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And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.
-Mark 1:11-12

God loves you and has a difficult plan for your life.
That message isn't mentioned in tracts or best-selling books. It isn't proclaimed in praise choruses or PowerPoint sermons. We've heard plenty about the god-of-the-wonderful-plan and the god-of-possibility-thinking. Recently we've been told to follow Our Bliss, which is another god disguised as the true God. And in every age, lots of people follow the god-who-will-do-well-by-me-if-I-do-well-by-him.

But the God who plans to make our lives difficult? And if he really loves us, he makes our lives really difficult? Yet according to the Gospels, especially Mark, this seems to be "the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ" (Mark 1:1).

The voice ripped open the heavens to say, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased" (Mark 1:11). It was as if he could hardly wait to visit a blessing on his Son. And then something heavenly settled on that tender frame. It looked like a dove-maybe like the dove that let Noah know that the drowned planet was getting a fresh start. It was like the Spirit who hovered over the original creation, as though something new, fresh, and vibrant was about to begin.

On top of that, Mark says that the words spoken to Jesus were very personal, very intimate. The Father speaks directly, perhaps affectionately, to his Son: "You are my beloved."

Beloved!

"With you I am well pleased."

Well pleased.

Again we hear echoes of the voice that looked over the splendor of the new creation and, on the bright dawn of the seventh day, pronounced, "It is very good" (Genesis 1:30).

Mark seems to be saying that Jesus is the Beloved, upon whom heaven is showering blessing upon blessing, before whom the future spreads out in unimaginable possibility. Is this not how the spiritual life begins for many of us?

We are baptized into the spiritual dimension. We discover God for the first time, or we accept Jesus as our personal savior, or we are confirmed in the church. And for weeks, months, or even years, it's as if the heavens open up and the Spirit descends upon us. We relish Bible reading. Prayer is a continual joy. We gain deep insights into spiritual matters. And we actually enjoy going to church! In sermon and song and in the depths of our souls we hear and we feel that we are loved, treasured, God's own-beloved!

In the summer of 1965, my mother knelt before our black-and-white television, and following the prayer led by the image of Billy Graham flickering on the screen, she accepted Jesus into her life. My mother was not an even-keeled person. She was either up or down, and most of her life she was down: verbal abuse (and maybe worse) by parents and relatives, wild teenage years, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, one child aborted, another given up for adoption, two failed marriages, and eventually a long bout with alcoholism.

But after becoming a Christian, my mother knew up like she had never known up before. The joy of her salvation was unmistakable. Irritating to others sometimes, to be sure, but it was often contagious.

That's the other thing about my mother: when she was smitten with some new interest, everyone was cajoled into being smitten too. In this case, the "we" was my twelve-year-old brother, Steven, thirteen-year-old me, and my twenty-something cousin Judy, who was living with us at the time. (My even-keeled father was the exception; he'd gotten used to Mom's enthusiasms and had learned to ignore most of them.) Over the next few months, she dragged us to the local Evangelical Free Church for Sunday morning worship. And Sunday evening worship. And Wednesday evening prayer meetings-unless we happened to be at church already for a week-long missions conference or revival.

On our spare nights, Mom gathered us around the dinner table for Bible study and prayer. (For at least an hour or two. Every night. For four months.) Enveloped by both my mother's cigarette smoke and the Holy Spirit, we argued about passages from the Gospel of John, wondered aloud about spiritual matters, and prayed-and then basked in many answers to prayer.

One of the astounding miracles of those months was this: to this day I do not recall ever feeling resentful, put upon, or rebellious-and I was thirteen at the time! What's with that?

Well, it was our baptism into things spiritual, and like Jesus coming out of the water, it was as if heaven was ripped open for the sole purpose of showering blessing upon blessing on us. God seemed to have nothing but a wonderful plan for us. We knew, without a doubt, that we were beloved.

