Know and Understand
“You can’t do true good if you don’t know—in a deep, trusting way—the One who is good. Only by understanding God as good can you accurately represent Him by doing good.”
This is a quote from my article, “Do Good,” published to my blog last week. The italics on “know” and “understanding” are mine today as I write to you with further thoughts on what it means when Psalm 37:3 exhorts us, “Trust in the Lord.”
So, more words on trust. Why?
1) This has been the Achille’s heel of my spiritual life. Finding help for this impediment within the Christian community was nonexistent because distrust was deemed unpardonable. This exacerbated the shame and guilt I felt and was counterproductive to remediating my struggle. Now that God has made progress in my healing, I’m dedicated to tearing down this stronghold and reservation—for you and me both.
2) Given that trusting God is the opening declaration of Psalm 37:3-5, as well as its summation, it’s clear that we must grasp what it means to trust the Lord if we are going to implement the guidance in the passage. As my opening quote states, it’s simply not possible to “do good” if you don’t know and understand God who is absolute goodness.
3) It borders on being cliché in Christian circles to tell each other, “Trust God.” But to diminish perhaps the greatest declaration of the faith with a cliché should be exposed. We must rededicate ourselves to grappling with what Scripture means when it says, “Trust the Lord.”
Part of me wants to say, “Pres, this problem of trust is unique to you. Dwelling on it, with yet more words in yet another article, is irrelevant to the majority of your readers. Write about something else—maybe why Jesus is riding a Palomino horse when He comes back and not an Appaloosa.” But I reject this thinking for this reason: If trusting God were not an issue common among us, Psalm 37:3-5 would not open and close with this exhortation.
I need a bit more awareness before I lean into trust.
To this end, then: What does it mean to know and understand God such that a deeply held conviction forms in your soul about His trustworthiness? I’ve told you what this means to me, but let’s return to Scripture.
Jeremiah records a statement made to him by God stating what it means to know and understand Him. Here’s God’s quote as recorded by the prophet:
“Thus says the Lord, ‘Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not the rich man boast of his riches; but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who exercises lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things,’ declares the Lord” (9:23-24).
God is being very transparent with us: “All those qualities and attainments you deem notable—your wisdom, might, and riches—since everything you have is from my hand, boasting about them is vain. What I truly desire is that you are able to boast that you know and understand me.”
And with that clarification, Father God reveals to us that exercising lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness are the things that bring Him delight.
The extent to which you grasp these three aspects of Him, and comprehend that doing these three things delight Him, is the extent to which you can say you know and understand what makes God tick. Personally, I know a lot about God. It’s interesting information. But what I deeply desire is to know God personally and understand how He thinks.
Further, knowing and understanding these three things about God are the pillars upon which trusting God rest. For some folks, trusting is easy. For others, like me, I need a bit more awareness before I lean into trust.
It is an amazing display of divine humility that God condescends to build my trust with self-revelation like Jeremiah 9:24. Like my friend said to me, God could easily taunt: “I wrote about trust in my Book! What part of I’m good, so trust Me, don’t you get? Either agree or suffer.” But as Lewis writes in The Problem of Pain, “God is not proud. He stoops to conquer.”
Lovingkindness
In March of 2003, Malcolm Smith signed and handed me a copy of his latest book, which has since been retitled, The Power of the Blood Covenant. For the next couple of years I picked up Malcolm’s book, got distracted, and laid it aside. Then, returning on an overseas flight, I opened his book, ignored my earlier bookmark, and started over from the beginning. I was stunned, often placing my finger in the book to mark my place, and staring out the window at the North Atlantic while contemplating Father God’s lovingkindness.
Malcolm introduced me to the Hebrew word, hesed, translated as lovingkindness (NASB), or steadfast love (ESV), in the Old Testament, and as mercy in the New Testament.
These words that frequent Scripture contain in their few letters the incomprehensible covenant between God, Jesus, and the Spirit that we refer to as the Gospel. While we are sharers in this covenant and beneficiaries of the Gospel, the covenant between God and Jesus, sealed with the blood of Christ and secured by the pledge of the Holy Spirit, is irrevocable, unchangeable, and exists in perpetuity, i.e., it’s perpetual, time without end.
