God is Good

The following is from Oswald Chambers' book Not Knowing Whither:

"And the LORD visited Sarah as He had said, and the LORD did for Sarah as He had spoken" (Genesis 21:1).

"One of the greatest demands on the human spirit is to believe that God is good when His providence seems to prohibit the fulfillment of what He has promised.  The one character in the Bible who sustains this strain grandly is Abraham.  Paul, in summing up the life of Abraham, points to this as his greatest quality:  'Abraham believed God.'

"God's Performance of His Own Promise (Genesis 21:1)

"No one can fulfill a promise but the one who makes it.  These words contain the whole autobiography of the godly ups and downs of the life of faith.  During the years when everything seemed to contradict the fulfillment of the promise, Abraham continually forgot this fundamental fact and tried to help God keep His promise.  God alone can fulfill His promises, and we have to come to the place of perfect reliance upon God to do just that (see 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24).

"Just as the Lord visited Sarah 'as He had said,' He visits the believer with the word of promise and visits him again with the word of fulfillment.  Abraham endured for twenty-five years without any sign of fulfillment.

"The majority of us know nothing about waiting; we don't wait, we endure.  Faithful waiting means we go on in the perfect certainty of God's goodness--no dumps or fears.

"God's Presentation of His Own Performance (Genesis 21:2)

"The presentation of God's performance here is in the birth of an ordinary child, extraordinary only to the eye of faith. 

"We come to God not with faith in His goodness but with a conception of our own, and we look for God to come to us in that way.  God cannot come to us in our way; He can only come in His own way--in ways man would never dream of looking for Him. 

"In the Incarnation the eternal God was so majestically small that the world never saw Him.  And this is still true today.  We cry out, 'Oh God, I wish You would come to me,' when He is there all the time.  Then suddenly we see Him and say, 'Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.' 

"We expect desolation and anguish; instead there is laughter and hilarity when we see God.  This astonishment at the performance of God is brought out over and over again until we learn to be humiliated at our despicable disbelief.

"God's Program for His Progeny (Genesis 21:3-8)

"What Abraham did for his son Isaac was in accordance with God's program for him, not his own.  God has a distinct program for every child born into this world. 

"There is no relation between the promise of God for the life He forms in us by regeneration and our personal, private ambitions; those ambitions are completely transfigured.  We must heed the promise of God and see that we do not try to make God's gift fulfill our own ends. 

"Suppose that God sees fit to put us into desolation when He begins the forming of His Son in us.  What ought it to matter?  All He is after in you and me is the forming of His Son in us. 

"When He drives the sword through the natural, we begin to whine and say, 'Oh, I can't go through with that'; but we must go through it.  If we refuse to make our natural life obedient to the Son of God in us, the Son of God will be put to death in us.  We have to put on the new man in our human nature to fit the life of the Son of God in us, and see that in the outer courts of our bodily lives we conduct our life for Him.

"Sarah's hilarity is the joy of God sounding through the upset equilibrium of a mind that scarcely expected the promise to be fulfilled (21:6).  The son of Sarah is himself a type of the Son of Mary, and in each case the promise is limited through a particular woman, and through an apparently impossible, yet actual birth.  Fancy making everything depend on that haughty, inclined-to-be-unstable, not-amazingly-superb-in-rectitude Sarah!  How haphazard God seems--not sometimes but always.  God's ways turn man's thinking upside down.

"Amazement comes when God's promise is fulfilled (21:7).  What is known as the dark side of Christian experience is not really Christian experience at all; it is God putting the rot of sacramental death through the natural virtues in order to produce something in keeping with His Son, and all our whining and misery ought to be the laughter of Sarah:  'Now I see what God wants!'  Instead of that, we moon in corners and gloom before God and say, 'I am afraid I am not sanctified.'

"If we fight against the desolation, we will kill the life of God in us; yield to it, and God's fulfillment will amaze us. 

"It is in the periods of desolation that the sickly pietists talk about 'What I am suffering!'  They are in the initial stages and have not begun to realize God's purpose.  God is working out the manifestation of the fulfillment of His promise, and when it is fulfilled there is never any thought of self or of self-consideration anywhere."