The Character of God
Part 3 – His faithfulness
"God – The Faithful One"
Lamentations 3 (especially vv 21-25)
September 26, 1999
Dr. Jerry Nelson
Richard Strauss tells the story of a successful salesman he knew named Don, who at 44 was struck totally blind.
His job, his hobbies, and his appreciation of the "great outdoors" were brought to a halt.
Don was so angry that he begged God to take his life and threatened suicide.
But God seemed to assure him that God had a plan for his life.
A short time later Don insisted on taking a walk even though no one was available to help him.
Angrily he took his cane, stumbled down the steps of his home and started across the road in front of his house.
He became disoriented and tripped into a small creek.
As he sat waist deep in water he thought he could almost hear God say to him, "Don, have you cooled down enough now to hear and trust me. I have a plan for your life."
That was the moment that Don gave away his anger and entrusted himself to God.
A few years later Don was serving the Lord as a representative of a Christian mission to the blind and finding more joy and satisfaction in life than he had ever known before. God was faithful. (Strauss in The Joy of Knowing God 275)
Such stories both encourage me and infuriate me.
They encourage me because I cannot refute their truth – Time and time again God has taken the worst and turned it for good – God is faithful.
But they infuriate me because they would seem to indicate that such happy endings are always the outcome of tragedy – and everyday I see evidence that that is not true. In those times is God still faithful?
Many weeks ago I decided that starting in September I would preach a series of messages on the character of God.
It was determined then, weeks ago, that on September 26, today, I would speak on the subject of the faithfulness, the trustworthiness of God.
Little did I then realize how I would struggle with what I truly believe about God’s faithfulness.
C.S. Lewis wrote, "You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope (is) strong… as long as you are merely using it to (wrap) a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a (cliff). Wouldn’t you then… discover how much you really trusted it?" (A Grief Observed 25)
I may be wrong in this, but I sense that the concept of God’s faithfulness is something of an abstraction until it intersects our lives.
Like Lewis’ rope, saying I believe in the faithfulness of God is much easier than confidently trusting in his faithfulness.
Therefore I will, today, speak of both God’s faithfulness and our faith in his faithfulness.
For though it is true that God is faithful whether we trust him to be or not, it is when our faith meets his faithfulness that we experience what God desires for us – the full knowledge of his love.
As I said, little did I realize, earlier this summer, how I would struggle this week with faith and the faithfulness of God.
One year ago (September 13, 1998) I held up before you a seven-month-old baby boy.
When he was 36 hours old he came into our lives – his mother gave birth to him in prison.
We loved him from the start – wanting desperately for him not to go back to the life that seemed inevitably his if he returned to his mother.
The more we got to know of the situation the greater our fear became.
For 17 months we lived from month to month not knowing if he would be with us any longer.
For 17 months the love grew deeper and deeper.
I suspect people who have adopted children understand when I say, "I am angered by those who think there is something less in the relationship because it isn’t biological." They don’t know what they are talking about.
Then three months ago we decided to take a risk.
With his mother’s mandatory release from prison imminent, we thought Paris would best be protected by appealing to the court for permanent custody until such time as his mother could prove herself fit to care for him.
But by taking the matter to court we knew we risked everything.
We had no legal standing in our relationship with the baby.
We were not parents, grandparents, or even foster parents.
We had no more legal standing than a babysitter.
By forcing the matter before the court we knew that two other options presented themselves to the court – He could be awarded to his mother who is now out of prison, or to Social Services to be placed in foster care.
Our love for Paris (for that is his name) is so strong, and our fear for his physical or emotional safety in the other options before the court, made it feel like we were risking everything.
Again I quote from Lewis, "Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief."
(A Grief Observed p25)
Last Wednesday afternoon we stood in courtroom 5b of the Jefferson County District Court, made our case, sat down and waited.
And this was in the midst of preparing for a sermon on the faithfulness of God.
Last Tuesday and Wednesday before going to court, as I studied the text for today, I realized I was wrestling with my belief in the faithfulness of God.
But to be more precise – it was not whether I believed God could and would do what he said he would do but whether he would do what I considered to be "good".
And I realized I was questioning the "goodness" of God.
Last week I spoke to the subject of the power of God.
I specifically said I wanted you to assume God is good as we discussed his power.
Today, with the subject of God’s faithfulness before us, we come back to his goodness.
To have an all-powerful God who is not good would be to have a malevolent God.
To have a good God who is not all-powerful would be to have a well-meaning but impotent God.
Implicit in the faithfulness of God are his attributes of power and goodness.