In this divine covenant, the oath is a binding, unbreakable obligation based on unconditional love, sealed by blood, and sacred oath, then recognized and celebrated by a covenantal meal together. In this covenantal bond, all that each party is and possesses becomes the belonging of the other party.
Thus, all of God is all of Jesus Christ, and all of Jesus is all of God. When our theology wrestles with Jesus Christ as fully God and fully man, it is laboring to conceptualize the covenantal agreement between the Trinity. Everything about God belongs to Jesus. Everything of Christ belongs to God. The Spirit secures the pledge.
The world is a nasty, brutish place.
Of all the declarations of Scripture, none is more declarative or frequent than the fact that you are in Christ and Christ is in you. This means two things: 1) When God and Jesus entered into covenantal agreement before the world was created, since you were in Christ, you are now possessed by God in perpetuity with an oath that is irrevocable and unchangeable. 2) Since Christ is in you, you are therefore a beneficiary of His agreement with God. All of Christ belongs to you. You share His nature (cf. 2Pt. 1:4). This treasure, which is Christ Himself, is yours in perpetuity and nothing can change or revoke this. This agreement has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the oath between God and Jesus, sealed by the blood of Christ, secured by the Spirit of God, and regularly commemorated in the celebration of a covenantal meal, i.e., sharing Communion or the Lord’s Supper.
Each time you come across a Scripture with lovingkindness, steadfast love, or mercy contained in it, you are reading—in a word—the divine oath of faithfulness between the Trinity of God. In Lamentations, it says, “The Lord’s lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, / For His compassions never fail. / They are new every morning; / Great is your faithfulness” (3:22-23). In Psalm 23, you will recall David declaring, “Surely goodness and lovingkindness will follow me all the days of my life” (v. 6). Biblegateway.com tells me there are 182 occurrences of “lovingkindness” in the Old Testament. “Mercy” appears page-after-page in the New Testament. With each occurrence, God is declaring, “I delight in being faithful, unchanging, and my oath existing irrevocably without end.
Now you know about lovingkindness—or to be truer to the grammar of Jeremiah 9:24, you are now coming to know more fully. Your knowledge is progressive as you contemplate and the Spirit guides your comprehension. “Father, speak to me about yourself,” is a prayer God always answers. As you consider how God uses lovingkindness, references it, and declares it throughout Scripture, you will understand—not just a biblical concept—but you will understand your Father in heaven and what makes Him tick.
Justice
In his book, Living Life Backwards, David Gibson summarizes the message of the Book of Ecclesiastes this way: At the end of your days, someone else will assume control of all that you accumulated and accomplished during your life and do with it as they please. Therefore, striving to establish yourself through attainment is a vain effort akin to grasping a wisp of smoke and putting it in your pocket. This is a disconcerting reality. But one of these days, God, who is just, will make all things right.
In this life, there are many consternations.
I’ve written about the unethical behavior of State Farm Insurance in handling my water claim. They paid—eventually—but their lying and delaying ultimately cost us thousands of dollars out of our retirement money.
A few years ago, Atmos Energy hit the foundation of our home with an auguring device. This resulted in about a hundred thousand dollars in damages. Atmos never denied hitting the house, but they never paid for the repairs. A hundred large is big money for Dianne and me, but it is small money in a lawsuit. The energy company beat us because they knew they were big enough to do so.
I’ve told you about being cancelled by the tech gods and the ruin of the platforms at Lifetime.org and PrestonGillham.com.
During a routine sinus surgery in 2020, an ENT deceived me and used an experimental procedure that left me with copious drainage down my throat that makes it difficult to talk without coughing. There’s no remedy and no recourse.
Now, it’s your turn: Ponder being taken advantage of. Reflect on the time you were bullied. Recall when you were dismissed, passed over, harmed. How many times have you believed… only to discover you were lied to? Consider being told one thing, only to discover later your partner did the other.
The world is a nasty, brutish place filled with rape, pillage, plunder, duplicity, injustice, inequity, and debauchery fueled by pride, malice, envy, jealousy, lust, greed, and wrath—and this is just the tip of a monstrous iceberg of treacherousness.
If God’s justice is doing what’s right, God’s righteousness is the standard by which right—what is the just action—is determined.
