God has given it to us.
Now, we must not conclude from this that God is being unreasonable and unkind. On the contrary, God is graciously teaching us to trust him. While we may be unable to figure out what God is doing, we can learn to trust him anyway. As Charles Spurgeon once said, “The Christian . . . trusts [God] where he cannot trace him.” And of all the reasons we have for trusting our God, there is none more glorious and guaranteeing than this: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).
I needed to embrace this truth in my difficult circumstances. I was struggling with bitterness toward those who were sinning against my family. But when I began to own that, ultimately, God was the giver of my unhappy business, I was then able to get my eyes off others and repent of my bitterness. The Puritan preacher Thomas Watson wisely said, “Whoever brings an affliction to us, it is God that sends it.”
Knowing that God sends our affliction changes everything. Rather than bitterly begrudging our trouble, we can humbly accept it. That’s because we know the Sender. He is good and does good (Psalm 119:68). He promises never to leave us nor forsake us (Hebrews 13:5). He will not allow us to be
“God is the giver of every painful and perplexing experience in this life.”
Hope in God Alone At times, we think we are trusting God when we are not. Such was the case for me. As the slanderous onslaught continued, I realized I wasn’t hoping in God. Instead, I was hoping for a particular outcome. Whenever the desired outcome failed to materialize, I would despair. I needed to set my hope on God, regardless of the result. Much of our misery in trouble is due to
tempted beyond our ability to resist (1 Corinthians 10:13). He pledges to help us (Psalm 46:1) and to comfort us in all our troubles (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). And he causes all our unhappy business to work together for our good (Romans 8:28). Trusting vs. Trying to Understand While we can be sure that God is up to good in our unhappy business, we don’t always perceive it. Time and again, right when I thought I was finally seeing the good that God was creating in our baffling circumstances, it would all collapse. What is God doing? I asked, wracking my brain. The harder I tried to understand, the more frustrated I became. Once more, I found help in the book of Ecclesiastes. We read in Ecclesiastes 3:11, “[God] has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” We discover from this verse that God gives us the desire to know what he is doing: “He has put eternity into man’s heart.” Yet he also limits our understanding: “[Man] cannot find out what God has done.” In other words, God has ordained our longing to understand and our inability to do so.
misplaced hope — hoping in something or someone other than God himself. But quiet confidence in God alone generates stability and delight amid all the unhappy business of life. We should trust God like Sarah and the other “holy women who hoped in God” — women whom the apostle Peter commends as examples for us to follow (1 Peter 3:5). We know from reading the Old Testament that disillusionment called upon these women. Yet they were not surprised by the visit. They knew God was the giver of their unhappy business. And they trusted in his sovereign goodness even when life didn’t make sense. They did not place their hope in changed circumstances but fixed their hope on God and him alone. By God’s grace, we can go and do likewise, no matter how busy we are with life’s unhappy business. Carolyn Mahaney is a pastor’s wife and homemaker who has written several books with her daughter, including True Life: Practical Wisdom from the Book of Ecclesiastes. Carolyn and her husband, CJ, have four children and twelve grandchildren.
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