Transcription
Welcome to Gospel and Life. Today we're starting a special series of meditations by Tim Keller, "Trusting God in Difficult Times." This new series is meant to encourage you to trust God more deeply and to meditate on his word and what it promises to give you strength and hope in difficult times. And now, here's today's meditation.
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Let me read just two verses from Psalm 11, verses 3 and 4. "When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?" "The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord is on his heavenly throne."
This is an excellent psalm for panicky times. The first three verses, in the first three verses, counselors have come to David the King, and they've said, "You've got to flee! The foundations are being destroyed. There are assassins about. People have infiltrated the palace. There's going to be a coup, and so you just need to get out of town." David, however, knows that as the King, the worst thing he can do for his people was to just flee. And therefore, he refuses to panic. And in verse 4, he explains exactly how he is able to avoid panic. He says two things. He says, "The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord is on his heavenly throne." That's a reason for the mind and a reason for the heart. That hope keeps you from panic.
Let's do the reason for the mind first. "The Lord is on his heavenly throne." Now, God is ruling the world. There is a plan. That's what David is reminding himself of. We are like, we modern people especially, are like the child in a car who's got a little toy steering wheel that he attaches to the glove compartment. He thinks he's steering the car, even though the parent, of course, is actually steering the car. And we are like that, especially we modern people, because we think that we're in control of the world. And therefore, if the world gets out of control, then the world is out of control. If we can't control it, then it's out of control. However, God is always in control. There's always a plan.
Now, this is not a comforting idea. It's not a comforting idea unless there's a little bit of humility. I remember when we were moving from Philadelphia to New York City many, many years ago, and our children are very young. And I do remember talking to one of the children who was very upset about the fact they were going to leave their playmates behind. And it's very difficult when you're a 40-year-old to talk to a five or six or seven-year-old and explain, "Yeah, you won't have your playmate, but we're going to a way better place. You're going to have a way better life. We're going to have terrific stuff that's going to happen to us." But there's almost no way for a 40-year-old to say to a little child something that would console him at that time.
Now, the difference between God and you and me is infinitely greater than the difference between a 40-year-old and a four or five, six-year-old. And therefore, when God, in a sense, comes and says, "There are some things happening right now, but I want you to know there is a plan. There is some way in which, in the long run, I am working everything out for my glory and for your good." We don't understand it any more than the little child does. But here's the thing: you will get no consolation from the idea that God is in control if you don't humble yourself to say, "I am a child, and of course, there might be some things that God would know that I wouldn't know."
And so, first of all, if you're willing to humble yourself like that, then the idea that God is on his heavenly throne, that is something for your mind that will calm your mind. But then there's also something for your heart. "The Lord is in his holy temple." See, the throne of God is infinitely remote. He's up there. But the temple is here with us. And the temple was the way for you to have fellowship with God. And even in David's day, there was a temple you could go to. The temple. Psalm 27, David says, "I go to the temple to see the Lord's beauty." But in the Old Testament, the reality was, if you are a worshipper, you never did see the Lord. You didn't see his glory. You weren't right in his presence because that was behind the veil, and that was over the mercy seat. And the only person who was able to go back into the Holy of Holies was the priest, the high priest, once a year on Yom Kippur, taking the blood of the atoning sacrifice. And so, really, you didn't actually have that kind of access. You weren't able to really get into his presence. You weren't able to really sense his love on your heart.
But now you suddenly get to the New Testament, and something has changed. Because in the Old Testament, Moses said, "Show me your glory," and God says, "I can't. It will kill you." But in John chapter 1, it says about Jesus Christ, "We beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." How could that be? Well, the answer is, when Jesus cast the money changers out of the temple in John chapter 2, he said, "Tear this temple down, and I'll build it back up in three days." And he was talking about his body. And what does that mean? He's saying, "I'm the temple, the bridge between deity and humanity. I am the great High Priest. I am the great sacrifice." Because of my death on the cross, because I paid for your sins, the veil in the temple was ripped from top to bottom. That's what the Bible says happened at the moment he died. And now you can actually go right in, and you can see his face, and you can sense his presence through prayer, through faith in the gospel, to the Word of God. And you can actually know his presence because "the Lord is in his holy temple," and his holy temple is Jesus Christ himself, the final temple, the true temple. If you have that fellowship for your heart, if you've got that understanding of God's sovereignty for your head, you can face anything.
