What Does It Profit to Walk with God?
The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand. (Psalms 37:23-24)
Each day we walk through our difficult life, we think about our confidence in Christ. Others wonder how we think like this when our journey here should be much easier than it is. As the scriptures say, they will mock our hope in Christ’s return, and they think it foolish that we give up so much to serve a dead man. The 37th Psalm reflects on the hardships of the Christian life and how we regularly fall behind in the prosperity of the world. The Word encourages us not to despair because this life is as good as it gets for the wicked. Though the evil man may appear to be prosperous, his prosperity is a mirage. He may clutch his title deed to the earth for a while, but soon God will take everything he has away. The earth belongs to God and is the inheritance of His people (v. 11).
The psalm fills the troubled Christian with hope, but none is better than the words of verses 23 and 24. Think carefully on this phrase: “The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD…” These are the most hopeful words you will ever read. They speak of two great doctrines of the faith—God’s divine providence and God’s sovereign predestination. There is not a step you will ever take that God did not know you would take. He knows because He is the one that puts one foot in front of the other.
When God formed the world by His spoken word, He knew a race would inhabit it that He had chosen for His name. The beginning of man was in the predestination of God, and we dare not think that after He created, He abruptly relinquished His divine providence. The fall in the Garden was not a surprise to Him and neither was how He would restore everything lost in that devastating event. If God should have relinquished control at that awful hour, there is not one soul that would ever have hope of redemption. Through the fall, we became completely corrupted. It radically altered every faculty of man so that sin consumes us through and through. This radical corruption is what we call total depravity, and it left man in such a state that we are incapable of looking up to God and helping ourselves in any way. We will not look because we care not to look. The scriptures say we became the enemies of God and of His righteousness. If God should leave us alone in our depravity, we are hopeless because we do not have the power or will to escape it.
The scriptures do not present a God who has abandoned us. We are enabled to come back to Him for one reason—His marvelous grace. In regeneration, He changes our disposition from hostility against His grace to openness to receive His grace. He orders the steps of repentance and faith. If you trust Christ as Saviour, you owe your trust to a sovereign act of the Holy Spirit. You did not change your mind; He changed your mind. Our statement of faith accurately says: “[He] secure[s] our voluntary obedience to the gospel” (Article 7). God’s method leaves Him alone responsible in all ways for our salvation.
With the tremendous costliness of salvation requiring the death of Christ for sin, how can we imagine that God who bought our redemption with blood should permit us to fall permanently? When we fall, God does not cast us off. In the bleakest hour of our deepest despair, God still has His eye on us. He fully intends to raise us again and put us back upon the solid rock. The timing of His lifting is also His alone. We know it cannot be too long because the time of life is nothing compared to eternity. Our long time is God’s brief time.
The promise is providentially intact. He sees with His eye but goes much further—He holds with His hands. We know we can never sink too low to be beneath His tender embrace. We often say, “Keep the faith!” We shall because it is God’s power not ours that keeps us (1 Peter 1:5).
Pastor V. Mark Smith