Taking the Spoils

After a long, bitter year, filled with such inconsolable sorrow that I felt I may drown in my tears over the separation of my son and his wife, I found myself once again faced with the holidays and feeling the pain of so many losses. I cried out to Jesus that I felt I was not recovering from this loss as I had with the loss of John. Or, with the other losses I have experienced since 2000, beginning with my Dad's cancer and death, then two years later the death of my niece Jennifer, then two years later with Adam’s divorce and a few months after that the discovery of John’s dementia, and then four years after that, John’s death. With each of those losses, I seemed to grow into Jesus through it. With this loss only one and a half years after John's death, I was growing away from Him, my feelings were hurt; I just didn’t want to hurt anymore and I no longer cared about anything.


A few days ago, on December 10, 2010, I wrote the following:


“I have not taken the spoils from this trial. I have wasted this pain. I have not plundered the enemy. I haven’t written of it or learned from it, nor poured out of it into the lives of others hurting in the same way.”


I wrote this after re-reading from my book, and after writing of what the publisher had said to me when he read the manuscript: “Thank you for not wasting your pain.”


Beth Moore speaks of the children of Israel coming out from Egypt and the instruction from God to plunder the Egyptians; take all of the gold, silver and valuables of the Egyptians with them when they escaped. Taking plunder from the years of suffering the Egyptians had inflicted upon them was His way of giving them their reward for the suffering. It can be seen in every war in the Bible—plunder the enemy. God later asked the children of Israel to bring that same plunder and offer it for the building of the tabernacle. They were to give it all back to Him. And He used it in the construction of the most holy place in the tabernacle. (By contrast, they had also used some of this plunder to make a golden calf to worship before He built the tabernacle.)


When we suffer through some difficult and painful trial in our lives, God will take it all and sort the precious from the vile and we are to take this plunder—the precious things He taught us about Himself in the midst of the suffering—and bring it out with us when He delivers us from the bondage of our time in Egypt. Egypt is not simply a representation of our lives of sin; it is a representation of our lives in bondage to some difficult trial or time of suffering. When He brings us out of our Egypt and we bring out the plunder, He will then take those spoils of victory and use it to build into His tabernacle where He dwells. What is His tabernacle today? It is His body of believers—the building of the temple, made up of His living stones—us. If we keep the precious things to ourselves, we will miss out on the very purpose of our time of suffering—we will waste it. But, when we bring it to that place where He is building the most holy place in His tabernacle, and allow Him to take those painful experiences to build into the life of some bedraggled pilgrim who is suffering along the way, to offer them hope and comfort and encouragement, then the suffering will not be wasted; it will be poured like living water into another life for the glory of God.


Many of us prefer to hide our personal Egypt away and “handle it” without letting on that we are also poor and needy and desperate believers. We do this, I think, because we are taught to keep up that appearance that everything is good—after all, we are Christians and we are expected to live in victory, peace and rest. Or, we do it because we are too proud to let others see what a mess we really are; that we don’t really “have it all together.” Others invite everyone into the process, exposing the underside of the abundant life—the underside where the cost of the abundant life is exposed, where everything is not good, and doesn’t feel good. Hopefully as this pilgrim invites everyone along to witness their failings of faith, their struggles through the process, there will be some poor soul who has felt ashamed that their faith was not as great as those who never seem to suffer emotional pain, whose lives seem to never drown under waves of sorrow, or who never struggle with their faith along the way. Hopefully these struggling believers will be nourished by this underside view of a believer’s life and urged along into the top side of the abundant life—where the victory is obvious.


When I wrote that I had not taken the spoils of this trial and plundered the enemy, I wrote out of utter defeat because I wasn't recovering from it, but from that defeat, God seemed to be bringing me out into a place where He would begin the process of building the pain into the tabernacle. I felt the first glimmer of peace and hope that I have felt in a long while.


This morning, reading from Streams in the Desert, after hearing this truth from Jesus, I was amazed to see the affirmation from Jesus that He is up to something again in my life:

In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loves us (Romans 8:37).

"… He wants us to be ‘more than conquerors,’ turning storm clouds into chariots of victory. It is obvious when an army becomes ‘more than conquerors,’ for it drives its enemies from the battlefield and confiscates their food and supplies. This is exactly what this Scripture passage means. There are spoils to be taken!


Dear believer, after experiencing the terrible valley of suffering, did you depart with the spoils? When you were struck with an injury and you thought you had lost everything, did you trust in God to the point that you came out richer than you were before? Being ‘more than [a] conqueror’ means taking the spoils from the enemy and appropriating them for yourself. What your enemy had planned to use for your defeat, you can confiscate for your own use."


I am beginning to understand why God uses illustrations from war and battlefields so often in the Bible. War is not a good thing—it is bloody, it leaves wounded lying in pools of blood, it ravages the landscape and ravages the landscape of lives. It is not pretty to look at; we cannot paint war in rosy pictures of positive thinking. The point is not to deny that a war is going on, but in the war, to see the end result. Someone has to win and someone has to lose the war. I don’t know where the paths of 2011will take me, but I know Who is taking me and because He is more than a conqueror, I will also be more than a conqueror in Him, even if I sometimes stumble and falter along the way.


“Now thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and through us diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place” (2 Cor. 2:14).


Thanks to every soldier on the battlefield who, though wounded and bleeding themselves, came back to help me up.