From Chaos to Christ

Gratitude for Ravi Zacharias (1946–2020)

Article by Jon Bloom, Staff writer, desiringGod.org

Countless thousands of us around the world, with tearful gratitude, are saying our earthly goodbyes to Ravi Zacharias, who passed away on May 19 after being diagnosed with cancer just a couple of months ago. Someone whose life enriches ours is worthy of honor — and, if he enriched us through faithfully laboring in preaching and teaching, double honor (1 Timothy 5:17). Ravi enriched mine.

I benefited from a number of Ravi’s books and many of his recorded messages. But what stands out most in my memory is reading Can Man Live Without God at a crucial time in my life nearly 25 years ago. I don’t know that I’ve read or heard a public intellectual more fluent and incisive regarding the history of Western philosophy and its consequences — at times horrifically brutal — on Western civilization, especially in the twentieth century. And this from someone born and raised in the East (India).

Ravi ruthlessly described the psychological and social ramifications of atheism’s existential meaninglessness and moral bankruptcy. If God doesn’t exist, the inescapable human need to make sense of the world has no foundation; it’s a castle in the air. If God doesn’t exist, we have no objective basis for our inescapable, deeply intuitive sense of good and evil; it’s a human construct projected onto an amoral reality, perhaps an adaptation favored by natural selection to advance our genes into future generations. Nothing more.

Once man realizes he has no inherent meaning and there are no objective morals — that he must create both himself — and once the restraining vestiges of theism have been removed, terrible consequences will follow. Chilling consequences like the Nietzschean superman madness of the Third Reich and the Marxian utopic madness of Soviet and Sino Communism and their unprecedented carnage. Or on the individual level, consequences like the violence and suicide that result from nihilism and existential despair.

Such despair was not theoretical for Ravi. At 17, seeing no hope for his future, he attempted suicide at his family’s home in Delhi. That proved to be the turning point. For Jesus, as he does for so many of his disciples, came to Ravi at his lowest point and gave him a future and a hope. A Youth for Christ worker visited him in the hospital and left him with this text: “Because I live, you also will live” (John 14:19). In these written words, Ravi heard his living Lord speak, and this previously unremarkable teen made a remarkable resolution: “I will leave no stone unturned in my pursuit of truth.”

For more than half a century, Ravi not only relentlessly pursued the Truth (John 14:6), but relentlessly taught and defended the truth all over the world. The good fruit of his labors can be seen in the legacy of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, Wellspring International (humanitarian aid), 28 books, and the list could go on and on.

All this is the harvest of a seed sown in a Delhi hospital bed after a failed suicide attempt. I would say the seed fell into good soil, though only Jesus would have known it at the time. One thing Ravi knew: he could not live without God. He spoke from his own experience when he wrote,

When man lives apart from God, chaos is the norm. When man lives with God, as revealed in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the hungers of the mind and heart find their fulfillment. For in Christ we find coherence and consolation as he reveals to us, in the most verifiable terms of truth and experience, the nature of man, the nature of reality, the nature of history, the nature of our destiny, and the nature of suffering. (Can Man Live Without God, 179)

I have one more reason to be grateful for the life and ministry of Ravi Zacharias: Michael Ramsden. Michael was installed last year as president of RZIM, succeeding Ravi. But prior to that, he led RZIM’s European outreach for many years. In the early 2000s, Michael graciously served on the board of Desiring God’s short-lived European arm, and he became a personal friend. More important than being perhaps the most brilliant person I have ever met, Michael is also among the most faith-filled, sincere, and humble people I have ever met. Ravi has handed this baton to another laborer worthy of double honor.

Father, thank you for the life of Ravi Zacharias. Thank you for showing him that he could not live without you. And when all he believed was that he could not live, thank you for showing him you. Thank you for his faithful and fruitful pursuit of stone-turning for the truth and for his double-honor-worthy labors in preaching and teaching and evangelizing and contending for the truth. Thank you that, in the words of Ajith Fernando, in “an era that has heralded the demise of reliance on objective truth as the primary source of direction to the lives of individuals,” Ravi showed “that a ministry committed to demonstrating the validity of objective truth is still relevant and desperately needed.”

Thank you for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of souls, like mine, that you have enriched and strengthened through Ravi. Thank you that he finished his course, kept the faith, left a legacy of financial and moral integrity, and enjoyed a strong marriage of 48 years. And thank you for the next generation of leaders in the RZIM family of ministries, who are taking the helm and leading in the same spirit and by the same Spirit. Give them a double portion of Ravi’s anointing. I have no doubt he would join me in saying, in Jesus’s name, amen.

Jon Bloom (@Bloom_Jon) serves as author, board chair, and co-founder of Desiring God. He is author of three books, Not by Sight, Things Not Seen, and Don’t Follow Your Heart. He and his wife have five children and make their home in the Twin Cities.

One Could Never Say Enough

How Ethnicity Proclaims His Excellencies

Article by Marshall Segal, Staff writer, desiringGod.org

“Excuse me, but I just had to ask — Are you guys fighters?”

My two roommates and I were eating wings and watching football when the woman approached our table, puzzled and a little nervous. Of the three of us, I was easily the most flattered by the idea. No one had ever mistaken me for a combat athlete.

“Umm, no, we’re not.” I looked to my roommates while I spoke, just to make sure I hadn’t missed something. By the look on their faces, you would have thought she was speaking in Swedish.

“Oh,” she responded, disappointed and searching. “So are you actors?” When one roommate slowly shook his head, she finally asked, “Well, what are you, then?”

The answer really was simple, but it suddenly didn’t feel all that simple anymore. What my other roommate said next confused her even more. And yet he answered perfectly: “Well, we love Jesus.”

“Huh. My husband and I were over there trying to figure out how you three knew each other.” What had mystified this couple so deeply? A white man, a black man, and a Filipino man eating wings and watching football together.

‘Lest We Be Dispersed’

As we watched that woman walk away, we tasted something of what happened when God judged the world at Babel — when he made the people into peoples and, for the first time, alienated them from each other.

To be sure, the world had known division and hostility before Babel, even murderous hostility (Genesis 4:8), but apparently it had not yet experienced racial or ethnic hostility. Families and generations had multiplied from Adam to Noah, and then for 350 years after the flood, from Noah until Babel. And still, after nearly four centuries of being fruitful and multiplying, “The whole earth had one language and the same words” (Genesis 11:1).

