When God Seems Inconsistent

Our faith in God is built around the expectation that God will be fair. Good things should happen to good people. There are benefits to serving God. But what we know about God and His ways is overwhelmingly dwarfed by what we do not yet know about Him. We stand at the edge of the endless ocean of His eternal being, and all our present knowledge of Him is but a scant impression of the whole. Yet what we do not yet know about God and His ways will not prove inconsistent with what we already know. And what we do know about God gives us great confidence, though life’s shocks cause our faith to tremble.

Asaph (Psalm 73) and Job base their view of God on the same basic premise: God rewards the good and punishes the evil. Both ask the same question but in different ways. Asaph asks, “Why do the wicked prosper?” Job asks, “Why do the righteous suffer?” The answers they discover help today’s believers to not be shaken when what God allows seems to contradict what they believe Him to be.

God will not settle all His accounts this weekend. What seems like a complete contradiction to His promises now will likely look quite different in retrospect. Through His word and life’s experiences, God will teach us that He is dependable, but not predictable; trustworthy, but never coerced. May we be the student and He the teacher as He slowly reveals the depth of His nature and the wisdom of His ways. May we learn to live as Wesley Naylor wrote:

God’s way is best, I will not murmur,
Although the end I may not see;
Where’er He leads I’ll meekly follow,
God’s way is best, is best for me.

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