As soon as I read these words I knew I had to meditate on this passage today. Yesterday, we were thinking of God as a stronghold in times of trouble and yet here in the very next Psalm we find that God apparently hides Himself in those very times (and the Hebrew is exactly the same here as in Psalm 9:9). What are we to make of this? Surely God must either be a stronghold (a “very present help in trouble” - Ps 46:1) or a God Who hides Himself in days of affliction - how can He be both?
The first thing we have to admire here is the honesty of the Scriptures! If this were a man-made religion based on a book of human authorship, it is highly unlikely that two passages so close together would seemingly contradict each other in this way. So the fact that this occurs actually should increase our confidence in the Bible as a work of divine origin. But is there more we can say on this? If not, we might wonder whether we can trust His Word.
The second thing to note is that (as Cowper put it in the opening verse of the hymn we finished our previous meditation with), “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.” He doesn’t have to explain Himself to us, His creatures, as though He is somehow accountable to us. He never told Job why he went through the affliction that came into his life, or why, in the midst of his troubles, Job felt that God had withdrawn from him, as the quote in our title indicates (Job 23:3). In Romans 9:18-21, Paul imagines someone calling into question God’s purposes in election. His response to such a person is quite strong - “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?”
So we have to do with a God who does as He pleases and works out His purposes according to the pleasure of His own will. But is there more we can say on this? If not, we might wonder about what strange and (to us) inexplicable thing He will do or allow to happen next (like a coronavirus pandemic), and how we could even begin to understand it.
That brings us to the third thing we must note here: we must never approach verses like this in isolation, as though we didn’t have the rest of the Bible to help us understand the hard parts. And we must never approach the Bible without realizing our dependence on the Holy Spirit to open our eyes and help us to see clearly, since our minds and our hearts are still subject to sin and liable to deceive us. In other words, when we think we see a problem in the Word, the first thing we should suspect is that the problem lies with us and not with the Bible!
We can lay a firm foundation from Scripture that will help us approach hard passages like this. For example, we know about God’s character (His Name) - His everlasting love, His grace, mercy, compassion, patience, faithfulness, kindness, goodness etc. We know about His omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence. We know He does not change. We know He is just. We can go on to list all that God has revealed to us of Himself. We find of God that He isn’t safe, but He is most definitely good (as Mr Beaver says of Aslan in “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.”) Then we see Jesus at Calvary, shedding His blood out of love for us, giving up His life so that we might be rescued from the second death. And that is the point where we give ourselves away to Him in utter faith based on His beautiful character. We say with Job, “Though he slay me, I will hope in Him” (Job 13:15) and we trust with Abraham that “The Judge of all the earth will do what is just” (Gen 18:25)
And with that background, we can return again to the text we began with in Psalm 10. If we perceive that God has withdrawn from us, does that mean He actually has gone somewhere else, or is it rather that our sense of His presence has diminished? There are many reasons why this can happen to us:
- We are fickle creatures, subject to changes of mood and situation that mean our awareness of God changes too
- We can quench and grieve the Holy Spirit so that we sense his removal from us to a degree - David prayed in Ps 51 that God wouldn’t take His Spirit away from him
- For His own good purposes, God can (to an extent) remove our comfortable sense of His presence for a season. We may never know why He has done this, but it could be to make us realize our need of Him and to redouble our cries to know Him near
But note this - in none of these situations has any change come over God. Nor has His determination to save us to the uttermost lessened to any degree at all, since we are His children. So He is STILL our stronghold, our best and only defense, our shield and refuge, the lover of our souls at these times - even if we do not feel Him with us in the same way. We can trust His Word, and He knows what He is doing! Christ’s blood is still sprinkled upon us and we have all His promises that cannot be broken to be anchors for our souls. We know that He will bring us to glory, even if there are times when “darkness veils His lovely face” and we need to “rest on His unchanging grace”. I am not sure that Paul (who had once been caught up to the 3rd heaven) felt God’s smile as fully when he was afflicted in Asia and felt intensely burdened, under a sentence of death, despairing of life. How insightful are Cowper’s words in that hymn we quoted yesterday:
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for his grace;
Behind a frowning providence,
He hides a smiling face.
Thankfully, His ability to save and to be our stronghold does not depend in the least on our ability to maintain a felt sense of His smile upon us! A helpful word for us at distressing times like these when He knows what He is doing, seeing the end from the beginning, but we do not!
