Seeing Truth in Affliction

As the world economic boom turned to bust in 2008 and 2009, the need for truth became obvious. Stock prices and housing prices had been inflated by the actions of individuals, banks, and governments drunk on an unfounded economic optimism. The bubble popped and huge fortunes evaporated in just a few months.

This was especially hard for a generation who had known nothing but nearly uninterrupted economic expansion since the mid-1980s. They were ill-equipped for real hardship and loss.

Soon, the pages of the Wall Street Journal began to record the suicides of well-known business leaders. The falsehoods upon which their economic hopes were based had been shattered by truth. But they were unable to grasp the reality that they were confronted with and fell, instead, into a despair that bore no more resemblance to the truth than their optimism.

My Truth Has Holes in It
In times of crisis, we need the solid footing of truth to keep us from being swallowed up in gloom or paralyzed in fear and hopelessness. Because of sin, our five senses don’t tell us enough of the truth to provide this solid footing. This is true for two reasons. First, our hearts are defective because of sin and this affects the way we understand the things that we observe. Evolutionary science, for example, is polluted by the strong wishes of mankind to be freed from the influence of God and the burden of our accountability to him. Theories have changed much over the past 100 years or so, but the one constant is this: there is no room for God in the discussion of the origins of mankind. The problem with evolutionary science isn’t in the observations themselves, but in the heart of scientists who in the end are just people with the same sin problem as the rest of us.

But there is another problem. Because sin has placed us at such a great distance from God, many of the most essential truths cannot be observed at all. We can learn a lot about an artist by looking at his paintings, but you really get to know an artist over a cup of coffee. In the same way, we can learn a lot about God by studying his creation, but to really know God calls for a closeness that sin makes impossible.

We face our troubles with a substantial and dangerous deficit of truth, which leaves us with the comforting stories of friends and the threats and accusing lies of enemies. We need truth.

In God, we find the truth that we need. In the Bible, God provides us with the truth that is essential—the things that we have to know to thrive in good times and bad. And through his Spirit, he teaches us the truth of the things that are written and gives us to live in a way that is consistent with that truth. This is what Christians mean when they talk about faith.

Faith has come to mean a lot of very different things these days. A teacher asked a little boy, “What is faith?” and he answered, “Faith is when you believe in something even though you know it ain’t so.”

That’s one sort of faith. Another is the kind that Friedrich Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote, “Faith means not wanting to know what is true.”

To some, faith just means keeping a positive attitude. This kind of faith is related to the first because its practice usually comes down to ignoring unpleasant facts and believing things that “ain’t so.” To others, faith has some sort of mystical property, some creative powers that operate like magic.

In a crisis, a better sort of faith is needed. Unpleasant facts have a way of rearing their ugly heads, no matter how hard we try to ignore them. False hopes are dashed, leaving you more discouraged than before.

In the end, you’ll find that your faith is only as good as the object of your faith. If you put your trust in someone who is dishonest or incompetent, you’ll be sorry. God is faithful and true. Those who put their trust in him will never be ashamed for doing so.

Faith is trusting God. This trust leads us to believe the words of the Bible because they come from someone we trust. As we trust God and his word, we find them to be trustworthy—faithful and true. The faith that is needed in a crisis is the faith that brings new truth.

The men and women who killed themselves when the world economy crumbled knew a lot of true things. But there were other things, just as true as a world economic meltdown, that they didn’t know.

Well, That Changes Everything
The reporter paddled her canoe through the flooded streets of Wayne, New Jersey. It had been raining for more than a week and the Passaic River had overflowed its banks. All around the reporter and in the background as far as you could see was water. “Eight days of rain, and some neighborhoods don’t even look like neighborhoods anymore.”

Viewers of the October 2005 broadcast thought they understood the situation on that New Jersey street. The water was real and the canoe was really floating in it. The circumstances seemed dire until just then, two men walked past the canoe in water that was barely deep enough to cover their shoes.

The news anchors couldn’t control their laughter. One asked, “Are these holy men, perhaps walking on top of the water?”

“Gee, is your oar hitting ground?” asked the other.

The truth of scripture is transformational. It is not just some other true things to be added to the things we already know. Instead, the truth of the Bible changes the way we understand everything we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste.

It is a truer sort of truth and it cannot be gotten from observation. The truer truth of scripture comes splashing through our flooded streets, helping us to see everything with a new and startling clarity.

Christian faith is about truth. It is not about wishful thinking, denial, and thinking good thoughts. At its heart, it is about cold, hard facts. “If you had been there that day, you could have taken your hand and rubbed it across the rough wood of the cross of Jesus Christ—you could have gotten a splinter in your hand from the cross.” Francis Schaeffer wrote this in his book, “True Spirituality.” He was right.