And I realized I was wrestling with whether I believed God would exercise his power to do what was good, even "the best", for Paris.
Four or five days later I had to stand and proclaim the faithfulness of God. Could I do it?
What if this very human judge, maybe overworked, maybe easily indifferent, maybe a "rehabilitationist", ruled that Paris should immediately be given to his mother or placed in the protective care of the social services’ foster care program?
Would I still be able to speak of the faithfulness of God?
The prophet Jeremiah was put to the test.
Look with me please at the book of Lamentations, chapter 3.
After the Psalms and then after the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah you will find this short book entitled Lamentations.
If you have watched and read the international news over the past several years then you know something of the conditions under which Jeremiah lived.
You have seen pictures of the atrocities of war waged on the Kurds in northern Iraq, the Albanians in Kosovo, earlier the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda in Africa, and earlier still the Cambodians under Pol Pot.
If you let the pictures touch you at all, you realize how unbearable it would be to experience such things.
You too must wonder if you would be like Elie Wiesel, the WWII concentration camp victim, who survived but only with the conviction that there cannot be a God.
Maybe you have read of the torture and death of so many Christians in Sudan and Columbia
So at the least your belief in the faithfulness of God is threatened.
In chapter 1, Jeremiah describes the results of the invasion of Jerusalem by the Babylonian army.
Like the pictures we have seen of thousands fleeing their homes in Kosovo – so the residents of Jerusalem were either running or being led away in chains by the thousands.
Jeremiah had seen the starvation that preceded the final assault.
He described the children and infants fainting without food and dying in their mothers’ arms.
Jeremiah was shaken to the core.
In chapter 3 he describes it all in very personal terms – he was personally a victim of the horror he described.
And he described it the context of his relationship with God:
READ 3:1-20
I don’t know if you can feel the anguish of his soul.
But maybe you too have wondered about the goodness, the faithfulness of God.
Maybe you too, like Jeremiah, have been put to the test.
It is Jeremiah’s anguish that makes his next words so powerful.
It is knowing, that he knows, what it means to be sick with fear, to question the goodness of God, to wonder if there is any hope, that makes his affirmation so attractive.
Hear his words, the Word of God, in Lamentations 3:21-25. READ
Walt Kaiser said that given the terrible circumstances at the time, Jeremiah’s resounding affirmation of the faithfulness of God is like someone standing in the concentration camp called Auschwitz in 1943 (before the war ended) and singing the beloved song, "Great Is Thy Faithfulness".
(Kaiser in A Biblical Approach to Personal Suffering p80)How could he do it? What caused him to make such a declaration when the circumstances were so dark?
He tells us.
He said, "Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:"
What does he call to mind, what does he remember?
The first is in verse 22.
"Because of the Lord’s great love, we are not consumed…"
The old King James translation said it this way, "It is (because) of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed…"
It seems the first thing Jeremiah remembers is that unless God had intervened in mercy, Jeremiah would have already experienced the consuming judgment of God – Jeremiah wouldn’t even exist.
He was a man who remembered that he deserved nothing from God except judgment.
He remembered he had no right to claim God’s goodness.
His own sinfulness deserved any misery inflicted on him.
It was only God’s mercy, great love, loyal love, covenant-keeping love that kept Jeremiah from being wiped off the face of the earth and eternally separated from God.
John Calvin said it this way, "Were God to take away the promise (of his mercy), all the miserable would inevitably perish; for they can never lay hold on his mercy except through his word. This, then is the reason why Scripture so often connects these two things together, even God’s mercy and his faithfulness in fulfilling his promises."
(Kaiser 87)"Have it your way", "You deserve a break…", "inalienable rights", children’s rights, women’s rights, workers rights, patient’s rights, "entitlements".
Every day we hear how we deserve good.
While the Bible unequivocally commands that we do good to each other, it equally clearly declares that not one of us deserves anything but the judgment of God.
That casts a very different light on life.
Hard as it is to accept, if I never knew any mercy from God, I would be getting exactly what I deserve.
Such humility takes the wind out of our sails of anger toward God for what comes our way.
Were it not for God’s mercy, his great love, we would know only judgment.
Victor Hugo (author of Les Miserables) said, "The supreme happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for oneself or more correctly (much more correctly) in spite of oneself."
Jeremiah is reminded that God loves him in spite of Jeremiah’s unworthiness.
The second thing Jeremiah notes is that in addition to mercy (God not giving us what we do deserve) – God does give us what we don’t deserve.