Into the wilderness
Most Bible versions put a visual break-an extra space or new
heading-after Jesus' baptism. As a result, we don't usually connect the baptism with what comes next. But there is no break in the ancient manuscripts. Immediately after the glorious baptism comes this: "And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness" (Mark 1:12).

This is the same Spirit who just a moment earlier was the visible image of the Father's love, sent by the Father to show Jesus he is beloved, pleasing, a splendor to behold, symbolizing the pristine beginning of something wonderfully new. Now this Spirit drives the beloved Son into the desert. Literally, in the Greek in which this was written, Jesus is "cast out" from the warmth of home and friends, from the comforts of town and village. He is even denied moral and spiritual support-the Torah, the synagogue, the wisdom of the town elders, even, it seems, the comfort of the heavenly Father's presence. Jesus is driven into the wilderness, deserted by love, to face a hostile adversary alone.

And not just any adversary, but the most powerful and sinister of enemies. Mark's version of Jesus' temptation doesn't tell us much about the strategy of this Evil One as do Matthew and Luke. For Mark it is enough to describe his fearsome incarnation: if the Spirit comes to Jesus in the form of a dove, satanic temptation comes to him in the form of wild beasts.

This temptation was severe-forty days and forty nights of fasting, a thorough and complete period of rigorous self-denial. On top of that, there were those beasts. But what exactly were they? They could have been physical-boars, snakes, or whatever. But it could be that the beasts were not merely outside of Jesus' body but also inside Jesus' head, like the experience of Antony of the Desert.

Antony was a young Egyptian Christian who, upon hearing the Scripture about forsaking wealth and family to follow Christ, did just that. Sometime around AD 285 he sold his possessions, put his sister into the care of friends, and walked out into the desert to pray and meditate to learn the spiritual life.

Athanasius, Antony's biographer, describes not only his triumphs, but also his most severe temptations. In one series of hallucinations, it seems that Antony's sanity is on the line:

"The demons were changed into forms of beasts and reptiles. The place was immediately filled with the appearance of lions, bears, leopards, bulls, and serpents, asps, scorpions, and wolves, and each of these moved in accordance with its form. The lion roared, wanting to spring at him; the bull seemed intent on goring; the creeping snake did not quite reach him; the onrushing wolf made straight for him-and altogether the sounds of all the creatures that appeared were terrible, and their ragings were fierce."

Don't many of our temptations take such forms? Do we sometimes hear the roar of condemnation for past sins, feel gored by remorse, and sense hope itself slip away because of the terrible and fierce ragings within? Indeed, if Jesus was tempted in every way like us, he was surely tempted by wild beasts just as fierce.

Mark seems to be saying something startling in his account: God so loved his Son that he sent him into a kind of hell.

God did this to Jesus, his beloved?
The mind reels. A love that casts out? A love that withdraws all loving presence? A love that drives us to the limits of sanity?

For most of us most of the time, life is glorious and good. It is punctuated with births and baptisms, with graduations and weddings, with falling in love and sexual ecstasy. We know our fair share of acing finals and getting promotions. We relish deep roast coffee in the morning and a rib roast dinner at night, sweet success in the marketplace and sweet fellowship in the home. And this is not to mention spiritual blessings that shower upon us after conversion, a life-changing retreat, or a special season of prayer.

But then come the interruptions to joy.

The years following my family's blissful conversion-well, let's just say it was sometimes hard to discern God's wonderful plan. We wandered aimlessly from church to church because, said my mother, each one was full of hypocrites. Steven drifted into drug abuse. My parents divorced, then got together, then had affairs, and then, just when they were beginning to get it together, my mother had a heart attack and died at age fifty-seven. In the meantime, I battled doubts about God's existence and the value of my marriage and endured a low-grade depression for years. I won't bore you with more details.

What I've noticed is that this pattern is not an accident. Sometimes God drives us into trials and tribulations, as he did with Jesus. Sometimes he merely allows evil days to overshadow us. In either case, we move from spiritual bliss to moments of misery by God's providence.

