How and why to trust God when we don’t understand him

More than 69 percent of Americans say they are stressed over next week’s presidential election. Here are five reasons:

1. Our elections are longer and more expensive than ever before, causing many to tire of all the ads and worry about the influence of donors on politicians.
2. Over 70 percent of Americans are concerned about election violence and the future of democracy.
3. Trust in the media to report election news fairly and accurately has fallen to an all-time low; the recent furor over newspaper endorsements illustrates the controversy in which many in the media find themselves.
4. Three-fourths of Americans are worried about the future of our nation and the economy.
5. Nearly half of all voters are skeptical that self-governance is working in America today.

Yesterday we distinguished between the secularist ambition to create a humanistic utopia that does not exist and the biblical ambition to advance a spiritual eutopia (meaning “the good place”) that improves the present while preparing for the eternal. Today we are faced with a third option: a dystopia in which “people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives.”

How do we pray effectively in times like these?

“A door slammed in your face”

If you’re like me, there have been times when you prayed in the midst of pain and adversity, but God did not give the answers for which you pled. It seems that sometimes, as C. S. Lewis felt in grieving the death of his wife, there is “a door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.”

Why is this?

Paul wrote, “We do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). Commenting on this text, St. Augustine noted that Paul suffered a “thorn in the flesh” that led him to pray three times for God to remove it (2 Corinthians 12:7–8). However, God did not answer Paul’s prayer as he asked, but instead taught him, “My power is made perfect in weakness” (v. 9).

According to Augustine, this episode shows that “when we are suffering afflictions that might be doing us either good or harm, we do not know how to pray as we ought.” As a result, we should pray and trust God for what is best, since “it might be that what we have been asking for could have brought us some still greater affliction, or it could have brought us the kind of good fortune that brings corruption and ruin.”

His wise words remind me of the time Billy Graham asked a young woman to marry him. She accepted his proposal but later rejected him. He was heartbroken and could not understand why God allowed this. Then he met Ruth.

One day in heaven, and perhaps long before then, you and I will be able to understand why God answered our prayers in the ways he did (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:12). In the meantime, we can bank on the fact that “God is love” (1 John 4:8) and that his character does not change (Malachi 3:6). His nature therefore requires him to answer us in whatever ways are best, whether we understand his answers on this side of paradise or not.

What are some practical ways this conversation can help us in hard times?

Two facts to remember for “unanswered” prayers

One: God loves us even when it seems he does not.

No one blames me when they contract cancer. But imagine I had an antidote that would heal any malignancy but refused to give it to anyone who asked for it. Isn’t this how we sometimes feel about God when he doesn’t seem to meet our needs? At such times, remembering that our Father’s character requires him to act only and always for our best can be the assurance that sustains us. The fault is neither with him nor with us.

One day Charles Spurgeon was walking with a friend through the English countryside when they came upon a barn with a weather vane on its roof. At the top of the vane were the words, “GOD IS LOVE.” Spurgeon remarked that this was inappropriate, stating, “Weather vanes are changeable, but God’s love is constant.”

His friend replied, “You misunderstood the meaning. The sign is indicating a truth: regardless of which way the wind blows, God is love.”

Two: God gives us what we ask or whatever is best.

A corollary question arises in challenging times: What if I don’t know how best to pray? What if I’m asking for the wrong things or not asking for the right things?

John Wesley claimed, “God does nothing except in response to believing prayer.” I’m not sure this is always true—Jesus healed a demoniac before the man had the capacity to pray, for example (Mark 5:1–20). But to the degree it is, we worry that prayers that are seemingly unanswered are therefore wrongly prayed (cf. James 4:2–3).

However, as Augustine noted, we can know that God’s answers are always for our best. If what we ask could have brought us “some still greater affliction” or “the kind of good fortune that brings corruption and ruin,” we can be grateful that he did not give us what we asked.

“Though he slay me, yet will I trust him”

But, there’s a but: What about horrible, heinous things that happen to God’s people? Surely the Christians who were beheaded by ISIS prayed for deliverance, as did their families. What about believers who similarly prayed to be spared the wrath of recent hurricanes but lost everything?