Because the flood had not washed away their sin, however, their unity did not produce deep thanksgiving, but only accelerated their defiance. Instead of seeing the awesome image of God in themselves, they thought they saw something better than God.

Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth. (Genesis 11:4)

Do you hear the ignorance and insurrection? Lest we be dispersed. And who, we might ask them, would disperse you? The God they thought they could eclipse and dethrone. And so, God does what any jealous and loving God would do: he brings “to nothing things that are” — like towers, and governments, and our own illusions of wisdom, power, and control — “so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Corinthians 1:28–29).

Walls of Our Pride

God came down to see their city and their tower, saying, “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:7). Then God did precisely what they thought they could prevent:

The Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:8–9)

Why did God divide and disperse them? Why insert the reality of ethnicity and alienate the unity of humanity? Because their oneness had begun to serve their pride, throwing gasoline on the sin that had ruined the garden (Genesis 3:5). What God did at Babel was an act of holy war against the sin under every other sin. He humbled the whole world, not because his sovereignty or glory was truly threatened — he has no rivals (Job 42:2) — but because if he let us build towers to ourselves, they would bury us deeper in rebellion and destruction.

Any complexity and difficulty in ethnic diversity, from Babel to today, is a blessed thorn meant to immerse us, all the more, in grace (2 Corinthians 12:7–9) — if we humble ourselves, repent, and focus on building his kingdom and church.

A People for All Peoples

Make no mistake: ethnic diversity is ultimately a blessing, not a curse, because humility is a blessing, not a curse. Like so much of the pain and groaning in history, it may have seemed like the hostilities were in Satan’s hands (and he certainly delighted in much of them), but we find out, just a few verses later, what God was really doing, at a far deeper and wiser level, when he confused and dispersed the peoples. Babel was about humbling humanity, but it was not finally about our humility; it was about his glory.

In the very next chapter, God chooses Abraham, out of all the people and ethnicities in the world, and births the new people of Israel. But before Abraham could take even the first step, before he built that first altar in the land of Canaan, God told him this was not about one nation, one people, one language, but about God having the whole world as his treasured possession:

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (Genesis 12:2–3)

God did set Israel against many nations of the world, for long and devastating centuries, but any wars they made were meant to ultimately bring the nations — all the nations — home.

Truly Together, Undeniably Different

That great ingathering really does begin, here and there, throughout the Old Testament. As Daniel Hays traces so well, ancient Israel was not as homogeneous as we might assume — from the “mixed multitude” coming out of Egypt (Exodus 12:38), to Moses’s African wife from Cush (Numbers 12:1, 8), through the “all the peoples” messages in the Psalms and Prophets.

But the flood walls really begin to break at Pentecost. Do you see the shadows of Babel’s tower in that terrifying and wonderful scene? As the winds and fire of heaven descend and surround them, Luke says,

Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. (Acts 2:5–6)

What’s particularly striking about Pentecost, and perhaps surprising, is that God did not remove all the languages. Instead, he finally harmonized them at the deepest level. Each man kept his own language, and yet they suddenly understood one another. Across the barriers of distinct languages, and hostile cultures, and horrible histories, they were together again, by faith in Jesus and the indwelling of his Spirit — not wholly or pervasively yet, but truly and deeply. In Christ, God had finally remarried the peoples — to build not a tower, but a church (1 Peter 2:4–5).

Pentecost confirms, in bold colors, what God had said to Abraham: the dispersing at Babel was not mainly or ultimately a judgment, but a preparation, over thousands and thousands of years, for unparalleled glory. God had multiplied ethnicities, exponentially and across generations and continents, to do greater justice to the beauty, worth, and sacrifice of his Son.

One Is Not Enough

The beauty and worth of his sacrifice, however, will come into full definition only in the world to come. Then we finally will hear the melody of the song we have waited for:

Worthy are you to take the scroll
     and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
     from every tribe and language and people and nation,
and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
     and they shall reign on the earth. (Revelation 5:9–10)

One tribe could never say enough about this Christ. One language would never have enough words and nuances. One nation would never last long enough to see what many nations over many centuries could. Everything truly great and beautiful about every people group in history will be gathered and lifted before the throne, trying to capture just something of who this Lamb is. And though we will never fully capture him, we will capture far more because we are not the same.

Heaven proves that, in the wisdom, imagination, and creativity of God, diversity is vital to the supremacy of Jesus. If it did not reveal and exalt more of him, why would it be there?

At one level, then, our experience of the beauty and supremacy of Christ will always depend on the diversity of our fellowship. That doesn’t mean our more homogeneous communities are necessarily in sin (especially if our wider context is more homogeneous), but it does mean that for now we are missing out on something precious and eternal.

As long as everyone we know and love lives with our perspective, shares our background, and speaks our “language,” we see Christ mainly through that one window, that one angle, that one set of eyes and experiences. Our slice of the surpassing worth of Jesus is smaller, at least until we join in the explosively diverse choir and joy of heaven.

Treasure of the Nations

Our ethnic diversity is not an accident, nor merely a consequence of sin. God did disperse the peoples at Babel in order to humble each and every people (and ultimately Israel more than any other), but the humbling of God was meant to lead us into the hands of mercy, the wounds of his Son, and the hope of heaven. Anything different about those of us joined in Christ serves to show just how great a Lord, Redeemer, and Treasure he really is.

As my roommates and I watched that woman walk away from our table, we did experience some of the humbling, even maddening harshness of Babel, that birthplace of all racial tension and prejudice. But we also tasted, over wings and football, something of what heaven will be like. And something of how powerful and captivating Jesus really is. As different as we may seem to some, friendship has never been easier or sweeter or deeper, because we found each other in Christ.

Marshall Segal (@marshallsegal) is a writer and managing editor at desiringGod.org. He’s the author of Not Yet Married: The Pursuit of Joy in Singleness & Dating. He graduated from Bethlehem College & Seminary. He and his wife, Faye, have a son and live in Minneapolis.

