2. Some Tangled Tales
2
Some Tangled Tales
Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home;
Lead thou me on!
Guide thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
John Henry Newman (1801–1890)
He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Psalm 23:3
The two song writers quoted above, though in eras nearly three thousand years apart, each gives us wonderful insight into God’s guidance. Newman shows the troubled circumstances, dark and gloom, when we most long for the “kindly light” that only God can provide. And poet-shepherd-king David reveals something of the purposes of God as he extends to us the kindly light of his guidance into right paths. It is “for his name’s sake.” The people of God, as his sheep, wear his name as part of their identity (Rev. 7:3; 14:1; 22:4). So God wants us to wear his name well and take it along routes where his name will receive honor because of the kind of people he is growing us to become through the work of Jesus Christ. The purpose of his guidance at all times is to enable us to do that.
Personal guidance, then, is an aspect of God’s covenant care, now exercised through the faithful shepherding ministry of the covenant mediator, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He, the self-identified Good Shepherd, leads each believer in paths of righteousness, and if we stray off track, he rescues and restores us. Though the restoring process may be traumatic and tearful, depending on how much thoughtlessness, willfulness, presumption, and rebellion went into the folly that now makes correction necessary, the restoration is always complete; though we may now have to live long-term with the sad consequences of our mistakes, we shall be back on the path, chastened but forgiven through our shepherd’s atoning death, and facing forward once more. Our Shepherd will continue to ensure that our souls are fed and that when spiritual predators surround us we are protected, and no one will be able to wrench us out of the firm grip of his hand (John 10:27–30). So we shall be led safely home into a state of unimaginable bliss in which we shall be unimaginably close to the Lord Jesus and to the Father and to the Holy Spirit forever. A grasp of these bedrock certainties about God’s gracious guardianship is the point of departure for exploring the further things about divine guidance that we have to say in this present chapter.
The Nature of Righteousness
Our first task now is to understand the nature of the righteousness into which the Good Shepherd leads us. In the Bible, righteousness in its primary meaning signifies personal behavior that is truly admirable and morally purposeful. Righteousness in both God and humans means doing what is right, in the sense of meeting all obligations and displaying all relevant forms of virtue, goodwill, and enterprise. Righteousness thus shows up the good person’s goodness and calls forth praise from discerning observers, both angelic and human. We may receive this praise into ourselves and thus be encouraged along this right path, but the praise will more rightly be redirected to Christ, whose name we wear whenever we term ourselves Christian.
Righteousness in God centers upon his faithfulness in keeping his Word, both his promises to give good things to those who trust and obey him and his warnings that he will deal with those who ignore or defy him as they deserve. (Thus it is that salvation and judgment are set forth in Scripture as equal expressions of God’s righteousness.) God’s holiness is his righteousness in intention, and his righteousness is his holiness in action.
Human righteousness, under God, which is our present concern, is essentially a matter of honoring, obeying, and pleasing God—in other words, living the life we were all made to live—and of dealing with people (relatives, partners, friends, colleagues, fellow believers, and fellow human beings as such) in an honest, respectful, well-wishing, Christlike way, serving them, helping them, treating them the way one would wish to be treated by them, and putting ourselves out to meet all the genuine claims they have upon us and to supply their genuine needs every way we can, never settling for the fairly good, or the “not bad,” in place of the best that the situation permits. This is neighbor-love as Christ taught it, and as all Scripture presents it. A Christian traveling in Buddhist Thailand saw an accident occur right in front of the tour bus and asked why they did not stop to help. He was taken aback (so he told J. I.) when the driver explained to him that Buddhists recognize no obligation to involve themselves in other people’s troubles. Christian righteousness, however, according to the New Testament sets love of God and neighbor at center stage, and so requires precisely this involvement, just as it requires us to know that God regularly shapes our circumstances so as to draw us out in showing neighbor-love at its fullest. Here our models are the Samaritan in Jesus’s story, as well as Jesus himself, both in his service of the needy during his public ministry and then supremely in his dying at the Father’s direction to save us all. Righteousness is love with wisdom; love is righteousness with goodwill.
Guidance, as we have seen, is often discussed as if discerning the specifics of God’s plan for one’s own life and making positive decisions within the frame of that plan is the whole of what guidance is about. For an adequate notion of guidance, however, we must add to this that God’s plan for us is to lead us in paths of righteousness, which means that the decisions we make should always have in view the twin goals of maximum service to others and maximum pleasing of God. All real human righteousness, so far from being self-centered as stereotypical Pharisees thought and taught, is both God-centered and others-centered, and it is into righteousness of this kind that our Good Shepherd leads us. Our purpose is to show as clearly as we can how he does it.