We are desperate to spare God from any blame: "What kind of God would let such things happen on his watch?" Well, certainly not the god-of-the-twenty-first-century. He is a kind, benevolent being who knows nothing of discipline, character, or tough love. He's a softy who sheds tears at our suffering and tries to give us brief moments of comfort and courage, but in the end is powerless to do anything else.

This, in my view, is a pretty worthless god-a passive, impotent deity who helplessly watches his creation fall apart before his eyes. Unfortunately, this god is often presented as the deity of the Christian faith, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Fortunately, a reading of the Bible shows this to be a lie. This passage in the Gospel of Mark (1:9-13) is but one example that God is anything but impotent, anything but passive, and anything but a softy.

He is instead a God who is in control of history and is in control of our lives. Indeed, he is gentle and merciful and kind. But he is also strong to save. And he loves us so much he refused to pamper us.

It is not an accident that right after Mark notes that the angels minister to Jesus (Mark 1:13), he goes forth into Galilee preaching, teaching, and healing. In other words, by God's design, Jesus' misery prepared him for his ministry. The writer of Hebrews puts it this way: "Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested" (Hebrews 2:18). Paul talks about this in his second letter to the Corinthian church: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction" (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).

Suffering is our preparation for ministry in a world of suffering-all manner of suffering: from the trivial irritations of daily life to paralyzing accidents, from family squabbles to church splits, from the ravages of sexual slavery to the countless deaths of innocents at the hands of cruel dictators. This is not a world for shallow people with soft character. It needs tested, toughened disciples who are prepared, like their Lord, to descend into hell to redeem the lost.

To be sure, some suffering remains an unfathomable mystery of pain. Still, many of the difficulties that God sometimes directs and sometimes permits in our lives make some sense when seen in this redemptive light. And such suffering is about more than character. God's got the whole world in his mind, and he is looking for people who are keeping that world foremost in their minds as well.

Often when I present this line of thought to friends, when I emphasize what suffering does for us and others, someone will invariably joke, "Ah yes, but who really wants to grow in character and love?" We all chuckle, but we are only relieving the tension of having just recognized again the selfishness that grips us.

Certainly some suffering cannot he avoided, but when I have a choice in the matter, I invariably take the easy way out. Take something trivial. Gluttony is a sin by which I'm regularly tempted-not mere overeating, but overeating as a way to numb stress and anxiety. It's a common habit in our culture precisely because it works, at least in the short run. When I'm anxious about some matter, I seek out food and drink, among other pleasurable activities, to distract me from my pain.

A wiser and harder course is to think and pray about the pain, seeking to understand myself better and putting my life again into the hands of God's loving care. But that requires my spending time in the pain to experience it, to endure it. And that I'm usually not willing to do. So I run from it, even though living through it will help me grow up in Christ and eventually can be used in some way to help others.

If I'm unable to live faithfully in this minor suffering, what am I going to do when something bigger overwhelms me? I'll probably do what most of us do: I'll whine and complain about the injustice of life or the cruelty of God. This despite the consistent witness of Scripture that God's plan for us is a difficult one and that redemption-personal, social, and spiritual-does not happen without suffering.

Paul had the deeper perspective: "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death" (Philippians 3:10). I love that first part: to know the power of Christ's resurrection. But how casually I ignore the truth that I can never know Christ's life and power unless I come also to know his sufferings and death.

This is but one of the ways the untamable love of God surprises us. Difficulties and sufferings are God's form of hazing. Sometimes it gets so bad, we think he is cruel. But he's only working to fashion men and women who will keep their cool when things go horribly wrong, people prepared to dash into burning rooms to rescue those about to be engulfed in flames.

Mark Galli is the managing editor of Christianity Today. A former Presbyterian minister, he is the author or coauthor of several books, including 131 Christians Everyone Should Know and Francis of Assisi and His World. This chapter is excerpted from his most recent book, Jesus Mean and Wild, � 2006, Baker Books. Used with permission.

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Trials, tribulations, and the love of God By Mark Galli

Trials, tribulations, and the love of God
By Mark Galli