God’s Faithfulness (Part 2 of 2)

You've probably heard somebody say, God is good all the time.

But what happens when life really is tough? Well today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains the importance of relying on what we know about God's faithfulness, particularly when trouble strikes. Our study picks up in the book of Lamentations, chapter 3. The kind of message that usually goes along with the faithfulness of God is a message that is not really true to the Bible, and is definitely not true to human life. And it doesn't actually work well with people who are able to identify with language that says I am bereft of peace, and I have forgotten what happiness is, and I don't think I'm going to be able to make it through another day. They don't need a message about, Jesus puts a smile on your face that even the dentist can't erase. They need to find out if there is reality in this theology, if there is substance in this thing.

Is there anybody here who understands? So for example, when you go amongst the Dalits of northern India, they're the lowest of the untouchable class of northern India, you don't want to go in there the way crazy people do from North America, with a gate-caval train of Mercedes-Benzs and drive them around Delhi to let them know that here is Christianity, has come to Delhi, look, if you embrace Jesus, you'll be successful like us, and you will have all of these things. How does that play to somebody who is an untouchable in the street?

It doesn't play at all. But if you tell them that Jesus Christ was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and he was one from whom people hid their faces, he was despised, and people did not esteem him, now the untouchables of northern India are saying, I would like to meet this fellow. I'd like to know who this man is. You see, he's not the high school quarterback.

He's not a cheerleader. We're at the end of about 50 or 100 years of American approach to Christianity that says, we're going to be able to do this if we just bring the CEO, if we just bring the cheerleader, if we just bring this guy and the next guy and the next guy, and we show all this stuff to these people. Well, how's it going?

No. We're going to have to do a far better job in developing a theology of suffering. A theology of suffering.

So that we can articulate to people that the story of the Bible is the good, the bad, the new, the perfect. God made it good, sin brought in the bad, in Jesus it becomes new, but only ultimately then will it become perfect. But we still live with sin. We still live with sadness. We still live with disappointment.

We still live with these things. And to say that we don't is to be untruthful, is to be unfaithful, because the faithfulness of God—and this is what I'm trying to press home to you—the faithfulness of God is set within this context. So you go through all of that, the gravel, the wasting, and everything else, and then you just say, well, let's just pause for a minute, does anyone have a song they would like to sing? And someone says, yes, why don't we sing great is thy faithfulness? The people go on, what are you talking about great is thy faithfulness? There's everybody standing up in Auschwitz in the middle of all that devastation saying, why don't we all just hold hands together and sing great is thy faithfulness? But in actual fact, we could.

And in actual fact, we should. And it is in that context that the people are then standing to say, great is thy faithfulness. Because what the message is, in simple terms, is this—life is hard, God is good.

Life is hard, God is good. Now notice the transition. How do you get to verse 22 from verse 18? By going through verses 19, 20, and 21, obviously. All right? He says, Remember my afflictions and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall?

My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. So he says, if I'm going to continue just to focus on this, I'm going to be a problem to myself and everybody else. Now, the answer is not to deny the reality of it, you see? It's not really as bad as you think. It's not really that bad.

No, no, it's not that bad. Look, I got you a balloon. Look, it has a verse on it. Look, it's a nice balloon.

Look here. Focus on the good things. Tomorrow will be your best life now.

Every day is a Friday. It's fantastic. Don't worry about anything. God doesn't want you to be unhappy.

Just go with the thing. It's fine. That's nobody's saying. No, he's saying all of this is reality. This is it.

People are eating their children. The gates are gone. The law is gone. The vision is gone.

The kings are gone. I am walled in in deep darkness. I am in the bleakness of this experience.

I am living in a place with no lights on at all. But this I call to mind. But this I call to mind.

What is he doing? He's not saying this isn't a reality, and I can cover it over by some other kind of reality. No, he's saying this is a reality, but this I call to mind.

In other words, I'm going to bring all that I know of God to bear upon all that I know of my circumstances. Because in the transition that gets us to verse 22, nothing has actually changed. It's just as bleak as it was before. Nothing looked hopeful. Nothing looked possible. Nothing looked worthwhile.

Nothing looked comforting. You see the guy that wrote Rose Garden, passed away in the last few days. Forget his name now, but you remember the song, I beg your pardon, I never promise you a rose garden.

Along with the sunshine, there's got to be a little rain sometimes. If you read the piece in the Wall Street on the guy, what was most telling to me was it says that his brother, who was a drummer, committed suicide in 1971, and this songwriter really dropped into obscurity since then. It's kind of like it was a sort of funny little country song recorded by a girl called Lynn Anderson, but the pathos of it ran clearly much deeper. The songwriter's recognizing this whole thing is not all moons and dunes and ferris wheels of the dizzy dancing way it feels when every fairy tale comes real. This life he's saying to himself isn't sending the clowns here.