Sell Yourself Short

The Rare Joy of Christian Humility

Article by David Mathis, Executive Editor, desiringGod.org

We live in a day in which understatement is an endangered species. There is no shortage of embellishment and exaggeration. Public communication can feel like one grandiose soundbite after another. Parties, events, releases, contests, political rallies must be bigger and better than the last.

In our society of hype and hyperbole, pomp and posturing, we embellish our own online profiles, selecting our most flattering photo, highlighting our most impressive accomplishments, and filling our timeline with the confirming data, all carefully curated. We are enduring (not to overstate it) an epidemic of over-promising and under-performing. At least in the public eye, few seem to have the humility to speak, post, and report with the simple truth.

Sadly, we Christians often fall prey to this cultural pressure. This Sunday, this conference, this study, this book, this message must be more “epic” (talk about exaggeration) than the last. Such a penchant can be especially acute in church planting and other ministry startups, when our collective insecurities and immaturities conspire to make it feel like everything needs to sound better than it actually is, to make us seem stronger than we truly are, to give the impression we have momentum and staying power. Often, it’s all an elaborate and upbeat cover for feeling fragile, weak, and gnawingly uncertain.

But what if we unsubscribed from the madness? What if we asked ourselves, in such a world as ours, How do I humble myself?

Think Less of Yourself?

Wise men want to be humble. And yet, ironically, the first lesson we learn in the pursuit of humility is that it’s not something we can just up and do. The first step in seeking humility is a humbling one. Humility begins with God’s initiative, not ours.

However, even though self-humbling is beyond our control, God does give us the dignity of participating in the process, and the opportunity to prepare our hearts to be humbled. Romans 12:3, which is one of the most important words in the Bible about humility, gives us a glimpse into the kind of heart that is ready to receive God’s humbling hand whenever it falls:

I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

C.S. Lewis memorably observed that humility does not mean thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. More than just guarding against swollen views of self, the apostle Paul would have us “think with sober judgment” — which I take to mean, among other things, don’t spend a great deal of time thinking about yourself at all.

Yet self-awareness is a mercy, even if Paul would caution us against self-focus. What might it mean, then, as a Christian, to think with sober judgment about self?

Observe the World’s Pattern

First, we will do well to remember what kind of world we live in: one swollen with inflated views of self. We cannot take our bearings from our surroundings and at the same time cultivate sober judgment of ourselves. In the verse before Romans 12:3, Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2).

From the beginning, from humanity’s very first sin, we have been overestimating ourselves. And as sin — the great, deadly, rebellious impulse in the heart of the creature to overestimate self in the face of God — as sin has taken root, and grown, and spread, and borne fruit in our world, one age after another (apart from revival) has sought to outdo the others in self-regard.

Maybe modern humans are no more swollen with self-regard than our ancestors, but we do have a bigger box of powerful digital tools for going into all the world and preaching ourselves. It’s in the air. And on our screens. If we look at the world around us for our balance, we will soar in self-exaltation, or soon crash in self-pity.

We need to get our bearings before the face of God, with hearts daily and weekly recalibrated by the rhythms of God-conscious worship and devotion. For most of us, the outworking of genuine humility before God also will include owning our proneness to overestimate ourselves. Humility may feel like underestimating self because our age is so bent on overestimating. The goal is not to underestimate ourselves, though, but to think with sober judgment, in a generation inebriated with self.

Choosing the Lowest Place

Jesus told a parable when he saw the evidence of such overestimation (pride) in wedding invitees. Rather than presuming to sit in “the place of honor,” he instructed them instead,

Go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, “Friend, move up higher.” Then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. (Luke 14:10–11)

Christ would have his people think of themselves as ordinary, not special. As lowly, normal, one of the flock, not as a rabbi, teacher, instructor (Matthew 23:8–12). Not as a cut above the common man, but as happily ordinary, even gladly a servant. Even as a child (Matthew 18:3), as one who knows his smallness and dependence. Such people feel no need to pretend to be strong and self-sufficient; they are happily God-reliant and self-admittedly lowly, too modest to pretend otherwise.

Speak with Sober Judgment About Self

So, we reject the world’s pattern of self-exaltation and self-pity, but how will we discern what we really think about ourselves — and whether it is sober or swollen? It will come out of our mouths.

Consider the countless junctures in everyday life when how we think about ourselves comes out for all to hear and see. How do you introduce yourself to a new person? How do you “tell your story,” and what do you foreground? How polished a version of yourself do you put forward online? How often do your words slide into the humble-brag, not to mention your social-media posts? Do you presume and anticipate public acknowledgement and appreciation from others? Do you deliberately self-denigrate, hoping someone will swoop in and correct you? Do you presume the greater seat or happily head for the gallery?

Thinking with sober judgment may begin in our heads and hearts, but it comes out in our words. And our words in the world not only reveal our inner person, but also then shape our minds and hearts going forward.

Secure Enough to Be Small

It is humility, after all, that goes hand in hand with what we call “understatement.”

Understatement, as a figure of speech, has long had the technical title “tapinosis,” based on the Greek for humility (tapeinosis). It is humble to understate certain realities (especially our own abilities and accomplishments) and allow our hearers to experience the rare joy (almost inaccessible in modern life) of discovering something is more impressive than promised. And it’s humble to understate ourselves such that some listeners may never know the full force of it — because we are secure enough in Christ to have our qualities go unacknowledged.

When Christ is our security, we learn to be content with our lives being more dramatic in reality than in our telling of them, whether in conversations or online. Rather than making subtle, and sometimes shameless, efforts to have others think we’re more impressive than we really are, we’re happy to have them underestimate what otherwise might amaze.

Ultimately, it is the bigness and unsurpassed beauty of Christ, who is “the radiance of the glory of God” (Hebrews 1:3) and whose worth we cannot overstate, that frees us from exaggeration and inspires us to understate self.

As we’re increasingly impressed with him, we lose our need to be impressed with ourselves.

David Mathis (@davidcmathis) is executive editor for desiringGod.org and pastor at Cities Church in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is a husband, father of four, and author of Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines.

