If God Never Leaves Me, Why Does He Withdraw?
Chapters
0:01:28 Can a Man Hide Himself in Secret Places
2:4 The New Covenant Promise of God
6:27 Sometimes God Withdraws His Presence from Us
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Michaela writes in to ask this,
00:00:06.840 | "Pastor John, in episode number 19,
00:00:08.320 | "you said God sometimes withdraws his presence from us.
00:00:11.720 | "How does that not contradict God's new covenant promise
00:00:14.420 | "to never leave us or forsake us?"
00:00:16.060 | In Hebrews 13, verse five.
00:00:18.800 | - I love that kind of question because to me,
00:00:21.480 | the best questions are how things fit together.
00:00:27.820 | What's helped me most, I think, in my study of the Bible
00:00:30.440 | is seeing when things seem not to fit together,
00:00:35.440 | seem contradictory, and then instead of walking away
00:00:38.960 | from the Bible and assuming, well, it's a bunch of
00:00:41.680 | double talk, digging down to the root
00:00:45.240 | so they come together and then you realize,
00:00:47.000 | oh, these two plants are not opposites.
00:00:50.840 | They have the same roots.
00:00:51.880 | So I think that's what we're dealing with here.
00:00:54.880 | So we need to think about kinds of presence of the Lord.
00:00:59.880 | The Bible talks about different kinds of his presence.
00:01:03.780 | So for example, most of us would agree
00:01:08.420 | that God is omnipresent.
00:01:10.720 | There's no place where he's not.
00:01:13.260 | Paul said, "In him we live and move and have our being."
00:01:16.540 | He's just quoting a pagan poet there to agree that yes,
00:01:21.060 | everybody is in God, held in being by God.
00:01:25.880 | And Jeremiah in 23, 24 says, "Can a man hide himself
00:01:30.880 | "in secret places so that I cannot see him?"
00:01:36.080 | God is talking.
00:01:37.180 | "Do I not fill heaven and earth?" declares the Lord.
00:01:41.880 | So I think the first and most basic sense
00:01:45.280 | that we need to talk about is he's everywhere.
00:01:49.240 | God is omnipresent, including in the lives of believers
00:01:53.020 | and unbelievers, holding them in being,
00:01:54.960 | knowing all that they do firsthand.
00:01:57.760 | And then Michaela points to, and she's absolutely right,
00:02:02.180 | there is this special presence.
00:02:04.820 | She calls it the new covenant promise of God's presence
00:02:09.020 | in Hebrews 13, five, which says,
00:02:11.860 | "Keep your life free from the love of money
00:02:15.100 | "and be content with what you have,
00:02:16.820 | "for he has said, 'I will never leave you or forsake you.'"
00:02:21.820 | Or we could go to Matthew 28,
00:02:23.860 | "Behold, I am with you always to the end of the age."
00:02:28.700 | Or we could go to 2 Corinthians 4,
00:02:30.940 | "I am persecuted but not forsaken."
00:02:35.940 | So you've got these New Testament, new covenant promises.
00:02:39.980 | God is never, ever going to abandon or leave his people.
00:02:45.420 | The one I love most is Jeremiah 32, 40,
00:02:50.420 | where it goes over the top and says,
00:02:53.400 | "I will make with them an everlasting covenant,"
00:02:56.740 | this is now the new covenant,
00:02:58.080 | "that I will not turn away from doing good to them."
00:03:02.340 | And then he adds, "And I will put the fear of me
00:03:05.400 | "in their hearts so they may not turn from me."
00:03:08.740 | So this new covenant promise is not only
00:03:11.460 | that God won't walk away from us,
00:03:13.260 | he won't let us walk away from him.
00:03:16.740 | So I wanna say to Michaela, yes, yes, yes, yes.
00:03:20.980 | She's right that there is a presence of God,
00:03:25.980 | a keeping, a staying with,
00:03:28.700 | that will never fail for God's elect,
00:03:32.140 | for those who are in Christ.
00:03:34.420 | But, now here's what she picked up on.
00:03:37.180 | There is another way in the Bible
00:03:40.220 | that it talks about the presence of God.
00:03:43.020 | So Psalm 69, 17, "Hide not your face from your servant,
00:03:48.020 | "for I am in distress.
00:03:50.400 | "Make haste to answer me."
00:03:52.600 | So his sense is God is distant, God is hiding from him.
00:03:56.480 | Or Psalm 143, 7, "Answer me quickly, O Lord.
00:04:01.220 | "My spirit fails.
00:04:02.640 | "Hide not your face from me,
00:04:04.540 | "lest I be like those who go down to the pit."
