"Can God Be Trusted?"
By Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.
"He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you
will find refuge." (Ps. 91:4, NRSV)
Many adults can recall a certain childhood feeling that has
now pretty much faded away. Unhappily, one of the things that fades away is a
childlike feeling of security in the nest. It's a sense that you are loved,
protected, and perfectly safe. It's a sense, above all, that somebody else is
in charge. In properly functioning homes, children often have this feeling.
Adults do not, and they miss it.
Years ago, on the old Candid Camera television program, a
very large and dangerous-looking truck driver--a man of about 50--was asked in
an interview what age he would be if he could be any age he wanted. There was a
silence for a while as the trucker contemplated the question. What was he
thinking? Was he hankering for age 65 and retirement so he could trade his
Kenworth four-and-a-quarter semi down to a John Deere riding lawn mower? Or was
he yearning for age 18 and the chance to go back and take some turn he had
missed?
Finally he turned to the interviewer and said that if it was
up to him he'd like to be three. Three? Why three? the interviewer wanted to
know. "Well," said the trucker, "when you're three you don't
have any responsibilities."
When I first heard the interview I thought this man was
trying to be cute. I now think he said something wistful. What he knew was that
when you are a child, and if your family is running the right way, your burdens
are usually small. You can go to bed without worrying about ice backup under
your shingles. You don't wonder if the tingling in your leg might be a symptom
of some exotic nerve disease. You don't wrestle half the night with a tax
deduction you claimed, wondering whether a federal investigator might find it a
little too creative. No, you squirm deliciously in your bed, drowsily aware of
the murmur of adult conversations elsewhere in the house. You hover wonderfully
at the edge of slumber. Then you let go and fall away.
You dare to do this not only because you fully expect that
in the morning you shall be resurrected. You also dare to do it because you are
sleeping under your parents' wings. If parents take proper care of you, you can
give yourself up to sleep, secure in the knowledge that somebody else is in
charge; somebody big and strong and experienced. As far as children know,
parents stay up all night, checking doors and windows, adjusting temperature
controls, fearlessly driving away marauders. They never go off duty. If a
shadow falls over the house, or demons begin to stir, or a storm rises, parents
will handle it. That's one reason children sleep so well. Their nest is
sheltered and feathered.
I think children might be alarmed to discover how much
adults crave this same sense of security. Adults need to be sheltered, warmed,
embraced. Some of us have been betrayed. Some of us have grown old and are not
happy about it.
People get betrayed, or they get old or sick. Some are
deeply disappointed that their lives have not turned out as they had hoped.
Others have been staggered by a report that has just come back from a pathology
lab. Still others are unspeakably ignored by people they treasure. Some are
simply high-tension human beings, strung tight as piano wire.
To all such folk, the psalmist speaks a word of comfort. It
is one of the great themes of the Scriptures: God is our shelter. He will cover
you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge.
The image here is that of an eagle, or maybe a hen; in any
case, it's a picture of a bird that senses danger and then protectively spreads
its wings over its young. An expert on birds once told me that this move is
very common. A bird senses the approach of a predator, or the threat of
something falling from above, and instinctively spreads out its wings like a
canopy. Then the fledglings scuttle underneath for shelter. The move is so
deeply instinctive that an adult bird will spread those wings even when no
fledglings are around!
And the psalmist--who has almost surely seen this lovely
thing happen--the psalmist thinks of God. He will cover you with his pinions,
and under his wings you will find refuge. The point is that God is our shelter
when the winds begin to howl; under God's providence we are defended,
protected, perfectly safe--someone else is in charge--someone big, strong, and
experienced, who never goes off duty.
In one of his books, John Timmer, my former pastor, tells of
his experience as a boy in the Netherlands at the start of World War II. German
troops had invaded Holland a few days before, but nobody knew just what to
expect. Then, on the second Sunday of May 1940, as the Timmer family was
sitting around the dinner table in their home in Harlem, suddenly they heard
the eerie whining of an air-raid siren and then the droning of German bombers.
Of course, all of them were scared out of their minds.
"Let's go stand in the hallway," John's father said. "They say
it's the safest place in the house." In the hall, John's father said,
"Why don't we pray? There's nothing else we can do."