Here I must fall back on what I know of God’s character: He is omniscient, knowing our every need (Matthew 6:8); he is omnipotent, able to meet our every need (Philippians 4:19); and he is omnibenevolent, wanting only our best (1 John 4:8; Psalm 86:15). I also know that his thoughts are higher than my thoughts (Isaiah 55:9), so that there are many times when I am unable to understand his providence.

And I believe that God redeems for a greater good all he allows. I must therefore believe that our Father redeems even horrible grief and tragedy, whether we can understand his redemption in this life or not. In the meantime, I know that he grieves as we grieve (John 11:35) and walks with us through the hardest places of life (Isaiah 43:1–3).

It comes to this: When God does not do what we want him to do, we can reject him in pain and doubt, or we can bring our pain and doubt to him, trusting his heart when we do not see his hand (cf. Mark 9:24). If we choose the former, we forfeit what his omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent grace can do for us. If we choose the latter, saying with Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him” (Job 13:15 NKJV), we experience his best within his eternal providence.

St. Augustine advised us:

“Trust the past to God’s mercy, the present to God’s love, and the future to God’s providence.”

Will you do all three today?

Wednesday news to know:

• Hezbollah announces Naim Qassem as new leader
• Astronauts on the ISS warned of urgent evacuation as NASA monitors 50 “areas of concern” including 5-year leak
• Historic Biltmore Estate, “largest home in America,” will reopen in time for holidays post-Hurricane Helen impact
• North Korea and Russia send political shockwaves with Ukraine war moves
• On this day in 1938: Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio play is broadcast

*Denison Forum does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in these stories.

Quote for the day:

“More secret than diplomacy, deeper than the investigations of the wise, and mightier than all the kingly power, is the providence of God.” —John Broadus

Denison Forum

What George Washington can teach us about reliance on Providence

For ninety-eight years, Neiman Marcus published a gift catalog they’ve called the “Christmas Book.” This year, for the first time, it will be known as the “Holiday Book.”

The Dallas Morning News reports that the book’s name was changed “in the spirit of inclusivity as it welcomes customers of all backgrounds, religions, and traditions to celebrate the season.”

To which we might ask: Without Christmas, what “season”?

Imagine publishing a wedding or baby gift book without acknowledging the existence of weddings or babies. But such is the logic of secularism: it “frees” us as creatures to deny the existence or relevance of our Creator, to imagine ourselves as the masters of our lives even though we did not bring ourselves into this world and cannot prevent the day we leave it.

Despite our obvious and painful finitude, we somehow believe we have the freedom and power to assess the past, control the present, and imagine the future according to our personal beliefs. From those who are reinterpreting American history through their critical theory lenses to those who feel free to define marriage as they wish, end the lives of preborn babies as they choose, and reject faith in “God as described in the Bible,” we are increasingly a post-Christian and even post-Christmas culture.

How did we get here?

What can we do about it today?

“Utopia” or “eutopia”?

Cultural commentator Jonah Goldberg recently wrote that the Judeo-Christian worldview bequeathed to Western culture a number of foundational tenets, including science (from the belief that a single creator made a universe that is predictable and rule-driven) and universal brotherhood (from the belief that we are “all sons of God”). However, there’s an unpopular side to the biblical worldview: It also claims that humans are finite and fallen, a perspective that Goldberg calls the “tragic” vision.

In his telling, we need “custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy” (a list he borrows from Edmund Burke) to improve our state in this broken world. Nor does human nature change for the better over time. As Goldberg notes, “We can get better—or worse—at making cathedrals and skyscrapers, but the bricks never stop being bricks.” The social and cultural progress we have made is “not stored in our genes, but in institutions and traditions.”

By contrast, what Goldberg calls the “utopian” vision claims that humans using unaided reason and the tools of science can improve themselves and their world without relying upon the institutions and traditions they insist are holding us back. Many point to damage caused by these institutions and traditions (Jim Crow laws, clergy abuse, etc.) as evidence for their position.

Many secularists think they can invent new rituals to do what religion used to do. Like Aristotle, they believe they can locate the transcendent in the imminent, using what is human to do what was once thought to be divine.

