Where is God When I’m Hurting?

I have grown in prayer, not as I have read books about prayer, but books about God. When you see what a person is like, you're either repelled or drawn in. That's all prayer is.

It's just going through life as if God is actually there, like he's your friend and father and cares for you. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. You know, one of the things I've honestly struggled with, and you know this, is reconciling the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament. Oh, you have struggled with this.

Like how can this happen? I mean, there's been times when I've gone through the one-year Bible and I'm like, I don't want to read any more in the Old Testament. It just feels like God's a God of wrath. And Jesus in the New Testament, who said, if you want to see the Father, look at me. He's a loving God. And I'm like, how do these two go together?

Are they really the same God? Well, this is going to be a great conversation today because a lot of people have wrestled with that very same issue. Yeah, and I think we're really going to help them. But you know, before we jump into that, we've got to say this. It's a really critical month for Family Life.

It's December. It's our year-end giving match where if you give, your donation will be doubled because we have generous donors that are going to match your gift up to $1.5 million. That's a gift from God. This is the time to give because of that match.

It will be doubled. Yeah, and I'm believing that you love what we do at Family Life Today and you share it with others, and we can't do that without you joining with us prayerfully and financially. So if you'd like to jump in right now, go to familylifetoday.com or call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY and make your donation, and that will keep this ministry going and thriving and changing your life and others as well. And just as a thank you for your generous giving, we're going to send you, ready?

I'm ready. Two gifts. Two gifts, playing cards, which aren't like play cards. They're conversation starters.

Well, they're both. Yeah, and then we've got a devotional written by our guest today, Dane Ortlund, which is a devotional on the Psalms, 150 different devotions, which will literally make 2022 a great year. So Dane, glad to have you in the studio today. Welcome to Family Life Today. Thank you, guys. Good to talk with you.

You know, we've had two programs talking about your book, Gentle and Lowly, and as a pastor in Chicago area in Naperville and a dad, a husband, five kids, this understanding of God that we talked about for the last couple of programs of Jesus being gentle and lowly. I've been crying, you guys. Yeah.

Several days in a row. Yeah, she wants me to start crying. And I remember when I was reading it and we talked about this, just being really hit, I was going to say softly.

No, it was strongly pushed back like a wave. This is who he is. And so, as we mentioned already, it seems different for a lot of us of the God of the Old Testament, a God of holiness and wrath and judgment in this gentle, lowly Jesus. And Jesus said, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father.

I and the Father are one. So if you want to know what God's like, Jesus is the visible representation. So he's the heart of God, but it doesn't feel like the same God. And you do a great job talking about this in the book. But talk about how do you reconcile those two different views of God?

There's a couple of ways to come at that, Dave. One is what actually won out at the end after the entire Old Testament, God is sending his son to die in our place for our sins. Satisfying his perfect justice.

Yes. And proving his perfect love. So at the end of the day, he didn't say, forget it. I'm done.

You guys are out of luck. He saved us. That's one way to look from a macro perspective. But there's passage after passage that bubbles up as we read through the Old Testament. If we can make it past February in our one year reading plan and through Leviticus. That's why I do the one year Bible, because at least you have a New Testament and a Psalm in there. There you go.

Keeps you afloat. The gentle and lowly heart of Christ. Actually, here's what I've said. If I have to go to only one part of the Bible to talk about what God's heart is, the prophets are perhaps the most blushing, the most effusive place to find it. You're right. No one talked about hell more than Jesus. There in Matthew 11, at the end of chapter 11, saying, I'm gentle and lowly in heart. He's walking around saying, woe to you, Bethsaida. Woe to you, Chorazin, because they didn't repent. But we read in a passage like Exodus 34, which is the, scholars will say, this is the definitive self-revelation of God in the Old Testament.

This is what in John 1, the apostle John alludes to and says, this text got up and walked around on two legs on planet earth. Moses says, show me your glory. And God does not respond, I will make all my glory pass before you. He responds and says, I will make all my goodness pass before you. Apparently, God defines his glory as his goodness. And then he says, the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious. What are the first words out of his mouth? A God merciful and gracious, slow to anger.

Like we grew up with a yellow lab. They're great because they just put up with so much before they nip you. Slow, irreverent analogy, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Keeping steadfast love for thousands to a thousand generations is really what that means. And then the text goes on to say, but who will note by no means, you know, acquit the guilty, but will visit the sins of the fathers on the children and the children's children. So you think, wait a minute, God, are you withdrawing all the good and glory you just said?

The answer is no. He says down to the third and fourth generation, judgment will roll. Down to a thousand generations, steadfast love will roll. And he doesn't mean at generation number 1001, you're done. It's a Hebrew way of saying it will never end.