“He leads me” along paths of righteousness, says David. Lead in itself is an umbrella-word covering many modes of direction: thus, the dictionary suggests that lead means to guide by the hand or by showing the way; to have preeminence and control, as in an orchestra, an army, a team, or a project; to draw, entice, allure, influence, and prevail on other persons to act in a certain way; and more. So we have to ask, “What sort of leading is in view here?”
In the picture that the psalm draws, the shepherd’s leading includes all the procedures whereby he induces the sheep to go where he wants them to. Walking ahead of them, he sets them an example and stirs them to follow it—that is, to follow him. Walking behind them as a modern shepherd would do, with trained dogs padding alongside to head off any sheep that start to stray, would be our picture of the same process; but trained dogs were not, it would seem, any part of the ancient shepherd’s equipment. What corresponds to this in the life of Christian discipleship? The answer is, God’s own instruction from and through his written Word. Direct guidance as to things we should and should not do is found in the Ten Commandments and the case-law based on them, in the oracle-sermons of the prophets recalling Israel to God’s standards, in the wisdom books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, in the teaching of Jesus, and in the many treatments of Christian behavior in the Epistles. And through the Word, via honest commitment to live by the Word and humble experience of the Word’s transforming power, God gives wisdom to discern his will in all situations that call for reflective thought.
Elisabeth Elliot has such situations in mind as she describes her own prayers for guidance. Having quoted “Tell God every detail of your needs” from the J. B. Phillips rendering of Philippians 4:6, she continues: “Sometimes to make sure I don’t forget the details, I make a list. The necessity of recalling all the things that have any bearing on my need for guidance—the pros and cons of all the possible courses which seem open, the circumstances which look to me significant, the reasons I have for wanting one thing above another—help me to sort out exactly what it is I am asking.” Paul too, points us along this path when he writes in Romans 12:1–2: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God [as expounded and thought through in his letter thus far], to present your bodies [your entire selves] as a living sacrifice. . . . Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing [options] you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect [on each occasion].” This will be the fulfillment of God’s promise to the godly in Psalm 32:8–9: “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you. Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding. . . .” God’s promise to guide us is first and foremost a promise to give discernment.
Sometimes God leads and guides his people by his providential provision of leaders. Writes the psalmist: “You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.” “[God] chose David his servant and took him from sheepfolds; . . . to shepherd Jacob his people, Israel his inheritance. With upright heart he shepherded them and guided them with his skillful hand” (Ps. 77:20; 78:70–72). God sent Nehemiah to lead the people in rebuilding Jerusalem’s wall (Neh. 2:17–20), and he looked to them to follow his lead, which they did. The writer to the Hebrews admonishes: “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account” (Heb. 13:17). Paul expects to be obeyed as a pastoral leader and a role-model: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1; cf. 4:16); “You became imitators of us and of the Lord” (1 Thess. 1:6); “As you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in by absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). What is discerned in cases of this kind is a leader guided by the authority of God. Where there is no living leader to indicate the will of God, God regularly uses circumstances to nudge us in the right direction and make the proper path obvious to us. Out of the circumstances, seen in biblical light, the discernment comes.
Prayer to be led by God, as sheep are led by their shepherd, is a recurring feature of the psalms. “Lead me, O LORD, in your righteousness” (5:8). “Lead me in your truth and teach me” (25:5). “Lead me on a level path” (27:11). “Send out your light and your truth; let them lead me” (43:3). “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I” (61:2). “Lead me in the path of your commandments, for I delight in it” (119:35). “Lead me in the way everlasting!” (139:24) “Let your good Spirit lead me on level ground!” (143:10). The same petition, expressed in the same image by the same word, appears in the Lord’s Prayer: “Lead us not into temptation” (Matt. 6:13; Luke 11:4). Here our Father is for the moment viewed as our shepherd, and we, his children, as his sheep. Finally, when (twice) Paul speaks of being “led” by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:14; Gal. 5:18), what he is celebrating is not recurring exotic experiences, but the reality of lives in which these prayers in the Psalms are fulfilled, ordinarily through our taking note of what the Bible teaches, accepting advice, and exercising sanctified common sense. In so doing, we prove for ourselves the truth of the vision in Isaiah 40:11: “He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.” We learn in experience the meaning of Isaiah 42:16: “I will lead the blind in a way that they do not know, in paths that they have not known I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. . . . I do not forsake them.” And repeatedly we realize that Isaiah 57:18 has yet again been actualized in our lives: “I have seen his ways, but I will heal him; I will lead him and restore comfort to him. . . .” How unimaginably good to us our Lord is!
Guidance: Scope, Shape, Specifics
We are now in a position to explore some affirmations about the scope, shape, and specifics of God’s guidance.
