Bitterness
When God created man, His desire was for man to live in perfect fellowship with Him and complete obedience to Him. When Adam sinned, the consequences of his sin were far greater than he could have imagined. Not only did he and Eve suffer, every one of Adam's descendants has felt the terrible consequences of their sin. Sin always affects to a greater degree than people expect.
Sin takes you farther than you want to go.
Keeps you longer than you want to stay,
And costs you more than you want to pay.
Sin always affects others who are not responsible for the sin. When John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee…” He was expressing the truth that whatever is done will affect others, whether good or bad. It is a fundamental principle of life. But as we will see, God is able to use the pain we experience at the hands of others and cause it to work out for our benafit.
Most people don’t expect God to protect them from the consequences of their own sin but they have a very hard time with suffering for someone else’s sin. It may seem like the innocent victim is being punished for the perpetrator’s sin. Punishment implies wrong-doing. It is not punishment, it is suffering. It is helpful to remember that Jesus has suffered for every sin that has ever been committed. 1 Peter 2:24 says, “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.”
Often we blame God for our pain, but He is not the problem. Sin is the problem; God is the solution. It is actually part of God's mercy that sin hurts; otherwise, wickedness would abound even more. Joe Beam, in his book, Seeing the Unseen, explains that the enemy seeks to use pain and hurt in the believer’s life to make him angry with God. He weakens the believer’s faith and clouds the believer’s vision so that the Christian blames God instead of the enemy. This hinders the believer from looking to God for help in those trials. When the believer needs God the most he turns from God, feeling that God does not love him.
Bitterness develops because of the desire for justice that God has placed in each of us. When a wrong has been committed, especially a wrong like child abuse, we have a need to see the one who sinned punished. Bitterness is an attempt to punish the perpetrator. Romans 12:19 says, “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but [rather] give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance [is] mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” The Lord is even more specific in Matthew 18:6-7, “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and [that] he were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”
We must know who God is and what His character is in order to be able to trust Him to punish those who have hurt little children in such evil ways when sometimes it seems as though the wicked are prospering. Forgiveness is taking the one who hurt me off my hook and placing him on God’s hook. Neil Anderson, in his book, The Bondage Breaker wrote:
Forgiveness is difficult for us because it pulls against our concept of justice. We want revenge for offenses suffered. But we are told never to take our own revenge (Romans 12:19) ‘Why should I let them off the hook?’ we protest, You let them off your hook, but they are never off God’s hook. He will deal with them fairly – something we cannot do … Forgiveness is agreeing to live with the consequences of another person’s sin. Forgiveness is costly; we pay the price of the evil we forgive. Yet you’re going to live with those consequences whether you want to or not; your only choice is whether you will do so in the bitterness of unforgiveness…
When I was a teenager I had a murderous hatred for my step-father because of the things he had done to me. By the time I was thirteen I had three things planned out: The first was to run away to New York City, the second was how I could kill myself, and the third was how I could kill my step-father. It is only by God’s grace that I never carried out any of those plans. When I was fifteen God brought me out of the situation I was in at home by allowing me to attend a very good boarding school.
It was there that God began to help me grow in my relationship with Him. I started to learn more about who He is. When I was sixteen I read the book, Trusting God: Even When Life Hurts, for the first time. That was when I started to realize that God did have a plan for my life an that He could use my past hurts for good in my life. I still struggled daily with intense bitterness though.
It was not until I was in my twenties that the Lord brought freedom from my bitterness. It was when I chose to trust God’s promise that He would punish my step-father for what he did, that I was released from the bitterness that was chained to my heart. There was such an instant release that I felt like I could float. I was no longer responsible for bringing justice. It was not my problem anymore.
Around that time my step-father’s health began to decline dramatically. A while later when I was home on a break from college my step-father was having a very hard time breathing. He is dying from emphysema and has several other serious medical problems. He was gasping for breath as my mother took him to the hospital. After they left I knelt by the couch and asked God to be merciful to my step-father. It was then that the Lord clearly showed me that this was part of God’s vengeance on my step-father for the things he did to me. In Romans 2:9 the Lord promises, “Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, …”
The Lord also showed me that it was His mercy that He waited to punish my step-father until I was not trying to punish him. If God had not waited, I would not have recognized God’s faithfulness to keep His Word. I would have been trying to increase my step-father’s suffering instead of asking the Lord to be merciful to him. Now, over ten years later, my step-father is still languishing. He begs to die almost daily. For several years he has been completely helpless and bedridden. I believe that my step-father has also come to realize that he is suffering for his sin. That makes his suffering even worse. My perspective is that he has suffered enough but God reminds me that I have placed that in His hands.
