Stuck in a Dungeon; Sustained by His word

There are some really interesting verses in Psalm 105:16-19 about Joseph:

When [God] summoned a famine on the land and broke all supply of bread, he had sent a man ahead of them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave. His feet were hurt with fetters; his neck was put in a collar of iron; until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord tested him

Joseph was chosen to be a central part of God’s redemptive plan for the preservation of Israel (Jacob’s family). He was given a preview of this amazing redemptive role as a young man, way before he had the maturity to handle it. His naïve retelling of his dreams earned him a rebuke even from his doting father, who even questioned the motives of his heart.

How big of a promise can you handle?

The first test of faith is simply believing the super-abundant promise of God. There are times when the scope and breadth of what God promises us is so vast that we can easily disregard it as a product our own overactive imaginations. I kid you not – it is sometimes a struggle just to believe that it is God who is speaking to us, because it is so outrageously awesome!  Step one is just accepting that this is really what God is saying to you. How big of a promise can you handle? One man I know had a vision from God to reach a million people for Christ. Another friend heard God say to her “What would you do if I gave you a million dollars?”. Both these people ended up seeing the promise of God come to fruition, but the first struggle was simply to believe that this really was God’s word to them. It seemed too big and way too grandiose! But this is what it means to have a childlike spirit, is it not? Think of Joseph being shown an image of his exalted position, so his entire family would bow and serve him. Think of Abraham being told: “You will be the father of many nations” or David: ”One of your household will rule as an eternal King” What about Loren Cunningham? “…waves of young missionaries covering the continents” Does God still do stuff like this? Does he come to ordinary people and give them an outrageous vision, and then train, gift and enable them to fulfill it in such a way that he gets all the glory?

Dying in the Dungeon

Between promise and fulfillment, often times is a process of  humbling and testing that purifies our faith in God.  Joseph went from mega-vision to dark-prison. Things did not get better for him, they got progressively worse. You see, after we believe the promise, at times we can “see” it working out. We can come up various scenarios of how this will play out and how everyone will finally realize how awesome we are! And that must die. I think every significant vision has a season where it dies in our hearts. We are brought, just like Joseph, to the very opposite of the vision. We’re stuck in a prison, a dark place of depression, where we are bound, trapped, feeling totally powerless. We went from “called” to “stuck”! We may even have taken great steps of obedience –- until we hit the wall.  We are brought to where nothing we see, hear or even know gives us any hope that the grandiose vision we once had can be fulfilled. This is usually where our natural imagination starts working against the vision we received. So we think: “Maybe I just misheard God”. We try to “defend” God and get him out of the fix: “Maybe what he meant by that (the vision) is really this (something within reach)”. Remember Sarah and Hagar? We dare not call God a liar or unfaithful, so we do our best to help him out with a reasonable solution. “Maybe that was the devil, a deception”. You see –- the moment circumstances turn against the vision that God gave us, we’re tempted to shrink back from it. Unbeknownst to us our faith is mostly in God, but partly in other things. So what will we do when those other things are removed from the picture?

Doubt in the Darkness

The word of the Lord tests us –- it wants to know if we will cling to it in the dark dungeon, when nothing else remains to trust in. Will we doubt in the darkness what we heard in the light? Will we “flatten” our dream to fit our current circumstance? Will we turn cynical and hard and rail against God in our hearts? Will we discount the steps of obedience we took that got us here, and try to “rollback” to try and get our life back (see Heb 11:14-16)?  Will you doubt the existence of God himself? There is a point when we run out of steam and all our strivings to be seen as “full of faith and passion” simply dry out. We’re really left alone with ourselves and the word that God spoke to us. And we think: “Maybe this whole thing doesn’t matter at all..”. There is no battle to fight, because it seems like even the devil thinks you’re a loser.

The Irreducible Core

“..remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you ..that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna…that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Deuteronomy 8:2-3

This is how God brings to the place where we believe in his vision quite apart from any thing else. We speak in a spirit of faith: “I believe it because God spoke it”. We are sustained, not by natural provision, but by the word of God. We believe against hope and against “reason”(Rom 4:18-19). He humbles us, to know what is in our hearts, and there he finds faith -– raw, simple, pure faith in him and his character. And he smiles. It’s a big deal to him, for he found what he was looking for. You see: God brings our faith in him to the irreducible core… “He exists and he will reward me for my trust in him”. It is the “assurance of things not seen”. Since he calls things that are not, as though they are – I abandon myself to his word, letting myself fall on the rock and be broken. “If I die, I die. But I will believe him”. It is a strange kind of rest, that trusts in God’s power to resurrect from the dead…

Faith and Reward

You see, he is after our faith – this glorifies him, pleases him and qualifies us to enter into all he has for us. He is not after the fulfillment of the vision, per se. Why? Because, if he was, he could do it on day one, with no fuss. He is God, is he not? No, there is something more at stake – he is interested in proven character and faith, tested like gold and shown to be precious. We are to be imitators of those who though faith and patience inherit the promises. Enduring faith brings amazing rewards! Don’t lose heart. So, as Galadriel says to Frodo: “May this be a light to you in dark places…”.