The scope of guidance. The guidance of God—his leading of us, that is—extends to the whole of our lives. Personal life is a unity, embracing character, skills, relationships, initiatives, goals, plans, and problems; use of time, money, and opportunities; choices of home location and wage-earning profession; long-term, life-strategy decisions (like the decision of J. I.’s friend who decided to spend his twenties learning, his thirties and forties practicing what he had learned, and his fifties and sixties writing out of his knowledge and experiences, or the decision of anyone who buys a house on a twenty-five-year mortgage); investment of energy in sports, hobbies, and general interests; and coping with various kinds of disability in oneself and one’s dependents. Scripture tells us that God guards believers within this larger context of complexity and assures us that God is under promise to be our guide in all of it too.
The shape of guidance. God’s guidance has various modes and comes to us in more than one form, but the bottom line in the guided life is always discernment and acceptance of the will of God so that our attitudes and reactions express joyful submission and faithful obedience to his leading. As the shepherd allures and reassures the sheep whom he is bringing into line, so does our fatherly God as he draws us to himself and moves us on with himself. Discernment comes through listening to Scripture and to those means of grace that relay biblical teaching to us in digestible form—sermons, instruction talks, hymns, books, Christian conversations, and so forth. Discernment comes as we judge alternatives, calculating the probable consequences of each, and testing each to find the best option (which, in cases where no happy options exist, will be the least evil, the course that makes the best of a bad job). Discernment comes as we wait on God, laying before him all the aspects of, and angles on, perplexing situations as we see them and asking for help to discern the proper path. Discernment comes too as God alerts us to the pitfalls of prejudice and impressions—pressures, that is, from untested, sacred-cow assumptions and insistent irrational desires, both of which belong to the confusion of mind about spiritual things that is inseparable from our fallen existence and that is guaranteed to induce temptations along these lines for every single one of us sooner or later.
A simple example of this sort of derailment is the following experience recorded by Elisabeth Elliot: “I knew a girl in college who looked on circumstances as nothing more than the devil’s pitfalls. She felt she had to inquire of God before making her bed or helping her roommate with the cleaning. Once she had to borrow shampoo because, halfway to town to buy some, she received a divine direction to go back. This kind of piety is hard to live with, to say the least.” Theological prejudice and error, and irrational, obsessive inner urges can of course produce, and have in fact produced, much more serious aberrations in practice than the oddities here described with such charitable restraint. But we leave out the horror stories; this is not the place for them.
It is true that God sometimes told his prophets to do crazy-looking things in order thereby to bring his people a message (see for example Isa. 20:1–3; Jer. 13:1–7; Ezek. 4:1–5:4), and it would be going beyond Scripture to speak as if we knew that God will never do anything of this kind again. But it is entirely biblical to distinguish rules from exceptions, and to say that for New Testament Christians, biblical warrant rooted in apostolic teaching should accompany all claims that particular courses of action are being taken in accordance with the will of God. The regular shape of guidance is that God teaches us to apply revealed principles of action, both positive and negative; to observe parameters and limits of behavior that the Bible lays down; and thus to follow the path of faithful obedience and true wisdom, in fellowship with the Lord our shepherd who by his Spirit leads us so to do.
The specifics of guidance. The decisive moments in human lives are the moments of decision and commitment whereby we embrace a course of action that excludes alternative possibilities. We call such moments of commitment “making up our mind.” In human lives that are guided by God, the same applies—ideally in the following way. As we collect and survey all the available facts that are relevant for making a decision; as we search the Scriptures for the relevant principles and parameters of decision and action; as we ask fellow Christians for words of wisdom and advice on the matter in hand; as we come to terms with the limitations and nonnegotiable alternatives, working out the likely consequences of each possibility open to us so as to make sure we will not unwittingly choose the merely good in place of the best, we should constantly ask God to judge, correct, and direct our thinking—heading us off from deciding badly and granting us the Spirit-wrought reality of his peace in our hearts as we move into what we see to be the wise way into which he is leading us. We should be willing, and (like the psalmists) tell God we are willing, to wait on him patiently till the desired discernment comes.
Paul, writing as he always did by the light of revelation as a spokesman for the Father and the Son and as enabled by the Holy Spirit, gave the Philippians the following promise, which is there for us all: “In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:6–7). The ineffable, and to outsiders incomprehensible, peace of God of which Paul speaks, using a Greek word freighted with all the overtones of well-being that belong to the Hebrew word for peace, namely shalom, is the Holy Spirit’s gift of awareness that one is the lamb that the divine shepherd is carrying in his arms, beloved, protected, and kept safe from spiritual danger—whatever physical hazards one may have to face. The word Paul uses for guard carries the picture of “a besieged citadel . . . the castle of the mind of the Christian . . . garrisoned strongly. Its walls are constantly patrolled. Its sentries never sleep at their posts. The troops are the Household Guards of the King of kings and they march behind the standard of the peace of God.” If the specifics of guidance, listed above, are followed out in sustained prayerful dependence on God, looking to him throughout for certainty on what to do, the fulfillment of this promise of peace is guaranteed both as one waits and also when God reveals the path ahead.
