Does God forsake those He loves?

by Will Walker

The recurring line in my thoughts the last year or so has been that I am not giving myself to anything. I don’t know, exactly, what it means. I do give myself to things, but it’s here and there, calculated risk, sacrifice at my leisure. I have family to bury and fish to catch, I guess.

I want to give my life away. “I want”… what a deceptive pair of words. There are two kinds of want. At least there are two kinds that I am thinking about right now.

One form of want is a desire for change. I am out of shape, so I want to exercise. I feel aimless, so I want to follow Christ. This kind of want is not reflected in anything you have been doing, but in fact stands in contrast to what you have been doing. Thus, “I want to give my life away,” in this case, means that I have been keeping it. This kind of want is unreliable because there is little to suggest that I have what it takes to act on it. This is the form of want that makes my wife, and perhaps all wives, skeptical.

The other type of want is explanatory. That is, it is an expression of desire that describes what we have been doing. I exercise because I want to stay in shape. This is the kind of desire that characterized Paul in his letter to the Philippians: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.”

Far from my sentiment – “I want to give my life away”— Paul’s statement of want was precisely because he had given his life away. He had nothing left, nothing to protect or guard. All that remained was to die with Christ and hope that somehow he might be resurrected.

So what does God do with those who give Him their lives? I experimented with this on a very small scale. In a moment when I had the choice between preparation and prayer, I prayed. It’s not like me to do that, but I wanted to see what God would do if I gave myself to Him in that moment.

The experiment failed. I felt abandoned, left to fend for myself, helpless. People were snickering and casting lots for my clothes.

To the question of what God does with people who give themselves entirely to His care, my working theory is that He betrays them. He brings about in them a death that is social, vocational, psychological, and emotional. Applause is silenced. Dreams are stolen. Direction is skewed. Even what we knew we knew becomes suspect. People who give themselves away should expect failure on every front, and probably plenty of people standing around to notice.

I felt this. Not quite as strongly as I just stated, but I felt betrayed. It’s one thing if I trust in my own strength and fail, but I was asking God to do whatever He wanted with me. Why did He want my death?

It’s a fair question. Jesus didn’t want death … “Take this cup from me” … but He gave himself to God … “Yet not what I will, but what you will.” And God gave Him death … “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" My question exactly.

It’s sort of like when you buy a stock that plummets. You’re not going to sell it because it’s worthless, and because you have too much invested already. You are going to live or die with that stock, for better or for worse. Your only hope is to hang on to it and pray that it regains its value. If we give ourselves to God and consequently die, then we have nothing to lose because we gave it all away. Our only hope for redemption and life is in Him, that we might, somehow, attain to the resurrection from the dead.

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Let down and strung up for all to see.
You walked out on me as I was walking in.
Turned your back when I was standing in.
Morning will tell if there’s any life left in me.
If you pull me up from where you let me down,
If you dig me up from the burial ground.
Morning will tell if there’s any life left for me.

Comments

[T MO]

I've been feeling the same things, but I wouldn't have dared call it betrayal...it sounded like the wrong word, or at least did until you clarified. I'm glad to say that even though He does let you die by taking away approval and certainty in things you believed were true, even though it hurts...there is such a freedom when you get past that death. Today, I felt the freedom of resurrection in Christ again, with some clarity of His will in my life, but even better with a joy in my uncertainty. I couldn't have reached that place without dying.