Our crosses generate virulent anti-God propaganda. Their tongues are sharper than their teeth. “Where is your savior now?”, their tongues taunt us as their teeth mercilessly masticate us into bits and pieces and spit us out. “Despair! Abandon hope! You are alone and forsaken. Nobody is coming to rescue you” (Matthew 27:42 - 46).
While we are nailed alive to our crosses as a live worm is impaled on a sharp hook and no Savior is in sight, it is a struggle to believe that God exists and that he loves us. Friction from our intimate contact with the sour truth challenges the idea that God is our almighty lover. "Isn't it foolish to place our trust in a Savior who doesn't save - a Redeemer who doesn't redeem - a false God who does not rescue us?" Isn't it unwise for a traveler to fly in an aircraft that tends to crash - for a warrior to trust in a weapon that does not work in the exigencies of war? Isn't it unwise for a child of Adam and Eve to rely on an unreliable God?
In the Valley of Tears, life is, indeed, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan). In the Valley of Tears, we stew like pickles in a barrel of toxic brine. In the Valley of Tears, we live like loveless beasts among the ruins of Paradise (See, The Vessel in which we are Baptized).
The sour truth plays rough. It bites. Intimate contact with it is harsh medicine. But, the medicine works. So God prescribes it. Among its salubrious benefits is that it prepares us to keep the gift of paradise when the gift of paradise is delivered to us. We will not fumble the ball as Lucifer did, as the gaggle of angels who followed Lucifer did, as Eve did, and as Adam did. The prodigal son is never going back to the pig sty. Neither will we. Our intimate contact with the sour truth of the Valley of Tears guarantees that our grip on the gift of paradise will be an iron grip. The gift of paradise will not slip through our fingers. Moreover, the medicine defangs the serpent. It drains the serpent’s lies of their power to deceive. The sour truth teaches us that the serpent’s testimony is a lie. We do not become gods, without God, in the Valley of Tears (Genesis 3:5). The sour truth reduces the serpent’s credibility to zero (John 8:44) and raises God’s through the roof. God had told us the truth (Genesis 3:3).
The medicine, however, has a deleterious side effect. It hides the sweetness of paradise from us.
To neutralize the the serpent’s anti-God propaganda, Jesus commandeered a cross - the instrument of our woe - and re-purposed it to offer us a contradiction. The testimony that Jesus offered us on the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection - in a demonstration of divinity - tells us that God is head over heals in love with us. His cross testifies to a loving God. Our crosses testify to a loveless God. We are at a standoff. The evidence conflicts. How do we resolve the conflict in the evidence? What breaks the tie? As Adam and Eve did, we conduct our own investigation. Like Jacob, we wrestle with God in an attempt to reconcile the conflicting evidence. We solve the problem of evil. We figure out the truth for ourselves.
P.S. We want God to extricate us from the bitterness of the Valley of Tears or eliminate the bitterness. God, however, has a different plan. He wants us to dilute the bitterness of the Valley of Tears by pouring into it the sweetness of love. There is a difference of opinions. His prevails.