This I call to mind. In other words, it's what the person knows about God that must be brought to bear upon what the person knows about life. Admittedly, this is not the totality of life. This is a period of life. This is an experience of life. But what he's saying is that when I encounter these things, then I need to bring the knowledge of God, who God is, his character, to bear upon my circumstances. If you like, what he's doing is he's flying the instruments when you fly, especially back east.

You have so many nice days out here, you don't get so much of it. But often when you fly back east, within 800 feet, you're enveloped in cloud, and sometimes the cloud level is so deep that you may never get out of it, even if you fly at 29 or 31 or 32,000 feet. So you are entirely engulfed in cloud the whole way. And so you hope desperately that the pilot or the co-pilot are not relying on looking out of the window, because all they can see if they look out of the window is that which would jeopardize the safety of themselves and everybody else. Because how would you be able to maintain any kind of equilibrium? How would you know what up was and what down was?

How would you know where you were spatially in this vast fog? The answer is you fly the instruments. And the Christian life is actually about flying the instruments. It's not ultimately about whether we're able to pump up our feelings. It's about whether we're prepared to trust God. And so that's what he does.

Look at what he says. I will call this to mind, and therefore I have hope. Where's the hope? It's in the steadfast love of the Lord. That's the chesed love of God, which runs the whole way through the Old Testament, the covenant love of God that Mike was talking about last night, that God has entered into a covenant with his people, an unbreakable bond. And so he says, I know that God has shown himself in this devastating way in all that I've now encountered, but I need at the same time to call to mind that the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. But that doesn't seem to fit. Because how does this fit with the steadfast love of the Lord?

He says, well, I don't know how it fits. Life is really hard, but the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. He keeps his covenant, and his mercies never come to an end. His mercies.

I grew up with, you know, sort of King James version language, but it always intrigued me. I never knew what journeying mercies were. My father used to pray about it all the time, that God would grant us journeying mercies. It took me a while to realize that what he was actually trying to say was, help us to get there without crashing the car. All right?

But then I grew a little older again. I said, no, help us to get there without crashing the car. Doesn't really convey the vastness of it all. What conveys the vastness of it all is that your steadfast love is expressed in your mercies, and your mercies emerge from your compassion, and your compassionate love is seen in your faithfulness. So the real test of an understanding of the faithfulness of God is not when you're at a men's conference and it's all, you know, the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, you know.

That's good. No, it's when you get the blood test back. It's when you get the pink slip. It's when you're face to face with the reality of the hardness of life, the toughness of life. Then I will call to mind. In other words, it is a volitional thing.

It's not an emotional thing. I call this to mind. In other words, he says, I'm going to have to bring my life under the jurisdiction of God, under the nature of his character, under who he is, because this stuff is about to completely overwhelm me.

Nothing seems worthwhile, nothing seems fixable, nothing. But I call this to mind. His love never ceases. And the proof that God has graciously loved his people was seen in the fact that they weren't consumed.

It's amazing, isn't it? His mercy's never come to an end. His steadfast love never ceases. The Lord is my portion.

It's because of his goodness that we are not actually overwhelmed. Now let me draw it to a close in this way. The mercy of God, both here and throughout Scripture, is finally seen in the fact that God does not give us what we deserve. When people say, I just want to be treated the way I deserve to be treated. I just want justice. That's the CEO who's having his photograph taken for the annual report, and he has the photographer come in, and he's got his best suit on and everything, and he's very officious with the girl, and he says to her, you know, I want this photograph to do me justice. And she remarks to her assistant who's setting up the lights, what this guy needs is mercy, not justice.

And I don't have a lens good enough to make him look good. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercy's never come to an end.

They're new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. That brings us really to the heart of the good news, doesn't it? It brings us to the heart of the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ suffered as no one else suffered. You remember here, I remember my affliction and my wanderings and the wormwood and the gall. The gall should trigger a thought in your mind, wasn't it gall that they offered Jesus?

Yes, that's right. And they offered him wine mingled with gall, but he refused to drink it. What they were really offering him was a form of anesthesia, an anesthetic potion, so that he could be dulled in the experience of the brutality that was before him, and yet he refused it because he was going to embrace suffering in all of his unmitigated reality. He was the prophet who bore the sufferings of the people. And because he was prepared to do that, because he remained, if you like, alert in that experience, you remember he was able then to care for the needs of his mother. He was able to say to the disciple, look after my mother, and to say to his mother, and he's your boy. It was because he was prepared to endure suffering in that way that his ears were open to the words that were spoken on either side of him when those fellows were railing against him, until finally the lights went on for one fellow, remember? And he says to his friend, I don't think we should continue saying this, because, and here's his language, he says, we are up here on the cross, we are up here getting what our sins deserve, but this man has done nothing wrong.

So what kind of thing is going on on that middle cross? Why is he up there? Why die? To show us how much he loves us? What would that answer that question?