Signs and Certainty
“But what about signs?” asks someone. “Should they not have a place in a list of the specifics of guidance? Does not Scripture show us God giving guidance by means of signs?” Yes, it does, just as it tells us of God giving guidance by means of the Urim and Thummim, whatever they were (scholars can only make guesses), and also by means of dreams and visions as well as the casting of lots. A prime example of a guiding sign was the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night that led Israel out of Egypt through the wilderness to the promised land (see Exod. 13:17–18, 21–22; 40:36–38; Num. 14:14; Deut. 1:33). But does Scripture encourage individual Christians to ask for and expect guiding signs in their personal decision making? That God may on occasion prompt us to perceive particular events or circumstances as guiding signs is granted without dispute; what God had done before he can do again, and many can testify to the reality of such signs as among God’s happy surprises for them at certain points in their pilgrimage. Whether we should as a matter of policy look out for signs to show us the will of God is, however, a different question.
“But what about Gideon?” it is asked. “In the roll call of Hebrews 11:32–34, he heads a list of heroes who ‘through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises . . . were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight’—so evidently Gideon is a man for us to admire and treat as a model. Gideon asked to be shown God’s will by a sign, and God gave him one. The fleece he put out was wet after a dry night, and dry after a dewy one. God answered his request, twice over, just as he made it, and thereby brought him the certainty he needed. Isn’t there an example here for us to follow? Isn’t it to give us that example that the story is recorded?”
Well, is it? Consider the following. First, in Gideon’s day most of the Bible had not yet been composed, and there is no reason to think that what there was (the books of Moses and maybe Joshua) adorned the home of country farmer Joash and had been the regular study of his youngest son Gideon, a laborer on the family farm. In modern tribal situations, where converts are new and do not yet have the Bible and sometimes in the lives of new converts in other situations too, God is found showing himself to people and dealing with them in ways outside the parameters of the rules he has given for ordinary adult Christian living. Something similarly special appears in God’s dealings with young Gideon.
Against this background we should feel the force of what Phillip Jensen and Tony Payne describe as “a crucial distinction . . . to set out how God can guide us (or how he has guided people in the past) does not tell us how God does guide literate people of today or how he will guide them in the future. This is worth repeating: to set out how God can guide does not tell us how God will guide in our daily lives.”
Second, God had already spoken to Gideon in a theophany (the angel of the Lord in the Old Testament is God acting as his own messenger). God had told the young Gideon to overthrow the local Baal-worship, centered on the farm, and restore Yahweh-worship, which Gideon with his heart in his mouth had done, and now God had told him to raise an army to overthrow Israel’s Midianite overlords—which also he had done. The destiny of the nation was thus the agenda item, not some private personal decision. A battle for the deliverance of subjugated Israel was now pending. Novice commander-in-chief Gideon still has his heart in his mouth, however, and that is why he asks for the sign of the fleece to confirm that God will truly “save Israel by my hand, as you have said.” That sign will give him the confidence for battle that he and probably his troops with him had not so far managed to sustain. (See Judges 6:36–40 in context.) Bruce Waltke observes: “Many have taken the concept of a supernatural sign, a ‘fleece,’ and made it normative for all their decisions. I have heard Christians speak of ‘putting out a fleece’ on whether to purchase a car, invest in a new product, and select a school. Those kinds of decisions, while certainly important to the individual believer, are not on the same scale with determining the course of a nation whom God has selected for blessing.” Gideon’s situation and ours hardly match.
Third, the essence of “putting out a fleece” for guidance about a private and personal decision, such as those Dr. Waltke refers to, is to devise a test to which God is asked to submit in a specified way, so that he dances to a tune that this or that believer composed for him. This comes close to the devil’s second temptation in the desert, which Jesus dismissed by saying: “It is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test’” (Matt. 4:7 citing Deut. 6:16). Gideon’s words introducing his second request, “Let not your anger burn against me,” sound as if Gideon knew there was something presumptuous about what he was doing. Young and untried as he was, however, he desperately needed personal encouragement and something encouraging to tell his troops, and it would be a frigid and feeble comment if we were simply to say that God’s promise to him (Judg. 6:16), coupled with the early sign (fire from the rock, v. 21), should have been enough. “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” was what Gideon was expressing, and the searcher of hearts knew that. God met Gideon where he was, in what we would call a blue funk, and by answering his request kept him going as Israel’s generalissimo. What we see here is God’s gracious, shepherdlike compassion for the self-confessed weakling, making him strong for the huge-looking task ahead. It would be wrong to see in Gideon’s plea for reassurance evidence of an irreverent and presumptuous heart, but it would be a different story if you or we “put out a fleece” for guidance in buying a car or choosing a school. Gideon’s was clearly a special case.