In times of affliction, we don’t just need to know the truth, but we need to base our choices, choose our words, and, as much as possible, conform our moods to the truth.

Imagine a man trying to walk across a dark room. A man with night vision goggles is helping him. “You’re almost past the table. Watch out, step a little to your left, a little more. Ok. You almost tripped over a loveseat.” The table is where it is. The chair is where it is. No matter what the man believes about the room, he’s likely to bang his shins if he is wrong about the position of the furniture. Or if he refuses to trust the man who can see. Our world is filled with people with banged up lives, from our prisons to our places of business, our seats of government, and our churches.

Christian faith is about truth that transforms what you observe and new truth that cannot be observed because of our blindness and distance from God. But there is another facet of Christian faith. It is also about persistently living in a way that lines up with the truth. Real faith always shows up in our behavior.

C.S. Lewis wrote about this in his book Mere Christianity. Faith not only enables us to see the truth, but it also makes us able to hold onto it in a time of crisis. C.S. Lewis wrote about this, saying that “…faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods” The sort of faith a man who recommends a dentist, he wrote, may be very different from the faith of a man who climbs into the dentist’s chair and relaxes.

For years, I knew that God loved me, that he was working good in my life through all things, that his promises to keep me were trustworthy. However, in a time of crisis, it required fresh faith, or a different sort of faith, to believe that they were still true and still applied to me. Oswald Chambers says that faith “… is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.”

Truth is needed in times of affliction. New truth that can’t be observed by men deformed by sin. Transformational truth that helps us understand what we observe. It is not enough to know this truth, but faith demands that we trust it, that we live by it, and that we keep on living by it even when we’re discouraged or afraid.

Paul and Silas were beaten and thrown into prison. About midnight, they were praying and singing songs of praise to God. This was not denial. It was not wishful thinking. Paul and Silas were receiving through their senses the testimony of one set of facts. But they knew that the pain in their backs and the bleakness of their surroundings were not the only facts to be considered. They prayed because they knew that now, as always, they were completely dependent upon God. They sang hymns of praise, because the words of praise are also true. In fact, the truths that they prayed and sang spoke the final word that night in a way that transformed the lives of the jailer and his family.

The language of the Psalms is the language of godly men who felt abandoned and ashamed, frightened men who were looking for a place to hide, and men who wondered aloud and in writing how long God would forget them, how long he would hide his face from them, how long will God simply look at them in their troubles without helping. But each time, the truer truth of God’s greatness, goodness, and love comes splashing through the streets flooded with hopelessness and sorrow.

In Psalm 69, David writes at length about his troubles. “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck!” This is how it starts. For the next 28 verses, he tells about sinking in the mire, being weary with crying, and being hated without a cause. He talks about shame, reproach, alienation, mourning, and mockery. He cries out to God again and again—“Do not hide your face from me! I am in trouble! I am poor, I am sorrowful. Come quickly.”

In the face of all this trouble, David reaches a surprising conclusion: “I will praise the name of God with a song, I will magnify him with thanksgiving.” He then calls on heaven and earth to praise God, together with “the seas and everything that moves in them.” Why? Because God will save his people.

Here’s my own version of Psalm 69:

I Will Sing

God, I’m in a dark, dark place
I feel like a man who has fallen
To the bottom of a well
With the water up to my neck
Slipping in the mud
Thick mud stuck to my head
And my hands

Wrestling against myself
Confused in the dark
Ashamed, afraid

I’ve asked you, God
To help me
To get me out of this mess

I’ve asked you, God
To help me
But my only answer
Has been the mockery
Of fools
And poisonous threats and lies
Of my enemies

My ears are covered in mud
And filled
With the voices of every enemy
I’ve ever had, shouting
And the laughter of every mocking fool
In the world

I ask you, God
To help me
Then I watch for you to come
Until my eyes go blurry
You don’t come

I ask you to help
Until my throat is dry
I cry like the broken man that I am
I cry until I’m exhausted
Until there’s no more crying left
And in the quiet I find myself
Still alone


But I will sing your praise
Sing to those who are far from you
So far that you look small
So far you can’t be seen at all

I am broken
I am poor
I mourn, I mourn
But I will sing

I am poor and full of sorrow
This is true
But I will sing of a truer truth
A truth more certain
Than the darkness of this moment
Than the pain and fear and shame

All these will be forgotten
Crowded from my thoughts
By the memories of your tender care
The feelings of loneliness forgotten
In the certain knowledge of your constant presence
Of your nearness to me
In my time of trouble

I will sing of how you heard me
And delivered me
At just the right time
I will sing of your salvation

God, I’m in a dark, dark place
Like a man fallen, slipping
Confused, ashamed, afraid

But I will sing your praise
Sing to those who are far from you
So far that you look small
So far you can’t be seen at all

I am broken
I am poor
I mourn, I mourn
But I will sing


Like David, I say in faith from my own dark place: I will sing. I know this is as true, even more true than the darkness and pain of this moment. I will sing and will have good reasons to do so. This is the truer truth that God sends splashing through my most bitter sorrows. And yours.

