Why God’s Protection Still Hurts

Audio Transcript

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You open your Bible in the morning. Maybe you’re reading the Navigators Bible Reading Plan with us this year. I hope so. If you do, you just met a huge promise from God, right there in black and white on the page. It said that you, Christian, will be kept from all evil. We just read it yesterday in Psalm 121. I hope you saw it and underlined it, because it is a huge promise. You should claim it! But then you will look around. You will see Christians who are sick, believers experiencing serious accidents. You will see tragedies in the lives of friends at church. And you will see the ways Christians have been sinned against. The math doesn’t add up. We are not kept from all evil. Today on Ask Pastor John: why God’s protection still hurts.

We dealt with murder last time, Pastor John, so we are freshly aware of the darkness of this sinful world. Here’s today’s question from an anonymous listener: “Pastor John, hello! Can you explain Psalm 121 to me? It boldly declares to us that we have God’s protective care: ‘He who keeps you will not slumber. . . . The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.’ That’s in verses 3 and 7. Yet many believers still experience suffering, danger, and hardships. Does ‘The Lord is your keeper. . . . The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night’ in verses 5 and 6 mean we will never face harm or loss? Or does this psalm offer deeper assurances?”

It’s really good to return to this issue repeatedly because we all love the Psalms. We love them. My wife would rather read the Psalms than any other book in the Bible. They are so full of practical wrestling with real-life issues that we all deal with. We love the Psalms, and yet all of us pause and ponder when we come to these seemingly absolute promises that God won’t let anything bad happen to us.

Promised Protection?

So, even though we have dealt with this issue on this podcast repeatedly, we’ve never dealt with Psalm 121 that I can see. We’ve dealt with Psalm 91:5, which has the amazing statement that “The arrow that flies by day” will not come near you. And we asked why Elisabeth Elliot named the biography of her murdered husband In the Shadow of the Almighty, which is Psalm 91:1, when in fact he did get hit by one of those arrows (or a spear) that would not come near him, according to Psalm 91. What was she thinking? We wrestled with that. That was APJ 1692. And we dealt with Psalm 34:20, which says that

[God] keeps all his bones;
     not one of them is broken.

And I was reciting that text as a little boy eight feet in front of me had a cast on his arm. I had to walk right up to him and say, “Okay, young man.” That was APJ 1885, in case you’re curious about what I said to that kid. And we looked at Psalm 103:3, which says that God “heals all your diseases.” Really? How? When? That was APJ 2148. So, we’ve been there. And now, I’m really happy to do this again and think through it again. And I think there are some remarkable clues in Psalm 121.

Kept from Evil

What about this psalm? I love this psalm. I’ve memorized it and re-memorized it. It has a very special place in our family. I mean, I used to travel a lot more than I do now, so Noël and I have said a lot of goodbyes and a lot of hellos. “I’m gone. I’m back” — which is a paraphrase of Psalm 121:8. And I want to say that in most of those farewells, I think most of them, we quoted this psalm. We laid hold on this psalm.

The Lord will keep
     your going out and your coming in
     from this time forth and forevermore.

So, what do Noël and I mean? What are we banking on when we say that? In Psalm 121:6, he says,

The sun shall not strike you by day,
     nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all evil;
     he will keep your life. (Psalm 121:6–7)

He will keep you from all evil. What does that mean? Does it mean that if you truly believe, if you truly obey God, you’ll never suffer anything hurtful? Now, we know from the Psalms themselves (not just somewhere else, but the Psalms), and we know from the New Testament, that’s not true. It’s not true about God, and it’s not what the psalm writers believed was true. The psalmist can say, and Paul quotes this in Romans 8:36,

We are killed all the day long;
     we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. (Psalm 44:22)

That’s from the Psalms, not just Romans 8. That’s Psalm 44:22. And besides that, the psalmists are always in some kind of suffering and pain and affliction, and over and over again, it comes out.

Through Death to Eternity

So, I think what Psalm 121 means when it says, “The Lord will keep you from all evil,” is that when evil befalls you, God will keep you from its condemning, destroying effects. That’s what I think it means. God will use his power to keep evil from touching you in a thousand ways now — yes, he has. I mean, I’ve come home. I’m still alive. No airplane crashes. I just got platinum status from Delta. Not because I earned it, but because I got so close they felt sorry for me because I’m a million miler, something Delta did exactly right. At any rate, no crashes for a million miles. And then, when it seems wise to God, he will let evil touch you, but he will protect you from it — that is, from its destructive effects. And finally, he will bring you to an eternal experience where you will never taste that evil of any kind again.

“Nothing sneaks up on God because he’s never asleep, and nothing is too hard for God because he made heaven and earth.”

Now, here are some clues in the psalm itself that suggest we should read it that way. Verse 8 says that the Lord will keep us forevermore (Psalm 121:8). He will keep us forevermore. So, we know that this psalm reaches beyond death, which means that when death happens — and it will, and that’s going to be a painful thing — God has not let this psalm fall to the ground. He already says you’re going to make it beyond death. So, you’re going to go through death, and he won’t let any evil touch you through death.

“The Lord will keep you from all evil” does not mean he’ll keep you from death. It means he will keep you through death so that death will not have its condemning, destructive effect. And you will come out into eternal life, where this song will have its perfect fulfillment. And there’s confirmation of this, that we’re on the right track when we think that way, because if you read in Revelation 7:16 the description of the age to come, it goes like this:

They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore;
     the sun shall not strike them.

Now, that’s a quote from Psalm 121:6: “The sun shall not strike you by day.” In other words, that verse is going to have its final fulfillment in the age to come when all evil is done away.

Sovereign Goodness

Another clue is Psalm 121:2–4, where the writer combines the sovereignty of God as the maker of heaven and earth with the fact that God never slumbers. In other words, God is so powerful and so attentive around the clock — he never goes to sleep — that anything that happens to you has to be according to his sovereign will. Nothing sneaks up on God because he’s never asleep, and nothing is too hard for God because he made heaven and earth. So, we know that whatever happens to his beloved happens according to his goodness. He wasn’t sleeping when this happened. He wasn’t weak when this happened. He was good. He was wise. He was strong.

So, when Noël and I say goodbye, we still do not assume when we quote this psalm that I will not die in a plane crash. We don’t assume that. We assume that God will not let our foot slip into unbelief, and we assume that if the plane crashes, he will keep me from destruction and damnation. He will keep my going out of this world, and he will keep my coming into the presence of Christ.

I turned eighty this year, back in January, and when everybody had gone home that day, I sat in my chair and I let it sink in how good God has been to me to keep me. He has kept me through blood clots and prostate cancer and a heart attack and endless close calls and on and on. I was simply overwhelmed as I sat there at the mercy of being kept by the sovereign goodness of God.

And so, Tony, you know what I do when I feel something strongly? I write a poem about it. So, I’m going to read it. I’m just closing with this poem that I wrote — it’s a sonnet, if that means anything to anybody — but it’s titled “On Turning Eighty.” It goes like this:

What do I have that I did not receive?
What breath, what sight, what thought or will,
What energy to do or to achieve,
What hope, what taste of holiness or thrill?

And shall I boast, as if a bird should claim
To form the wind, an ant to forge the earth,
As if I gave myself a parent or a name
Or brought about my first or second birth?

No. It lies not within my fallen power
To seize the gift of life, or even weep
That I cannot, but rather every hour
My hope was not myself or soul to keep

But this: to bow and joyfully accept
That for these eighty years I have been kept.

I love Psalm 121.