That's the proportion three or four to 1000 and more. God's judgment, which is true and fearsome. God's abounding love.

That is so beautiful. And I tell you, one of the things I found really interesting in your book is when you comment on Lamentations 3, which I'll read it and just, you know, comment as you did in the book. But it says he does not afflict from his heart or grieve the children of men. In other words, you get into he does not afflict from his heart.

What's that mean? Well, Dave, you and I are going to die one day not having plumbed that. We're going to enjoy that. We're never going to just download that, have that in our back pocket and move on to better other truths.

This is wondrous. Right here in the middle of Lamentations, when basically the entire nation is going into meltdown, it's the worst things could be circumstantially. In the very middle verse of the entire book, it is the exact middle.

And there's a literary point to that. God says he doesn't from his heart afflict or grieve the children of men. Does he afflict or grieve the children of men?

Yes. But he doesn't do it from his heart. He's sovereignly overruling all the good and the hard things that wash into our lives. It's all under his fatherly care. But the hard things aren't from his heart.

What does that mean? Apparently, it's not as if he is chuckling and sort of have a little wry smile on his face, thinking, I'm going to teach them. Our tears elicit his tears. Here's the teaching of the Bible, guys. Because of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, when we are in dismay and distress, Christ himself feels that dismay and distress himself more acutely. So God does not afflict from his heart. And it's so different because we think, well, I'll tell you this.

I thought of this this morning as I was reflecting on the truth out of general lowly. My dad, when I was five, six, seven years old, had girlfriends, was drinking too much. I found out later, didn't even remember this, took me on trips with his mistresses while still married to my mom, ends up divorced. And this is in the early 60s, very few divorces at the time. So I'm now being raised by a single mom. And it's just myself and my little brother.

We moved to another state to basically go live near my mom's parents because she needed help. All that to say, within about six weeks, my little brother dies of leukemia. Wow.

At the end of this tragic year. And I know my dad over years later as he softened up and I had more of a relationship with him in college. I know he always felt like that death was God's punishment for his sin. He articulated it like one time, but I know it was like there.

Wow. Talk about that, because I think a lot of us feel like that's sort of God. We do things wrong and these are the kind of bad things happen to us because that's the heart of God. Well, God couldn't have punished your dad's son for your dad's sin because he had already punished his own son for your dad's sin. All God's divine, ferocious wrath, justly deserved by each one of us, and I'm number one on the list, if we're in Christ, has been fully exhausted.

Not like he got most of it out, but he might have another tantrum. Fully exhausted on the cross of Jesus Christ. Jesus experienced hell and condemnation so that we, though we will die, when we look back at the cross, we see our deserved hell and condemnation back there. If we are not in Christ, if we are not safe in Christ, then our hell and condemnation is out in the future. If we're in Christ, we can look back and say it's behind me because Jesus dealt with it there. I'm never going to face that again.

Hardship, pain, suffering, death, yes, but never hell and condemnation. And you're right, Dave, we deeply, deeply disbelieve that. So we've got to keep telling each other. I think we do have to keep telling each other.

OK, I probably shouldn't bring this up, but this is something we talked about in one of our seminary classes. This is Stump Dane now. Stump? Well, I just like this. I don't think he's stumpable.

I don't either. This is a hard passage of when David says, let's bring the ark into Jerusalem. And Uzzah is carrying the ark and he slips, the ark falls and Uzzah dies. I read that and think, oh, you know, if we make one wrong move, God's going to annihilate us. Well, that is a very solemnizing, sobering passage, isn't it?

And just one or two thoughts. One is we don't know exactly what was going on in Uzzah's heart. That's what our seminary prof said. Apparently, there was some kind of pride or recalcitrance or hard-heartedness or stubbornness or willfulness or something such that, this is the way R.C. Sproul puts it in The Holiness of God, such that Uzzah proudly assumed his hand was less profane than the ground. In other words, why couldn't the ark hit the ground? But here's this sinful man and he says, oh, I'll steady the ark. And he assumed that he was more holy than the ground, something like that. So we don't know what was going on inside of his heart. But the ark that he reached out and touched, there was something there that deeply displeased God, and God made an example of him. Now, okay, that's true.

All right, that's very sobering. Jesus Christ showed up and he said, destroy this temple and in three days I'll build it. He was the temple.

Ephesians 2, the same thing. He's the chief cornerstone. We are living stones being built up into him. And the ark was the forerunner of the tabernacle and then the temple. We are ourselves not only touching that ark and not dying.

