Four Faith Shaking Questions
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The glorious greatness of God and His promises to the elect are the cause of the greatest faith shaking questions in the Christian life!
You are asking how can this be? Are not God’s greatness and the greatness of His promises our greatest hope and encouragement?
By all means! They are indeed our greatest hope and encouragement.
How then can they be the cause of our most faith shaking questions?
They are the cause, because our current experience seems to question the validity of God’s greatness and the truth of His promises.
This is what Psalm 89 is all about. The better part of Psalm 89 is devoted to recounting the greatness of God and His promises to His elect.
It was from this section of Psalm 89 we sang from earlier. We sang the first eighteen verses of Psalm 89, but this section goes on for another 20 verses!
In these verses we hear of how great God is and how great His promises are to the House of David, but then in verse thirty-eight the cold hard realities of life hit!
Let us turn to this section and read from Psalm 89:38-45.
But now you have cast off and rejected;
you are full of wrath against your anointed.
You have renounced the covenant with your servant;
you have defiled his crown in the dust.
You have breached all his walls;
you have laid his strongholds in ruins.
All who pass by plunder him;
he has become the scorn of his neighbors.
You have exalted the right hand of his foes;
you have made all his enemies rejoice.
You have also turned back the edge of his sword,
and you have not made him stand in battle.
You have made his splendor to cease
and cast his throne to the ground.
You have cut short the days of his youth;
you have covered him with shame. Selah
Most commentators believe the psalmist is writing about the destruction of the House of David by the Babylonians and the exile that followed. Everything about this traumatic event seemed to scream out that God and His promises were a lie. The faith of Israel was shaken to the very core.
The realities of life do the same thing to our faith. The trials and tribulations we face would not challenge our faith so greatly if our God and His promises were not so great. As a result we start questioning our faith and some of our questions shake our faith to it’s very core. Let us continue reading.
How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever?
How long will your wrath burn like fire?
Remember how short my time is!
For what vanity you have created all the children of man!
What man can live and never see death?
Who can deliver his soul from the power of Sheol? Selah
Lord, where is your steadfast love of old,
which by your faithfulness you swore to David?
Remember, O Lord, how your servants are mocked,
and how I bear in my heart the insults of all the many nations,
with which your enemies mock, O Lord,
with which they mock the footsteps of your anointed.
There are four questions here and let us take each one in turn.
Has God Forsaken Me in His Wrath?
Has God Forsaken Me in His Wrath?
This is the question we find in verse 46.
The Old Covenant saints knew that God’s judgement had come upon Israel and the House of David because of their sin. Although many had returned from Babylon to rebuild both Jerusalem and the temple, they knew that the exile would not formally end until a Davidic King, the Messiah, sat on David’s thrown once again and all of God’s people were brought back into the Kingdom.
You can now understand why people reacted so strongly to Jesus’ preaching of the Kingdom—there would be either joy or outrage depending on whether or not you believed what Jesus said.
I make this point, because this first question is not an idle one, it was hundreds of years between the time Jerusalem was destroyed and Jesus came preaching the Kingdom! Sometimes the consequences of our sin do not last but a lifetime, but several lifetimes!
How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever?
How long will your wrath burn like fire?
Some of you listening to the sermon today are suffering the consequences of past sins and you are questioning, “How long, O Lord? If my sins are forgiven, why must I and the ones I love still bear the bitter consequence of my sin?”
This leads to the second question.
Has God Forgotten How Frail I Am?
Has God Forgotten How Frail I Am?
This is the question found in verses 47-48.
Remember how short my time is!
For what vanity you have created all the children of man!
What man can live and never see death?
Who can deliver his soul from the power of Sheol? Selah
Sometimes the trials and tribulations of life seem more than we can bear.
It is not hard to imagine Jeremiah asking this question during the siege of Jerusalem or Daniel as a young teenagers being taken captive into Babylon.
I think we all understand the need to be disciplined by God for our sin and the need to be trained by trials and hardships, but at times the weight of these trials and tribulations seems so great that they are going to crush us.
This leads to an even more troubling question.
Is God True to His Word?
Is God True to His Word?
This question is found in verse 49.
Lord, where is your steadfast love of old,
which by your faithfulness you swore to David?
Earlier the psalmist recounts what God said would happen if Israel and her kings violated God’s law.
If his children forsake my law
and do not walk according to my rules,
if they violate my statutes
and do not keep my commandments,
then I will punish their transgression with the rod
and their iniquity with stripes,
but I will not remove from him my steadfast love
or be false to my faithfulness.
I will not violate my covenant
or alter the word that went forth from my lips.
Once for all I have sworn by my holiness;
I will not lie to David.
His offspring shall endure forever,
his throne as long as the sun before me.
Like the moon it shall be established forever,
a faithful witness in the skies.” Selah
Do you see the problem? God is very clear about what would happen: Israel and the House of David would be judged for their sin, but God would restore them because He is steadfast in His love and faithfulness! You can see why Israel was asking this third question.
Believers are still asking this question because Christ’s Kingdom is not fully consummated. This is the question being asked in 2 Peter 3.
They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.”
This third question becomes all the more urgent when we consider the last question.
Where is God’s Justice?
Where is God’s Justice?
This question is found in verses 50-51.
Remember, O Lord, how your servants are mocked,
and how I bear in my heart the insults of all the many nations,
with which your enemies mock, O Lord,
with which they mock the footsteps of your anointed.
As we gather here this Lord’s Day in freedom to worship, there are thousands of Christian congregations gathering in fear and hiding because of persecution.
Between the Babylonian exile and the present day there has been a constant persecution of Jews and Christians. It has not let up, but only increased as the centuries have gone by. If you are not asking this last question you have either chosen to close your eyes or have hardened your heart. Perhaps you have done both!
Right now Scripture says the martyred saints in heaven are crying out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”
Conclusion:
Conclusion:
You see, even those in heaven are asking these faith shaking questions.
You may be wondering at this point, where are the answers? The answers are given in Psalm 90-106, which is the forth book of the Psalms.
I want to accomplish two things this morning:
Give you the questions that make Psalm 90-106 come alive. These Psalms are already among the favorites of many people. I got the majority of requests to preach from these Psalms. I believe that reading these Psalms as God intended—as answers to these four faith-shaking questions, we will appreciate them all the more.
I want to give you permission to ask hard questions of God and of your faith. These questions are meant by God to shake our faith, not to destroy it.
There is an interesting section in the book of Hebrews that speaks of shaking.
At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain.
I think of a gold miner panning for gold. The miner takes a hand-full of mud from the river and starts shaking it in a pan. All the impurities are cast away in the water and what remains is pure gold! This is what God does when He shakes our faith. Psalm 89 is the pan and Psalm 90-106 is the gold! By shaking our faith up with Psalm 89, God is preparing us to receive a faith that cannot be shaken!
Let us pray.