FAITHFUL ARE THE WOUNDS OF A FRIEND

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Hosea 6:1 NIV “Come, let us return to the LORD. He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; he has injured us but he will bind up our wounds.

It’s on the eve of 31st 2019 and a friend and I are headed to church to cross over the year. I have this nagging thought in my mind that I can’t seem to shake off. We get to church a few minutes past nine, the church is already full but we manage to get a space, it’s not ideal but it’s also not at the overflow section and that works just fine.

The thought again reverberates in my spirit, loud and clear, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend“

The words are familiar, I’ve read them before in the Bible. I know the verse is in Proverbs but I don’t know the specific verse or chapter. Up until today, I’ve never given the verse an in-depth look neither have I come across an exposition on the verse from other sources but the more the verse echoes in my spirit, the more I understand what He is saying to me. I do a quick search on Google to find the exact chapter and verse in Proverbs.

Proverbs 27:6 ESV Faithful are the wounds of a friend, But the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.

During the last quarter of the year, I really felt like I had been operating on autopilot getting on by doing just the bare minimum; wake up, shower, work, home, read the Bible, mumble a short prayer often laced with anxiety and anguish, sleep and wake up to repeat the same cycle.

I found the verse to be somewhat comforting and yet on the other part I still didn’t understand His choice of trials for me and I found myself asking Him for the one hundredth time, “Why Lord, why?”

To which He responded yet again with a firm but reassuring voice, “My wounds are faithful”

We don’t expect our friends even with their human failings to wound us. In fact, in the current times we live in, a friend who purposefully wounds another will be “cancelled”. As sure as the sun sets in the West and rises in the East, I know that our friends will wound us and we will wound them. The other thing I am equally certain about is that there is no friendship that rivals Jesus’s friendship. There is truly not a friend like the lowly Jesus, the One who sticks closer than a brother, the One who paid the price I could not pay, the One who can be trusted with my greatest grief and my deepest joys.

Job 5:18 NIV For he wounds, but he also binds up; he injures, but his hands also heal.

Yet still, I have found that this bosom Friend will sometimes wound me. I have come to accept that suffering is the inevitable portion of our lives. It is during these seasons of wounding that we tend to question His faithfulness and His goodness. Whether we are wounded because of our own sin, or because He wants to produce a particular character in us, or because He wants to test us, we can rest in knowing that even in wounding He is faithful.

You may wonder, why should we trust His wounds? Other than the fact that He is an inherently good God, He is not asking us to do what He hasn’t already perfectly done for us. He led the way when in that garden of Gethsemane when He, despite having no sin, chose to die a humiliating death for us who deserved it.