Fourth, to treat the Old Testament account of someone’s action or experience as a model for ourselves without taking account of the difference made by the coming of Jesus, and the completing of revelation, and the writing of canonical Scripture, plus the present reality of the full post-Pentecost ministry of the Holy Spirit, is always a mistake. It was natural that spectacular signs of God’s presence, purpose, and promises should abound in days when resources for inward knowledge of God and discernment of his will were less than they are for us, and it is equally natural that in view of the richer resources that we Christians have for this knowledge and discernment, outward signs should be fewer, as no longer needed in the same way. The apostles never tell Christians to seek signs of God’s will for their decisions, as though the gospel and its ethical corollaries are not in themselves sufficient to guide our steps, and Jesus warned the Pharisees explicitly against the irresponsibility of seeking signs when they should be facing up to his words. After Jesus had fed some four thousand people with seven loaves and a few fish we read, “The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, ‘Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.’ And he left them, got into the boat again, and went to the other side” (Mark 8:11–13). We might need a similar warning. And if our hearts still hanker for the kind of spectacular signs we read of in the Old Testament, we may need also to open our ears to Dallas Willard’s point that longing and indeed lusting after the spectacular in any form at all
generally goes along with the less mature levels of the spiritual life—though the mere absence of such spectacular events must not be taken as indicating great spiritual development. After all, such an absence is consistent with utter deadness. . . .
When the spectacular is sought, it is because of childishness in the personality. Children love the spectacular and show themselves children by actively seeking it out, running heedlessly after it. It may sometimes be given by God—it may be necessary—because of our denseness or our hardheartedness. However, it is never to be taken as a mark of spiritual adulthood or superiority. If spectacular things do come to them, those who are more advanced in the Way of Christ never lightly discuss them or invoke them to prove that they are right or “with it” in some special way.
Was Gideon spiritually immature? Undoubtedly. Did his immaturity restrict God’s blessing of him in his God-appointed leadership role? Not in the least. But is his immaturity something for Christians to cultivate and imitate? Surely not.
Fifth, pastorally, over and above concerns about inward maturity, there is a further angle to be noted on the quest for fleeces. Bruce Waltke expresses it like this: “I think ‘laying out a fleece’ is generally the lazy man’s way to discern the will of God. It requires no work, little discipline, and almost no character development. God has a different program of guidance.” God has blessed Christians in this quadrant of the earth with ample opportunity to know God’s character, his priorities, and the principles recorded in Scripture by which he expects us to make our decisions. God has also given us vast opportunity for knowledge of how Scripture has been interpreted by devoted scholars over two thousand years—and further how Christians throughout that time have lived God-guided lives. It is possible that God provides simplified means of guidance for his children who lack such wealth of knowledge. But we who are privileged by these opportunities must seem lazy indeed if we short-circuit them in search for a sign.
Sixth, the future coming of Antichrist, wrote Paul to the Thessalonians, will be accompanied “by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception” (2 Thess. 2:9–10). This reference to Satanic deception makes explicit what Jesus himself had in view when he said: “False christs and false prophets will arise and perform signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, the elect” (Mark 13:22). It thus appears that the quest for guiding signs, which is at best a blind alley and an obstacle to spiritual maturity, can be at worst setting oneself up to be deceived by Satan, the archetypical specialist in lying and deception, who is only too ready to foul up our decisions and commitments by setting false signs before us and leading us to misinterpret our circumstances and make ruinous decisions. And if bad does not in this way come to worst, the mindset that seeks signs and hesitates to act without them is bound to paralyze us morally and keep us from making commitments that we ought to make, and that in all conscience is something that truly limits what God will do in and through us.
From no standpoint whatever, then, are we to expect signs to litter a properly God-guided path. If God gives signs, as he sometimes does, they are to be received as a bonus and an encouragement, but we should be seeking guidance via the specifics noted earlier and not by any form of a quest for signs.
