Learning to Trust God in Times of Trouble

The focus of this whole section that I want to use today is where God shows us how He deals with people in times of trouble and difficulty. What is it that God does in times when His people are in trouble? Now normally we think that we want God to say, okay, I'm going to do something to erase or remove all the trouble that you have. That's not always what God does. And sometimes it's based on the reason why the trouble comes. You would respond to people in a different way if they did something that caused them to have trouble than you would if somebody had done everything right and didn't create the problem that came to them. Well, God does the same thing. Sometimes the trouble people get into is a result of what they've done. And God reacts to them in a different way than if they were people who had done everything exactly as they're supposed to and still trouble came to them. In this section, it's really a continuation of chapter 2, verses 20 through 22. So I want to step back there and read that for just a moment. Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel and said, Because this nation has violated the covenant that God laid down, the covenant that I laid down for their forefathers and has not listened to me, I will no longer drive out before them any of the nations Joshua left when he died. I will use them to test Israel and see whether they will keep the way of the Lord and walk in it as their forefathers did. The Lord had allowed those nations to remain. He did not drive them out at once by giving them into the hands of Joshua. This is the precursor to what takes place in chapter 3, verse 1. These are the nations the Lord left to test all those Israelites who had not experienced any of the wars in Canaan. He did this not only to teach warfare to the descendants of Israelites who had not had previous battle experience. The five rulers of the Philistines, all the Canaanites, the Sidonians, and the Hivites living in the Lebanon mountains from Mount Baal, Hermon, to Lebo, Hamath. They were left to test the Israelites to see whether they would obey the Lord's command which he had given their forefathers through Moses. So verse 1 of chapter 3 is a key ingredient here. These are the nations the Lord left to test all those Israelites who had not experienced any wars in Canaan. Now when he talks about that he is sort of referring back to what had taken previously not only just what I read but when he was talking about the people of Israel who had been the first generation who had fought the battles to conquer the land of Canaan. And then he was talking about the fact that these people who were the second generation listened to what happened to the first and the third generation then they had already forgotten all the things that God had done. So now he is talking about that group that never fought the battles to claim the land of Canaan for God. These are the people who didn't experience the first battles when they were fighting and now he is trying to teach them how to be able to fight to secure the land that they need. And he is also testing them. These are the nations the Lord left to test the Israelites. Now whenever he made a covenant with the people of Israel he said you go into the land and I will make sure you win the battles so that you will conquer this territory. But what happened was they didn't live in obedience to him and so he did not give them the victories that they needed to have. So that the victories that he promised to them did not come because they failed to be faithful to him. Instead of doing exactly what he told them in the battle they sort of improvised with themselves. They decided to do the things they thought were right instead of what God said to them was right. He told them to destroy all the people in Canaan, every one of them. But they thought maybe it would be better if they did some things on their own that would not cause them to destroy all the enemy who was there. And as a result of that he said you have not done what I have asked you to do. And slowly but surely he withdrew his presence and power from them until they were not able to conquer the land of Canaan. Now he is saying these people who are the third generation who have forgotten what it was like for the people to come in and take the land they don't know how to battle. They have not experienced any of the wars in Canaan and they are being tested. Now the test that he is talking about here is the test not of the people but he is testing them as to whether or not they learn how to depend on him and to be obedient to him. The reason that God did not allow them to conquer the land was that they didn't do exactly what he told them. They didn't listen to his supreme authority over their lives. They did instead what seemed to them to be right. Take one example. They would destroy all the cities. When they came to this city they saw someone slipping out through the wall and instead of destroying him and all the city they went to him and said we will let your family live if you will tell us how to get into the city in a secret way. So instead of doing what God said they thought they had a shrewd way to be able to capture the city. It was these small things that grew until the nation of Israel they were doing what they thought was right instead of exactly what God said they should do. So he withdrew his power from them because of their