About 3 minutes to read
It feels as if God is against me
Paul asks who can be against us if God is for us, and he answers with the cross.
He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?
Romans 8:32 (KJV)
God has already given the most he had to give. If he meant you harm, he would not have paid so much for you. A few verses earlier Paul says all things work together for good to those who love God. He does not say all things are good. Many are not, and you may be living inside one. Romans 8:29 tells you what the good is. God means to make you like his Son.
For the Lord will not cast off for ever: But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.
Lamentations 3:31-33 (KJV)
He does bring grief, but he takes no pleasure in it, and his compassion outlasts it. You may weep. Jesus wept over Lazarus, though he knew he was about to raise him.
I think he is punishing me
The punishment for a believer’s sin fell on Christ, and God does not collect the same debt twice. What a believer may receive is chastening, the training a father gives the son he loves. Hebrews 12 says God does it for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness, though no chastening feels joyful at the time. Afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness.
The Confession says God’s children are chastened by him as by a father, yet never cast off (WCF 12.1). And not every blow is a rebuke for some particular sin. When the disciples asked whose sin had made a man born blind, Jesus said it was neither his nor his parents’ (John 9:3). You may never learn in this life why a thing was sent. You can know it was not sent in wrath.
For Scripture gathered by the kind of loss, a death or a diagnosis or a broken marriage, see Scripture for the Hard Hour.
While you wait
Do Not Fight This Alone
A page cannot sit with you or pray over you. Tell your pastor or an elder what you are afraid of. Keep sitting under the preached Word, and if you are a communing member, do not stay away from the Lord’s Table while your doubts are being answered. The Larger Catechism says it was appointed for the relief even of weak and doubting Christians (Q&A 172). Safe in His Keeping gives a few things to do while you wait for the fear to lift.
If you cannot tell whether you have ever come to Christ, do not wait to settle it. Come to him now. He promised to cast out none who come (John 6:37), and the gospel is set out for you in full.