What Billions Say in Silence

The Deafening Sermons of the Stars

Article by Jon Bloom, Staff writer, desiringGod.org

“When I look at the stars, I see someone else.” (Switchfoot)

When David looked up in the Near Eastern night sky 3,000 years ago, what he saw almost took his breath away. And in an attempt to express the wonder that flooded him as he contemplated his minuteness in view of such vastness, and God’s design in it all, he did something uniquely human: he transposed his awe into art.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3–4)

The “heavens,” that mysterious realm of marvelous lights, have astonished mankind from our earliest days. When we look at the heavens today, our understanding of what we see, due to advances in science and technology, far exceeds David’s understanding. David only had a hint of how minute he was in relation to the heavens. Our fuel for awe is astronomically greater. We know more, but do we marvel more?

Silent Sermons of the Stars

The starlit sky is speaking. In Psalm 19, which C.S. Lewis considered “one of the greatest lyrics in the world” (Reflections on the Psalms), David again wrote,

The heavens declare the glory of God,
     and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
     and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words,
     whose voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out through all the earth,
     and their words to the end of the world. (Psalm 19:1–4)

If the heavens are the work of God’s “hands,” and if they are declaring the glory of God, what are these silent preachers telling us? To listen closely, I have leaned on David Blatner’s book, Spectrums: Our Mind-Boggling Universe from Infinitesimal to Infinity to help capture the wonder of what we too often take for granted.

All That We (Do Not) Know

When David surveyed the sky, part of what he saw belonged to our solar system (sun, moon, and a couple “stars” that were really planets), part belonged to our Milky Way galaxy, and part were distant stars and (probably) other faraway galaxies. David would have barely had a clue how massive and distant these heavenly bodies were.

To give us some perspective, Blatner writes, “if our solar system . . . were the size of a grain of salt, the Milky Way galaxy would be about the length of a football field.” That “milky” stripe we can see on a clear, dark night is a dense collection of stars in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms — and it’s about 1,000 light-years thick! And what these starry arms (and we with them) are spiraling around is a supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A, located about 27,000 light-years from us. Scientists estimate that our galaxy is about 100,000 light-years wide.

Looking at the sky with the naked eye, as David did, we can see a few thousand stars at most. But, “look through the telescope, do the math, and you’ll find there are somewhere between 200 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way.” That’s a lot of stars! But our neighboring galaxy Andromeda appears to contain a trillion or more stars.

And that’s not even a chip on the tip of the cosmic iceberg. A recent estimate of the total number of galaxies in the universe is 150 to 200 billion, but the Hubble Telescope is indicating that the real number might be ten times that amount. And when it comes to the total number of stars, we really don’t know. One estimate is around 1 septillion (that’s a “1” followed by 24 zeros). And all this inhabits a universe that has an estimated radius of about 46 billion light-years.

All this information doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of what we as a species collectively now know. And scientists say that what we now know barely scratches the surface of what we don’t yet know.

What Are the Heavens Declaring?

So, if these heavens declare the glory of God, what are they declaring?

Having spent hours pouring over scientific expositions of the silent sermons of the starry hosts, I first want to put my hand over my mouth. I want to say with Job that far too often “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (Job 42:3). I fear trivializing what is ineffably profound.

These glory heralds don’t have three points and an application. They join all who in the presence of God cry “Glory!” (Psalm 29:9); they join all who in the presence of God cry, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Revelation 4:8). And it seems to me that worshipful prayer is the only appropriate response.

PRAYING THROUGH THE HEAVENS

Lord God Almighty, when I look to your heavens, I join the choir in ascribing to you absolute glory. And I echo David in saying, “What is man, who occupies this pale blue dot, a dust mote in the vast heavens, that you are mindful of him? And who am I, a man so often consumed with the tiny microcosm of my own concerns, to speak of you who speaks this whole cosmos into being? Indeed, ‘there is none like you’” (Psalm 86:8).

When I look to your heavens, I hear them declare that there is none like you possessing such wisdom. For you, Lord, “by understanding . . . established the heavens” (Proverbs 3:19), “determin[ing] the number of the stars [and giving] to all of them their names” (Psalm 147:4), and conferring upon each one unique aspects of your glory (1 Corinthians 15:41). And they declare that your wisdom is infinitely greater than ours: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). In view of such wisdom, I repent of all my foolish leaning on my own understanding (Proverbs 3:5).

When I look to your heavens, I hear them declare that there is none like you who possesses such power. For “by the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host” (Psalm 33:6). For it is you alone “who brings out [this] host by number, calling them all by name; by the greatness of [your] might and because [you are] strong in power, not one is missing” (Isaiah 40:26). Yes, “yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. . . and you are exalted as head above all” (1 Chronicles 29:11). In view of such omnipotence, I repent of all my foolish trust in the strength of man (Psalm 118:8).

When I look to your heavens, I hear them declare your sheer immensity, since even “the highest heaven cannot contain you” (1 Kings 8:27). And they declare your incomparable creativity, since “the universe was created by [your] word, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Hebrews 11:3). And they declare your supreme authority, since “all things were made through [you], and without [you] was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). And they declare your sovereignty (Psalm 115:3), your righteousness (Psalm 50:6), your faithfulness (Genesis 15:5–6), and your steadfast love (Psalm 136:9). In view of such glory, I repent of my foolish, selfish pride and bow my knee and confess with my tongue that Jesus Christ, the Word through whom the cosmos was created (John 1:3) and the Word made flesh (John 1:14), “is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10–11).

More Valuable Than Galaxies

When David looked up at the heavens, he did not know what we now know: the unfathomable extent and scope of the universe. And when he asked, “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8:4), he did not know what we now know: the unfathomable extent and scope of God’s care for us in sending the incarnate Jesus “to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).

The heavens will not tell us that Jesus came or why. Only Scripture’s special revelation tells us that. But the heavens do declare in a silent shout, literally around the whole world, glorious things about our Creator’s and Savior’s “eternal power and divine nature” (Romans 1:20).

All that is involved in creation and all that is involved in redemption is nothing less than fearful and wonderful. The deeper we look into these things, the more fearful and wonderful it all becomes. A child can take joy in the sun, the moon, the stars, and the empty tomb. And scholars will never plumb the full depths of such glorious things. But children and scholars alike can take comfort in this: the God who remembers the names of a sextillion stars, and knows all sextillion molecules in a drop of water, knows and remembers us.

