Suffering and Patience

Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:17

Baxter is worth hearing on this subject because he had unusual qualifications. He was ill from his early twenties until his death at seventy-six, in continual pain, with a catalogue of complaints he recorded with a physician’s precision. He was expelled at forty-six from the parish he had given his life to, and forbidden ever to return. He was harassed for a quarter of a century, fined, and had his goods and books seized. He buried the wife he loved. He was imprisoned at seventy, after a trial in which the Lord Chief Justice abused him from the bench and would not let his counsel speak. He wrote about affliction as a man reporting on a country he lived in.

What suffering is for

He refused two explanations that were common then and are common now. He would not say that suffering is meaningless — an accident in a world God does not govern. And he would not say that it is always punishment for particular sins, which is the error of Job’s friends and which he had watched destroy people. His position was that God uses affliction purposefully, and that its purposes are several.

And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope. ROMANS 5:3–4

It weans us from the world, which no amount of preaching accomplishes. It exposes what is actually in us, which prosperity conceals. It teaches dependence. It fits a man to comfort others, since no one is much use to the suffering who has not suffered.

Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. 2 CORINTHIANS 1:4

Patience is not passivity

Baxter distinguished patience carefully from resignation, apathy and stoicism. Christian patience is not the suppression of feeling. Scripture’s sufferers complain loudly — the Psalms are full of it, Job says what he thinks, and the Lord Himself asked in Gethsemane for the cup to be removed. Baxter had no patience with a piety that required people to pretend they were untroubled. What patience means is continuing to trust and obey while the trouble lasts. It is a matter of direction rather than of temperature.

Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him. JOB 13:15

He added a practical observation. Most people can bear a great deal if they know it will end. What breaks us is indefiniteness — not knowing how long. And this, he said, is precisely where the doctrine of heaven does its work, because it supplies the one certainty that matters: there is a term, and what lies past it is out of all proportion to what precedes it.

The arithmetic

Paul’s comparison in 2 Corinthians 4 is the passage Baxter returned to most, and he insisted it be read as a sober calculation rather than a pious flourish. Light affliction — from a man who had been flogged five times, stoned, shipwrecked and imprisoned. For a moment — from a man who had endured it for decades. The words are not a denial of the weight; they are a comparison, and the other term of the comparison is an eternal weight of glory. Baxter’s point was that the arithmetic works only if you can see both figures. Which brings the matter back to chapter eleven: what we call impatience is usually a failure of sight.

For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. ROMANS 8:18

When it does not feel like this

An honest note, because chapters on suffering can be written by people who have not suffered and read by people who are. Baxter did not always manage this. His writings from the worst periods contain plenty of distress, complaint and something close to despair. He lost his temper with God, and said so. That should be a relief rather than a disappointment. The doctrine does not require you to feel it working. A believer flat on his back, unable to pray, unable to see any purpose, and merely enduring, is not failing — he is suffering, which is what the doctrine is about.

Nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. HEBREWS 12:11

Afterward. The fruit is not visible during. That is stated in the text, and it is worth remembering when nothing appears to be happening.

Baxter kept his post for fifty years under conditions that would have justified retirement several times over, and produced most of his work while expecting to die. He was not made of different material. He simply kept going, which is generally what patience turns out to consist of.

Before Judge Jeffreys

Baxter’s teaching on patience can be tested against a documented occasion, which is more than most writers on the subject can offer. In May 1685 he was seventy years old, in poor health, and charged with sedition for supposed reflections on the bishops in his Paraphrase on the New Testament. He was tried before Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys, whose conduct on the bench is one of the more notorious episodes in English legal history. Jeffreys abused him throughout. He called him an old rogue who had poisoned the world with his Kidderminster doctrine, mocked his appearance, refused to let his counsel present the defence, and at one point suggested he deserved to be whipped through the city. Baxter’s recorded conduct was to remain quiet, to answer briefly when permitted, and at one point to remark that he was not concerned to answer such language. He was convicted, fined a sum he could not pay, and imprisoned for some twenty-one months.

Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously. 1 PETER 2:23

Three things are worth drawing from it. He did not pretend the treatment was just. He recorded it plainly, and his account is the reason we know what happened. Patience does not require calling wrong right. He did not retaliate, and he had the tongue to have done so devastatingly. A man who had spent forty years in controversy chose, on the one occasion when he was personally attacked before the nation, to say almost nothing. And he went on working. Most of his remaining output, including Dying Thoughts, comes from after this. The injustice did not become the subject of the rest of his life, which is the more usual outcome and the harder thing to avoid.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name what your present trouble might be accomplishing, without pretending you can see it working. 2. Distinguish patience from pretending. You may complain to God; the Psalms do. What matters is that you keep facing Him. 3. If the indefiniteness is what is breaking you, take hold of the one thing that is definite: there is a term, and what lies past it is greater. 4. Use what you have suffered. Find one person in the same trouble and go to them. 5. When you can do nothing but endure, understand that you are not failing. The fruit comes afterward, by the text’s own admission.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have asked for this to be taken away and it has not been taken away, and I do not know how long it will last.

I will not pretend to feel what I do not feel. But I will keep facing You.

Work in this what only You can work — the weaning, the dependence, the usefulness to others that I cannot yet imagine. And if I see nothing of it, let me trust the text that says the fruit comes afterward.

Hold me until it is over. It will be over. Amen.