In any case, the second stunning case Paul makes is additionally stunning: the redemptive agony God offered Paul to shield him from the ruinous torment of his pride was conveyed to him by "a courier of Satan." Suddenly, we end up in a much more profound piece of the philosophical pool. What's more, given the simplicity with which Paul says this, he unmistakably anticipates that Christians will have the capacity to swim here.
Satan penetrates us with a thistle from God? Truly. Does this inconvenience us? Does it inconvenience us that it didn't inconvenience Paul? Paul wants to qualify or clarify how God can give his kid a redemptive endowment of torment through an insidious means. Why? Since this wonder happens all through the Bible.
Paul knows his Old Testament like the back of his hand, and it has certainties like this woven all through it: "you implied fiendish against me, yet God implied it for good" (Genesis 50:20). Furthermore, he realizes that the most redemptive endowment of agony ever, the demise of Christ the Lord, was given to us through the evilest implies.
Our redemptive thistles likewise might be conveyed by a sinister delegate. In any case, we can know this: it may be one all the more way that God "incapacitates the rulers and specialists and puts them to open disgrace" (Colossians 2:15).
Our God is so intense thus insightful that he can work all things — including our underhandedly conveyed thistles — for our great (Romans 8:28). Trust in this sort of power is the thing that fills our happy, sure happiness while encountering the shortcoming and exhaustion of our pain.