My Truth is Bent
C.S. Lewis, in his science fiction book Perelandra, writes of the appearance on Earth of a being from another world. The being, he wrote, “was not at right angles to the floor. But as soon as I have said this, I hasten to add that this way of putting it is a later reconstruction. What one actually felt at the moment was that the column of light was vertical but the floor was not horizontal—the whole room seemed to have heeled over as if it were on board ship. The impression, however produced, was that this creature had reference to some horizontal, to some whole system of directions, based outside the Earth…”

We learn in grade school that the earth’s axis is not perfectly upright. It is tilted by about 23 degrees. Humanity’s spiritual condition is off a good bit more than 23 degrees. Don’t take my word for it—read the newspaper. There is a serious problem.

Our whole spiritual world is tilted, with all the houses and trees, the whole landscape, and gravity itself. With everything pulling us to the orientation of this tilting spiritual world, it’s impossible to figure out which way is up using only what we see, feel, and think.

When God’s word comes to men and women in this world, it is “not at right angles to the floor.” It is aligned to a horizon that is “based outside the Earth.” If we are to walk uprightly, we have to be re-oriented to a new system of directions.

These two horizons are in constant competition for dominance of the Christian mind. Everything around us is conformed to one frame of reference while God, through his word and his Holy Spirit, is reorienting his children to true north.

Without the guidance of God’s word and Spirit, our sense of affliction will be aligned with the gravity of fallen man’s tilting spiritual world. No matter how clearly we see the details, everything tends to be falsely aligned and incorrectly understood. To illustrate, let’s look at David’s life and my own.

In Psalm 69, David captures in vivid detail what he saw of his own trouble:

The waters have come up to my neck
I sink in deep mire
Where there is no standing
I have come into deep waters
Where the floods overflow me
I am weary with crying
My throat is dry
My eyes fail…

These are the words of despair. David is in a bad spot, he can’t help himself, and God hasn’t helped him. In September 2009, this is what I wrote about my own troubles:

God has opened my eyes or as Psalm 40 says—bored out my ears. I’m seeing and hearing more about life these days than I ever cared to. Pain, fear, sorrow, despondency—that kind of stuff. As I write, I weigh 22 pounds less than I did a dozen or so weeks ago, my chest is tight, and my breaths are short. I catch myself grimacing. I’m thankful for the two or three nights each week that I can sleep for more than five or six hours. I’m thankful for the precious hours, here and there, when I feel peaceful. I’m thankful for those sublime and overwhelming invasions of peace and comfort brought by the Holy Spirit. But mostly I feel dread and sorrow.

What we see of the floor, walls, and ceiling of our problems are real enough. But the whole house is pulled to a sloping landscape by gravity that has gone wrong. Put plainly—the hopelessness that we feel is natural, but there’s something terribly wrong with our nature.

God speaks through his word and his Spirit from a perspective that is aligned to the gravity of heaven. God speaks from the perspective of truth. When we respond to God, our words and actions, like God’s, are not at right angles to the floor. A little later in Psalm 69, David wrote:

But I am poor and sorrowful
Let your salvation, O God, set me up on high
I will praise the name of God with a song
And will magnify him with thanksgiving

I included the first line, the one about being poor and sorrowful, so you could see how abruptly thoughts of praise, song, worship, and thanksgiving come into this song of sorrow. This joy-filled outburst, this anticipation of a good ending is clearly oriented to another horizon.

In September 2009, at about the same time as I wrote the lines above in my journal, things got so bad on one day that I couldn’t go to work. I thought a day of hard labor might help me, so I took a personal day to stain my deck. Early that morning, as I drove to the store to pick up a pair of rubber gloves, I began to pray, telling God about my problems and asking him to help me. I was praying a lot of prayers like that.

I had barely started to pray when, abruptly and for no reason that I can see, I found myself filled with joy and confidence. I knew, in that moment, that the promises of scripture were spoken to me. I knew that God was MY God. I was filled with faith that he had not for one moment lost sight of me or lost control of the details of my life.

A joy that was oriented to another horizon filled me. It felt like my sorrows were being pushed out from the inside, displaced by God himself as he filled me.

