Show Me Your Gloryਨਮੂਨਾ

The Cost of Fighting Mike Tyson

A temporal perspective on suffering makes God appear cruel for allowing so much of it, but an eternal perspective on suffering removes the sting from what humans might endure during the brevity of this life. Put differently, if this life is all that exists, then human suffering would seem brutal and cause us to question whether God is good. However, if an eternal life awaits us after this life, it inevitably changes the way we view human suffering in this life.

One of the Bible verses that has best helped me learn to gain a proper eternal perspective is 2 Corinthians 4:17–18. It says, “For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

It’s clear that this verse is claiming that our suffering in this life is not as bad as we make it out to be. How can that be an accurate assessment? Well, if I was offered fifty dollars in cash for stepping into a ring with Mike Tyson at the prime of his career, I’d probably decline the offer. However, if I was offered fifty million dollars in cold, hard cash to step into the ring with Mike Tyson for 15 seconds, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it. The value of the outcome determines the weight of the suffering. Just as important, the length of the suffering compared to the length of the utility and fulfillment yielded from the suffering determines the weight of the suffering. Put in simpler terms, if all I have to deal with is 15 seconds of trying to survive Mike Tyson’s uppercut and five weeks of recovery because I failed to do that successfully, I might still have sixty years to enjoy my fifty million dollars. 100% WORTH IT!

What amount of money would it take to get you to step into the ring with Mike Tyson for 15 seconds?

Read this carefully and think about it for a moment: “For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

What amount of time in the next life would you require in order to endure whatever suffering may come your way in this life? A thousand years? A million years?

The average life expectancy is 73 years. If eternity exists, where we will live forever, then how significant is the suffering we endure here, if that suffering produces something of value that can be enjoyed forever in the next life?

Koukl says, “Sometimes we are in a good position to know something and sometimes we’re not. How would we know whether the amount of evil in the world is appropriate, justifiable, defensible? Well, we’d have to know a whole lot more than we do. In fact, there’s only one person who has that knowledge. That’s God. So, at this point, that’s where we have to leave it—with Him.” John Piper states it this way, “God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.” In other words, trusting God is by far wiser than trusting ourselves with our lives and our eternity. From our limited vantage point, we see very little and know very little in the grand scheme of eternity.

According to 2 Corinthians 4:17–18, what is to come for those who go to Heaven is worth everything we endure in this life. If an algorithm existed to describe the outputs of suffering, the right side of the equation would include more people in Heaven and a maximum level of preparedness for those in attendance, who get to enjoy God forever.

As Dr. Sean McDowell states, “Sometimes we think the purpose of life is to get a lot of things and be happy. What if that’s not the purpose of life? What if the greatest good is to know God and be with him forever? I don’t know any greater disruptor that stops us thinking inwardly about ourselves and gets us to think outwardly about loving God, loving others and eternity than suffering.”

If we assume that the greatest good is to know God and be with Him forever, what might we expect God to do to bring that to fruition?