The Works of God

From Pastor John, in a 1999 Taste and See Article, Luther, Bunyan, Bible and Pain:

(O)ne of God’s gifts to us in suffering is that we are granted to see and experience depths of his Word that a life of ease would never yield.

Martin Luther had discovered the same “method” of seeing God in his Word. He said there are three rules for understanding Scripture: praying, meditating and suffering trials. The “trials,” he said, are supremely valuable: they “teach you not only to know and understand but also to experience how right, how true, how sweet, how lovely, how mighty, how comforting God’s word is: it is wisdom supreme.” Therefore the devil himself becomes the unwitting teacher of God’s word: “the devil will afflict you [and] will make a real doctor of you, and will teach you by his temptations to seek and to love God’s Word. For I myself . . . owe my papists many thanks for so beating, pressing, and frightening me through the devil’s raging that they have turned me into a fairly good theologian, driving me to a goal I should never have reached” (What Luther Says, Vol. 3, Concordia Publishing House, 1959, p. 1360).