Lamentations 3:22b "…for his compassions never fail, they are new every morning…"
If mercy is "not getting what we do deserve" then his compassions are grace - "getting what we don’t deserve".
I don’t think you will find the plural word "compassions" in your dictionary.
The English translators are attempting to describe a Hebrew word that is related to the word "womb" – noting the various ways a mother tenderly cares for her child.
Though Jeremiah doesn’t enumerate them here, his mind apparently wandered down memory lane noting the ways God has demonstrated and still demonstrates his grace each day.
I think the hymn-writer captured something of this when he wrote,
"Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.
Every season, every new day, every colorful fall mountainside, every enjoyment of life, even life itself is a gift from God – witnesses to his grace, his tender "mother-care" of every one of us.
Jeremiah knew it would be a great blasphemy to characterize God based only on the discomforts, difficulties and even tragedies that come into our lives.
It was his responsibility and privilege to characterize God based also on the compassions he showers us with each day.
Tennyson, I think, starts to get at this attitude when he writes,
"For nothing worthy proving can be proven
Nor disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt."
But Tennyson has not nearly the insight of Jeremiah for Jeremiah concludes, "Great is your faithfulness!"
With Jeremiah it is not the "sunnier side of doubt" but the full light of belief in the faithfulness of God.
Jeremiah had not only seen God’s faithfulness declared new every morning but he had heard God himself say:
Jeremiah 32:40-41
"I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them… I will rejoice in doing them good and will assuredly plant them in this land with all my heart and soul."
God’s declaration is that he is always doing good for his own.
He doesn’t do good sometimes and bad other times.
Romans 8:28
"He works all things together for good to them that love him…"
Psalm 84:11 "No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly."
Even when things are going badly, it means he is changing things to be able to do more good.
Isaiah 38:17 "Lo, it was for my welfare that I had great bitterness."
Psalm 119:71 "It was good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes."
In fact, God said in Jeremiah 42 that he "rejoices" in doing good for us.
The Scripture depicts God as taking great pleasure in accomplishing our good – so much pleasure does he take in it that he will go to any length to accomplish it, including the sacrifice of his own Son.
In fact, God said in Jeremiah 42 that he rejoices in doing good for us with all his heart and soul.
God is not passionless, emotionally unmoved, uncaring.
He pictures himself as involved at the very core of his being – caring more for us than WE could ever care for anything.
In Luke 15 Jesus tells the story we know as the prodigal son.
In the story the father is clearly a representation of God.
John Piper commenting on this story said "Well-to-do, dignified, aristocratic, aging men don’t run."
He said they would probably stand and wait or possibly they would walk to meet their returning son but they wouldn’t run.
But God wants us to know that his love for us is so great that he can’t contain himself – he runs.
I am that son and I see the Father running toward me – he is glad with all his heart and soul that I am in his family and he delights in doing good for me.
While God’s compassions are new every day, they are also as old as human history.
Jeremiah didn’t have half the history we have to see the love of God unfolding and yet he believed in the faithfulness of God.
He knew of God’s promise to Abraham 1400 years earlier, he knew of the miraculous birth of Isaac.
Even before Isaac was born, God had told Abraham:
Genesis 15:13-16 Then the LORD said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions… In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.
In the days of Abraham’s grandson Jacob, and his sons, these people moved to Egypt and there they were enslaved just as predicted by God.
Abraham’s descendants groaned under the burden of Egyptian slavery. Had God forgotten his promise?
No. Jeremiah remembered the faithfulness of God in raising up Moses who led the people out of slavery at exactly the time God said it would happen.
Exodus 12:41 "At the end of the 430 years, to the very day, all the LORD's divisions left Egypt.
Jeremiah knew of the 1200 years of God’s faithfulness and he believed God had not changed.
We have a longer history with God.
Through Isaiah the prophet God declared "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Immanuel."
800 years later the virgin Mary conceived and Paul said to the Galatians, "When the time had fully come, God sent forth his son born of a woman."
We have heard the witness of the disciples, the witness of men and women for the past 2000 years since Jesus was here.
We have known personally the forgiveness of sin and a new relationship with God.
Sociologists like longitudinal studies – how about a 4000 year study – God never failing to do exactly what he had promised.
What does Jeremiah remember in the middle of his miserable circumstances?
Jeremiah remembers that God is merciful and that God is gracious.
But he also remembers that God himself is the goal of Jeremiah’s life.
Lamentations 3:24
"I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him."
This reflects a refocusing of perspective that I don’t pretend to fully understand.
I think the Psalmist was expressing the same perspective when he wrote,
Psalm 73:25-26
"Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."