compromise with him. Why that was so critical to God is the very first commandment. You are to have no other authority over your life but me. That's what it means. You are to have no God but me. I am to be the sole authority for everything that you do. What they did was they listened to God and then did what they thought was right instead of doing what he said. So they were willing to do some of the things God told them but not everything. It was this flaw that made God say you don't accept me for who I am. Now they are in the land of Canaan and God wants to test them to see if they, this third generation, will be willing to say we are prepared to do everything you tell us exactly the way you tell us. He is placing them in circumstances where they have to decide are we going to do this ourselves our way or are we going to do it God's way. He wanted to teach them how to fight his way. I will tell you what to do and if you do everything I tell you to do then you will win the victory in these battles. What he means by doing it his way was a wide variety of different things he asked them to do but the key ingredient to all of them was I am going to tell you what to do. Sometimes you will fight. Sometimes you won't fight. Sometimes you will win the battles and the people will run away. Sometimes they will make peace with you. However this works out my plan always works. What he was trying to build was a nation of people who trusted God absolutely in every circumstance. They didn't. So now he is saying I want to test you to show you how this thing works. I am going to test to see if in the middle of difficulty you come back to me and say wait a minute we are now prepared to do exactly what you want. Verse 2 he says he did this only to teach warfare to the descendants of the Israelites. He wasn't trying to teach them military strategy. He wasn't trying to teach them how to fight. He was trying to teach them to be warriors as he decided they should. When you look back on what happened in the book of Joshua when they went into the land of promise the very first battle they fought was at Jericho. Do you remember how that worked? They walked around the city of Jericho seven times and broke their glasses, their jars and shouted to the Lord and the walls fell down. They went to another battle and he said I want you to put some men in the front and some behind the city and whenever the people in the city start winning I want you to run away. And then when they run away the people behind them are going to come in and burn the city. He had all kinds of different schemes. But one thing was the same about all of them. It is my instructions that you obey. What he wanted to teach them was warfare in God's style. Now this is a critical thing for us to understand about how we learn to follow God. Because when you look at the kingdom of God in the New Testament especially it is an upside down and backward kingdom. You get ahead when you give up. You get ahead when you give away. The Beatitudes, blessed are those who are poor. Blessed are those who are in need. Blessed are those who suffer. The kingdom of God is a kingdom that is different. Because the people who are involved in the kingdom of God are doing things in obedience to God and allowing God to bring the victory over the circumstance. The victory doesn't come in the kingdom of God because of our skill or intelligence. It comes because we have appropriated the power of God. It is really hard for a person to stand by and not do everything that they think is right. But when we pledge to live our lives in obedience to Christ we pledge to live our lives the way he tells us. So in the process of all this we find ourselves in circumstances sometimes where it really seems as if what God tells us in the Bible we should do is the opposite of what would be effective. He does this because he wants us to understand that the victories we have are not the result of our power, our skill, our wisdom, or our money. They're the result of God's power. What we do as we live in obedience to God is we bear witness to the power of God in us. If we're smarter than everybody else in the world and we succeed then people look at us and say if I was smart I could succeed. If we are effective because we're shrewd people think well you're effective because you're shrewd. And if I were shrewd I could do that. And when you say give your life in obedience to Christ people would say well what's that mean? I need to be shrewd. I need to be powerful. I need to have all the tools in the world. What the gospel tells us is we give our lives to God and we do what he tells us and he brings the victory so that there is no one regardless of circumstances who can't have victory in this life because it does not come as a result of our skill or wisdom or ability. It comes as a result of what God is doing. They had fought the battle of Canaan under their own military wisdom and they never conquered all the tribes that were there. So God says I want to teach you how to win. And so he left some of the tribes there. You'll notice in that first verse it says these are the nations the Lord left. He could have wiped them all out. All he would have had to do is to say one day I want everybody within this framework of the Canaan land to drop dead now and they would have done it. But he didn't do that. He said I want you to fight the battle and I want you to experience the victory that I will