Guided Endurance
A myth, that is, a nonfactual fancy, which for some surrounds the subject of guidance, is the idea that as one follows God’s guidance everything falls neatly and pleasantly into place, so that the headaches and heartaches that unbelievers have to cope with do not arise. Thus the guided ones lead a charmed life. The wide currency of this notion is, we think, further evidence of our immaturity, the naïve magic-carpet view of living that Dallas Willard illustrated for us a few lines back, when he spoke of being addicted to the spectacular. We round off this chapter therefore, by categorically denying that either in the Bible or in life, today or any day, are those whom God guides shielded from hardships and bewilderments.
This denial should not be problematical to any believers; for surely we all know, first, that it did not work out this way for Jesus, the Lord whom we follow, and, second, that God uses stretching and sandpapering experiences both to teach us truths and to shape and, if we may so speak, polish our souls. Says the psalmist; “You have dealt well with your servant, O LORD, according to your word. . . . Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word. . . . It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes” (Ps. 119:65, 67, 71). These are words that every believer will have reason to echo sooner or later. To Christians being hammered for their faith the writer to the Hebrews says: “It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? . . . He disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness” (Heb. 12:7, 10). This regimen of character training is appointed for all who follow Christ. The Pentateuch shows Israel experiencing hardships (lack of food and water along with periodic conflicts) as they trekked where the pillar of cloud and fire led; and the story of Jesus walking on water starts with the disciples caught in a wind storm because they were obeying Jesus’s instructions to cross the lake to Bethsaida (Matt. 14:22; Mark 6:45; compare Mark 4:35–41 for a similar situation).
Micaiah and Jeremiah also brought trouble on themselves by obeying God, in their case by saying what he gave them to say, and infuriating their hearers by so doing. Wicked King Ahab summoned the Lord’s prophet Micaiah to his presence and asked if he should lead his people into battle against Syria. In the background, four hundred prophets were already telling Ahab to go for it. Prophet Zedekiah was dancing around with iron horns on his head saying, “Thus says the LORD, ‘. . . you shall push the Syrians until they are destroyed.’” But Micaiah spoke a true, though unwelcome message: “I saw all Israel scattered on the mountains, as sheep that have no shepherd” (v. 17). Zedekiah gave Micaiah a resounding slap on the face for his trouble, and Ahab clapped him into prison to exist on a diet of bread and water “until I come in peace” (v. 27). In fact, Ahab did not return at all; he died in battle, as Micaiah had foretold. (See 1 Kings 22.)
The prophet Jeremiah fared no better. Instructed by God, Jeremiah warned Jerusalem, “Thus says the LORD of hosts, . . . I am bringing upon this city and upon all its towns all the disaster I have pronounced against it” (Jer. 19:15). Pashhur the priest did not find these words particularly inspiring; so he beat Jeremiah and put him in the stocks for a day. Upon release, Jeremiah spoke again—this time against Pashhur himself. “Thus says the LORD: Behold, I will make you a terror to yourself and to all your friends. . . . I will give all Judah into the hand of the king of Babylon. He shall carry them captive to Babylon. . . . Moreover, I will give all the wealth of the city . . . and all the treasures of the kings of Judah into the hand of their enemies. . . . And you, Pashhur, and all who dwell in your house, shall go into captivity. To Babylon you shall go, and there you shall die, and there you shall be buried, you and all your friends” (Jer. 20:4–6).
Oddly, by human standards at least, Jeremiah does not then go off to gloat about God’s curse on his evil rival. Instead he grieves the fate of his city and prays a haunting prayer of lament: “O LORD, you have deceived me, and I was deceived; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed. . . . For the word of the LORD has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. . . . Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, ‘A son is born to you.’ . . . Why did I come out from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?” (Jer. 20:7–8, 15, 18). At each turn, Jeremiah was faithfully following God’s guidance, but each guided turn took him deeper into despair. And his troubles continued. By chapter 38, we find Jeremiah and Pashhur still in conflict, with Jeremiah now under threat of death. Even King Zedekiah turns Jeremiah over to his rival prophets, and they dump him into a cistern so full of mud that Jeremiah sinks down to his armpits where he is left to die of thirst and starvation. Jeremiah is rescued—again. But he rises out of the cistern to face a ruined city. All who receive God’s guidance and seek to live by it must expect experiences of this kind, to instruct, test, correct, purge, deepen, and strengthen them. For it is by these means that God trains, matures, and toughens his children, increases their faith, and makes them grow in Christ.
To illustrate this further, we now offer excerpts from the tangled life-stories of three contemporaries, all born within the same two-year period: J. I.’s friends Denys and Elisabeth, and J. I. himself. We do this with some hesitation, not presenting these persons as role models or as anyone special, only as individuals whose experience helps to show how living under God’s guidance may work out, and we ask our readers to confine their interest in the narratives to precisely that question; for we offer them not as human interest stories, but simply as testimonies to God in action in three people’s lives. No intrusions into privacy are involved, for Denys is now in glory, Elisabeth has put her own story into print, and J. I., who is drafting these paragraphs, has already had the external facts of his life up to 1996 made public.