Jesus himself repeatedly spoke of our need to change our perspective.
The "good life" is not made up of things or even trouble-free lives.
John 17:3
"Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent."
I will say no more on that subject because I am out of my league.
In summary, when Jeremiah finds himself thoroughly depressed by the circumstances of life, he calls to mind the mercy, grace and centrality of God himself.
And in the midst of his Auschwitz he proclaims with conviction:
"Great is your faithfulness!!"
We waited last Wednesday.
We had stated our case for keeping Paris in our care.
We sat and waited for a very human judge to determine the fate of a little boy that we couldn’t love more deeply than we do.
I wondered then as I had all week,
"On what do I base my belief in the faithfulness of God?";
"Can I say with Job, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust him’?";
"Will I say with the Psalmist, "Will not the judge of all the earth do right’?"
If this District judge says Paris will now live with strangers or worse will I be able to say, "Great is thy faithfulness!"
George Mueller is famous in church history as the Englishman who started orphanages and sustained them by prayer alone.
In July 1853 Lydia Mueller the only child of George Mueller became deathly sick with typhoid fever. She went to the brink of death.
Here is Mueller’s description of this time of trial:
"While I was in this affliction, this great affliction, (I was also) at peace, so far as the Lord’s (plan) was concerned… Parents know what an only child, a beloved child is, and what to believing parents an only child, a believing child must be. Well, the Father in heaven said, as it were, by this (sickness of my daughter), ‘Are you willing to give up this child to me? My heart responded, ‘As it seems good to you, my heavenly Father. Your will be done.’
But as our hearts were made willing to give back our beloved child to Him who had given her to us, so He was ready to leave her to us, and she lived…. Of all the trials of faith that as yet I have had to pass through, this was the greatest; and by God’s abundant mercy, I owe it to His praise, I was enabled to delight myself in the will of God, for I felt perfectly sure, that, if the Lord took this beloved daughter, it would be best for her parents, best for her and more for the glory of God than if she lived: this better part I was satisfied with; and thus my heart had peace, perfect peace and I had not a moment’s anxiety."
Seventeen years later, the outcome was not so good.
On February 6, 1870 George Mueller’s wife, Mary, died of rheumatic fever.
They had been married 39 years.
George was 64 years old.
Shortly after her death he preached a sermon from Psalm 119:64 entitled "You are good and do good".
His points for the sermon were:
The Lord was good and did good in giving my wife to me.
The Lord was good and did good in so long leaving her with me.
The Lord was good and did good in taking her from me.
During her illness he had prayed:
"Yes, my Father, the times of my darling wife are in your hands. You will do the very best thing for her and for me, whether life or death. If it may be, raise up yet again my precious wife – You art able to do it, though she is so ill; but however you deal with me, only help me to continue to be perfectly satisfied with your holy will.
After her death he prayed this:
"Everyday I see more and more how great is her loss… Yet without an effort, my inmost soul habitually (rejoices) in the joy of that loved departed one. Her happiness gives joy to me. My dear daughter and I would not have her back, were it possible to produce it by the turn of the hand. God himself has done it; we are satisfied with him."
(Autobiography of George Mueller 424-440 in Piper The Pleasures of God 190-191)
No matter what the circumstance, Mueller had matured to be able to say, "Great is thy faithfulness."
What about me? Could I say it and mean it?
I’m not George Mueller, or Job, or Jeremiah – yet!
And as yet, God has not put me in the position to test it fully.
Last Wednesday the Court declared we have full parental responsibility for Paris.
He is in our home until the court changes its mind – if it ever does.
He is not yet available for adoption but he is protected by the court for the foreseeable future.
As the judge ever so slowly, it seemed, revealed his judgment, it became increasingly apparent that Paris was safe.
We couldn’t contain our emotions.
And though our thanks went to the judge, our praise went to God!
But I was still troubled, what if the decision had been otherwise?
Later I realized that what God had done was give us one more reason to trust his faithfulness.
In his grace he was building our confidence in him.
No, I’m not a Jeremiah yet.
But I hope by God’s grace, as painful as the process is or will become, that I am getting there.
A conviction regarding the faithfulness of God doesn’t come in a flash of inspiration, but like a long rain – it soaks in, almost imperceptibly over time.
C.S. Lewis said it is "Like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight, when you first notice them, they have been going on for some time."
In every experience of life God is working his grace in us to believe him, that with his whole heart and soul he rejoices in doing us good – the kind of "good" that comes from his perfect wisdom and perfect love.
"I remember my affliction…and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.’"