God does not measure value or significance in size, but in his creative design. The cross reminds us that he is mindful of us in ways that galaxies will never know. Of how much more value are you than they?

Jon Bloom (@Bloom_Jon) serves as author, board chair, and co-founder of Desiring God. He is author of three books, Not by Sight, Things Not Seen, and Don’t Follow Your Heart. He and his wife have five children and make their home in the Twin Cities.

The Maker of the Mountains Is with You

Article by Scott Hubbard, Editor, desiringGod.org

In days of darkness, God regularly delivers his comfort and strength to us through four simple words: “I am with you.”

I am with you. The promise comes to God’s fearful people across time and testaments: to Isaac in Beersheba (Genesis 26:24), Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:12), David in the valley (Psalm 23:4), the disciples as he commissions them (Matthew 28:20). The living God knows what we need most in our deepest distress: not answers, but the promise of his presence.

And yet, the power of this promise rises only as high as our knowledge of the one who gives it. The presence of a vague Benevolence is of little help when suffering steals toward us. And so, God not only promises his people that he is with them; he also reminds them of who he is.

When we walk through the valley of deep darkness, defenseless as a sheep, he calls himself Shepherd (Psalm 23:4). When we lie face down, overpowered by enemies too strong for us, he calls himself Redeemer (Isaiah 43:14). And when we feel small, vulnerable and afflicted in a dangerous world, he calls himself Creator: “Let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Peter 4:19).

Our Faithful Creator

Small, vulnerable, and afflicted describes how many must have felt when they received the letter we know as 1 Peter. Already “grieved by various trials,” they did not know where suffering’s shadow would descend next (1 Peter 1:6; 4:12). They were the threefold target of a world that maligned them, a flesh that besieged them, and a devil that stalked them (1 Peter 4:4; 2:11; 5:8).

Into that fear, uncertainty, and pain, Peter speaks a promise. He has already assured them that they are “God’s people,” heirs of the pledge “I am with you” (1 Peter 2:10). Now, he lifts their eyes above their trials, above their enemies, even above all heaven and earth, to remind them that that God who calls them “My people” is also their “faithful Creator” (1 Peter 4:19).

“Know this, my brothers and sisters,” Peter says in effect, “The God who walks with you, who hems you in behind and before, is not only your Savior, Redeemer, and Lord, but also the Maker of the mountains, the Crafter of the skies.” And for those bought by the blood of Jesus, this Creator is not only mighty, but faithful — even to the smallest, most vulnerable, most afflicted among his people.

Sovereign over Creation

If we embrace God as our faithful Creator in our suffering, we will begin to find two unmoving rocks beneath our feet. First, God governs all creation from the highest to the lowest, from the farthest to the nearest — from the orbits of moons in unseen galaxies to the shadows of leaves in our front yard.

The suffering of Peter’s audience may have seemed frustratingly random. So too with our own suffering: cruel spouses and false “friends,” careening cars and spreading viruses may seem, by all appearances, ungoverned: arbitrary menaces in an arbitrary world. But here, Peter reminds us that behind every creature, animate and inanimate, stands a Creator — a Creator so involved in the details of his world that suffering reaches us only if he, in his wisdom and lovingkindness, deems “necessary” (1 Peter 1:6; 3:17).

Just as God says to the seas, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed” (Job 38:11), so too he says to our suffering. No slander cuts, no tumor grows, no arrow flies, and no plague spreads a millimeter farther than the Almighty decrees. To each, God says, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther” — and creation is bound to obey.

Suffering can thwart our Creator’s sovereign rule as soon as the sun flies from its course, or the seasons refuse to arrive, or the molecules stop hearing the word of him who upholds the universe (Hebrews 1:3).

Sovereign over Us

God’s sovereignty as Creator extends not only over the creation around us, however, but also over us. Our souls, which often feel so fragile, are in the arms of Omnipotence. And no suffering can reach into those arms to snatch the people God protects.

“By God’s power,” Peter writes, “[you] are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Peter 1:5). In all afflictions, fears, sorrows, and uncertainties, the power of God is garrisoned about our souls, guarding and keeping us — not from the suffering itself, but from anything in the suffering that would ultimately destroy us. He is our Creator twice over — once by birth, twice by new birth (1 Peter 1:3, 23) — and he will not forsake the work of his hands.

Such is the power that undergirds the promise at the end of Peter’s letter: “After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you” (1 Peter 5:10). After we have suffered through the “little while” of this life, our Creator will bend down to the dust once again and put his breath back in to the children of man. Then paralyzed legs will walk again, blind eyes will see again, scarred skin will feel again. Then the pieces of every broken heart will be put back together; then will every wound, seen and unseen, be bound up for eternity.

Our Creator has every ability — indeed, every intention — to make all things new, and to place us in a world where suffering has no home.

Servants with Scarred Hands

When you meet the kind of Christians who trust God as their faithful Creator, you will know it. Such saints have a mark they cannot hide. Not only do they walk through suffering with an abiding peace in Jesus; they also walk through suffering with an eye toward others: “Let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.”

Having entrusted their fragile souls to the safekeeping of a faithful Creator, they have found the courage to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives, hand them to Jesus, and trust that he is still able to take what is broken and use it to nourish multitudes. They may speak comfort with a tremble in their voice, or reach out to another with scarred hands, or serve with wounds that cannot been seen and cannot be fully healed in this life. But they still speak, still reach, still serve, bringing the treasure of God to others in a jar of clay.

Why? Because the Creator of the stars keeps them as the apple of his eye. Because the Architect of the earth counts their every hair. Because the Maker of the mountains holds their souls in the hollow of his hand. And with him they are safe.

Scott Hubbard is a graduate of Bethlehem College & Seminary and an editor for desiringGod.org. He and his wife, Bethany, live with their son in Minneapolis.

For Anyone Happy Without God

Article by Greg Morse, Staff writer, desiringGod.org

“I know you don’t believe me, but I do not need Christianity to be happy. I am happier than most Christians I know.” Looking up from his coffee, he smiled and assured me, “I am glad you found happiness in Jesus, but I am quite content without him. I have found my path to happiness, and I am glad you have found a different one. We stand at the same end, it would appear.”

I did not know what to say.