I’m a grumpy, bald man. I don’t cry easily. But when I parked my car at the store, I just sat and cried. After a few minutes, I knew that I wouldn’t regain my composure quickly; I didn’t want to. So I drove to a remote part of the parking lot and continued to thank God for the joy that filled me and for the certainty of his care for me.

For about 15 minutes, I sat in this heavenly place. Before long, though, I felt the old sorrows begin to return. The old sense of dread began to fill me. The orientation of the floors, walls, and ceilings of my troubles began, again, to dominate my consciousness.

I’m not saying that this is what Christian life is always like or what it ought to be like. I’m just saying that this is what happened to me on one day of my life. Into my sorrows came this other-worldly joy that for a few minutes shifted my sense of up and down. Although the sense lasted only a few minutes, it had the long-term effect of creating a persistent suspicion that there may be more to the truth than is spoken by my sorrows.

The Devil Is a Liar
There is one final problem in our perception of reality, and it’s huge. Christians have an enemy, Satan, who is actively working against our peace. He is a liar and the father of lies. When he comes with his lies, he’s speaking his native language. Within our partial and warped view of reality, the lies, threats, and accusations of Satan can be convincing.

It’s really hard to tease out the stuff that goes on inside your head. Some of it comes from God, some of it from the devil, and a good bit of it you think up on your own. Without trying to trace out the origins, let me tell you some of what I’ve been feeling, on and off, for the past few years.

For weeks on end, I’ve woken up to a feeling of dread and hopelessness. Most days, I felt sure that things were not going to get better, but worse, tragically worse.

I felt alone. “Real Christians don’t get into messes like this,” I thought.

I felt like God was not going to help me, that he was angry with me, or punishing me.

Sometimes, I worried that he might not even exist. That my whole life had been built on false hopes and, now, everything would come crashing down.

I felt ashamed. “This isn’t happening to you because life is tough, or because the world is a hard, bad place. It’s happening to you because you’re a stupid, bad person. People are going to know about this—they’ll know what a loser you are, what an idiot you are.”

In Psalm 40, David writes of God having brought him up “out of a horrible pit.” This pit is “horrible” because of the clamor. The Hebrew word has a connection to the crashing of waves, of loud noises like the roar of a waterfall. When I read this a few months ago, I thought about how “…the clamor of Satanic threats, mockery, and accusations fills my ears.” This is what I wrote in my journal. I felt like I was in a pit, unable to get any sound footing, and tortured by the mockery of my great enemy. I felt foolish, hopeless, ashamed, sorrowful, and afraid.

This is what it felt like for me, seeing only part of the truth in the bent perspective of this fallen world and assaulted by the lies, threats, and accusations of my enemy.

Conclusion
God’s truth is needed in times of affliction. It is God’s truth that will set us free from the shackles of doubt, fear, and pain.

We see in part. What we do see is distorted by the effects of sin. This distorted, partial view of reality isn’t much protection from the lies, threats, and accusations of Satan.

The truth provided by God isn’t merely supplemental. It is the essential difference between those who are crushed by affliction, those who merely endure affliction, and those for whom affliction produces advantages.

Paul wrote to the church in Corinth about their afflictions: “We wish you could see how all this is working out for your benefit, and how the more grace God gives, the more thanksgiving will redound to his glory. This is the reason why we never collapse. The outward man does indeed suffer wear and tear, but every day the inward man receives fresh strength. These little troubles (which are really so transitory) are winning for us a permanent, glorious and solid reward out of all proportion to our pain. For we are looking all the time not at the visible things but at the invisible. The visible things are transitory: it is the invisible things that are really permanent.” [J.B. Phillips 2 Corinthians 4:15-18]

In the clamorous pit of affliction, you have to decide which voice you’ll listen to, which horizon you’ll orient your life to, which view of things you’ll embrace. This is all the more difficult because we ought to give more weight to the things that are invisible, trusting in the unseen hand of God caring for you and his unseen, but real, presence with you, especially in times of trouble.

Immediately after The Fall, Adam hid from God. Now, so much that is important to know about God is hidden to us. The things that are hidden—the things we lost in The Fall—are the most important things.

In times of affliction, the things that are of the most help, the things that are permanent, the things that are essential, are hidden to us. But God reveals these things in his Word and teaches them through his Spirit. Those who are enabled by the Spirit to own this truth will find, as Oswald Chambers put it, a “deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.”

The next two chapters talk about where this truth may be found (only in the Bible) and how we can come to “own” it, not just agreeing with God’s Word but acting based on a trust that it applies to us. The latter comes only through the work of God's Holy Spirit.