Recently, I have seen God work in diverse ways in people’s lives. For some, He answers amazing prayers for health and healing. For others, He allows the sting of death to take a loved one with little warning. On one hand, I am able to rejoice when life is granted in an amazing way that dumbfounds the medical profession. On the other hand, I grieve with a friend when death shows up unannounced and with little warning.
As children of God, sometimes things like this confound us. “What is faith?” we ask ourselves. We have faith in God when we ask Him to heal. Sometimes He does, and sometimes He doesn’t. At this very moment, there are people in great medical peril I am praying for. Will I rejoice with the family when God performs an amazing act of kindness, or will I mourn with a family if He says, “No?”
What we learn through all this is that we don’t rest our hope in Him based on how He chooses to answer our petitions. This is a hard lesson to learn, especially when we are the ones whom the prayers affect most. The way God answers is not a reflection of how much He loves us or how important we are to Him. Sometimes, as it was with Job, we may never have the answers we are seeking. This is where our faith comes in.
After reading Job in the context of having friends who are dealing with healing and sickness, life and death, some answers become a little more clear to me. But these are not answers to the questions we often seek when we go through painful sufferings. These are not often the answers we seek when the cold grip of death snatches someone from us with no warning.
It is human nature to ask “why” and to try to find meaning in the things we face, but we are often left with more questions and few answers. Sometimes, that can set us on a treadmill of question after question that yields no answers until, out of frustration, we lash out at God and implore Him to explain Himself.
Perhaps we will never know how fortunate we are to have a God who deeply loves and understands we are but dust. He knows our weaknesses and has more patience with us than we have the right to expect of Him. Instead of rebuffing us when we lash out, He seeks to embrace us in His arms to comfort us when we hurt.
But He doesn’t always feel comforting. Sometimes, God feels cold and distant. He feels this way because the pain we are experiencing is acute. In our minds, comfort equates to the end of suffering. When the pain still lingers, we feel little comfort. This is often the source of the angst we have with God.
“The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away,” is a truth that sounds good until we are the ones experiencing the loss. Then, the truth Job speaks seems unfair to us. Why does the Lord take away when He is all-powerful and can choose to give whenever He wishes? And when we ask questions like this, we get on that treadmill that ends up bringing more questions and few answers.
I wish I had answers as I write this. I have friends who have loved ones in ICU at this very moment. I have friends who had a child with extensive brain damage one day and completely healed the next day, confounding all doctors. I am grieving with a friend who lost a spouse unexpectedly and much too early in life.
The world is full of evil people who receive joy and blessing, while good people deal with pain and sorrow. This was Job’s observation. Sometimes, it’s hard to make sense of this in a world where good and evil are governed by an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing God. Perhaps the hardest thing to learn when sorrow strikes is that outcomes are not the measure of life.
What do I mean? Well, as we painfully learn, sometimes healing comes, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes our prayers are answered the way we want, and sometimes they aren’t. These are outcomes. As hard as it is to learn this when we are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, God doesn’t want us to focus on the outcome but on the walk. Regardless of the outcome, it’s all about the walk with Jesus.
This is how Job could respond to his wife’s admonition to curse God and die by saying, “Shall we receive good from God, and not evil?” Job was not focused on the outcome as much as the walk. Yeah, he did struggle with the questions he had while on the walk, but the outcomes didn’t dictate his walk.
While God does sometimes choose to intervene when we pray for deliverance, sometimes He doesn’t. Often, He doesn’t. Sometimes, His grace comes by walking with us rather than altering our circumstances. It’s God’s prerogative to choose how He will respond. But our walk with Him shouldn’t be based on how He, in His sovereignty, chooses to answer us.
This is often painful when we’re in the midst of our deepest suffering. And I am sure it is much easier for me to write these words now than it would be if I were experiencing tremendous suffering while trying to do so. But that’s why we must always focus on our walk with Jesus when things are going great. We need that rock for the times when we are forced to focus on our pain.
