DISAPPOINTMENT
“If we are children we are heirs also: heirs of God, with Christ, if only we suffer with him so as to be glorified with him” (Rom 8:17). Only if we suffer with Christ shall we be made worthy to triumph with him in glory. This puts a high premium on both our suffering and our glorification. Before we look at the reward, let us take first the suffering. One of the greatest of human sufferings is disappointment. Why? Because it demands so much faith and hope. Disappointment is not the same as disillusion. Disappointment is having our hopes crushed; disillusion is having our hopes soured. It is better to be broken than to be bitter.
“When the Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth and how no desire that his heart conceived was ever anything but evil, he regretted that he had made man on the earth and his heart was grieved” (Gn. 6:5-6). This was disappointment. But “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whosoever believes in him may not die but may have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16), so it shows there was no bitterness in the divine disappointment. The flood showed the extent of the disappointment, but sparing the human race through Noah shows the extent of his love. “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the desires of man’s heart are evil from the start; nor will I ever again strike down all living beings as I have done” (Gn. 8:21). God was again disappointed in man at the building of Babel’s tower but he did no more than “confuse the speech of all the world, and it was from that place that he scattered them all over the earth” (Gn. 11:9). Again and again God’s chosen people were a disappointment to the Father: they worshipped false gods; they stoned his prophets; they tired of being led by judges and insisted on having kings; they rebelled against him in the desert in spite of being fed miraculously, and so it went on, but God never ceased to show mercy and give them another chance. He showed them his disappointment but his love was proof against bitterness.
The moral of all this is that if we are made in his image and likeness, we must never let our disappointment in people – people we know or the human race in general – destroy our confidence in the perfectibility of man. God did not take a chance in creating human beings and then decided that, though he has lost on it, he must play his part and stick to the bargain. It is we who are losing all the time by the unspiritual lives we lead but must nevertheless go on believing that there is a likeness to him in all of us somewhere and that inevitably the likeness must reveal itself. To take any other view leads to cynicism and defeatism. The psalmist knows the feeling that man has overreached himself in doing wrong – he calls all men liars and not one of them to be trusted – but he goes on trusting them all the same. Why? Because if we trust in God we must trust in the wisdom which created man.
To despair of humanity, as so many do in a godless century such as our own, is to come perilously near to despairing in God. It assumes that either there cannot be an all-wise Creator or that Christ’s mission has failed. Either divine foreknowledge erred, the sceptic would say, or that divine power and love have not stepped in to put things right. Disgust with oneself is not a bad thing, and disgust for the way in which the world is behaving is hardly to be avoided, but disgust must not be allowed to colour our view of God’s handiwork.
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