We have become a people of high drama. For the more exuberant, each story, meal, or vacation is the best ever. For the struggling, each personal setback or trial is unimaginably horrible, the worst that has ever happened, to them or to anyone else. Our inborn selfishness, which needs little encouragement to run amok, is further flattered and facilitated by the access to instant communication that encourages us to place our lives on constant public display. Life’s highs and lows are thus trivialized by parading our various experiences, without adequate reflection and stillness of soul, before others in electronic contexts that cannot express true grief or true joy. Solomon’s words, “The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy” (Prov. 14:10), are an important reminder to us of the essential privacy of God’s deepest dealings with us.
That being said, many are experiencing hard times, and most feel that the very foundations upon which they have built their lives are crumbling around them. It is a good time to question those foundations, for our Savior said that the life built upon him will not crumble, for the foundation of his word cannot crack (Matt. 7:24-27). The soul will experience storms of hurricane intensity, but the man or woman that is built upon Jesus Christ, his word and church, his promises and presence, will survive and thrive because, joined to Jesus Christ in a living union of faith and power, it will be drawn to the higher rock and find in him more than sufficient resources to maintain stability, purpose, even peace, even in hard times. It needs no drama to believe this; it wants only Jesus Christ.
There are a variety of foundations we do well to ponder, to see if part of our angst is to be explained by adopting bad expectations. For example, as most Americans now live in suburban areas, the standard of living expectations are very high. The constant exposure to intensive marketing finds a friend in our envy and covetousness. Together, they often fall prey to high personal debt. Then, when the delusion of a fiat economy is revealed, we feel that the sky is falling. Some see through the deceptiveness of suburban expectations and begin making personal amends, but many simply despair, grow frustrated due to their inability to escape the vortex of bad decisions, and are gradually inclined to yield more and more to the promises of the government in order to survive and maintain some standard of living. Then, when to this is added the moral pressures upon the family and congregation to immerse themselves in the feeding frenzy of consumerism and ethical relativism, they are easy victims for the “peace, peace” of therapeutic preaching. The last thing our sinful nature wants is a real expose> of its sins and the sins of the broader culture. Thus, “grace” has become a catchword not for undeserved kindness and mercy from the Lord as revealed in the gospel of the cross but for pleasant words, soothing words, words that are easy to swallow and cause no offense to anyone. Even believers struggle with this. We want to be told that all is well, that there is a solution to our economic, parenting, and marriage problems just around the corner, that life will return to “normal” soon. We feel guilty, but we do not want to deal with the cause of our guilt but to escape its reminders and consequences, while simultaneously preserving the idols of our heart.
Within the Christian community, perhaps the most misguided expectation is that we should simply try to get back to the idyllic America of Currier and Ives, soda fountain drug stores, and “God Bless America” days of yore. The problem, of course, is that such days were not necessarily better than these days, and if you will read the essays and books of thinking Christians that were written during those times, you would think that they are writing today. They warn of the same consumerist tendencies, the growing weakness of the family, and the shallowness of spirituality within the churches – all that fifty and seventy-five years, even a century and more ago. Our current political problems, moreover, are longstanding, imbedded in the religious ambiguity of our founding documents and reaching a crisis when the South, the only section of the country that by 1860 retained vestiges of the older Christianity, a land-based economy, Jeffersonian localism, and strong families not immersed in the creeping mercantilism and industrialism of the North, lost its war for independence. All that has happened since is simply the consolidation of the foreign power that won that war. This was all in God’s providence, pointing to the realities that even the South was far from holding to the sufficiency of Scripture and kissing the Son as it ought to have done. Perhaps another lesson of this defeat is that the kingdom of our Savior, including its earthly manifestations of justice and peace, comes as men beat their swords into plowshares rather than depend upon them to produce a liberty that only heartfelt submission to his law can bestow. No, we cannot go back, at least in that way. There is a going forward but only if over the next several generations, we seriously, as our Reformation brethren did, consider honestly and personally what to do when hard times come, when the foundations are destroyed.