00:04:07.100 | Or Isaiah 64, 7, "There is no one who calls upon your name,
00:04:12.000 | "who rouses himself to take hold of you,
00:04:14.120 | "for you have hidden your face from us,"
00:04:18.220 | us, your covenant people,
00:04:19.780 | "and have made us melt in the hand of your iniquities."
00:04:23.280 | Now, what occurs to me when I read these
00:04:25.820 | is that Michaela might say, others might say,
00:04:29.700 | "Wait a minute, those are Old Testament prayers.
00:04:34.000 | "Maybe the saints had to pray like that in the Old Testament.
00:04:36.780 | "Don't hide your face from me, don't go away from me.
00:04:39.020 | "But we're new covenant people.
00:04:41.020 | "Would we ever pray like that?"
00:04:43.540 | And there are a couple of problems with that objection.
00:04:47.260 | One is that in the very text that Michaela quoted,
00:04:52.260 | from Hebrews 13, 5, where it says,
00:04:54.920 | "The Lord has said, I will be with you,
00:04:57.460 | "I will not leave you," that's a quote from Joshua 1, 5.
00:05:02.460 | So he's quoting an Old Covenant promise
00:05:07.420 | and applying it to New Testament believers.
00:05:11.300 | And the other problem is that the Old Testament
00:05:15.180 | abounds with promises to God's people
00:05:18.260 | that he won't forsake them.
00:05:20.220 | First Samuel 12, 22,
00:05:21.660 | "The Lord will not forsake his people
00:05:24.120 | "for his great namesake."
00:05:25.500 | Psalm 37, 28, "The Lord loves justice.
00:05:28.540 | "He will not forsake his saints."
00:05:31.480 | Psalm 23, 4, we all love Psalm 23,
00:05:35.180 | "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow
00:05:37.660 | "of death, I fear no evil 'cause you're with me."
00:05:40.880 | In other words, even in the worst of horrible, dark times,
00:05:45.520 | "My shepherd is with me."
00:05:47.080 | Those are Old Testament statements.
00:05:50.140 | So here's my answer to her question.
00:05:53.420 | The old Puritans put it all together
00:05:59.020 | by talking about the manifest presence of God.
00:06:04.420 | And they were using that phrase manifest,
00:06:07.700 | experienced, known, tasted presence of God
00:06:12.700 | to distinguish it from the omnipresence of God
00:06:15.340 | and from the covenant keeping of God,
00:06:19.380 | which may or may not be experienced intensely
00:06:21.900 | from time to time.
00:06:22.940 | And I think this is really, really helpful.
00:06:26.140 | In other words, sometimes God withdraws his presence from us.
00:06:32.860 | That's the phrase, that's the statement I made
00:06:35.220 | that Michaela stumbled over.
00:06:36.580 | She said, "How can that be?"
00:06:38.460 | When I say that, sometimes God withdraws
00:06:42.620 | his presence from us.
00:06:44.020 | I don't mean that we are forsaken by our covenant God.
00:06:49.020 | I mean that the manifestations of his presence are limited.
00:06:54.300 | He doesn't withdraw his covenant commitment to us
00:06:59.420 | or his sustaining grace from us.
00:07:02.220 | What he withdraws is the sweetness of his fellowship
00:07:06.380 | from time to time or the conscious sense of his power.
00:07:11.260 | And he has his reasons for doing this.
00:07:13.940 | And I think maybe that would be another time
00:07:17.420 | for us to talk about that.
00:07:18.500 | But surely one of them is to make us feel
00:07:23.500 | our desperate need from him so that we fly to Christ
00:07:28.460 | and to the cross where we hear
00:07:30.700 | the covenant promise afresh.
00:07:33.180 | - Yes, amen.
00:07:34.100 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:07:34.980 | And thank you, Michaela, for your question.
00:07:36.420 | She was asking a follow-up question to episode number 19,
00:07:39.460 | does God ever withdraw his presence from his children?
00:07:42.260 | You can find that episode in the Ask Pastor John archive.
00:07:44.500 | And if you have a question on the brain
00:07:46.100 | that you'd like to ask Pastor John,
00:07:47.340 | please email it to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:07:52.180 | Monday, we return to address a question
00:07:54.140 | from a single man who is sick of his singleness
00:07:57.340 | and wants to be satisfied in Christ
00:07:58.860 | while he waits for his bride.
00:08:00.860 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:08:01.700 | Have a wonderful weekend.
00:08:03.260 | (upbeat music)
00:08:05.840 | (upbeat music)
00:08:08.420 | [BLANK_AUDIO]