Tuesday, April 26, 2011

April 25/26 What God Lets Slip Or doesn't!

Psalm 121:7-8  The LORD will keep you from all harm - he will watch over your life; the LORD will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.

The writer of the meditation reminds us that "even full trusting God is no guarentee of complete safety," and I guess that is true if you are thinking of safety as we generally do. I get really frustrated (honesty here) when I hear people say that God will supply all of your needs.  That thought is relevant here because we think that physical or even emotional safety is a basic need.  And I do believe the issue is how we view needs.

I saw believers in Africa go hungry, for days.  Not because they were lazy, but because they had planted their grain, there was little left and they had to wait for the harvest.  Good  - by that I mean righteous as God defines it, people suffer and some die every day, horrible nightmarish deaths.  Couldn't we say that we need to be free of incapacitating pain? of hunger?  How is God meeting their every need? It makes me think of how we misuse or misquote Scripture, making it say what we want it to say, rather than what it does say and meant when it was written.

So God is watching us.  Well, we do believe He is omnipresent and omniscient, so yes, He is watching us.  But what about the harm part? The Hebrew word has the sense of evil, distress, misery, injury, calamity. But we believers experience these things on a regular basis, so how do we understand these words David penned centuries ago?

The Hebrew word translated here watch has the sense also of to keep, guard, observe, give heed, a) (Qal) 1) to keep, have charge of 2) to keep, guard, keep watch and ward, protect, save life a) watch, watchman (participle) 3) to watch for, wait for 4) to watch, observe.

So God keeps guard over us, and First Corinthians 10:13 says that he filters everything that comes into our lives, "but God [is] faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear [it]. "

In His role as guardian or watcher, He gives us what we need to get through it in a way that is good for us - that allows us to glorify Him and lay up rewards in heaven. And, I just thought of this - each trial we go through strengthens us for the next, if we allow it to.  If we rehearse God's faithfulness in the past, we can be encouraged for the future.  That same God will never leave nor forsake us.

So I guess I don't think God lets anything slip...at least not out of His power to redeem it - to make something useful of it.  The issue is whether we are willing to trust Him through it, to allow Him to reveal just how He is going to use our challenges or our pain or our temptations and on His timetable.

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