And now, here's Tim and Kathy Keller for a short time of Q&A on today's meditation.
I've got really in control of the world, then why does he let stuff like this happen? This meaning the current moment with the worldwide pandemic, or before that, any of the terrible things like earthquakes or cancer or just name whatever you want. I mean, I can understand this. This is not my question, obviously. It's a question that keeps coming up in conversations, and we get sent to the Gospel and Life website, which, by the way, is correspondence at gospelandlife.org if you have a question. I can understand how some bad things are the result of people's sin. But when something like this happens, well, the point of actual fact, nothing like this has ever happened. But when something of a natural disaster kind of thing happens, then how can you say that God's really caused a lot under it? Got everything out of control? I don't understand it. I mean, this is the question that comes up. People say they can't understand how you can say God's in control whenever, why, if he'd be in control, why do you let this stuff happen?
Now, the problem is, you're channeling a lot of different people. Yeah, obviously. I'm the one that answers. This is a big secret, so now letting it out to the world. I'm the one that answers the gospel, the correspondence at gospelandlife.org. So, you'll love this answer. Hmm. The answer depends. It depends on where the person is coming down. See, there's a more, there's a more philosophical way to ask that question. There are plenty of people who have a, who rightly have a true intellectual, philosophical question about suffering and evil. They're saying, "If you have a good God, an all-powerful God, how can you, how could such a God allow all this?" And there are very good philosophical answers. And I would go there if I didn't feel a person who was asked me that question was actually having a lot of suffering in his or her life at the moment.
There's a, in the last 30 or 40 years, in the world of philosophy, there has almost been a laying to rest that objection. Almost. I mean, that is, there's still plenty of people who, who emotionally feel like, "I can't believe in a God who would allow evil and suffering." But the philosophical objection has come down to this: and that is that if there is a God who is omnipotent and all good and all-powerful, that God might have, and probably does have, reasons that we can't conceive of why he hasn't, hasn't stopped it yet. So here comes the suffering. You have the God of the Bible as, as eventually going to stop it, but he doesn't, hasn't done it yet. And there's Alvin Plantinga and a number of other philosophers who have done a wonderful job writing very fairly, difficult to read books, but are very, very closely reasoned that basically say you can't assume that because you can't think of a good reason why God would allow evil and suffering, that there can't be a good reason that we just can't perceive. And I was trying to get at that way about the child and the father, right? Plantinga was that was basically trying to channel Alvin Plantinga's arguing. So philosophically, it doesn't mean there can't be a God. We can struggle just like Job did. But Job struggled with the fact that he was suffering, but he never said, "Well, there can't be a God."
On the other hand, if the person who was asking me this question is actually suffering quite a bit themselves, I wouldn't go there because that's just not what they need. I would go to the cross. I would say, "Look, without showing too much disrespect to all the other world religions, we're the only religion that has a God who actually came and involved himself in suffering in order to save us." And therefore, we don't know what, we may not know what the reason for your suffering is, but we know what the reason for your suffering isn't. It isn't that God doesn't love you. Didn't John Stott have a thing about that? "I could never believe in a God who didn't suffer." And then there's that, well, there's a poem by Yo-Yo Edward Shillito, I believe. Can you remember it? Okay. Well, if you remember it, you're better off than me because I can just remember that it exists. I can't. But Edward Shillito, he said this. He said it's a poem and speaking to Jesus, he says, "The other gods were strong, but thou wast weak. They rode; thou didst humble to thy throne. To our wounds only God's wounds can speak, and no God has wounds but thou alone." And that's, I think, how you talk to a suffering person and say, "I don't know why God allowed this, but I do know it's not that he doesn't love you."
If you found today's meditation encouraging, please subscribe below and be sure to share it with a friend to encourage them as well. And if you'd like to hear more teachings by Tim Keller, you can listen to new sermons every week at gospelandlife.com/podcast. Thanks again for watching Gospel and Life.
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