Consider Psalm 11:3: “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” The question itself is encouraging, for it reminds us that we are not the first and will not likely be the last to experience hard times, to feel that the world in which we live is crashing down around us. The answer, oddly, is not what we would expect. There is not a “something you must do,” at least as we traditionally understand doing “something,” which today, even within the church, is almost always given political content. Before considering the answer that is given, we should momentarily consider the reasons that politics is the dominant “doing something” in popular thinking, even in Christian thinking. The answer is simple: when the foundations are destroyed, there is usually an abandonment of belief in absolute truth, universal, objective moral standards, and a higher court of appeal by which earthly conundrums and injustices can be resolved. This is exactly what we encounter today. Before we can even “defend the faith once for all given to the saints,” we find ourselves in the position of having to defend the idea that there is such a thing as truth, as obligatory moral standards beyond the feelings and comfort of the individual, and justice from the God of heaven. Facing this will help us sense something of the imperative of the answer the Holy Spirit gives to the question. We do not live in a culture in which many men are fighting for truth. It is a worthless and uncomfortable issue to most, the ghost in the closet we would rather pretend does not exist. Our foundations are destroyed; all that is true is the market, or my personal standard of living, or the “moral” system in which I happen to have found the greatest comfort. In such a context, politics rises to the surface as the dominant paradigm of really “doing something.” Power alone can force others to see things my way. This is the reason we no longer have substantial debates over public issues; all that counts is getting your man in office so that you can have your way. This is the final stopping place of all naturalistic, materialistic philosophies. Assert dominance over nature, over men, over systems, over money. This can be achieved only by holding political power, or better, by controlling the men who can get elected due to their charisma or appearance. The real power brokers today do not stand for public office; they do not need to do so. Public faces may change, but the controlling influences remain entrenched and grow more deeply entrenched. Men who will not capitulate may get elected, but they are marginalized and vilified. This is not despair, defeatism, or a call to disengage; it is the reality of power politics, realpolitik, which has been in the ascendancy in the new order of globalism since the early 1900’s.
Ah, but this makes the answer of Scripture all the more necessary to consider. Yes, we live in an age in which questions of truth, the standards of truth, and the objectivity of truth, are perilously ignored. Yes, we are reaping many uncomfortable consequences of our rebellion: job loss and economic disruption, a jaundiced, despairing citizenry, creeping statism, and general moral disintegration. Yes, the decisions of those in power deepen the darkness and judgment. And, yes, the occasional sane voices that the Lord has raised to show the true causes of our collapse are dismissed as lunatics. But, there is something we can do, and it has nothing fundamentally to do with politics, public marches, martyrdom complexes, survivalism, or expatriation. It is the most important, the foundational response you and every God-fearing man, woman, and child that finds himself living in hard times must make. It is found in verse 4: “The Lord is in his holy temple, the Lord’s throne is in heaven.” All earthly crises, all hard times, all personal struggles have only a theological solution. By theological I mean a “God-oriented” solution. This theological solution is to fall down before the majesty of God, the throne of God, the wisdom of God, the glory, grace, and mercy of God in Jesus Christ. Only in this posture of humble submission to the living God can we see and believe that “his eyes behold, his eyelids try, the children of men.”
In other words, there is a great drama unfolding. It is the drama of God sifting not just the nations or the bad men. He is sifting all men, including his children. Will we truly bow before his wise and inscrutable providence that has called us to live through hard times? Will we recognize that he alone is the central person of history, that our lives, as important as they are to us, are only small parts of his unfolding purposes, his intent to save this fallen world and beautify the meek with salvation? Will we turn to him in trust and adoration, patience and perseverance? Once we see him in his glory we are done with hoping for easy, quick solutions, surface changes that promise to bring deep satisfaction by giving us a feeling of “doing something.” We enter a mode of life the Bible speaks of as “patiently waiting for him.” He is the great script-writer. His purposes, not ours, are being realized. His glory, not our personal comfort and peace, will fill the earth. His word, not our compromises, “solutions,” and new paradigms will prevail over the hard times that come to sinners whom the Lord constantly tries. His eyes are running through the earth to see if there is anyone who understands, seeks him, waits upon him, who, in the midst of hard times, is willing to affirm with Job: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.”
Before his throne, we see ourselves as we really are: in need of testing, of hard times. I need to learn that the Lord alone is my stay, my rock, my fortress, my high tower – not the silly hiding places I have erected as calms in the storms of life. No, let the storms roar; hidden in the cleft of the rock, the eternal Rock that was cleft for us at the cross, Jesus Christ, I am secure. I need to come before his throne, as John did, and see that the only “sea of glass,” the only place of peace, the only place in the universe where conflict cannot touch me, is before his throne. It is here that I can affirm with confidence: “If God be for us, who can be against us,” but only here. Everywhere else, I will feel disturbance of soul, uncertainty, as if the waves and billows of hard times are about to overturn the little boat I call “my life.” I have no life but in him – no peace, no security, no hope, no joy. In him, before his awful throne, though even here I must lay my hand upon my unclean lips and hope only in his mercy and promise to cleanse, I am in communion with him who sits as King above the floods, more personally and powerfully now that we know that King as our Savior who bled and died for us, who ever lives to make intercession for us at the right hand of the majesty of God.
