More Than You Can Handle: Week 6

Once Upon A Curse STUDY

This Bible Study series accompanies my new book Once Upon a Curse. Death and aloneness, temptation and suffering is not outside our everyday experience, as much as we want to hide and ignore it. This study comes face to face with the ultimate enemy, declared by God, in the curse to the man.

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Suffering is commonly thought of as the greatest evil. Especially a suffering that you cannot escape. A life changing alteration in perception forces you to ask questions you never thought you would have to ask, or even were important. Suffering compels you to seek answers that you may not have previously been prepared to hear. Suffering invites you to peek behind the curtain of unexamined comfort. You can take a look at what is failing, what does not endure, what is not working. You eventually must embrace the reality of this finite life. You can see the reality of the cursed world. And in suffering, you can feel with every sigh, that this is not right. This is not how it should be. This revelation in itself is a gift of truth. The overwhelming lack of control is good awareness of the current state of this world.

Suffering is the unanticipated consequence of a broken world because we were created with the knowledge of what should be. So every time that we feel that aching awe for what is not, those are the times in which the suffering of the curse overtakes. All is laid out bare.

READ Genesis 3:19

What is the ultimate curse on the creation?

Groaning. Suffering. Crying. Longing. For something that was promised. For something that you may not even know how to put your finger upon. An expectation of a perfect reality. A mourning when you must discover it is less than perfect. The whole creation does this, not just sad disappointed people. Because the creation, the trees, rocks, sea, and birds, were not created by God for destruction and decay. God made His world to live forever. God made His people to live forever. Yet God’s people chose death and destruction for themselves and for the earth they walk upon.