GOD’S TENDER LOVING CARE

One morning recently before the children got away to school, I was reading to them from the Reader’s Digest about the importance of childhood memories, an article that had more to say to parents than to children. The author told of one memory that had lingered lovingly in his mind since he was but a lad of ten. His mother was seriously ill. He had got up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water. As he passed his parents’ bedroom, he saw the light on. He looked in and saw his father sitting in a chair in his bathrobe next to his Mother, doing nothing. Rushing into the room, he asked his father what was wrong. His father soothed him by saying, “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just watching over her.” Now a man with a family of his own, he says the memory of the light and warmth from that room that night has given him strength to bear his own burdens. And he has found those words, “I’m just watching over her,” curiously powerful.

This story went well with a point that we had discussed from the Bible the night before. It was from 1 Pet. 4:19: “So then, those who suffer because this is God’s will for them, should by their good deeds trust themselves completely to their Creator, who always keeps his promise.” I had emphasized the point that God is to be completely trusted, for He always does what He says He will do. He promises tender loving care to those who trust Him. I pointed out to the children that I’ve never known anyone who was ever disappointed in trusting God, nor anyone who ever regretted serving Him. Men often forsake us or back down on their promises, but God never. And yet what is more needed in today’s confused world than simple trusting faith in one who always keeps His Promises.

It is a tender scene, the man sitting beside his wife in her illness, watching out for her. It became a cherished memory to the child. Love like that is impressive, and it says more than volumes of words. We miss the point of religion when we fail to see that it too is a love story, the greatest love story of all, the story of God’s tender loving care for each one of us. It is not necessary that we fancy God sitting in a chair beside our bed, watching out for us, but that kind of imagery gets close to the picture we have in the Bible of God’s care for us.

To Israel God said through Moses: “I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.” Man in bondage is as helpless as the eaglet that has not yet the strength to fly. The power of the eagle, its wings spread wide bearing the eaglet in its flight, symbolizes the upholding strength of God for each of us. The Egypt to Canaan pilgrimage provides many instances of God’s tender loving care. Deut. 8 tells us that in the wilderness wanderings, brought on as God’s discipline of Israel, the people’s clothing did not wear out during all those years and apparently grew with them, and their feet did not swell. Moreover they were fed with manna from heaven and they got water from the rock that followed them. And all along they had the promise of a land that flowed with milk and honey, a land from whose hills they could dig copper, a land of wheat and barley, a land in which they would lack nothing.

David was awed by God’s tender loving care of Israel, a people who in their rebellion cried out, “Can God spread a table in the wilderness?” That is just what He did. As David puts it: “Man ate the bread of the angels; he sent them food in their abundance.” Not only manna did He feed them but quail as well, causing David to say in Psalms 78: “He rained flesh upon them like dust, winged birds like the sand of the seas; he let them fall in the midst of the camp, all around their habitations.”

The marvel of all this is that Israel still did not learn to believe in God, to trust in His promises. David puts the finger on it when he says: “They had no faith in God, and did not trust his saving power.” Or as he says in Psalms 78:42: “They did not keep in mind his power, or the day when he redeemed them from the foe.”

Do we really believe God? A vital question it is for us today, just as it was for Israel. How near are we to those in Jesus’ home town, who in spite of his presence and his mighty works, would not believe in him. The New English Bible puts it: “He was taken aback by their want of faith.” It was so different with Abraham, who “strong in faith, gave honour to God, in the firm conviction of his power to do what he had promised” (Rom. 5:21) This is what faith is all about: all implicit trust that God will do as He has promised.

We need to ponder His promises more, for they serve as a safeguard against all the evil forces that attack us. 2 Peters 1:4 puts it this way: “Through this might and splendour he has given us his promises, great beyond all price, and through them you may escape the corruption with which lust has infected the world, and come to share in the very being of God.” What a statement that is! Th~re can be no question but what lust has infected our generation as it has all history. The good news is that an appreciation of God’s promises will deliver us from such peril, which is itself a promise. It teaches us that we are not only to be more knowledgeable of the promises, but that we are to cultivate belief in them, really trusting God in all that He says He will do. It is to believe that in Him there is tender loving care all the way.

Take that simple but beautiful promise of Matt. 10:39: “By gaining his life a man will lose it; by losing his life for my sake, he will gain it.” Really believing that will make all the difference in a man’s life. This is the life of trust that explains why Pastor Niemoeller was able to stand up against the Nazis and declare himself a free man in Christ in those cruel years of Hitler’s reign. While other pastors cooperated with the Nazis, rationalizing that someone has to preserve the church, Niemoeller believed that in losing his life he would gain it, just as Jesus promised. He did not see that the church’s purpose is to preserve Itself, but to witness to the truth at whatever cost.

One gains by losing! God promises. One wonders how often the Lord has the chance to prove Himself on that score, man’s lack of faith being what it is.

To Paul the tender loving care of God is so great that he insists that He is “able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or conceive,” which means he believed as Jesus did when he said, “Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well” (Matt. 6:33). Seek God’s kingdom first. This means commitment to God, not a false trust in our own power. Moses urged Israel to remember in their prosperity that “It is God that gives you the power to gain wealth.” Jesus seems to be saying that we need not worry about being taken care of, if we will but put God first.

In Luke the statement “Seek first the kingdom of God and the rest will come to you as well” is followed by “Have no fear, little flock, for your Father has chosen to give you the kingdom.” It is a tender stroke, the Father choosing to give us the kingdom. But it is in some way related to our seeking it. God cannot give what is not willingly sought. And there is no promise of a life free of fear except as one seeks God’s kingdom above all else. There is therefore an important relationship between what God promises and our trust that He will make it so in our lives.

God’s promises are as many as they are marvelous, but there are those that are especially precious. The promise that He works everything together for our good (Rom. 8:28) thrills us all. Then there is the promise that He will not allow us to be tempted without giving us a way to escape (1 Cor. 10:13). And there is “the promised Holy Spirit,” with all his attending blessings (Eph. 1:14). There is that “house not made with hands” which will be ours eternally in heaven, along with the promise that even in this earthly house we are “day by day inwardly renewed” (2 Cor. 4:16). There is the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, the New Jerusalem, and the victory of Christ over Satan, a victory we all share. On and on it goes, all evidences of God’s tender loving care.

But the most precious of all to me, I think, is the one that meant so much to Paul: the assurance of Christ’s love regardless of what happens. There in Rom. 8 :31-39 he observes that the gift of Christ’s love is based upon the gift of Christ himself. “With this gift how can he fail to lavish upon us all he has to give?,” he says. I like that word lavish, for it tells the story of God’s love. And nothing can separate us from that love, nothing. Not hardship or affliction. Not persecution or peril. Not even spirits or superhuman powers. Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord!

No wonder Peter would declare that such promises make us partners of the divine nature, thus giving us the motivation to overcome human nature. With such promises taken to heart it should be easy for us to preserve the Spirit’s unity and stop the madness of our divisions. These promises should help us with our family problems, for what man who really believes in the gifts that God has lavished upon us in Jesus will be overbearing .with his children and rude to his wife. With a view of “the things unseen” always before us, service to suffering humanity should be a joy. -the Editor