But take the “Holiday Book” as an example. Are materialistic gifts really the deepest meaning of Christmas? Can presents that perish give the gift of eternal life? And who, by using unaided human reason, would have conceived of a God who became one of us that we might be one with him? Of a Creator of the universe who chose to be born as a helpless baby and die on a cruel cross for your sins and mine?

According to Goldberg, we must choose between striving for utopia (which literally means “no place” because it cannot exist) and eutopia (which means “the good place”). The eutopian “looks at the world as it is in front of his or her face and says, ‘I can make this better.’”

The question, of course, is how.

“When I fall, I shall rise”

The graphic designer and illustrator Seymour Chwast noted: “If you dig a hole and it’s in the wrong place, digging it deeper isn’t going to help.”

In a time of grave immorality (Micah 6:16–7:6), when it seemed that “there is no one upright among mankind” (v. 2), the prophet responded: “As for me, I will look to the Lᴏʀᴅ; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me” (Micah 7:7). He then boldly declared:

“Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the Lᴏʀᴅ will be a light to me” (v. 8).

No matter how deep your darkness, you can make Micah’s declaration yours today.

If you forsake self-reliance for Spirit-dependence, turning from “holidays” to “Christmas” and from Santa Claus to Jesus Christ, asking your Father to sustain you in your challenges and redeem your trials for his glory and your good, he will “supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).

And you’ll help build eutopia in this world, leading to utopia in the next.

When George Washington was “wearied almost to death”

I’ll close with an example.

According to historian Douglas Bradburn, the British army fighting in the American War for Independence grew to 190,000 soldiers toward the end of the conflict. The British also had the largest navy in the world, with over five hundred ships.

By contrast, the Americans had no navy at all. George Washington never commanded more than sixteen thousand healthy troops at one time. He was typically outnumbered at least two-to-one in every battle he contested. While he fought seventeen different battles during the war, he won only six.

At one point at the end of 1776, when his army had dwindled to about three thousand men and he was being chased by the British across New Jersey, he wrote a letter to his brother in which he despaired of the future, saying, “I am wearied almost to death with the retrograde motion of things.”

As a result, Washington regularly invoked divine authority for help because he thought the war effort was otherwise impossible. He wrote, “I look upon every dispensation of Providence as designed to answer some valuable purpose.” And he sought to “inculcate a due sense of the dependence we ought to place in that all-wise and powerful Being, on whom alone our success depends.”

On whom does your “success” depend today?

NOTE: For more on the urgency of depending fully on God, please read my latest website article, “Trading the ‘American Dream’ for the ‘heavenly vision’: The antidote to financial stress.”

Tuesday news to know:

• US approves $2 billion in arms sales to Taiwan including advanced missile defense system
• Fires set in drop boxes destroy hundreds of ballots in Washington and damage 3 in Oregon
• Israel wants more peace deals with Arab countries after war, Netanyahu says
• On a hurricane-ravaged Appalachian Trail, vast damage and uncertainty
• On this day in 1998: John Glenn returns to space

*Denison Forum does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in these stories.

Quote for the day:

“I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.” —Martin Luther

Denison Forum

When Johanna Olson-Kennedy and her team began their research into the effects of puberty blockers on children in 2015, the research was supposed to last for two years. Yet, as Azeen Ghorayshi of The New York Times reports, neither she nor her team have published their findings nearly a decade later.

When asked why, Olson-Kennedy stated, “I do not want our work to be weaponized.” Those concerns stem from the fact that the study found the 95 children recruited to participate did not show signs of improved well-being as a result of the puberty blockers.

In response, Olson-Kennedy argued that the lack of impact was due to the children being well-adjusted before beginning the trial. In 2020, however, she stated that roughly a quarter of the kids were depressed with significant anxiety and suicidal tendencies.

The negative response toward the decision to withhold the results of “the largest grant that’s ever been awarded in the US on the subject” isn’t sitting well with the scientific community, including those who are generally supportive of transgender rights.

Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist and transgender youth expert, noted that Olson-Kennedy’s refusal to publish her findings is “contrary to the scientific method. You do research, and then you disclose what the results are. You don’t change them, you don’t distort them, and you don’t reveal or not reveal them based on the reactions of others.”

And that is especially the case when negative reactions to the research appear to be justified. After all, Olson-Kennedy’s research is not the first to point to puberty blockers being a poor way to address gender dysphoria in kids.

