God is the God of great mercy and He brings great salvation. But it should not be concluded from this that the God of the Bible is a soft God. He is the Lord of Heaven and earth, and though He is altogether good, He is not what we would call well-behaved. The universe is full of angles and edges, and hard things.
The mercy and grace that we declare presupposes these hard things, and it presupposes that our God is the God of these hard things. His purposes are good, and the end of the story is good. But the story itself is not an endless chain of buttercups and daisies.
When we seek comfort for our bruises, we cannot get anywhere by pretending that the bruises are something else. God is the God of hard edges. He wields a knife, but because we know the story, we know that He is a surgeon, and not some vicious attacker. But the knife of the surgeon and the knife of the attacker can be equally sharp—the difference is a difference of intent.
The message today is on dealing with discouragement, and we will be considering how our God is the God of encouragement. But He is also God over that which we need to be encouraged in. Do not, for the sake of making God more palatable, pretend to Yourself that when the troubles first came to you, that God was a little bit too far off to help, but He could see, and He was saying, “Oh, dear, oh, dear.” No – our God is in Heaven, and He does as He pleases.