Epilogue
Epilogue
An End to Fear
I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go;
I will counsel you with my eye upon you.
Psalm 32:8
Ninety-five percent of knowing the will of God consists in being prepared to do it before you know what it is.
Donald Grey Barnhouse
This book was born out of anxiety for the many whose anxiety about guidance gives them nightmares as to what might happen to them if they make a mistake at this point. We saw their fear as having a twofold source: failing to appreciate the greatness of the grace of God and falling into superstition about the way guidance is given. We wrote accordingly.
In these chapters we have tried to make three things clear. First, God’s guidance is a covenanted aspect of his larger ministry of graciously guarding us against sin’s folly and Satan’s malice in order to bring us safe and sound to glory. Second, our quest for guidance should be thought of as essentially a quest for the wisdom we need to cope with all the demands for decision that come to us in our waking lives, rather than with just a few big ones. Third, the gift of God-centered peace of heart as we contemplate and embrace the best, wisest, and most God-honoring option open to us is God’s ordinary way of confirming to us that we have attained the wisdom that we sought by observing circumstances, praying for a clear head and discerning heart, searching the Scriptures, consulting experienced friends, and thinking hard before the Lord. This peace, be it said, is not any sort of informative nudge; it is, rather, a sense that the quest is ended, the solution has been found, and no more puzzling over the matter is necessary.
Christians fall into superstition when they posit causative forces and causal connections of which the Bible knows nothing, or which it explicitly rules out by denying them to be real. Thus, expecting benefits from worshipping unreal gods (idolatry), or real demons (Satanism), or supposing that the structure of creation somehow limits the Creator (process theology, deistic liberalism, open theism), or imagining that we can manipulate God and harness his supernatural powers to our own wishes (magic), or thinking that some sort of meritorious performance earns from God favor that was not ours before (legalism), are all superstitions; and so is the idea that one condemns oneself to being a permanently second-class Christian by getting one’s guidance wrong on a major matter. Unbiblical superstition must be rejected in all its forms.
Faithful God
When we look at landscapes and landmasses from miles up in the air, as satellite images now enable us to do, we sometimes see parallels that escape us when our vantage point is at ground level. And when we take a bird’s-eye view of the two Testaments in our Bible, we similarly see a likeness that we may miss while doing detailed textual study. Both Testaments have, basically, two parts: first, a great redemption story, and then a mixed bag of narrative, admonition, and response, addressed to the redeemed as they seek, often shakily, to live up to the privilege and hope that redemption has brought them. The New Testament proclaims what was God’s goal from the start—total redemption from sin and death through the living, dying, rising, reigning, and future return of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. The Old Testament proclaims a foreshadowing of this—total redemption from slavery in Egypt for what should have been an idyllic life in Canaan, the Promised Land. The New Testament redemption story is told in four parallel accounts of Jesus’s three-year ministry in Israel. The Old Testament redemption story extends over forty years and fills four books that come from Moses, Exodus to Deuteronomy inclusive. In both stories the divine Redeemer is the sovereign (absolute ruler) and at the same time the shepherd (the covenant-keeping shepherd of Psalm 23; the Good Shepherd of John 10). The sovereign shepherd faithfully guards and guides his people as he leads them to their true home, and though what surrounds them, obstructs and threatens them, they are safe under his care.
We began this book with some reflections on God’s shepherding. We return to that theme as now we draw to a close. In the narrative of how Israel got from Egypt to the Promised Land (Moses’s story) three things stand out. The first is the huge reality of miraculous divine deliverance, achieved through the long-term providential preparation of Moses, the ten plagues, the Passover, the opening of the Red Sea for Israel to cross and its closing to destroy the Egyptian forces, the provision of food and drink in the desert, and the guidance given throughout by the pillar in the sky (cloud by day, fire by night).
The second thing that stands out is the huge reality of Israel’s multiple mistrustings of God—their grumbling, complaining, disobedience, and defiance, culminating in their irrational and irreverent refusal to invade Canaan, which prompted God to prolong their wanderings by thirty-eight extra years. As Moses reminds them in his farewell address: “You are a stubborn people. Remember and do not forget how you provoked the LORD your God to wrath in the wilderness. From the day you came out of the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the LORD. . . . You have been rebellious against the LORD from the day that I knew you” (Deut. 9:6–7, 24).