The only way we can do that is by choosing Jesus, not because of what He can give us while we are on this earth, but because He can lead us on our pilgrimage to a better home that He has prepared for us. When we do not experience the relief we earnestly seek from Him while we are in deep suffering, we need to see the grace He offers by leading us through the grief. We do not have to walk through it alone.
From a human perspective, I wish I could give answers that promised relief from our pain, but I cannot. But I can promise that if we choose Jesus and commit to our walk with Him when these times of pain and suffering come, we will not have to endure them alone. The only way we will be able to make it through these times is if we don’t focus on outcomes, but instead we focus on our walk.
And we can only focus on our walk if we choose Him. Only then can we say, “Not as I will, but as you will.” Strength from God is not found in the answer to our petitions but in the walk that we have, knowing He is next to us and leading us through it every step of the way.
I know I have dark days ahead. We all do. This is the consequence of living in a fallen world. Some are experiencing their dark days now. My prayers are with you as you walk this painful road. And while I pray for your deliverance, I pray more for your walk. It is in our walk that we find sure footing when the world turns upside down.
Because I do not know how God will answer my prayers when I need Him, I choose Him today because I know He will walk with me however He chooses to answer me in the day of trouble.
I am in the book of 1 Chronicles in my daily Bible reading. Fragments of the book were found in Qumran which makes the dating of this book in the Persian period almost certain.
It was a book to remind the dispersed people of Israel how God had united them into a nation. When you get to the second third of the book, the writer focuses on the rise and reign of King David.
What becomes abundantly clear is how David's rise to power was orchestrated by God alone, and David always knew that. He never presumed on his own strength. He never stopped seeking the Lord's favor. When David was at his height of strength and popularity, his humility always bowed to God.
Sometimes, it's easy for us to lean upon the Lord when we struggle and realize our need for Him. But when God answers and delivers, we sometimes follow the path of Saul and start to live to ourselves and forget the God who brought us to where we are.
The secret to David's longevity as a warrior king was that he rested in the power and strength of the Lord and not in his own power and might.
As we find favor with God and He blesses us, let us remain humble before Him. Whatever the blessings are, let us always remember that they flow from God. Let us remember that the same God who gives can also take away.
In humility, let us honor God. Let us always give praise, glory, and honor to Him. Let us not be people who only seek God in humility when we lack, but be people of humility before God when He also richly blesses.
Listen to the words of David as he remembers who God is when he is at the height of his power and strength:
“Then King David went in and sat before the LORD and said, “Who am I, O LORD God, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far?
And this was a small thing in your eyes, O God. You have also spoken of your servant's house for a great while to come, and have shown me future generations, O LORD God!
And what more can David say to you for honoring your servant? For you know your servant.
For your servant's sake, O LORD, and according to your own heart, you have done all this greatness, in making known all these great things.
There is none like you, O LORD, and there is no God besides you, according to all that we have heard with our ears.” (1 Chronicles 17:16-20 ESV).
What a time to be alive! We can share our faith with people in the entire world. We can confess Jesus to people in lands we will never visit.
We are the first generation where anyone with a computer or cell phone can literally carry out the Great Commission by themselves.
“And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.” (Mark 16:15 ESV).
I am in the book of 1 Chronicles in my daily Bible reading. It spends much time discussing genealogies and the names of men and families in exacting detail.
The temptation is to speed-read through these names and pick up when the action resumes. But if we do that, we may miss an amazing thing God is demonstrating.
Remember, this book was written during the time of the Persian empire. The children of God had been taken captive and removed from their land, just as the Lord said would happen if they quit following Him as their God.
These names and genealogies meant to the people that God was also true to His promise to bring them back from captivity if they repented. God protected the important genealogies that were integral to the Law.
Even when God used nations to bring His judgment upon His people, He still protected the nation's soul by preserving the records needed to establish His worship and civic service.
