When Trouble Comes

“For in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling; he will hide me in the shelter of his tabernacle and set me high upon a rock.” (Psalm 27:5 NIV).

I’ve used it before, but the quote by Alan Redpath comes to mind as I read this Psalm: "There is nothing -- no circumstance, no trouble, no testing -- that can touch me until, first of all it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me. If it has come that far, it has come with some great purpose, which I may not understand at the moment. But as I refuse to become panicky, as I lift up my eyes to Him and accept it as coming from the throne of God for some great purpose of blessing to my own heart, no sorrow will ever disturb me, no trial will ever disarm me, no circumstance will cause me to fret, for I shall rest in the joy of what my Lord is."

God promises to keep His children even when they are in trouble. Notice this: God’s promise is not to keep us from trouble but to protect us when we are in trouble. Marvelous promise. It doesn’t work. Got your attention? Read on.

There are times when we face difficulties and it may seem to us that God’s promise has failed. Certainly that is true when we face death in any form but particularly true when death comes violently. What about the promise then? Has God failed His child? What about victims of violent crimes? Has God abandoned them? Forgotten them? It would certainly seem so, particularly to those who are hurting.

But what may seem real to us in experience does not change the reality of God’s promise. God made us with eternity in mind, and the sooner we get this view the sooner we will begin to realize in our emotions the reality of His promises.

Let me illustrate. As an adult, I put aside my childish fears of the dark a long time ago. My reason and intellect tell me there is nothing to fear. Dark, no matter how black it may be, cannot hurt me. I know that. Yet there are times and circumstances where, even as an adult, that creepy feeling rises up within me. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and a chill of terror courses through my body. It is not that my reason has failed, it is my imagination begins to play games with my emotions; my intellectual reasoning powers at that moment bow to my feelings. What I know becomes clouded by what I am feeling.

That same experience haunts my Christian life as well. There are times that what I know, that which I have become absolutely convinced of, falls prey to the pain of hurt and my emotions threaten to eclipse my knowledge. That is where faith comes in. Faith is not as some would have us believe a blind leap in the dark. Faith is the ability to keep on believing what I know to be true when every fiber of imagination and emotion within me is screaming, “the promises have failed! God has deserted you! Quit this foolish ‘pie in the sky hope.’ (Understand here that such emotions are fueled and fanned by the devil whose plan from the beginning has been to get mankind to question what God says and/or promises.)

Why do men even have ‘pie in the sky hope?’ I believe it is because God has set eternity in our hearts. (See Ecclesiastes 3:11). Our problem is we have spent so much time living for this temporary world that we have all but lost the conscious view of eternity. Still it calls to us in our souls. Evil men deride it and sometimes good men begin to doubt it, but the reality of it remains. And it is in this reality that the promise of God still rests! Notice David’s insight: “For in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling; he will hide me in the shelter of his tabernacle and set me high upon a rock.”

God has not promised us all sunshine and roses in this life. Just the opposite. In Genesis 3 God told mankind in effect, “O.K., you wanted to see what life would be like if you were in charge? Fine. From this moment on you will struggle, you will suffer and you will die. The reason for this is because I know, and I want you to know, that your sense of worth, your sense of happiness, your sense of accomplishment can only be found when you walk in right relations with Me.”

God’s promises never fail. Deliverance may seem delayed because we measure it by time. But remember this: God views it the way we were meant to view it: from the perspective of eternity. Because of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, you can be sure of this: in the day of trouble He will keep you safe and that safety eventually will be fully realized when we stand face to face with Him in His dwelling; in heaven.