What will you do? What are you doing currently? What chance do you have of winning the day, exacting the vengeance due in proper degree? How will you make right the wrongs done to you?
God tells us in Jeremiah 9:24 that He exercises justice, and that in doing so, He finds delight. In other words, because God is just, He is delighted to do what is right.
Scripture conveys justice as vindication, avenging a wrong, and it indicates that when God performs justice it is vengeance, but not vengeance as we define it. Vine notes that, “The judgements of God are holy and right and free from any element of self-gratification or vindictiveness.”
In Romans, Paul quotes from Deuteronomy, writing, “Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord” (12:19).
I don’t know how this works, but I know this: One of these days, my heavenly Father will make all things right because He is just. This world dishes out all sorts of hardship, and while we love a story where the bad guy gets his comeuppance, since God works from and for eternity, justice may not manifest itself in my days on earth, but one day God will make all things right. Meanwhile, I have given the insurance company, the energy company, the tech gods, et al, to God—in writing!
God loves justice… but it haunts Him as well, and perhaps this is why He delights in it. In Romans 5:12 ff, Paul takes us into the mind of God as He contemplates the plight of humanity, cursed and dead in our sins, fallen with the progenitor of our race: Adam. We are irretrievably useless to God, but still He ponders whether there is any justification to extend life to us in our destitution and death.
God determines that the good thing to do is come down to us, to incarnate His divinity into human form, and take our death upon Himself in the person of Jesus so that we might have life and be the recipients of grace. God’s justice cost Him Jesus, yet His goodness required it and His pledge of lovingkindness frames His process. Only after the full measure of His goodness was extended to us through Christ was God satisfied that His justice was mercifully and satisfactorily demonstrated.
In Jesus is the personification and life of lovingkindness. In Jesus is the personification of God’s goodness and justice. John puts it this way: Jesus explained God for us (cf. 1:18).
Righteousness
If God’s justice is doing what’s right, God’s righteousness is the standard by which right—what is the just action—is determined. This is true in every way, but in no way more fundamental than keeping His promises. James puts it this way. He says with God there is “no variation or shifting shadow” (1:17).
Therefore, because God is absolutely right, He is the definition of righteous, and because He is righteous and true to Himself—without variance or shadow—He always does what is just, i.e., the right thing.
From God’s lovingkindness, He demonstrates righteousness by both His standard and just action. These three qualities—lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness—are essential to God’s identity and integrity because their source is His goodness. Based upon these absolutes, the promises of God cannot fail.
And what are the pledged promises of God?
He has sworn an oath and taken upon himself a blood covenant, sealed by the blood of Jesus and secured with the Holy Spirit. He promises: I will never leave you. My mercies are new every morning. My lovingkindness abides forever. I will do right by you. My justice will not be vacated. These are the things I do because these are the right things for me to do. Since all I am emanates from the fact that I am good, I can do nothing else than exhibit lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness. These are my routine practices. Being true to myself and true to you brings me delight.
So, I pray: “Father God, I want to know and understand you. What makes you tick?”
How does God walk, and talk, and what does He think about? And when He walks, where does He walk? Metaphorically, Scripture says God rides upon the wings of the wind, skips on the mountains of spices, and dwells in deep darkness. He resides in heaven and He lives in you. Where you are, He is, and given His lovingkindness, where He is, you are and always will be.
Thus, to amplify Psalm 37:3: Trust in the Lord. He is good. He delights in lovingkindness, His blood oath of faithfulness. He delights in justice and judgement, the doing of what is right. He delights in righteousness because it is the standard by which His justice is levied. Knowing this about Him, and understanding that this is how He rolls, trust Him and rely upon His Spirit as you do good.
But to what end? This we will explore next as our Psalm tells to “dwell in the land.”
Note: Tony Clark, Frank Friedmann, and I have been recording each week on Tony’s platform, VineLife.us. Frank and I discuss questions about the end times, Bible translations, church divisions, biblical difficulties, the journey of the Christian life, and much more. Here’s a link to get you started viewing.
Also, thank you for participating in the final publication of my new book, Mastering the Battle for the Mind. If you have not downloaded your free copy, you can do so here.
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