The third thing that stands out is the huge demonstration of God’s unfailing faithfulness to the wanderers, in spite of their constant lapses from faithfulness toward him. A stunning expression of this is God’s own utterance given to Moses as his prophet to relay to the people and repeated by Moses in his farewell speech: “The LORD your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands. He knows your going through this great wilderness. These forty years the LORD your God has been with you. You have lacked nothing” (Deut. 2:7). Such generous grace, in face of childish and extreme provocations that nearly drove Moses out of his mind, fairly takes one’s breath away. God at Sinai had identified himself to Moses as “the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. . . .” (Exod. 34:6–7); and his forty years of mercy to perverse and pigheaded Israel proved the truth of his words.
We said at the beginning of our book that for some Christians the guidance of God is a theme that awakens anxiety, even panic. When we wrote that, we were thinking particularly of depressives, for whom the fear of getting God’s guidance wrong is a bogey constantly haunting their minds. “Whoever fears has not been perfected in love,” wrote John (1 John 4:18)—nor in wisdom, either! We cannot shout it too often or too loudly: once God takes us into covenant with himself, as he does the moment we put faith in Christ and are born again by the Holy Spirit, our relation to God is of child to Father and sheep to shepherd, and that means that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit will hold us fast and not let go of us, even if in moments of madness or sadness, or just plain badness, we stray into the wilderness of sin and death. The Shepherd searches for the lost sheep until he finds it; the Spirit troubles our conscience as we wander; the Father waits to welcome and restore his child when sanity and repentance set in. And if God so restores Christians who have lapsed with their eyes open, none should fear that he will abandon any who, while seeking to see and do God’s will, inadvertently get their guidance wrong.
And suppose we become convinced that in good faith we really have made a major wrong decision—married the wrong person, taken the wrong job, embarked on the wrong career, moved to the wrong place, joined the wrong church, or whatever—and for the time being due to circumstances we are unable to do anything about it? That puts us on a par with Israel, obliged to spend thirty-eight further years in the wilderness because of their wrong decision when God told them to invade Canaan. Remember, now, that it was of those years that God could and did move Moses to tell the people: “These forty years the LORD your God has been with you. You have lacked nothing.” If you wait on God, acknowledging your mistake and affirming to him that his will is what you still want to do, you will find that God makes these words equally true of you. You have nothing to fear. God is good, and he is yours forever.
Faith-filled Prayer
There has been little about prayer in these pages (though we have published a whole book on it elsewhere), but something must be said on the subject as we close, for in finding God’s guidance, prayer plays an important part. When we speak of prayer, we have in mind a following, at least in spirit, of biblical models. These prayers are conversational and petitionary: they address God with the expectation that he will respond, both in dealing with the need prayed about and also, perhaps, by giving us a special sense of his presence in our prayer session itself. The staple ingredient of these prayers is the need that God is being asked to meet.
In the Old Testament, the Psalms are the supreme instances of such praying; in the New Testament, the Lord’s Prayer itself is perhaps the front-running example. So when we pray for anything, whether alone or in company, silently or aloud, we should first invoke God, however briefly, as who and what he is; we should thank him for past benefits; and then we should ask him for what we and others need, giving him reasons why we think that for him to give what we ask will truly make for his glory, as well as furthering our own and others’ welfare. All our prayers, in intention anyway, should be reducible to “Hallowed be thy name (i.e., may you be glorified), thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” The basis for biblical Christian prayer is the covenant relationship whereby the God, who through Christ is our father, and the Lord Jesus, who because of our adoption is now our elder brother in God’s family, stand pledged to hear and answer the prayers of believing people (see John 14:13–14; 16:23–24; 1 John 5:14–15).
When praying for guidance, we should always start by asking to be delivered from stupidity, pride, and pigheadedness, and all forms of motivational perversity that would skew our thinking, and we should ask for sensitivity, pure-heartedness, and clarity to discern what course of action will bring about the most good and honor God most fully. This line of prayer needs to be constantly churning in our hearts as we do the reading, thinking, talking, and listening that our quest for discernment requires of us.
At the outset of this book we looked at Psalm 23, as the Bible’s classic witness to God’s way in guidance. As God had the first word, so he shall have the last: some verses from Psalm 25 form a classic prayer for guidance, and our final word to our readers is: go, and pray likewise. Your fears and problems regarding guidance will melt away as you do.
Make me to know your ways, O LORD:
teach me your paths.
Lead me in your truth and teach me,
for you are the God of my salvation;
for you I wait all the day long. . . .
Good and upright is the LORD;
therefore he instructs sinners in the way.
He leads the humble in what is right,
and teaches the humble his way.
All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness,
for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies. . . .
Who is the man who fears the LORD?
Him will he instruct in the way that he should choose. . . .
My eyes are ever toward the LORD,
for he will pluck my feet out of the net.
Psalm 25:4–5, 8–10, 12, 15