We're part of it. We are part of that temple. Immovably, invincibly, we have been swept by grace up into it, into fellowship with God. What the ark was always meant to do, restore Eden. The ark and then the tabernacle, which was just an RV to a home. The tabernacle was a movable temple, then the temple. That was a little miniature Garden of Eden, where fellowship, the profane and the sacred could come together all over again.

Uzzah got it wrong. Let us take note and let us all the more wonder that we've been brought into this very thing of fellowship and presence. Oh, that was actually way better than I've ever had to explain.

I told you he's unstoppable. There you go. I mean, that really was. And that's what I would say to people, too. When we when we're reading scripture and something seems like, oh, that doesn't seem fair, there's usually something deeper behind it. But you can always count on God's love and mercy being there. And you wrote and you've talked about this a little bit as you think about the Old Testament and the punishment.

You actually read I'll read your exact quote. Mercy is natural to him. Punishment is unnatural. Even call it like strange, natural, strange. That is so contradictory to what I read is like it is it seems like punishment is natural. It's like every page it feels like the Old Testament. It isn't right. But it feels that way because it jumps out.

It's almost like media jumps on controversy because it it leaps higher. How is mercy natural punishment unnatural? Not in the sense that God is like he's 100 percent merciful and 85 percent judging or anything like that. We believe in a doctrine called divine simplicity.

Just in one quick sentence. All that means is any attribute that God is, he is 100 percent. He's not like a pie with slices.

And the love slice is a little bigger than the wrath slice. No, every attribute is he's 100 percent. We believe that that's Orthodox theology. We believe that for 2000 years. OK. Now, having said that, how does the Bible talk about God? I want to talk about God in the way the Bible does, not in the categories of philosophical theology. How does the Bible talk about God? This is Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Goodwin both say the Old Testament scriptures speak of punishment being God's strange work. What they mean by that is it's something less natural to him. It's it's something that he has to sort of like you put the water on the when you're making the mac and cheese, you put the water on the stovetop and it takes a little while to boil up.

It's not like the microwave. There's something unnatural in him for him to judge, because what pours out of his own deepest heart most naturally is mercy. We saw it there in Lamentations three. And that's the consistent testimony of scripture. He will not wink at sin. He will judge sin over the impenitent. But for those who humble themselves, who say, help save me, I need help.

I'm a wreck who have the honesty to do that. They will experience what is most natural to God. We think it's unnatural. What is most natural to God, which is the flood like nature of his mercy and embrace. Oh, I like that. Don't you like the flood like nature of his mercy? Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's just again, it's like mind blown. Part of me is thinking of all the sermons I preached over 30 years. Did I articulate that well enough for people to understand the beauty, the softness, the gentleness of their father, who absolutely adores them and they want to run to not run away from in their sin? You can do it right now with our listeners.

Well, I mean, we are. I mean, thank you, Dane, for writing this and talking about this. Here's a thought I had when I was just listening to you. I thought, has this changed your prayer life? Do you pray differently now that you have a different view of who he is? Oh, I have grown in prayer, not as I have read books about prayer, but books about God. I grow in prayer.

I don't need someone to tell me, here's three tips, here's five steps, here's a new strategy. But if I see who he is, I mean, you were talking about my dad earlier, Ann. When you see what a person is like, you're either repelled or drawn in. That's all prayer is. It's just going through life as if God is actually there. Like he's your friend and father and cares for you, not just a force or like a platonic ideal way out there, some abstraction, but a person with a capital P, a person, not a human, but a person that we relate to. So I have so much growth I need in my prayer life. OK, don't hear what I'm not saying, as one of my seminary profs said. But I can pray and enjoy praying if this is who God is. I have felt that. I think as I've gotten older, I run to him.

I think before it was more of a discipline. I need to get this in. It's my vitamin of the day. And here are my prayers.

I'm praying. And now it has become that maybe it's because I see him more clearly of who he is. I mean, I get teary talking about it because he's my best friend. But I also know he's God. He's the king. He's majestic. He's the creator. And yet he loves me.

And I've said this before, Dave. But when we were dating and how that infatuation, the love, the feelings. It's still there, honey.

I know it's still there. But it also comes and goes. And that can be true of our walk with God. But I feel that about the Father, about Jesus. But that's because I've spent so much time now out of my desperation for him, being with him.

You can't be with him that much without being changed by his love. Amen. And just a footnote to that, sister, there is one person in the universe who really understands us. Yes.

Our spouses, they understand us better than any other human. Right. But there are some things where it's like, no, no, this is what I'm saying. You don't see God and Christ is never mystified.

Wait a minute. What's going on inside you? They understand exactly where we are at. And that is powerfully, winsomely drawing us to him that they understand us.