I knew how to share the Joy of the world to the discontent, the miserable, the downcast, but I stood perplexed at this man who told me, in no uncertain terms, “I do not need Christ to be happy.” Wasn’t his heart restless until it found its rest in him? He assured me it wasn’t. Didn’t he have a God-shaped hole in his heart? He swore that he didn’t. And what was more, he truly seemed to be, as far as I could tell, happy.

I knew Jesus was a Comfort for those who mourned, a Light to those in darkness, a North Star to those who wandered the world without hope. I didn’t know what he was to those happy enough in their own way.

Can Unbelievers Be Truly Happy?

I wish I could go back and talk with this man. Instead of trying to convince him, for hours on end, of his unhappiness, all so I could then share Christ with him, I wish I would have spoken the way Paul did when he addressed those he found in Lystra.

He [God] did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness. (Acts 14:17)

Paul did not address the downtrodden, the depressed, the poor in spirit. Here, he addressed those who ate, drank, and when tomorrow came, died. Those with food and happiness enough not to alert them to their spiritual starvation. To such as these, Paul did not start by handing out prescriptions for happiness they didn’t feel they needed. He knew he spoke to a people that I was unfamiliar with: the happy heathen.

Paul says that God satisfied their hearts with food and gladness. Gladness. The only other place in the New Testament where this word appears is in Luke’s citation of another well-known verse: “You have made known to me the paths of life; you will make me full of gladness with your presence” (Acts 2:28; citing Psalm 16:11). In Psalm 16, God’s Fatherly presence to his children gives one kind of heart-gladness (a full, everlasting, permanent kind), but his food and common-grace-goodness bestows another. Both are real.

God Makes His Enemies Smile

God allows his enemies to smile. Have you wondered at this?

God allows those who ignore him, reject him, despise his glory, and belittle his name to breathe his air, feast on his food, swim in his waters, hike in his forests, ski on his mountains, laugh, sing, and dance on his lands. He has not yet evicted them. He has not taken back his bread from their plates nor his air from their lungs. Rather — and note the benevolence of the God of the universe — he “gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25).

No good and perfect gift comes down from any other hand but his (James 1:17). He is an abundantly gracious God, even to his enemies. The God constantly sneered at and ignored “makes his sun rise on the evil.” Almighty God “sends rain . . . on the unjust” who despise his glory (Matthew 5:45). This kindness makes angels sing of his mercy and patience.

Gifts Without Gratitude

The man that I spoke with took these gifts from God, enjoyed them, and refused to say thank you.

Man is the only creature other than fallen angels to pay God back so basely. God opens his hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing (Psalm 145:16). He opens his hand to eagles in their treetops, to antelope on the plains, to fish in the sea and flowers of the field. They declare his glory and groan for his return (Romans 8:19–23).

But men and devils do not. Devils contemplate the return of God saying, “What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?” (Matthew 8:29). And men look their fellow men in the eye and say they have no need of Christ; indeed, who is Christ that he should be obeyed? God opens his hand to this creature — best positioned to return to him gratefulness and love — and he will not bother to look up. He does not honor him, nor does he return him thanks (Romans 1:21).

I wish I would have shared with this man how his reasons for happiness — family, friends, health, good food, good drink, good sports — were not just “how things were.” I wish I would have bid him to consider how God watches him, day in and day out, parade about with his gifts while discounting his person.

What Our Pleasures Testify

Instead of telling him that I was sure he is really unhappy somewhere deep down, or trying to debate him as to whether he feels his God-sized hole (which he still has), what should I have told him?

I should have explored all his reasons for happiness, and then told him plainly that these were all gifts from God meant to lead him to God. And that, furthermore, his failure to do so was already a serious crime that must be atoned for, and thus he must be led to Christ, God’s greatest gift to the world. Sin, not just his psychological experience of joy, gave Jesus utmost relevance to him. He had a sin problem, if not a felt joy problem. He stood not only a branch withering apart from the Vine; he stood a branch prepared for the fire (John 15:6).

Paul told the happy heathens that God had not left himself without witness to both his existence and his goodness. And what was this witness’s testimony? Repent. “Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” (Romans 2:4). Beautiful families whisper, repent. Enjoyable careers urge, repent. Sunsets in vacation selfies cry, repent. All of these declare that God is good, benevolent, and patient with his enemies, and that he calls them to turn away from sin and to forgiveness found in Christ.

Word to Happy Heathen

If I could go back to talk with this man, I might say something like the following.

The Christian faith is not merely about man’s happiness, although God gives more joy than you can now imagine. Christianity addresses how sinful men, women, and children can be reconciled to their Creator and live happy lives for his glory. God has placed good gifts to summon you to see God’s ultimate gift: his Son, Jesus Christ. He came to save a people he didn’t have to save. To live a life we couldn’t live. To die the death we deserved to die. And to rise, summoning all everywhere to turn away from their sin, and trust in his finished work on the cross for sinners.

The smartphone in your pocket has everything to do with this God. The music massaging your ears, the colors jumping before your eyes, the gladness of heart and the love you feel are kindnesses from God with one message upon their lips: “Repent and believe.”

Instead of justifying a life apart from God, substituting the gifts for the Giver, the gifts of great joy are given to lead to the Giver. His multi-varied kindnesses, his overwhelming patience, his forbearance give room for faith. Even now he beckons. Even now he invites. Come, heed the message in every good gift of God’s perfect gift — Jesus Christ — and live.

Greg Morse is a staff writer for desiringGod.org and graduate of Bethlehem College & Seminary. He and his wife, Abigail, live in St. Paul with their daughter.

The Wonder We Once Had

Unearthing the World God Made

Article by Marshall Segal, Staff writer, desiringGod.org

When was the last time something God made stopped you with a deep, undeniable sense that he must be real?

Few of us pause nearly enough. Some have constructed whole lives that avoid the endless sermon God is preaching through creation. We walk through God’s world of miracles, literally or figuratively, with headphones in. We can’t be bothered with the natural any longer. We’ve moved on to cars, and smartphones, and podcasts, and YouTube. We’ve grown out of fascination and wonder, and then stored them as hand-me-downs for our children or grandchildren. As G.K. Chesterton writes,

Grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our father is younger than we. The repetition in nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be theatrical encore. (Orthodoxy, 58)

We know that the infinite, eternal God deeply enjoys what he has made (Genesis 1:31). But have we adults become bored, or distracted, or simply too busy?