The US trails the world

Similar research was conducted in England a little more than a decade ago, and both were attempts to mirror the findings of a study from the Netherlands in the 1990s and 2000s. That study, released in 2011, found that children with persistent gender dysphoria experienced fewer depressive symptoms and improved behavioral and emotional states after receiving puberty blockers.

As Ghoravshi describes, “The findings were highly influential even before they were published, and clinics around the world opened to treat transgender adolescents with puberty blockers and hormones.”

The problem is that no other study has been able to replicate those results. In fact, the only consistent findings are that puberty blockers can negatively impact bone growth and result in fertility loss in the children who take them.

As a result, the National Health Service in England has stopped prescribing them outside of clinical trials, and several other European countries have done the same.

In fact, the United States is one of the few countries left where puberty blockers are still used to treat children who claim to have gender dysphoria. And, at this point, it seems clear the decision to do so is motivated by politics more than science or a genuine desire to help hurting kids.

The line between confidence and conceit

I bring this story up today because I believe it’s important, particularly on politically and culturally charged issues, to remember that there are empirical reasons to believe that the Bible is correct. Whether it’s transgenderism, abortion, homosexuality, or a number of other topics about which Scripture disagrees with the views of modern America, we don’t simply have to take God’s Word on faith. And that should give us the confidence necessary to hold fast to his Word, regardless of what those around us may think.

That said, the line between confidence and conceit can become awfully fine when we get defensive in the face of attacks from those who disagree. And staying on the right side of that line is crucial to maintaining our witness in the world around us.

After all, as important as these issues are—and I do believe they are very important—they are not essential to salvation, and we err when elevating them to a higher level of significance than God does.

Scripture clearly states that the only beliefs necessary for salvation are that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead (Romans 10:9). And keeping that list of essentials as short as Scripture does is important for two primary reasons.

Unessential does not mean unimportant

First, only God gets to decide what’s essential to the gospel. His word is quite clear that any attempts—regardless of how well-intentioned they may be—to add to it places us in opposition to the Lord. For proof, we need look no further than the Judaizers, who genuinely believed that they were helping Gentile believers by elevating some of the most historic and widely agreed upon elements of the Law to the gospel that Paul taught (Galatians 2).

When we add a particular belief about transgenderism, abortion, social justice, or any of the other hot-button issues of our day to the core teachings of the gospel, we make a similar mistake. And, ironically, we often diminish their importance in the process.

Second, only what God’s Word deems essential should be central to our beliefs. You see, we need to keep the list of essentials as small as Scripture does because if we elevate beliefs beyond where the Bible places them, it reduces the significance of any topic that does not make our list.

Unessential does not mean unimportant, yet that is how it often seems when every issue that is important to us is deemed a key determinant of who is saved and who is not. The truth is that every false belief we have about God lowers the ceiling on how close we can be in our walk with him. As such, there is no unimportant belief when it comes to who he is or how he calls us to see the world around us.

Even though Christians can disagree on these issues without having to question the other’s salvation, getting them right is still crucial to a thriving relationship with God. That’s why it’s part of our calling to not only hold to a biblical view on these subjects but also to help others do the same (Matthew 28:20).

We just need to be careful not to confuse those subjects with the gospel in the process.

NOTE: In just a few days, your opportunity to receive the Respectfully, I Disagree and How Does God See America? political resource bundle will be gone. And while the election will soon be over, the noise and chaos won’t stop — no matter who wins the White House. Receive these impactful resources as our gift to thank you for your donation of $25 or more. Don’t miss out — get your political bundle today.

Friday news to know:

• North Korean soldiers have joined the fight against Ukraine
• Former President Trump to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast
• Billy Joel is selling his $49.9 million mansion on Long Island
• Russell Moore on the dangers of “cheap hope”
• On this day in 1400: Geoffrey Chaucer—author of The Canterbury Tales—dies in England

*Denison Forum does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in these stories.

Quote for the day:

“Christians have to discern between the bad traditions we must change and the inconvenient truths that must change us. Scripture is our guide, not the world and our individual ‘truths.’” — Justin Giboney

Denison Forum