Difficult Themes
Sometimes I struggle with what I read in Scripture.
There are parts of Scripture that are really hard.
There are passages I struggle to understand, teachings I have trouble accepting.
One category of this is all the times God speaks of protecting his people. Passages like Psalm 91:
If you say, “The LORD is my refuge,” and you make the Most High your dwelling, no harm will overtake you, no disaster will come near your tent.
Or when Jesus said:
Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
Yet harm does come to those who serve God. Disaster happens. People starve. What do we do with these Scriptures that seem to promise protection when we see and experience the opposite?
These promises cannot mean that we are free from suffering in this life. You only have to look at those in the Bible who served God best to know that they do not mean that.
Stephen was killed for his faith.
The apostles were beaten, imprisoned, killed for their obedience to God.
The entire chapter of Hebrews 11 is enough to tell us that the promise of protection does not always mean physical protection in this life.
So what do those promises mean?
Sometimes poetry can teach us in ways that facts, a lecture, any amount of study, cannot. There are deeper truths expressed through the art of poetry that fall flat when prose attempts the same.
One of my favorite living poets is Malcolm Guite. Guite wrote a book of 150 poems that respond to each of the Psalms, allowing these ancient words to speak into our own condition.
I’ve been slowly, meditatively going through the Psalms for several months, and along with each Psalm I read the poem that Malcolm Guite wrote in response to that Psalm.
Part of his of poem on Psalm 91 says this:
…
I may be threatened by the passing harm
Of outward pestilence, but still I trust
He gives his angels charge, and with his arm
He shelters and embraces me. No power
Can separate me from his love. His name
Is my protection and delight. I pour
My heart and soul to him in songs and psalms,
And he will bring me through my darkest hour.
Perhaps that is the deeper truth of these kinds of promises: no matter what harm comes to us in this life, no matter the suffering we endure, our heart and soul is kept secure and safe in Christ.
Nothing that happens in this life can separate us from his love.
Perhaps this is part of what faith means: trusting that whatever happens here on earth is not the end. It is not the full story or the deepest truth. Perhaps the deepest truth is that we are never separated from the God who gave up everything just to be with us and that we can trust him to keep our very selves secure in his hands.
By faith we understand, if we are to understand it at all, that the madness and lostness we see all around us and within us are not the last truth about the world but only the next to last truth … It is He who made us and not we ourselves, made us out of His peace to live in peace, out of His light to dwell in light, out of His love to be above all things loved and loving. That is the last truth about the world.
~ Frederick Buechner
You nailed it here. I am learning that the issue of “presence” is the most realistic comfort we have in this world for ourselves and for each other. God sent his Son to literally be “with us.” Immanuel. It seems this is a big part of how the NT also says to encourage, though looking to the day we are also with him and forever. We might add to this, implicitly at least — that we care.
Thank you for sharing what you learned from your deep wrestling. A big thing I’ve been learning over the past few years is so try to lean into the things I don’t understand in scripture instead of running away from them. I love how your deeper understanding only came after the struggle.