Denys’s story illustrates how harrowing the business of making decisions may become as one seeks to live a guided life. The last time I (J. I.) saw Denys we had been friends in Christ for a quarter of a century and were both in our midforties. He came to our home, where I was bed-bound with an ulcer on my leg, and we talked in the bedroom. Denys had come to Christ in Oxford, a year after my own conversion, and we had walked together through the first months of his new life. Called by God, he was sure, to be a medical missionary, he switched from chemistry to medicine as his academic study, and started making plans. A Brethren missionary in Ecuador named Wilfred Tidmarsh, recruiting replacements for a mission station he had had to abandon, sparked in Denys’s mind a vision of pioneer solo service in South America, but, guided by his own constant need of medical attention, he finally became an anesthetist in a hospital in Africa. His disability was iritis, a chronic inflammation of the eye, which he had picked up when, as head boy of his school and also a strong swimmer, he had dived into a tank of dirty water to retrieve a younger boy’s spectacles. Regular medication and dark glasses thus became necessary for him, and, to enable him to keep functioning professionally, the dosage had to be steadily increased. Now, back in England, so he told me expressionlessly from behind his dark glasses, he was suffering from a long-term depressive condition that made him zombielike both at home and in all his nonprofessional relationships. He knew it, but could do nothing about it. He had come to talk over with me the medical choice that had been set before him: whether to accept an increased drug dosage that would counter the depression and keep his eyes going for work at the hospital, but would also strain his heart and almost certainly shorten his life, or to settle for the status quo, a steady though slow reduction of his emotional and visual capacity. We explored the pros and cons, and he went away to make his decision. I do not know who else he consulted or what if anything he said to his family or how finally he made up his mind; I only know that in a few months he was dead. “But for those months,” his widow said to me, years later, “I had my husband back.” I cannot doubt that he made the better decision.
We think it widely assumed that when God guides us we shall be shielded from ever having to make agonizing decisions of this kind. Not so, however. Dallas Willard speaks trenchantly to the point.
In recent years innumerable spokespeople for God have offered ways we can use God and his Bible as guarantees of health, success and wealth. The Bible is treated as a how-to book, a manual for the successful life in the way of the Western world, which if followed will ensure that you will prosper financially, that you will not get cancer or even a cold and that your church will never split or lack a successful minister and program. . . . The word of God does not come just to lead us out of trouble—though it sometimes does this—or to make sure that we have it easy and everything goes our way. . . . We must not be misled by wishful thinking. We are going to go through the mill of life like everyone else. We who are disciples are different because we also have a higher or additional life—a different quality of life, a spiritual life, an eternal life—not because we are spared the ordinary troubles that befall ordinary human beings.
Exactly so.
Elisabeth’s story illustrates the way in which the God of mercy will mercilessly pulverize—the word is not too strong—our imperfect, naïve, and prejudiced humanity so as to work in us, whom he guides, meek and self-negating submission before his greatness (that is, humility of heart); contented ignorance of his strategies in face of his wisdom (that is, humility of mind); unfailing love for others in light of Jesus’s self-giving love for us on the cross (that is, humility of soul); and unflinching obedience to God’s Word and leading at whatever cost (that is, the humility of true strength). Elisabeth is a brilliant and magnetic writer, with the gift that Bunyan and C. S. Lewis also had of objectifying her thoughts and experiences so as to write about them as if they were somebody else’s, and I guess I (J. I.) am one of her most appreciative readers. Years of friendship have not augmented for me what she has already said in print but have simply enabled me to understand it better and value it more. Because her own books lay everything out so clearly and fully, my survey of her story will be brief.
Nurtured in pietistic circles where missionaries were idealized, Elisabeth was sure from early on that mission work was God’s way for her. Being linguistically gifted, she qualified at Wycliffe’s Summer Institute of Linguistics on reducing languages to writing for Bible translation and went to the Colorado tribe in Ecuador for that purpose. But her informant, the only person fluent in both Spanish and Colorado, was killed in a brawl, and the suitcases containing the entire fruit of nine months’ unremitting linguistic labor were stolen.
This was not to be her only loss. In due course she married fellow missionary Jim Elliot, who with four colleagues was killed in 1956 by the Waorani tribal people whom they had gone to evangelize. Elisabeth stayed in the area working now on the language of the Quichua tribe. A couple of years later Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint (sister of Nate Saint, who also died in the massacre) were invited to live among the Waorani. Taking this as an answer to prayer, Elisabeth and her small daughter lived among her husband’s killers for two years, after which circumstances dictated a return to America. There she found she no longer fitted into the evangelical subculture from which she had come; she was cold-shouldered and sometimes treated badly. Elisabeth remarried, but her new husband soon died of cancer, and that led to a third marriage some years later.