bring. What he was trying to do was to teach the people of Israel how to live in dependence on him. Not only in this military way but every kind of way. Because in obedience to what he asked them to do the Ten Commandments and all the instructions this would bring them life in all of its fullness. And if they didn't do everything exactly as they said they should have done then they're not going to find it. It's not a matter of compromise. I want to choose three of the ten. I want to choose four of the ten. I want to choose nine of the ten. But everything has to be because the first one is the clue. You have no power and authority over your life but me. Even you don't have authority over it. I have authority. That one leads to all the other commandments that God gave. So he's trying to say the people of Israel have failed to come in and conquer the land as I promised they would because they didn't obey me. Now I'm going to test this new generation. I'm going to test them to see if they know how to have warfare so that they can have victory. So he left some of the nations there. Now I want to reflect on this for a minute about us. A person gives themselves to Christ and begins to follow Christ and live in obedience to him. And normal things come up. You know, like you have to pay your bills. You have to get a job. You have to relate to your wife or your husband. You have to deal with your children. You have to deal with your neighbors. You have to deal with your extended family. All kinds of relationships. All kinds of structures that you have to deal with. Now, whenever we start following Christ and say, God, I'm going to give you my life and I'm going to live the way you want me to live, what happens immediately is God begins to change us. He places his Holy Spirit in us. He gives us wisdom about circumstances. But in the process of that, we never do everything exactly right. So what happens is we still have in our own lives areas in which we have not learned to submit to God. Faith is a growing thing. I was talking about this the other day in the passage where it talks about Jesus saying, I'm going to teach you to grow in your salvation. Growing in our salvation. I've been saved so that God is now in my life, but it doesn't mean that all parts of my life are being transformed. So he transforms us and we are beginning this journey of being changed step by step so that God leaves some things in our lives, even after we've accepted him, that are still problems to us. I am sure that all of you here, if you've committed your life to Christ and begun living in obedience to him, can put your finger on some parts of your life that you know have not been changed the way God wants them to be changed. Why didn't he just change everything in your life all at once? When you accepted Christ, why didn't he change your character, your nature, your faith in him so that you didn't ever worry about money, didn't ever worry about clothes, you treated everybody right all the time, you never did anything that was wrong. Why did he not do that? This, I think, gives us a little bit of a clue. What God is trying to help us to do is learn how to fight the battles of problems we face by trusting in him. I remember one time a lady was telling me she had gone through a divorce, had children, and her husband was unfaithful to her. All kinds of things happened. She was going through a really difficult time and she finally just said, OK, I'm going to trust God for this and I'm going to really do what he told me to do about it. I'm not going to complain. I'm not going to try to find out what he's doing and run around and chase him and get on to him. So she got through this and then about three or four months later something else happened. It was financial. And she said, You know, I just got to the place where I could learn to trust God with this part of my life and now here's another part of my life that I haven't learned how to trust him in. Why can't I just have one great victory and all these things be gone? Well, it's just the way God works with us. I'm going to leave some things in your life that are not quite the way you want them to be and I'm going to see if you will trust me with those things. Do you find it easier to trust God about some things and not others? Some people are so filled with faith that God, when they die, is going to take them to heaven. That God in his mighty power will take their dead body and make it live again and that they will be forever with him in heaven. Now that's a lot of power, isn't it? But if you were to talk to them about tithing, they would say, Well, I can't do that. I'll go broke. You mean the God that makes dead bodies come to life can't provide financially for you? You don't have that much trust in him? If you can't trust him for a dollar bill, then why would you trust him with your whole body and life? What God does is he looks at us and sees that there are some ways in which our faith is strong and powerful and some ways in which our faith is very weak. So he leaves those things in our lives that we have not yet learned to conquer because he wants to teach us in this part of our life how to be able to fight. He wants to teach them warfare. What he's wanting to teach us is spiritual warfare in the battles that we face in life. How do you conquer the things that are in your life? And so he leaves those there. So whenever you're living the Christian life, you're