1 Chronicles demonstrates the Lord's magnificent providence. God is sovereign, even in the most dire circumstances. It must have been overwhelming for the captive people to read the details in 1 Chronicles while still living in captivity and see God's gracious hand upon them. While we may skim through the verses, Jews who were dispersed through the Persian empire must have found great comfort in these details.
What a wonderful God we serve Who is able to preserve amid destruction. And the wonderful thing these dry verses mean to us is when things look bleak, our God can also preserve amid our calamities.
Before God confounded the language of man at Babel, He came down to see what men were doing. This is His response to what He saw:
“And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” (Genesis 11:6 ESV).
I've always wondered what God meant when He said, “Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”
However advanced men were before the flood, or before Babel, the Lord knew that man could grow even beyond where they were.
God took action to destroy the world by water in the days of Noah, and then disperse man in the days of Babel. But since then, man has continued to evolve and grow.
Where has man grown today? Where will we grow tomorrow?
Today, we have walked on the Moon.
We have built an instrument of destruction so powerful that we can instantly destroy a city and millions of people as easily as God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone from heaven.
We have turned the night into day with electric lights we control at will.
We can speak, and our personal assistants, Alexa, Google, and Siri can turn those lights on just from the command of our word.
We travel to the bottom of the seas and scale to the top of the highest mountains.
In less than a day, we can travel the globe.
We can speak to someone on the other side of the earth in real-time while watching them on video.
We can heal people in a day with our medications.
We can take the heart out of a man and replace it with one we have created.
We can create computers that fit into our hands and tap into the knowledge of the ages.
We can send spacecraft out of our solar system and into interstellar space.
The list can go on and on...
Whatever God had in mind in Genesis 11, we can see what man, who is created in the image of God, can be capable of as we evolve and learn.
But despite all these amazing advances, some things never change.
We will never approach the majesty of our Creator.
We will never be self-sufficient to the point where we can direct our own path.
We will never be able to save ourselves, and we will always need a savior.
Sometimes, we can impress ourselves so much that we forget that we are still just dust.
God is eternal, we are mortal.
God is all-wise; we are still foolish compared to Him.
God can do everything, but we are still limited to following the laws He created to govern the universe.
God will never be surprised at how far we evolve, but we are often unimpressed by His sheer holiness and power.
Some things will never change. We will always need Him, no matter how advanced we become.
I am in the book of 2 Chronicles in my daily Bible reading. We read about King Solomon's work to build the temple his father had prepared his whole life to build.
David ensured Solomon had all the material to carry out this great work. We call it the Temple of Solomon because King Solomon executed the building, but David collected the items needed to build it. It was David's inspired plan that Solomon used to build the temple.
Even the location of the temple was tied to King David:
“Then Solomon began to build the house of the LORD in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the LORD had appeared to David his father, at the place that David had appointed, on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.” (2 Chronicles 3:1 ESV).
For good or bad, our children are our legacy. When we are gone, how will our influence on them be seen? Will the things they do and say reflect our great love for God, or will their pursuits and accomplishments give little thought to God?
Let us prepare our children to walk with Jesus so that when we go on to our reward, they will continue the walk we have taught them. This will be our true legacy.
I am in the book of 2 Chronicles in my daily Bible reading. In Chapter 13, we read that Judah goes to war with Israel after the kingdom had split.
While the king of Judah spoke before the battle, the king of Israel sent an ambush behind Judah. But the Lord foiled the attempt of Israel:
“Thus the men of Israel were subdued at that time, and the men of Judah prevailed, because they relied on the LORD, the God of their fathers.” (2 Chronicles 13:18 ESV).
The one and only reason Judah prevailed was because they relied on the Lord. That was it. It wasn't their own power or might that delivered them.
What a lesson for us to remember today. Living in a land that worships the virtue of individualism, sometimes relying on the Lord is hard. We see wisdom and virtue in self-reliance. But this is precisely what God wants to break in us.
Our self-reliance is only a virtue when it is built on the foundation of always relying on the Lord.
Not sometimes.
Not most of the time.
Always.
May we be a people who prevail because we always rely on the Lord.