Rising, I am still surrounded by hard times. I realize, though, that it is not my ship or city that is burning. It is the city of man that is on fire, fully engulfed in the conflagration of unbelief and rebellion. If I am charred a bit, I may have pitched my tent too close to Sodom – mentally, emotionally, in my expectations of prosperity and ease, in my own sins and compromise. I may have forgotten to believe and pray: “I am a stranger in the earth; hide not thy commandments from me” (Ps. 119:19). I may have ignored that “here we have no continuing city; but we seek one to come” (Heb. 13:12). My hard times persist, but I also persist by looking to the only city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. I persist by tying my expectations and hopes not to any earthly nation or city, but to the city of God that cannot be toppled. Jesus Christ is its chief cornerstone. I am not disinterested in the times in which I live, indifferent to the rise and fall of nations, unwilling to take the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other, but I do so with different expectations and aspirations: for God to be glorified in my weakness, for the power of Christ to rest upon me in hard times so that I may stand still and see the salvation of God. From one perspective, I glory in hard times. I count it all joy when I fall into various testings, for I know they are intended by the Lord to confirm my citizenship in heaven by purifying me, reducing me to dependence upon him through testing, for I would not learn this, he knows, in any other way. The hard times, if I look to his throne, are the truly God-times. They are the blessed times, the joyful times, for in them I am blessed to see the power of my Savior in my weakness.
This calm and strength, though, are not found by retreating within my personal spirituality and pursuit of God. When Isaiah learned where his true security was found, his response to God’s call was: “Here am I, send me” (Isa. 6:8). Membership in God’s city empowers and impels an active life of service to him. I seek, first, fellowship in his church, for though it is yet an imperfect expression of his eternal city, it is nonetheless where he dwells, in Zion, from whence his word goes out. I love his people, his preachers, his elders, his government and discipline, his sacraments, even if I find my local expression weak. Then, I seek his city in my family, endeavoring to encourage my spouse and children to come to God’s throne, to find their life and security not in the world’s promises and parties but in his presence and word, to take their place in his church and city. With my particular gifts, I do the best I can to be his servant, working hard with my hands that I may have to give to those in need, so that we may share both the hard times and the good times together. I speak with others of God’s wondrous city, his glorious throne, and his transforming truth – not with any arrogance or confidence in my presentation ability but as one who comes daily before his throne and beholds his glory in the face of Jesus Christ. Where I can, I speak his name, defend his truth – not with any delusions as to what unbelieving men can accomplish or of the destiny of my particular nation. No, I call upon all men within my sphere of influence to submit to the only Lord and Savior of men, Jesus Christ. And I speak, as the Holy Spirit does, of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8-11). If I would be his ambassador, even with a small “a,” I speak the message the Spirit was poured out to proclaim – not improved feelings, better living conditions, less or better government, more comfortable lives, more satisfying human relations. These are secondary fruits of a more fundamental work of transformation, of regeneration. The Spirit works as he does in order to bring sinners before the throne of God, to find in him forgiveness, grace to endure hard times, and hope of the eternal good times that are coming, when he is all in all.
Do not, then, despair of hard times. Do not wish them away. Do not look for easy solutions to them. If the hard times seems to be intensifying, though our understanding of this or any time is always very fallible and influenced by love of self, it is because men have forgotten God. Once men and nations turn from his light and wisdom, love and mercy, hard times should be expected. Their remedy? We must return to his throne. We must gain clearer and deeper views of his glory and majesty, wisdom and sovereignty, power and faithfulness. We must see Jesus, our Lord, reigning now at the Father’s right hand, the One who bore the hardest time of all when he took upon himself our curse. He prevailed for us, and we shall prevail in him, if we continue to come to him who saves to the uttermost those who come to the Father through him. He is praying for us that our faith fail not. He is not praying that all our problems will go away, i.e., that we shall be taken out of the world, but that we will be delivered from the evil one. His prayers are always answered. Stay close to his throne, and hard times can be blessed times of growth in grace, victory in weakness, and ripening for heaven.