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When things go wrong and life falls apart, it’s not unusual for people to want to fire God.
It would be like axing an incompetent personal assistant. Is this any way to run a universe?
Or we want to go to Facebook and un-friend God – to remind him that his performance is totally unacceptable. The conflicts that are currently ravaging Ukraine, Lebanon, Iran, South Sudan, and the Congo – with myriad innocent victims caught in the crossfire – are only the most recent examples.
In response, God offers us some surprising texts in Scripture that help us see a larger picture.
One of them is from the book of Daniel, where life comes crashing down on the heads of three young men. Their names are Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
They’re forced to make a choice: bow before the egomaniacal king of Babylon instead of God or be thrown into a fiery furnace – an ordeal which they cannot possibly survive. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego reaffirm their trust in God, knowing it’s a death sentence.
Into the furnace they go.
But then something happens. To the shock of everyone, the furnace doesn’t kill them. The king himself can see them walking around inside. And then he sees something else: There’s a fourth person, whom the king describes as “a son of the gods,” walking alongside them. They ultimately emerge unscathed.
In a world that is ravaged by tornadoes, child abuse, pandemics, treachery, and broken promises, all of us go into the furnace from time to time.
In his book Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, pastor Timothy Keller points out that most of us assume we now have three options.
We’d very much like to run around the furnace – to avoid it, if at all possible. Or maybe we can just race right through it – to deny how dreadful it is. Or maybe we should just lie down in the middle of the pain and give in to despair.
Yet none of these options is realistic or hopeful.
Keller – who himself entered the furnace of the cancer that took his life three years ago this week – insists that our call is to just keep walking, one step at a time, alongside the Savior who is always beside us.
That takes us to one of the Bible’s most familiar texts, Psalm 23, where a pair of prepositions is often overlooked.
The first is the word through. “Even though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death” (verse 4). God does not lead us into Death Valley in order to leave us there. It may be necessary to walk into the shadows for a time, but our true destination – whether in this world or the next – is the green pastures and still waters that David describes at the beginning of the psalm.
As Winston Churchill said, “If you find yourself going through hell, keep going.”
The second key preposition is with. “I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” No one wants to descend into a death-shadowy season of life. But we will quickly discover that we can go anywhere with a security that will never fail us – as long as we are accompanied by the One, the Fourth Person, who has defeated Evil by means of his cross and defeated Death by means of his empty tomb.
It’s easy to overlook the essence of the Twenty-Third Psalm. That’s because we buy into an age-old spiritual myth:
God’s job is to keep me out of trouble.
Actually, God’s job is to teach us to become like him. And one of the most effective ways to accomplish that is by teaching us to trust him during all the times we do in fact get into trouble. The Valley of the Shadow of Death is a kind of grad school for the soul.
Are you walking down a very dark path today, and trying to endure what feels like a fiery furnace?
Keep walking. Go through whatever you are facing.
There is no place we can ever go, there are no thoughts we can ever think, there are no decisions we can ever make, even in our moments of greatest weakness or emptiness or sheer stupidity, that can separate us from the love of God – if we are willing to keep walking with him.
For as we walk, we will discover soon enough that we’re not alone.
The Son of God is walking beside us.