Routines Without Wonder

Consider for a moment just how much of your day is hemmed in by what man has made.

From the bed you sleep on, in the house you live in, to the shower, to the breakfast table, to the car, to the desk and the office, to the phone, the computer, and the television. Apart from a brief walk to and from our cars (and that window down the hall), we can almost totally avoid the vast and breathtaking world we live in. We might begin assuming most of what we encounter in any given day, at least in urban contexts, could have been made without God.

But that tree in my front yard defies all human ingenuity and expertise. Who could make a tree like that? There’s absolutely nothing unusual or spectacular about our tree. Driving down our street, you would never notice it among many larger, more beautiful trees. And yet if you stop to look at it, really look at it, it is stunning, unexplainable, God-soaked. If we stop.

Missing the Forest and the Trees

God is revealed clearly everywhere in what he has made. The apostle Paul says, “His invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Romans 1:20). He is speaking about the ungodly and unrighteous, who are without excuse because they suppress what God is saying in night skies and stunning sunrises, in roaring seas and peaceful pastures, in mountain lions and anthills. So do we have an excuse?

Those of us who love the Bible, and we do love the Bible, can be prone to miss the other book God has written for us. Creation is not Scripture, and we should see everything in creation through the window of the infallible, inerrant, sufficient, glorious word of God.

But if we love the voice we hear in Scripture, we can learn to hear that same voice in trees, and turtles, and thunderstorms, and the two ducks that walked through the front yard this morning. If we love the God we read about in Exodus, Isaiah, Matthew, and Romans, we can come to see him in oceans, smell him in flowers, taste him in honey, feel him in the warmth of sunshine or under that first snowfall. If God is really speaking in the Bible, then he is speaking every bit as much and as loudly in creation, even if the language lacks the degree of precision we’ve learned to lean on.

The Key to Really Seeing

God dispatches us, through Romans 1, far and wide and deep into creation, with hearts sensitive to the vast and subtle messages in everything we see, smell, hear, taste, and touch. But Romans 1 also sounds a severe warning about all the beauty we discover. If we do not walk by faith through the world (Romans 1:17), then we may fall, to our destruction, in love for this world.

Human history tells the story of sinners who suppressed the truth and “exchanged the glory of the immortal God” — the glory that we see in all that he has made, including man and birds and animals and creeping things — “for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Romans 1:23). And because they chose the beauty of the birds over the God who made the birds, they missed the true beauty, and song, of the birds. The glory they thought they saw was just an awful, God-belittling mirage of reality.

And misreading reality, they dove headlong into sin and wrath (Romans 1:24–25). But in Christ, we have been given new eyes for creation. “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). And as his light shines in us, through his word, that same light soon rises, like the sun, on all that he has made. “For the full and final purposes of creation to come to light, the things God has made must be considered through the eyes of faith in Jesus Christ” (T.M. Moore, Consider the Lilies, 89).

When We Look

“Until we see the beauty of Christ,” writes Steve DeWitt, “we will never see the true beauty in anything else” (Eyes Wide Open, 116). That means if we really want to hear what God is saying in the blues of bluebirds and waddle of penguins, in the raging of rivers and stillness of lakes, in the opening of lilies and landslides along cliffs, we first and forever fix our eyes on Jesus. We will never appreciate creation by looking away from him, but by looking through the one through whom the world was made (Hebrews 1:2). His beauty unleashes every other beauty, if we are willing to look.

As we look out, like I did last night, on another “normal” Tuesday’s night sky, King David’s awe and worship could increasingly become second nature.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
     the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
     and the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3–4)

This kind of awe may require some intentionality and discipline at the outset, especially for those of us who have learned to avoid and ignore creation, but it requires less and less over time. Make no mistake, it will always take time — “When I look at your heavens” — but if we want to honor God, thank God, and enjoy God through creation, we won’t have to look hard to find him. He is, after all, displaying an eternal power, not a pedestrian power; a divine nature, not an above-average one.

Heaven Will Be an Earth

However, even if we struggle to see and enjoy God through his world here on earth, we will not in the new world to come. Heaven will unleash this kind of theology and experience. The created world will have been set free from its bondage to corruption, and we will be set free from all our blindness to God in creation.

When those endless days come, we will know something of what God felt when he “saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Any nervousness we once had about the idea of general revelation (some for good reason) will give way to centuries of discovery, of uncovering glimpses of God in everything, many of which were right before our eyes all along.

Until then, we practice hearing him in what he has made, as broken as it (and we!) may be. As Joe Rigney says, “God’s love for God led him to create the world from nothing. Therefore, our love for God, if it is to be an accurate reflection of God’s love, must also lead us to a deep and profound and fitting love for creation. God’s love for God pushes him into creation. So should ours” (The Things of Earth, 62). God made this world to give us more of what he loves the most: himself. Will we pause to enjoy him?

Marshall Segal (@marshallsegal) is a writer and managing editor at desiringGod.org. He’s the author of Not Yet Married: The Pursuit of Joy in Singleness & Dating. He graduated from Bethlehem College & Seminary. He and his wife, Faye, have a son and live in Minneapolis.

‘My Soul Refuses to Be Comforted’

A Song for Long Nights in Darkness

Article by Jon Bloom, Staff writer, desiringGod.org

His soul was in such turmoil he could not sleep. So confused and disturbed were his emotions (and the questions that fueled them), he couldn’t capture them all in words. He wasn’t experiencing a generalized, undefined depression. He mentioned no specific enemy threatening his life. The person he was in anguish over was God. When Asaph penned Psalm 77, he was experiencing a crisis of faith.

I cry aloud to God,
     aloud to God, and he will hear me.
In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord;
     in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying;
     my soul refuses to be comforted.
When I remember God, I moan;
     when I meditate, my spirit faints. Selah
You hold my eyelids open;
     I am so troubled that I cannot speak. (Psalm 77:1–4)

Why was Asaph so troubled? Because from his perspective it appeared God had decided to abandon his promises to Israel. And if God doesn’t keep his word, those who trust in him build the house of their faith on the sand — a very disturbing thought.

