As believers, our portion is not in this life. Our portion is an inheritance in Heaven that will last forever. We may wonder why God has
ordered and ordained things in His creation the way He has, and we may very much wish that He had done things differently. However, the ways and wisdom of God are beyond man’s understanding, as the Bible teaches us in passages such as Romans 11:33, Ecclesiastes 8:16-17, and Ecclesiastes 11:5.
Since God in His wisdom has ordained that we must share in Christ’s sufferings now, during our present lives, in order that we may also share in His glory in Heaven (John 12:24-26, Romans 8:17), we as God’s people may well find ourselves among those who are poor, who hunger, and who weep now (Luke 6:20-21). We can expect that we will be hated, rejected and excluded by those of the world who do not know God.
We could also expect that our lives may be more characterized by having received our “bad things”, rather than the many “good things” received by the rich man in Jesus’ parable (Luke 16:25). When we consider the life of the rich man and the many material blessings he enjoyed in his life, let us also consider Psalm 17 where David prayed:
…Deliver my soul from the wicked with Your sword, From men with Your hand, O Lord,
From men of the world, whose portion is in this life,
And whose belly You fill with Your treasure… (Psalm 17:13-14).
We as believers are not among those whose portion and reward are in this life. Rather, we are among those who will weep and mourn in this life, while those who belong to the world will rejoice, as Jesus taught us in John 16:20-22. Now is our time of mourning as we share in the sufferings of Christ, but the day is coming for every believer when we will see Him face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12), and then no one will ever take away our joy again. At that time, we will fully understand what God was accomplishing through all of the sufferings we endured. Until that day, God requires of us that we walk by faith, and not by the sight of that which can be seen and fully understood (2 Corinthians 5:7).