The promise we mistake for the Gospel

Many years ago, I watched an amazing life lived out by one of the most spectacular Christian women you’d ever meet. Awesome person, fantastic wife, beloved mother, Bible teacher whose reach extended farther than she probably thought it ever would. A modern-day Proverbs 31 woman.

Then, in a coming-out-of-nowhere style, she was diagnosed with cancer. As you might expect with a woman like this, she practiced a very healthy lifestyle, which made the diagnosis even more bewildering.

The church surrounded her, prayers were lifted 24x7 for healing, and she openly demonstrated her faith during everything that came her way. No one (including me) thought a bad outcome would result, even though things appeared to go physically downhill for her.  

Then came the day the doctor told her she didn’t have long to live. She listened to what he said, and, in typical fashion for her, told him that she rejected his prognosis and believed in a God who would deliver her.    

Three days later she was dead.

When I heard about her death, I vividly remember thinking one thing: if she’s not safe in this life, none of us are. And that thought made me very afraid.

Some of you may scold me for a lack of faith in feeling that way, but I’d bet a month’s pay you’ve experienced the same thing at some point. The rug gets pulled out from under you, and the confidence you had of being a child of an omnipotent God, and thus impervious to harm, suddenly hits rock bottom.

Our culture’s mindset doesn’t help with this either. We live in an age obsessed with safety. The highest good, we’re told, is minimizing risk — emotional, financial, physical, social, and psychological. A good life, we’re instructed, is a protected life.

And yet, for all the work we put into that pursuit, we’re mostly not at peace, are we? Even in the church, anxiety disorders are rising, loneliness is widespread, and depression and despair cut across age groups, ideologies, and economic classes. We’ve worked hard to build more external and internal safeguards than any generation before us, and we still feel profoundly unsafe.

Tim Keller describes the feeling that dogs many of us as living with the theme music from Jaws playing 24x7 in our ears while our heads are constantly on a swivel looking for the fin. I know I’ve felt that way too many times.

Those of us who have spent meaningful time in Scripture know that Christianity offers the uncomfortable explanation for all this as never being promised safety in this life, at least not in the way most of us paint that picture in our heads. We know this intellectually, but emotionally and practically, it can be hard to embrace and rest in.

That’s because the promise we mistake for the Gospel is that Christianity exists to make life easier, calmer, and more secure. C’mon, be honest, you think that sometimes, don’t you? I know I do.

When suffering comes — as it inevitably does — our faith gets put on trial and fear mounts. Next comes the guilt we feel when we acknowledge to ourselves, if Christianity is true, why am I afraid?

So, what do we do? Pray harder? Pursue some massive spiritual breakthrough where a strong and unwavering faith is set to “permanent hold,” much like a temperature on our home thermostats?   

One thing that’s helped me over the years when fear strikes is a return to a section in Hebrews 11 that talks about the experiences of the great personalities portrayed in Scripture. In verses 4-35, we’re told about great wins those folks had — as the kind we all want, and let’s admit, expect because we’re a child of God.  

But then comes an eye-opening set of verses that describe events for the same type of people as in the prior verses:

“Others experienced mockings and scourgings, yes, also chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were tempted, they were put to death with the sword; they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated (men of whom the world was not worthy), wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground. And all these, having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised” (vv. 36–39).

The first time these verses lifted me from the fear that comes on every so often was right after my first wife died at a very young age of a rare form of thyroid cancer. She was a lot like the woman described earlier — loved by everyone and yet experienced what the writer of Hebrews talks about with awful things befalling God’s people.

I remember sitting in the darkness of our bedroom, alone, and practically realizing for the first time that no safety net exists in this world, and I felt that, maybe, Christianity isn’t true. If it was, I wouldn’t be sitting here a widower, I thought.

But the writer of Hebrews tells us this isn’t the case, and that was a huge source of comfort delivered to me when I needed it the most.

I realized that if every major character in Scripture was portrayed as walking through life unscathed and taken up to Heaven in a supernatural chariot like Elijah (2 Kings 2:11), then I’d toss my Bible into the nearest trash can because that narrative certainly wouldn’t reflect the kind of life we experience in the here and now.

But that’s not what’s seen in Scripture’s pages.

The Bible shows the exact opposite and doesn’t present God as a cosmic risk manager whose chief concern is our comfort. Instead, it presents Him as a Redeemer who enters a broken world to rescue people through suffering, not around it.

We never read about Jesus telling His followers they would be safe, but instead He says plainly, “In this world you will have trouble” (John 16:33). And we see that the central symbol of the Christian faith is not a shield but a cross.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy every time to acknowledge that Christian hope isn’t rooted in the absence of pain, but in the presence of God within it. But these truths help us to step back, regroup, and admit that suffering can be meaningful — not because pain is good, but because God can redeem it.

Christianity insists that real hope is forged, not protected, and is born in the dark and anchored beyond this life. It does not promise safety — but it does promise redemption. And that promise has proven strong enough to carry martyrs, mourners, and ordinary believers like you and me through the worst the world can offer.

In a culture desperate for security, the Gospel offers something better: a hope that does not collapse when life does. And that may be exactly what we need most.