspective, telling us, “This is the way it will all turn out, this is the way it will be, you’ll see!” Again, it’s a matter of faith. A pile of problems are on one side of the scale; heaven’s glory, the other.

  If the problem-side of the scale seems heavy, then focus your faith on the glory-side. When you do, you’re a Rumpelstiltskin weaving straw into gold; like a divine spinning wheel, your affliction “worketh…a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17 KJV). It’s as J. B. Phillips paraphrases, “These little troubles (which are really so transitory) are winning for us a permanent, glorious and solid reward out of all proportion to our pain” (2 Corinthians 4:17 PHILLIPS).

  It’s not merely that heaven will be wonderful in spite of our anguish; it will be wonderful because of it. Suffering serves us. A faithful response to affliction accrues a weight of glory. A bounteous reward. God has every intention of rewarding your endurance. Why else would he meticulously chronicle every one of your tears? “Record my lament; list my tears on your scroll—are they not on your record?” (Psalm 56:8).

  Every tear you’ve cried—think of it—will be redeemed. God will give you indescribable glory for your grief. Not with a general wave of the hand, but in a considered and specific way. Each tear has been listed; each will be recompensed. We know how valuable our tears are in his sight—when Mary anointed Jesus with the valuable perfume, it was her tears with which she washed his feet that moved him most powerfully (Luke 7:44). The worth of our weeping is underscored again in Revelation 21:4 where “he will wipe every tear from their eyes.” It won’t be the duty of angels or others. It’ll be God’s.

  “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning” (Psalm 30:5 KJV).

  Our reward will be our joy. The more faithful to God we are in the midst of our pain, the more our reward and joy. The Gospels are packed with parables of kings honoring servants for their diligence, landlords showering bonuses
on faithful laborers, monarchs placing loyal subjects in charge of many cities. Whatever suffering you are going through this minute, your reaction to it affects the eternity you will enjoy. Heaven will be more heavenly to the degree that you have followed Christ on earth. “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18).

  It has been said that something so grand, so glorious is going to happen in the world’s finale, something so awesome and wonderful—the denouement of the Lord Jesus—that it will suffice for every hurt, it will compensate for every inhumanity, and it will atone for every terror. His glory will fill the universe and hell will be an afterthought compared to the resplendent brightness of God’s cosmos and “the Lamb who gives it fight.” Heaven’s joy far outweighs hell’s dread. Heaven has no opposite, just as God has no opposite (the Devil is a created being, and a fallen one at that).

  A FINAL WORD

  You will see your daughter unfettered from her cerebral palsy. You will know the freedom of a heart pure and blameless. You will see your husband walk without a limp. You will know family members and friends as God intended them to be all along, their best attributes shining clearly, and their worst traits gone with the wind. No bruises on your daughter, free from the shackles of an abusive marriage. No confused thoughts, no mental illness, no Alzheimer’s disease.