GOD’S PRESENCE
Isaiah
43:2-3a
When
you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they
shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One
of Israel, your Savior.
Water
and fire are important spiritual symbols in Israel’s history, When Moses led
the Israelites out of Egypt, they crossed the Red Sea basin on dry ground as
the river waters towered on both sides of their traveling corridor (Exodus
14:22). When Daniel and his colleagues plunged into Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery
furnace, a fourth person like “a son of the gods” walked with them in the
intense oven, causing the king to leap in amazement and to acknowledge that
Daniel’s God had rescued him and his friends from certain death (Daniel
3:19-29). In times of intense crisis when God’s servants encountered great
difficulty, the Lord overshadowed them with his preserving and guiding
presence. As they obeyed, he went ahead of them and worked within them.
It’s
not an issue of “if” you will pass through rivers of difficulty or fires of
crisis. It’s a question of when. So often God engineers these dilemmas to give
him an opportunity to breakthrough into our lives with life-changing power!
Let’s admit it – so often when everything is going fine, we get absorbed into
our own world and forget the Lord and his consuming presence (Hebrews
12:29). We take God’s blessings for
granted and soon become lax in our gratitude. So to quicken us, the Lord turns
up the temperature in the furnace.
I’m
not saying that your current trial was engineered by God’s initiative.
Sometimes our sin, ignorance, stupidity and hardheartedness causes us to make
bad decisions. But one thing is for certain. If you’re going through a time of
difficulty, God wants to be with you. All you have to do is ask him to walk
with you and he will.