Out of all of this has come a significant ministry about being real with the real God in various departments of life. The road has been rough for her all along. From first to last, Elisabeth has sought to find and follow God’s guidance. On the pressures and perplexities that arise for all who follow that goal, she has this to say:
When I lived in the forest of Ecuador . . . I always had with me a guide who knew the way. . . . Trails led often through streams and rivers which we had to wade, but sometimes there was a log laid high above the water which we had to cross.
I dreaded those logs. . . . But the Indians would say, “Just walk across, senorita,” and over they would go. . . . I was barefoot as they were, but it was not enough. On the log, I couldn’t keep from looking down at the river below. I knew I would slip. I had never been any good at balancing myself on the tops of walls and things, and the log looked impossible. So my guide would stretch out a hand, and the touch of it was all I needed. I stopped worrying about slipping. I stopped looking down at the river or even at the log and looked at the guide, who held my hand with only the lightest touch. . . . But his being there and his touch were all I needed.
. . . The lesson the Indians taught me was that of trust.
G. K. Chesterton declares with blithe abandon that Christians when they cannot see where God is taking them, which is quite often, “go gaily in the dark.” How can anyone do that? Because we can trust the God who leads us as Elisabeth learned to trust the Indians who led her across the logs. The deepest question with which Elisabeth’s story, and, we hope, this whole book confronts us is: do we really trust the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, the Triune God who guards and guides?
J. I.: What, now, of my own story? I do not think there is anything out of the ordinary about it, but I sketch it out here because I think it illustrates something of real importance, namely the responsibilities that divine guidance imposes and the sense of partial failure that it generates.
As I review God’s steering of my life, one thing that stands out is the element of surprise at all the crucial points. I was never expecting what came; I was always projecting something else. This was true of my conversion to Christ in 1944, at a time when I thought I knew what a Christian was and had been one for years. It was true of the certainty that God wanted me in pastoral ministry, an awareness that broke in when I was expecting to end up as a schoolmaster. It was true of my discovery that educating adult Christians for ministry was an activity after my own heart, for which I had some instincts and natural skills; this realization came through being providentially pitchforked into seminary teaching for a year, at a time when my sights were set on local church ministry and my own theological studies had not begun. It was true of my further discovery that I could write books, a discovery made through trying to fulfill a request to write a pamphlet. It was true of the time that Kit and I first met, at a retreat where neither of us had expected to be. (It took me all of forty-eight hours plus an entire sleepless night to discern that under God she was the one for me. She was not in the least like the wife I had imagined myself finding some day.) And it was supremely true of the conviction, forced on me in my fifties by a complex of circumstances when I was expecting to serve out my time in England, that we were to become Canadians and that I should take in hand the work that has occupied me since 1979 at Regent College, Vancouver. In all of this my heavenly Father has proved himself a God of happy surprises and has engineered for me a personal fulfillment beyond my dreams.
All of that no doubt sounds wonderful; but it has its flip side. Gifts and opportunities are given to be used, and the more one is given the more will be required of one, in both quantity and quality terms. The underside of the guided life as I have experienced it for almost two generations is failure to do all that I could and should have done, whether as a grateful child laying himself out to please his Father and serve his siblings or as a public performer actualizing his full potential for honoring God and helping other people. Like all my fellow believers, I have fallen and do fall short of what with more alertness, concentration, and self-discipline I might have done for Christ and his kingdom, and I can only live by being forgiven on a daily basis.
That is surely enough about Denys, Elisabeth, and me.
What is the point, now, that we are laboring to make in all this? Simply that, though the principles of God’s guidance, and his guardianship are universal, the guided lives of believers are as different from one another as are the believers themselves, and the reality of God’s guardianship and guidance, while glorious in itself, brings no immunity from any of the pains and problems of everyday human life in a fallen world.
The closing comment shall come from Cornell Capa, the hardheaded photographer who covered the Waorani massacre for Life magazine. Almost half a century ago he wrote:
I wondered how Betty [Elisabeth] could reconcile Jim’s death at the hands of the Aucas and the Lord’s apparent failure to protect him from them. Her answer came back without hesitation: “I prayed for the protection of Jim, that is, physical protection. The answer the Lord gave transcended what I had in mind. He gave protection from disobedience and through Jim’s death accomplished results the magnitude of which only Eternity can show.
There are many Christians among the Waorani today, and the Elliot story has had the enormously wide impact of inspiring young adults to pioneer mission work. Truly we can set no limits to the potential significance of lives in which God guides and guards the heart.