John says he has long ago forgotten the exact wording of his
father's prayer--all except for one phrase. Somewhere in that prayer to God to
protect his family from Hitler's Luftwaffe, Mr. Timmer said, "O God, in
the shadow of your wings we take refuge."
God spreads his wings over us. Here is a picture that all
the Jewish and Christian generations have cherished, in part because it invites
us to recover our childhood feeling of security in the nest. Or, to discover it
for the first time if we have had a terrorized childhood. It's a picture that
offers sublime comfort, and only a pretty numb Christian would fail to be
touched by it.
Still, a disturbing question pricks us. How true is the
picture of a sheltering God? How secure are we in the nest? I wonder whether in
1940, on the second Sunday of May, some other Dutch family begged God to spread
his wings over their house. I wonder if the bombs of the German air force
pierced those wings and blew that house and its people to rubble.
You read Psalm 91 and you begin to wonder. It offers such
comprehensive coverage. He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings
you will find refuge. . . . You will not fear the terror of the night, or the
arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the
destruction that wastes at noonday.
Really? I need not fear any of these things? I can sleep in
a dangerous neighborhood with my windows open? I shall not fear the terror of
the night? My child's temperature soars and his white blood count plummets: I
shall not fear the pestilence that stalks in darkness? I can plunge into my
work at an AIDS clinic: I shall not fear the destruction that wastes at midday?
Really? Is there a level of faith that can honestly say such things even after
all allowance has been made for poetic exaggeration?
In his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas L. Friedman
writes of his years in the Middle East. One of the terrors of life in Beirut during
the civil war there was the prospect of dying a random death. Long-distance
sniping and shelling made it hard to tell where bullets or shells might land,
and the people who launched them often didn't care. You never knew whether the
car you walked past might explode into a fireball, stripping trees of their
leaves so that in the terrible silence that followed, scores of leaves would
come fluttering down in a soft shower on top of the dead and the maimed.
No one kept score. Police would even lose track of the names
of the dead. "Death in Beirut had no echo," says Friedman.
I shall not fear the grenade that flies by day. Could a
believer say this in Beirut?
Let us face the truth. Faith in the sheltering wings of God
does not remove physical danger or the need for precaution against it. We
cannot ignore Beirut tourist advisories, or feed wild animals on our camping
trips, or jump a hot motorcycle over a row of parked cars and trust God to keep
us safe. We cannot smoke cigarettes like the Marlboro man and then claim the
promises of Psalm 91 as our protection against lung cancer. A person who did
these things would be a foolish believer and a foolish reader of Psalm 91.
You may recall that in Matthew's gospel Satan quotes this
psalm to Jesus in the temptation at the pinnacle of the temple. "Throw
yourself down," says Satan. After all, it says right in Psalm 91 that
"God will give his angels charge over you." And Jesus replies that it
is not right to put God to the test. God's protection is good only for certain
events, and restrictions may apply. Jesus was teaching us that we cannot act
like a fool and then count on God to bail us out. God may do it--and some of us
can recall times when we acted like fools and God bailed us out. But we may not
count on it.
But, of course, some believers get hurt, terribly hurt, by
no folly of their own. Suppose a drunk driver smashes into your family car.
Suppose an I-beam falls on you in a storm. What if you make the mistake of
visiting a great city during tourist-hunting season?
Or suppose you are a devout middle-aged Christian woman who
lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One June you start to feel sick. So you visit
your primary-care physician, who sends you for tests, and then a visit to a
specialist, and then more tests. Finally you go back to your own physician, and
she says, "Ma'am, I'm sorry to say that you had better get your affairs in
order." She says more, far more, about treatments and research and making
you as comfortable as possible--on and on with all kinds of stuff that is
well-meant. But you have grown deaf. All you can think is that you are 46 years
old and you are going to die before your parents do and before your children
get married.
Whatever happened to the wings of God? Can you get brain
cancer under those wings? Get molested by a family member? Get knifed by some
emotionless teenager in a subway in New York? Can you find, suddenly one
summer, that your own 17-year-old has become a stranger and that everything in
your family seems to be cascading out of control?
Where are those wings?