In part. But if I jumped off a high tower to show my wife how much I loved her, people would say, that's kind of foolish. If I jumped into the Pacific in order to rescue her, they might say that was an act of valor.

This man has done nothing wrong. And then he says, Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus says, today you'll be with me.

I can do better than that. Today you'll be with me in paradise. And if you imagine now today that thief in the glorified presence of Jesus, if it's possible for people to ask him, you know, what was it like getting in here?

You can imagine him saying it was unbelievable. Because when I showed up at the gates, an angel said, you know, what are you doing? And I said, I don't know what I'm doing. And they said, well, that's not the way it's supposed to be.

I mean, if you're coming in here, you got to know something where you're justified by faith. The guy says, not as far as I know. He said, well, have you been engaged in your local church?

In my local what? Again, the angel says, well, hang on, I'm going to get one of my supervisors. So he goes, supervising angel comes over, it's like phone an AT&T or something, and the supervisor says, and eventually they get it sorted out. Because the fellow says, look, the only reason I'm up here is because the man on the middle cross said I could come, and he bore the punishment and the suffering that I deserve, and took it all in himself in order that I might then be set free. Because he was faithful to the point of death, because he was faithful through death.

And when in Revelation 19, you have a picture of the ascended Christ seated on a horse, what is it that is emblazoned across the horse or across his chest? One word, faithful, faithful. So let me encourage you, fellows, if everything is plain sailing for you today, then remember Lamentations 3, because there's going to come a day when you need it. If you're in a Lamentations 3 experience today, then take it seriously, acknowledge it, and bring to mind what you know of God. Because the issues of what we know, this hymn writer says, it's what I know of thee my Lord and God that fills my heart with praise, my lips with song. It's what I know about you.

I have to operate on the strength of what you have revealed of yourself. It says that you're a faithful God, that you're faithful to all your promises, that you will execute all of your warnings, that you're so faithful that you cannot deny yourself. And when I can't finally get it all put together in my thinking, I turn my gaze upon your son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And I say to myself, there's not a friend like the lowly Jesus, no not one, no not one. Because standing somewhere in the shadows, you'll find Jesus. And he's the only one who cares and understands. And somewhere in the shadows, you will find him.

And you'll know him by the nail prints in his hands. Why would we have a suffering Christ without a suffering church, without the reality of life being hard and the equal reality of God always being good expressed in his patience, in his jealousy, in his faithfulness, in the totality of his person. It is comforting to know that when life gets hard, we have a good and faithful God who understands our pain. You're listening to a message titled God's Faithfulness on Truth for Life with Alistair Begg.

Alistair will be back in just a minute to close with prayer, so please stay with us. Well, the more time we spend studying the Bible, the more we learn about the attributes of God, not the least of which is his great faithfulness. In scripture, God reveals both his nature and his love for us so that we can grow in our knowledge of him and our relationship with him. That's why at Truth for Life, we teach every day directly from the Bible. In fact, our mission at Truth for Life is to teach the Bible with clarity and relevance. We do this knowing that when the Word of God is heard, his Spirit works in the lives of those who listen to convert unbelievers, to establish believers more deeply in their faith, and to strengthen both members and pastors in a local church. This is the mission you're supporting when you pray for Truth for Life and when you give to this ministry.

We're grateful for your prayers, and if you're able to support us today with a donation, we are grateful for that as well. We'd like to say thank you by inviting you to request the book With All Your Heart, which you may have heard me mention over the past few days. This is a book that helps us center our thinking and our emotions more fully on honoring Jesus. In fact, that's the description the subtitle of this book gives us, Orienting Your Mind, Desires and Will Toward Christ. The book With All Your Heart guides you to think in line with the will of God, to set your desires on things that honor Christ. Request your copy online at truthforlife.org slash donate, or you can request by using the mobile app.

If you'd prefer, you can call us at 888-588-7884. Now let's join Alistair for a closing word of prayer. Father, thank you for the opportunity to think along these lines. It's unsettling for us in many ways. We tend to think in familiar categories and to try and reinforce ourselves in thought forms that are often challenged when we are prepared to allow the Bible just to stand up and speak to us.

Forgive us, Lord, when we present to our unbelieving friends a picture that somehow or another suggests that once you turn to Jesus, you get removed from all of these things, that there's nothing anyone should really be concerned or worried about. Well, we know that we shouldn't ultimately be worried about it, but it doesn't change the fact, the reality of it. Our loved ones still die. Our children still wander.

Our bodies still break down. Our country finds itself under the malaise of immorality and idolatry, and in many ways we find ourselves saying, surely the walls are breaking down, the king is gone, the simplicity of life is eroding, but this I call to mind. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end.

They are new every morning. The great is your faithfulness. What a faithful God you are, and we bless and praise you in the name of your Son, amen.

I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for joining us. Please listen again tomorrow as we turn to the book of Proverbs to learn about the qualities that make someone a great friend. We're kicking off a new series titled Wise Words. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the learning is for nothing.