You Hold My Eyelids Open

Many who have endured a faith crisis recognize the experience Asaph describes. Something happens that shakes our confidence in what God has said, causing us to waver over what we’ve understood to be true about him or his character. This uncertainty produces anxiety and fear. In an effort to quell our anxiety, our mind becomes an incessant investigator, diligently searching for answers that will restore our confidence (Psalm 77:6).

Such anxiety can rob us of sleep. It did for Asaph. During the day, other responsibilities, activities, and people require our attention, offering some distracting respite. But in the dead of night, it’s just us and our troubled thoughts. So we lie awake in bed or pace a dark room with our figurative (or literal) “hand . . . stretched out [toward God] without wearying,” and our “soul refus[ing] to be comforted” (Psalm 77:2).

Refusing to be comforted? Is that okay? Asaph’s example here doesn’t endorse every inconsolable moment we have. We all battle sinful unbelief. But this psalm, I believe, is not a clinic in sinful unbelief, but in honest, anguished spiritual wrestling. There can come desperate moments in life — and we’ll see shortly just how desperate Asaph’s moment was — where telling our turmoil-afflicted soul to “hope in God” (Psalm 43:5) doesn’t bring quick comfort, because at that moment we’re wondering if God can be hoped in. This is why Asaph says, “When I remember God, I moan; when I meditate, my spirit faints” (Psalm 77:3).

Before we go on, we simply need to let this sink in: Asaph’s faith in God was shaken, the resulting anxiety was keeping him awake at night (he even told God, “You hold my eyelids open”), and this experience made it into the canon of Scripture. There’s a reason God preserved this psalm for us.

Has God Forgotten to Be Gracious?

Psalm 77 doesn’t tell us what was fueling Asaph’s distress. But Psalm 79, also attributed to Asaph, very likely does:

O God, the nations have come into your inheritance;
     they have defiled your holy temple;
     they have laid Jerusalem in ruins.
They have given the bodies of your servants
     to the birds of the heavens for food,
     the flesh of your faithful to the beasts of the earth.
They have poured out their blood like water
     all around Jerusalem,
     and there was no one to bury them.
We have become a taunt to our neighbors,
     mocked and derided by those around us. (Psalm 79:1–4)

Asaph had witnessed horrors, even if he speaks of them in poetic language. Many of us have seen gruesomely prosaic photographs of war — of brutalized corpses of men, women, and children rotting in the streets. Those who have actually seen the violence, walked those streets, and personally known some of the slain are often scarred by such trauma for a lifetime.

Asaph knew God’s judgment (most likely the Babylonian conquest of Judah) had fallen upon the nation due to unfaithfulness (Psalm 79:8). But the experience of it, described even more graphically by the author of Lamentations, was overwhelmingly horrific on every level. It didn’t just look like judgment; it looked like wholesale abandonment. So, in his midnight anguish, Asaph was asking,

Will the Lord spurn forever,
     and never again be favorable?
Has his steadfast love forever ceased?
     Are his promises at an end for all time?
Has God forgotten to be gracious?
     Has he in anger shut up his compassion? (Psalm 77:7–9)

He was asking these disturbing questions because, from his vantage point, at that moment, the answer to each of them had every appearance and emotional impact of yes.

I Will Appeal to This

But Asaph knew his Bible. He knew the covenants God had made with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David. He knew Israel’s history, from Abraham’s sojourning to the Egyptian slavery to the exodus to the Mosaic law to the conquest of the Promised Land to the reign of kings. He knew the holiness and power God had manifested (Psalm 77:13–14).

And so, in the midst of his disorientation and disillusionment and fear, having witnessed traumatic devastation of God’s people and God’s land, Asaph looked backward for hope:

Then I said, “I will appeal to this,
     to the years of the right hand of the Most High.”
I will remember the deeds of the Lord;
     yes, I will remember your wonders of old.
I will ponder all your work,
     and meditate on your mighty deeds. (Psalm 77:10–12)

In particular, he focused his troubled mind on the crossing of the Red Sea, reminding himself of how, at that desperate moment, when by all appearances it had looked like Egypt would wipe Israel out and the covenants would fail, God had “redeemed [his] people, the children of Jacob and Joseph” (Psalm 77:15).

When the waters saw you, O God,
     when the waters saw you, they were afraid;
     indeed, the deep trembled. . . .
Your way was through the sea,
     your path through the great waters;
     yet your footprints were unseen.
You led your people like a flock
     by the hand of Moses and Aaron. (Psalm 77:16, 19–20)

In his crisis of faith, Asaph reminded himself how, repeatedly through history, those who hope in God have had to hope against hope (Romans 4:18) that God would keep his promises despite circumstances appearing hopeless. If we read Asaph’s psalms (Psalms 73–83), we’ll see how many times he had to remember God’s faithfulness in the past to keep his faith in God’s promised future grace from failing in the present — or in his words, to keep his foot from slipping (Psalm 73:2).

Hope When Circumstances Are Unchanged

Psalm 77 was birthed during an anguished, sleep-deprived night. And it has no explicit resolution; no pretty bow of hopeful words to wrap it up. It just ends, “You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron” (Psalm 77:20). However, the hope is implicit: God, as horrible as this looks right now, as much as it appears that you have forgotten to be gracious, redemptive history tells me that you will still keep your promises and bring your deliverance.

That is one reason God has preserved this psalm and this experience: to help us if and when our faith undergoes severe testing. Asaph provides us language for lament, and an example of what to do when anxiety is surging, and by all appearances it looks like God’s “promises [may be] at an end for all time” (Psalm 77:8).

Like Asaph, our horrible moment might make it appear like God isn’t being or won’t be faithful to his promises, fueling sleepless nights of anxious praying and pondering. Like Asaph, we can pour out our heart to God with profound candor during such a moment. Like Asaph, we can remember God’s faithfulness in the past to keep our faith in God’s future grace from failing in the present.

And like Asaph, we might not quickly receive the comfort we long for, but we fight for it with all our might.

Jon Bloom (@Bloom_Jon) serves as author, board chair, and co-founder of Desiring God. He is author of three books, Not by Sight, Things Not Seen, and Don’t Follow Your Heart. He and his wife have five children and make their home in the Twin Cities.