‘Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings...’ (1 Pet. 4:12–13).
Peter can urge us to rejoice in our sufferings not because he’s a religious masochist but because he knows: Christ is the firstborn, our forerunner, and where He goes, we follow. He is our Head, and like in a birth, the body must follow where the head goes. This is the pathway through suffering to glory.
A new direction of travel
Everyone suffers, gets ill, and grows old, but for the Christian, all of this is changed. For us, none of this is pointless. Born again into Christ’s new humanity, we’ve been taken out of the simple downward slide into death.
That’s the horror for the unbeliever: it’s all downhill. Things are only going to get worse – old age, then death, and then they hope against hope that maybe there’s something more. But for us, we’ve been taken out of that, brought into Christ’s life. We share His direction of travel now.
‘But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.’ (1 Pet. 4:13-14).
A new desire
And Peter’s no hypocrite as he addresses us. In Acts 5, Peter and the apostles were flogged before the Sanhedrin, yet they left ‘rejoicing because they had been counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the name’ – the dear name of Jesus (v. 41).
It wasn’t that the flogging didn’t hurt. It was that their desire to be like Jesus was stronger. There was joy to be found sharing in the sufferings of Christ.
This is worth pressing into. Think of the very first time the suffering of Christ gets spoken of in the Bible: where the Lord says to the serpent, ‘I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.’ (Gen. 3:15).
That, of course, tells us about the offspring, the seed: Christ, the promised Son. But Paul picks up the verse and says it can apply also to Christians: ‘The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet’ (Rom. 16:20). Do you see what Paul has done? He’s saying that we’re brought into Christ bruised and bruising. ‘He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.’
We become united with the Bruised One. Paul speaks here of the special bruising Christ’s people must go through.
The pain we must endure
Where once we were at peace with the god of this world, where once we loved how he blinded us (we loved how he covered us with darkness because it hid our shame), now our eyes have been opened, and we’ve come out from under his dark dominion. Our old master is angry with us.
And so are his offspring – that is, all who still follow the prince of the power of the air. As we turn to love Christ, sometimes friends, family, and outright foes start to portray us as weird, fanatical, a threat. A war has begun. And we feel it in our bones. Sin, which once was so purely sweet to us, has lost its sweetness. It chafes, and we want to be free of what we once loved. Yet we are also under attack, and there are impediments to our progress in Christ.
The world, the flesh, the devil: of course Christians are going to suffer! But look at the counterweight that Paul gives us: ‘The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.’ Yes, we’re brought into Christ bruised. But we are also brought into Christ bruising. Yes, we will get bruised as we follow Christ, but consider what bruising we’ll do in His power and His name!
A new perspective
And that’s the perspective all of Scripture wants to give us: never triumphalistic, but definitely triumphant – even in the day of small things, even in the day of being bruised. Scripture urges us: don’t be naive; do be deeply jubilant. Satan nibbles at our feet, but we crush his head.
As Christians suffer patiently, like Christ; as we are content when all the world is so unsatisfied; as we walk away from the glittering rubbish of the world – we show that all the world does not satisfy; we show how Satan has been stripped of his power. Every time we rejoice in Christ, resist sin, proclaim Him, and show His love, we do something completely unnatural. We show our freedom from the serpent’s chains. We stomp on the old dragon’s head.
Sometimes when we encounter suffering, we set our sights too low. We simply hope to endure. But even under intense affliction, a Christian can do more than cope; a Christian, Peter teaches, can actually profit from suffering. This is only true because Christians are the children of an omnipotent and loving Father. Even our trials are in His kind hands.
