This life and life with God

Statistically, those who suffer great losses are open to hearing about God — for a little while. When their lives stabilize, their interest in Him usually begins to fade.

In today’s devotional reading, Spurgeon uses the last part of this verse to say that God will bring people into poverty and other difficulties as a way of getting their attention.

I will return again to my place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face, and in their distress earnestly seek me. (Hosea 5:15)

In other words, Spurgeon agrees with those statistics; distress can cause people to seek God. However, this devotional author lifted this phrase out of context. The rest of the verse says that God withdraws the sense of His presence because His people are guilty. The resulting distress of that loss causes His people to seek Him.

I don’t think this is how God works with everyone. Instead, it is a description of how He works with His people who have sinned. When believers do not acknowledge their sin and turned from it, God moves away from them (not actually, for He is always with us) so that we feel the loss of His blessing in our lives. Because we know and love the Lord, this sense of lost fellowship with Him is often enough to give us a desire to deal with our sin and seek Him. The same idea is echoed in this verse:

O LORD, in distress they sought you; they poured out a whispered prayer when your discipline was upon them. (Isaiah 26:16)

I don’t think it is biblically correct to say that hard times make other people seek God. Hard times can also make people harden their hearts against Him. Besides that, I noticed this distinction because someone taught me that there are several kinds of faith.

Saving faith is that trust in God that admits sin and seeks His forgiveness. It is a faith that is based on who God is and on a concern for eternal matters and God’s judgment of sin.

However, there is a temporary faith. This is when people seek God’s help because they are in trouble. This temporary faith is just that because when the trouble goes away or the problem is solved, that faith also goes away. This sort of trust concerns only life issues and had nothing to do with eternity so it lasts only as long as the issues last.

Long-term problems in life can lead to saving faith. It did for me. I turned toward God when my marriage fell apart, but in the turning, God showed me that a relationship with Him meant that I had to deal with my sin. It is sin that separates us from God, not just lack of faith. After all, even the demons believe in God (James 2:19). They know more about Him than we do, yet their “faith” is not going to save them or do them any good.

This idea of tribulation awakening an interest in spiritual things can be exploited. At least one cult seeks out people who are lonely, grieving, or who are in other negative situations. These hapless souls are preyed upon, plundered by those who are driven by a point system; the more souls they involve, supposedly the more rewards they will receive. This is not right. God is not like that. He tells His people to care for the poor and needy, not expecting any return and certainly not taking advantage of them for some sort of notch in our belt. He even makes this selfless caring a mark of faith: 

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (James 1:27)

In contrast, the Bible describes a worldly attitude that only does “good” for ulterior motives. That could be good deeds done to make me look good, or to influence others to go along with my agenda, instead of simply touching their lives to show them the love of God.

God wants people to have faith in Him because He is holy and good, and because we need His love and His blessing on our lives. The only thing that stands in the way of that is our sin. He wants everyone to turn from sin and become believers in Him. He “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4).

He also wants believers who sin to “confess our sins” because “He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Sin ruins our fellowship with Him and He will use troubles to restore that fellowship.

Even so, troubles come and troubles go. If someone trusts God only during troubles, that “faith” will vanish along with those troubles. Yet sin is always an issue. It separates us from God even when everything else is going well for us. So if sin gets in the way, we need to repent. We cannot measure our relationship with God by how well life seems to be going for us. He asks, “Do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” (Romans 2:4) Troubles or not, sin is always the issue regarding our relationship with Him.

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Father, rich or poor, healthy or sick, no matter my external situations, may I have a heart that seeks You. May You put in me an increasing and deepening desire to be close to You and to enjoy Your presence. May Your Spirit prompt me to be quick to see and confess sin, quick to repent and turn from it, quick to run to You. Don’t let me assume that Your goodness means that I am okay when You intended that Your goodness always leads me to keep short accounts with You.