going to find yourself every once in a while coming up to something where you know God tells you what you should do, but really deep inside of you it's hard for you to trust God with it. It's hard for you to say, OK, God, I've got this problem here. I know what you tell me I should do about it, but I'm not sure that it will work. It seems so difficult to trust you with this. And what he's trying to do is to get you to step out in trust and faith to conquer your problem by learning how to place it in his hand and do with your life what he told you you should do. This is God's method of dealing with this. So I would want to say to every believer, every follower of Christ, when you find in your life difficulties cropping up, problems coming up in your life, you're in this position that these people of Israel were in. God has allowed the problem that you're facing to come to you that he might teach you how to fight against that problem with victory as he has in all the other places in which you've won the victory. Now, if it's big and strong and you have no idea how to conquer it, that's your clue. God is saying to you, I want to teach you how to have warfare over this problem in your life by trusting me with it and winning the victory over it like you have in all the other parts of your life. So when you come against one of those, you sit down and say, okay, now I've been following Christ and I can see that he helped me to overcome this problem and he helped me overcome this problem and he helped me overcome this problem and that problem. I know he has the wisdom and the power to help me overcome this one. So I'm going to stop and say, why is it that I can't conquer this? What do I need to get over it? I need instruction from God. Okay, he tells me what to do. And then when he tells us what to do, usually we look at it and say, either I don't think I can do that or I'm not sure if I did it, it would work. Those are the two areas in which our faith are really stretched. We have faith about some things, but here is one in which we see bigger problems and we just can't believe it will happen. And you can read the promises in the Scripture that God says he's going to take care of us, he's going to give the victory, but in your mind, all you can see is this is bigger than I am. Well, good. That means that God is going to take care of that. He's trying to teach you to expand the victories in your life past the things that you've already won the power over into a new arena in which you've never experienced his power. That's why we have problems. We're teaching tools by which God is going to help us know what to do to find the victory that he has. And it's so easy, simply, really. Whatever problem comes up to you, you look in the Bible and say, what should you do? And you do it. Why don't we do that? Well, it's because we say, I'm not able to do it or I can't see how that's going to work if I do it. Both of those are absolute failures to have confidence that God can do in your life what he said he was going to do. It happens with people in terms of their finances. It happens in terms of people with their relationships. It happens in terms with people with their Christian service. I know God wants me to do this, but I just can't do it. Well, that's true. The question is, can God do it? And if he can and you think he can, then you just start trying to do it and you wait to see how he accomplishes what he's trying to get you to do. You see, the bottom of all of our difficulties is the absence of trust in God. Does his plan work? Does he give me the ability to do what he asked me to do? If he gives me the ability to do what he asked me to do, will he really bring about the change that needs to be done? Well, God promised the people of Israel, you go in and you'll conquer all those enemies that you have in the land of Canaan. They'll be bigger than you, they'll be stronger than you, and they'll outnumber you. But you will win. But when the people of Israel got in there, they discovered they were bigger than them, there were more of them, and they were better trained than they were. And so they, in the face of all those human realities, they said, we've got to find another way. And you'll find that true for many people who are following Christ. They're doing some things right, but they come to a place where they're really not sure that if I do what God tells me to do, it's going to work out. Why? Because I can't see either how I can do that in my limited ability and skill, or if I did do it, I don't see how that would help. How does it help if somebody's nasty to me and I just turn the other cheek? How will that help? If they hit me once and I just turn the other cheek and they hit me again? I can't see any benefit to that, so I'm not going to do it. So you close the door in learning how to stop conflict. God leaves us with problems, and every single person I know has problems. But what he's given those problems to us for, or left them for us instead of removing them, is to teach us how to win the warfare. I want to make you stronger and more powerful. And in every area of your life, the bigger issue you conquer, the more confident you become in your ability or skill. In the Christian faith, the bigger the issue you conquer, the more confidence you have in God. That's his ultimate long-range plan. He did this to teach warfare to the descendants of the Israelites who had not had previous