We will never be misunderstood by him. You know, it's so critical, as you know better than anybody, because you wrote the book, for us to understand this proper, clear vision of who God is through Jesus. Because, I mean, I used to preach this.

This is one of my themes. It's not the size of your faith that matters. It's the size of your God. In other words, you can have mustard seed-sized faith. Jesus said that tiny, but if it's in a small God, you need mustard and a huge God.

Well said. And I remember saying to a guy once who was going through something in my church, actually a friend who was going through something, I used this pat answer. Hey, dude, you know this, but let me remind you, Jesus is with you in this.

And you know what he said? That's not comforting. Because that Jesus is pretty disappointed in how I'm responding. I'm like, oh.

So think about that. If you tell somebody God's with them, but their view of God is he's an angry guy or... That's even more crushing. Yeah, right. It's like, I'd rather be alone than with that guy. But when you understand he's gentle and lowly, he's crying with you, he's holding you, he's... Yet all powerful. Oh, it's like, oh, now that's going to get me through this.

And I'm just thinking of our listeners. Like, if you haven't experienced him in that way, continue to run to him. Get to know him. Be in his word. Listen to it on audio.

Download the YouVersion app. There's so many ways to connect to him. But the more you're with him, I think the more we see him and understand his love for us. Dane, thank you. What a joy to talk with you, Anne and Dave.

Thank you. For so many of us, our picture of who God is has been shaped by our relationship with our earthly father or by something we heard in childhood that may or may not have been accurate. What we've been hearing this week, as Dave and Anne Wilson have talked with Dane Ortlund, is that our picture of who God is should be shaped first and foremost by what we see in his son. Jesus, who describes himself as being gentle and lowly.

And when we start to see that this is the God who we serve, the God who has saved us, it changes everything for us. Dane's book, which is called Gentle and Lowly, has been a bestseller. We've got copies of it in our Family Life Today Resource Center. I think there are probably people you know, you may be on this list as well, people who need this book, and especially during the Christmas season, you may want to get several copies to be able to give Dane's book as a gift to others. You can go to our website familylifetoday.com to request your copy, or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY.

Again, the title of the book is Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund. Order it online at familylifetoday.com, or order by calling 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word Today. Now, today is the first day of December, and December is an important month for all of us. It's a significant month for us here at Family Life, and we've got the president of Family Life, David Robbins, here with us today. David, help our listeners understand why December is such a significant month for this ministry.

Forty percent of the donations that come in to help fuel Ministry of Family Life come in during this month. And the reason it's so important is certainly to help us fuel more ministry, but it fuels more ministry to people like Steven and Rachel. They were like many couples in this past 18 months at the end of themselves when they were thinking about their marriage and struggling, and the pressure was beginning to build and become overwhelming in their home. And out of desperation, they decided to reach out to Family Life and go to their first ever weekend to remember Marriage Getaway. And in sharing with us, they were doubting whether or not their marriage could be restored at all.

But as they went, God met them in that place, began to find some peace. And today, Steven and Rachel continue working on their marriage and have shared their newfound strength with friends and neighbors by building community around them and have actually formed an outreach ministry to other marriages. But their amazing transformation and transition into pouring into other marriages came because of generous partners just like you who helped fuel the Ministry of Family Life and minister to them in their great time of need. Well, I think our listeners need to know that when you give, you're helping us reach and equip more people like Steven and Rachel.

More ministry happens as a result. It grows exponentially, and that's why it's so critical that we hear from you during the month of December. As you said, David, this is an important month for us, and the good news is every donation we receive this month is going to be matched dollar for dollar, up to a total of one and a half million dollars, thanks to some generous friends who have put that matching gift fund together for us. So your donation will be matched, and we'll say thank you for your gift by sending you a copy of Dane Ortlund's new devotional book from the Book of Psalms, 150 daily devotions from the Book of Psalms.

The book is called In the Lord I Take Refuge. This is a beautiful hardcover book that we want to send you as a thank you gift when you donate today. We will also send you a deck of playing cards so that as you play a card game on each card, there are some conversation starters to get you talking about meaningful things while you have fun together. Those gifts are our way of saying thank you when you support this ministry here at Year End.

Make an online donation at familylifetoday.com, or call to donate at 1-800-FL-TODAY. And again, we want to say thank you for your support, and pray for us that we'll be able to take full advantage of this matching gift opportunity here during the month of December. And we hope you can join us back tomorrow. How many times do people say to you, How are you doing? And you say, I'm doing OK. And the question is, are you really doing OK?

Do you know what that means? Do you know how to tell how you're doing? Deborah Folletta is going to join us tomorrow to talk about how we're doing and how we can know how we're doing. So I hope you can be with us for that. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We will see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.