What troubles us is not so much the sheer fact that
believers suffer along with everybody else. C. S. Lewis once pondered this. If
the children of God were always saved from floods like believing Noah and his
family; if every time somebody pointed a gun at a Christian, the gun just
turned to salami; if we really had a money-back guarantee against hatred,
disease, and the acts of terrorists, then of course we wouldn't have to worry
about church growth. Our churches would fill with people attracted to the faith
for secondary reasons. These are people who want an insurance agent, not a
church. For security they want Colin Powell, not God. We already have people
becoming Christians because they want to get rich or get happy. What would
happen to people's integrity if becoming a believer really did give you blanket
protection against poverty, accident, and the wages of sin?
No, it's not the fact that we have to take our share of the
world's suffering that surprises us. After all, our experience and the rest of
Scripture have taught us to expect hardship. What worries us is that Psalm 91
tells us not to worry. It says "a thousand may fall at your side, ten
thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you." This is
advertising that sounds too good to be true. In fact, the psalmist says,
"Because you have made the Lord your refuge . . . no evil shall befall
you." And the statement troubles us. What about Paul? What about Stephen?
What about our Lord himself? He wanted to gather the citizens of Jerusalem as a
hen gathers her chicks. What some of those citizens did was to take him outside
of town one day and nail his wings to some two-by-fours.
So what is going on in Psalm 91? How are its extravagant
promises God's Word to us?
What Psalm 91 does is express one--one of the loveliest, one
of the most treasured--but just one of the moods of faith. It's a mood of
exuberant confidence in the sheltering providence of God. Probably the psalmist
has been protected by God in some dangerous incident, and he is celebrating.
On other days, and in other moods--in other and darker
seasons of his life--this same psalmist might have called to God out of despair
and a sense of abandonment. Remember that when our Lord was crucified, when our
Lord shouted at our God, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?"--when Jesus shouted this in astonishment, and with maybe even a note
of accusation, remember that he was quoting another psalm (22). Despair or
astonishment at what can happen to us under God's providence--that too is natural
and biblical.
Psalm 91 gives us only part of the picture and only one of
the moods of faith. With a kind of quiet amazement, the psalmist bears witness
that under the wings of God good things happen to bad people. You need another
psalm or two to fill in the picture, to cry out that under those same wings bad
things sometimes happen to good people.
Psalm 91 says no evil
shall befall us. When we have cashed out some of the poetry and then added in
the witness of the rest of Scripture, what we get, I believe, is the conclusion
that no final evil shall befall us. We know that we can believe God with all
our heart and yet have our heart broken by the loss of a child or the treachery
of a spouse or the menace of a fatal disease. We know this is true--everyone in
the church knows it. And yet, generation after generation of bruised saints
have known something else and spoken of it. In the mystery of faith, we find a
hand on us in the darkness, a voice that calls our name, and the sheer
certainty that nothing can ever separate us from the love of God--not for this
life and not for the life to come. We may be scarred and shaken, but, as Lewis
Smedes says in one of his luminous sermons, we come to know that it's all
right, even when everything is all wrong.
We are like fledglings who scuttle under the wings of their
parent. The forces of evil beat on those wings with everything they have. The
pitchforks of the Evil One, falling tree limbs in the storm, merciless rain and
hail--everything beats on those wings. When it is finished, when evil has done
its worst, those wings are all bloodied and busted and hanging at wrong angles.
And, to tell you the truth, in all the commotion we too get roughed up quite a
lot.
But we are all right, because those wings have never folded.
They are spread out to be wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our
iniquities. And when the feathers quit flying, we peep out and discover that we
have been in the only place that was not leveled. Yes, we have been bumped and
bruised and hurt. Sometimes badly hurt. But the other choice was to be
dead--the other choice was to break out of the embrace of God. If we had not
stayed under those wings we could never have felt the body shudders and heard
the groans of the one who loved us so much that those wings stayed out there no
matter what came whistling in. This is the one who protects us from final evil,
now and in the life to come--the life in which, at last, it is safe for God to
fold his wings.
He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you
will find refuge. It's not a simple truth, but it is the truth. And we ought to
believe it with everything that is in us.