battle experience. In verse 3, he lists all the people they're going to be fighting. The five rulers of the Philistines, all the Canaanites, the Sidonites, the Hivites, living in the Lebanon mountains from Mount Baal, Hermon to Mount Telebo, Haman. There's one group of people left out of this as opposed to the list in chapter 2, verse 7. There he lists again the people who are in the land of Canaan, and the Gershonites are not mentioned. They won one battle and completely destroyed that group of people. But the others, they failed to be able to conquer because they compromised obedience to God. Now, in verse 4, they were left, all these people were left, to test the Israelites to see whether they would obey the Lord's commands which he had given their forefathers through Moses. The key ingredient in how God wants to deal with our areas of weakness is to see how we're going to handle them. What happens when you come up against terrible difficulties in your life? Do you go to your friends and ask their advice? Do you go to an expert and ask their advice? Do you bring the issue before God and say, what should I do? Now, what you're doing is you're not looking for a solution to it because the solution won't come from you. What you're looking for is the instructions of God. What does he tell me I should do? And when you know what you're supposed to do, then you do it and you trust that because of the power of God, he will make that successful. That's how we fight these battles in our lives. And when you conquer one of them, you can't sit down and say, well, now I've won the victory because as soon as you get through with that, you will come face to face in a short while against another. It's like you're going to school, taking a math class. Once you learn how to add two and two, then they want you to learn how to subtract. Once you learn how to subtract, then they want to teach you how to multiply. Once you have that under your belt, they want to teach you how to divide in long division. And once you have that down, they want you now to go to algebra. Every one of those things builds on the next one so that by the time you're through with your courses, you become proficient at mathematics. So God takes us and he starts us out at the beginning. Trust me with your life. And usually we're in a position where we're desperate and we say, okay, God, I'll trust you with my life. I'll do everything you tell me from now on the rest of my life. And you feel the Holy Spirit come in you and joy in your life. And then the first thing after that happens and all that settles down, you have a problem. And your first temptation is to solve it the same way you did before you met Christ. And you keep doing that and it doesn't work and doesn't work and doesn't work. And then you come and say, okay, to a Christian friend, tell me what to do. Well, here's what the Bible says. You go back and try to do what the Bible says and God helps you through it. Each step of the way, he's building in your life a life of faith that allows you to face more and bigger difficulties and trials. What God was trying to do with the people of Israel was test them to see how long it would take before they would stop and say, we give up. We're ready now to do what God told us to do. And when we get through this book, you'll see that he let them go to some very difficult things happen before they were ready to say, okay, there is a different way. And he'll do that with you too. He won't slap you down and make you stop. But over and over again, you will discover that you've come face to face with things bigger than you are. And you're faced with the issue of saying, can I solve this? Can my friends solve this? Can other people solve this? Or is God the source for me? That's how God works through the problems that come to us. So, whenever you have a problem in your life, you should stop and say, God has allowed this problem that I might learn how to have spiritual warfare and victory. He's already promised me that I'm going to win. All I need to know is how to win. All I need to know is what he tells me to do in this situation. But I have to be prepared that when he tells me, it will look like it wouldn't work at all. But because I trust him, I'm going to take this step of faith and experience the power that only God has. That is what he was trying to teach the Israelites. And that's what he's been trying to teach all of his people from the beginning of the world to today. Your problems are the door. And when you knock on it, and you open it to God, you find the power of God, the wisdom of God, and the answers of God. Let's pray. We know you've left us with problems in our lives because we encounter them every day. Sometimes we try our very best to do what you tell us. But sometimes what you ask us to do seems so far from what's right in our human minds, it's hard for us. And sometimes they seem so overwhelming we can't even imagine that you would work them out. All of these difficulties are matters of our lack of trust in you. So we ask, give us enough trust in you to be able to face every trial that comes to us. That we won't be afraid, we won't run away, but we will simply wait. And when we hear from you, we'll have the courage to do what you tell us with confidence that the victory comes to those who've learned to fight with the tools you give us. Trust and obedience. In the name of Christ we give thanks for that. Amen.