Sorrow to Salvation

Lately, I have been thinking about the tsunami in Japan a few weeks ago, and how that tragedy fits in with God's plans and God's actions. Also, I was looking back through my journal of devotions notes, and I realized that I wrote about the same verse twice, and I think it's quite fitting for this subject:

"The kind of sorrow God wants makes people change their hearts and lives, this leads to salvation, and you cannot be sorry for that. But the kind of sorrow the world has brings death." - 2 Corinthians 7:10 (NCV)

In essence, I do think that everything happens for a purpose, but whether the event that happened was in God's control or not could go either way, and we can never know. In church today, Professor Kowalski talked about this, and he called it "divine ambiguity". The fact that there are some doctrine things that we are given the benefit of the doubt. Because if we knew everything, we wouldn't need to have faith or place trust in God. And the truth that there are topics that people can take different ways, so that people can uniquely apply it to their lives.

So whether or not God's hand was involved in the earthquake and tsunami in Japan is something we will not be fully sure of while living on this Earth. And maybe God kept another natural disaster from coming somewhere else, but that's something we'd know even less. We could keep questioning and doubting, but that would get us nowhere, because God works on his own time and reveals certain things to us to guide us, but not to drag us. He gives us freedom, but he still actively pursues us!

But the foundation still stands that our world is broken by sin, and we don't deserve anything less than death and hopelessness. When God gave us everything, we turned away from his compassion and the chance to live with him. Our sin creates a barrier with him and with happiness. Luckily, God is compassionate and offers salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. So that even in our sorrows, we can find hope in Jesus' absolute love for us. And because of our sorrows and pain, we may realize that we are nothing without God.

That is what 2 Corinthians 7:10 is saying. God never gives us more than we can handle. He may allow us to go through sorrow, because he knows that in the end it will make us stronger and happier. But he never supports the sorrow or sadness that we feel, those worldly things that nothing good comes out of. Blessings can come out of bad things; and in the end God is not to blame, He is the one to behold.