Where was Jesus when you were suffering?

Christians have a lot to say about suffering. We say our own pain sanctifies us, it lets us share in Jesus’ suffering, it gives us opportunities to grow and to trust God more fully. All true things. And most of that feels great when we are not immersed in a deeply painful experience, or lying in the dark at night with a mind full of fearful imaginings, or remembering traumatic moments when we were alone and helpless.

We all find ourselves there from time to time. Maybe, like me, you have been afraid to go to bed recently lest you start thinking about scary headlines or running through house fire scenarios in your head. Maybe you’ve been wrestling too, with the fear that God is absent when things are going terribly wrong. Maybe all your usual mantras about deliverance and strength and hope have been feeling kind of hollow, with the way our timeline seems to keep multiplying worse and worse outcomes.

I’ve been there, in that fearful and confusing place, off and on at various points in my life, and I keep wishing I could just be satisfied with a single answer and have peace. But I’m not, and so I ask God for help.

Help to understand, or at least to accept that I don’t. Help to see Him more clearly. And it occurred to me a few weeks ago that maybe I’ve been seeing things backwards.

The Bible says Jesus’ sacrifice was “once for all.” We generally take that to mean Jesus died once, in the middle of time, and his sacrifice and resurrection stretches forward and backward to the beginning and end of time. It reaches from that single point to redeem your life and all its pain. So your suffering (part of the future of Jesus’ time) was covered in advance, almost from a distance.

I’m not fully satisfied by that. I know my life was redeemed by Jesus’ death and resurrection. But that event feels pretty remote when I am in the midst of trials. I’m in pain now, and it seems to me that when Jesus was on earth, he looked into a future where I would suffer, and he saw me in moments of pain and vulnerability, and passively let it happen because he had already done the work to redeem it.

But consider this: Jesus died once, for all.

Before He was here, in the flesh, Jesus was in Heaven with God. Coexisting, co-creating, co-redeeming. And that place, where God exists in unity with himself, is not bound by the human experience of linear time. There, on His plane, He sees the vast arc of reality in its entirety. Nothing on that timeline lands outside of His present.

You may have suffered greatly in your past, a past that seems so completely disconnected from the redemptive work Jesus did two thousand years ago. You may, like me, fear a future in which God sits by the sidelines, not intervening, while you face evil and are overwhelmed. But listen.

God contains all your moments. Not one of them—past, present, or future—is unknown to him. He knew your days, he saw your suffering contained in the pinprick of your life, and he responded. His response to your suffering was, is, always has been, the cross. Not only is he here with you, giving strength and comfort through his Holy Spirit, He is there, on the cross two thousand years ago.

Bearing the death of your loved ones.

Shouldering your sexual assault.

Bowed by the weight of your loneliness, depression, suicidal thoughts, chronic illness.

Beaten and broken. Exhausted.

And He is there, three days later, rising in power, alive. Conquering. Healing. Empowering.

What was that thing Paul said? Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.

Neither trouble, nor hardship, persecution or famine or nakedness, danger or sword.

We walk in the conviction that neither death nor life, angels nor demons, nor the present, nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation—not even time itself—shall be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Jesus Christ our Lord.

He is not bound. He is not silent, he is not passive. Jesus stretches out his hands across all barriers to reach and redeem you. More than that, he transcends, nullifies those barriers.

You think Jesus came to save you before He knew your story. In the sense of his humanity, that may be true. But Jesus, the Word of God, knows your story from before time began, and he responded by laying his life down, bowing to the cruelty of the cross.

Who can know the depth of suffering he encountered there, as he died? But I know this: no one can do, or ever has done, more than Jesus did in order to save us. The power that cleansed the leper is the same power that walked into death’s jaws and removed its teeth.

When you were hurt and abused, he was not passively standing in a corner, watching. He wasn’t sitting next to you, silent and resigned. He was, and is, and will be, hastening to rescue you. Running toward the cross. Immersing Himself in your suffering, taking it on himself, and reversing it by His resurrection.