When God’s Promises Feel Untrue

There are many reasons why reading Scripture can be difficult. The mere act of opening your Bible in a world of busyness and distractions can be a struggle. Even when we do read a passage, we may be too preoccupied or exhausted to remember what we read. Other times, we read passages and they feel completely irrelevant (hello, Leviticus!), or we are overly familiar with a passage, so it feels stale. Whether it is our lack of discipline, misplaced priorities, or short attention spans, it is hard to know how to approach Scripture meaningfully even when we know it’s good for us.

There is another reason why reading Scripture can be difficult: The words we read can feel untrue. How many times have we read a passage of Scripture and had no idea how to make sense of it—not because it was hard to understand theologically or the language was confusing—but because it seemed to directly contradict our life circumstances? It left us wondering, “Does God keep his promises?”

Recently, I spent a few days reading and re-reading Psalm 23. This is a passage where there is a risk that my familiarity with it will make my eyes and heart glaze over. Yet my experience of reading Psalm 23 this time was not a tuned-out “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this already.” Instead, I found myself completely engaged, almost as if I was reading this psalm for the first time. It wasn’t because it offered encouragement and comfort, though. It was because it felt confusing to me in a new way. The confusion only grew once I arrived at verse 6—“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever”—and I actually heard myself laugh out loud. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. I laughed because the verse sounded so contrary to what my lived experience felt like. “Goodness and mercy are following me? What goodness? What mercy?”

I am not proud of this response. It feels impious even as I write this. It reminds me of Sarah’s laugh—her laugh of unbelief—when God told Abraham that she would bear a son in old age (Gen 18:12). Yet the experience of reading the promises of God when so much of life feels like a blatant contradiction is real. What do we do when we read God’s promises in Scripture and they feel untrue? What do we do when we look at the circumstances of our lives—the sin that feels unrelenting, the suffering that persists and grows with time, the earnest, desperate prayers gone unanswered day after day after day? We can only wonder: Has God gone back on his Word and forgotten about us? Will he not keep his promises to us? What do we do when our lives feel so dark and discouraging that reading “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life” doesn’t feel like an encouragement, but rather feels like a laughable absurdity?

While I don’t fully know the answer to this, two seed thoughts have sprung up in my heart.

First, these occasions become the perfect opportunity to practice walking by faith, not by sight. I’m not sure why I forget on a daily basis that inherent to the Christian journey is a call to faith. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Romans 8:24–25 says, “For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” I live with an unspoken stubborn desire, even expectation, that I should be able to see what God is up to, that I should be able to understand what he is doing and why. I live with the expectation that I should be able to read Psalm 23:6 about his goodness and mercy following me and say, “Yes, I see how this is true for my life today.”

I need to be continually reminded that one of the enduring callings I have been given is to walk by faith, not by sight. That means there will be days I cannot see what I hope for. There may be days his goodness will seem nonexistent to me. There may be days that I am asked to walk by faith that his promises are true and being worked out in my life, even if there is so much “seen” evidence to the contrary. If I can’t see it, that doesn’t mean it’s not true. It means I am given the opportunity to practice what it means to grow in my faith. Not blind faith, but faith in Christ who died for me, was raised, and invites me to trust in him and not in myself. Faith in the One who, as my colleague Ed Welch has often said, loves us with a love that is sometimes more sophisticated than we can understand. Faith in the One who “is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.”¹ The places where there seems to be a wide disparity between God’s promises and the realities of our lives are difficult but precious opportunities to practice trusting in his promise-keeping wisdom and care. One day, all that remains unseen will be seen, and we will find him faithful.

Second, these are occasions to look back on previous seasons of life when God knew what was best for us. One of the ways that God invites us to trust him is to look back on his past faithfulness. When the Israelites faced new tribulations in the Old Testament, he often encouraged them to look back to the exodus when he delivered them from slavery. Perhaps we have stories we can look back on as well—times when we were convinced we knew what was best yet later on realized God’s wisdom far surpassed our own. Seasons where unanswered prayers gave way to receiving what was more than what we could’ve even asked for or imagined. Seasons where we were initially embittered that he didn’t give us what we wanted, but later thanked him for the closed doors that ultimately led to something far sweeter. It is easy to forget that there have been other days when it didn’t feel like goodness and mercy were following me until I could see it in hindsight. Consider the following statements I’ve heard from others:

Sometimes he gives us these testimonies to remind us to hold onto hope in our present-day confusion and discouragement.

So what did I end up doing that day when I laughed reading Psalm 23:6? What did walking by faith look like for me then? I ended up writing a lengthy entry in my journal. I expressed to God why the verse sounded absurd to me. I listed the ways I felt God wasn’t answering my legitimate prayers for good, God-honoring things, the ways he was letting me be stuck, and the ways he wasn’t providing what I felt I desperately needed. Where was the help I was praying for every day? Goodness and mercy felt more like cold silence and neglect. I told him I felt discouraged.

I don’t know what will come of that journal entry and prayer. I imagine a few years from now, I may be able to look back and be able to see more of what God was up to—how even unanswered prayers and unremoved suffering can bear witness to his goodness and mercy. I don’t presume to understand it all today. But I ask God for more faith, and I ask others to pray this for me as well. And I wait. Today, impatiently. Tomorrow, perhaps a bit more patiently. I hope for what I do not see—that his promises are indeed true for me—and I wait.

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1. John Piper, “God Is Always Doing 10,000 Things In Your Life,” https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/god-is-always-doing-10000-things-in-your-life. ↩︎