How To Trust God in the Dark: Trusting in the Name of Our Lord
The answer to your suffering is not a why but a who.
When you go through trials and tests, you probably know what you are supposed to do because you’ve once been trained in the 101 of trusting God. You’d probably hold onto His promises in the Bible, believe that He is a good God and that He knows best, and endure suffering with patience. Basically, whether it’s to continue to meditate on specific verses, or to psychologically train yourself to a point where you can say that you are able to face challenges unperturbed, you have some idea that trusting God is on the basis of something, whether it’s basing it on certain verses of the Scripture, or whether it’s basing it on the level of your AQ (Adversity Quotient).
But if you have been in the Christian faith long enough, there will come a point of time in your walk with God when you have done everything you know to be “right” in the Christian faith, but you find yourself right smack in darkness. This type of darkness is one which you know you are not able to just repeat some verses in your head or use some mental prowess to make the pain and circumstances go away. This darkness is much heavier than that, and it is one so dark that it could resemble Job’s experience.
If this sounds like you, then you can trust what I’m about to say here because this is exactly what I’m facing right now. I’m not an armchair theologian who writes philosophical books on the theology of suffering in the comfort of my room. I’m a regular nobody, without any name or status in this world, yet as I’m writing this, I’m currently suffering from a neurological pain syndrome, a job loss from a company-wide mass layoff, a loss of a hefty sum from certain legal procedures (despite resolving them as amicably as I could), and worst of all, a heartache from loved ones leaving me — all of this suddenly happening to me all at once.
Therefore I will start off with this: I’m not saying this to gain any sympathy from you; I’m saying this to earn your trust because I know exactly what I’m saying. And with that, I hope that as you continue to read this article, you know that my advice is viable, because this is what I’ve been relying on throughout this tough period of my life.
Suffering Without Cause
The first thing you should acknowledge is that just as our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, suffered without cause, so we who are His servants, who are not greater than our Master (John 15:20), will suffer without cause.
I know what it is like to be internally fighting a spiritual warfare everyday while facing all sorts of fault-finding from believers or unbelievers alike. They would tell you what they think you’re going through and what you should or should not do to get out of this situation — but they are never going to get it just quite right, much less even understand your pain. Just like Job’s three friends’ useless advice to Job, they may even criticise you for not doing enough in certain areas of your life, causing you to face what you’re facing. In all of this, they did not stop to consider that while you may admit that not all of what you’re facing is righteous suffering (nobody is completely righteous like Jesus is anyway), the thing is, when this all happened, you have already done everything you could to prevent it from happening, and even tried salvaging the situation, but suffering ensued.
What these people do not understand is that there will be Christians whom God, in His infinite and perfect wisdom, chooses to be one of His “Jobs”. He will sovereignly allow suffering into the lives of such Christians not to get them to learn how to change their thinking, attitude or behaviour so that they can have a better life after all that fixing, but to get them to a point where they know that they’re at the end of themselves, and now, the only answer is God.
But what do I mean by “the only answer is God”? Before I go into that, you need to understand how different our God is as compared to the other gods of other religions.
Who is Our God?
Without going into the connection between Judaism and Christianity, as far as I know, I believe that the historicity of our faith’s religious lineage makes our God the first God who has multiple names. All other religions either mimic this later on when they started the religion and attributed many different names to their gods, or they merely have only one or a handful of names for each of their gods, with some deciding to call the “Higher Being” or “Higher Power” they worship “unnameable” instead.
Just to get a rough sense of how many names our God has, here’s a video on it:
Having a God who has multiple names is significant. It means we cannot describe Him fully. It means He has a nature that is beyond this world. It means that while He is also a person like us with names Himself, He is also more than that, since His names tell us far more about Him than we can ever come to understand in this lifetime about Him as both 100% man and 100% God.
It also means He is who He is, the “I AM WHO I AM” of Exodus 3:14, and there is no better description that can fit Him. Who our God is is found in His names.
The Answer is in His Name
Now back to our main topic: What do I mean by “the only answer is God”, when you are struggling all alone in the dark?
In my current state, when nothing that I’ve once learned in Christianity 101 on the basics of trusting God works, I’ve discovered that the answer is beyond verse-repeating and the unleashing of mental strength. When my situation got bleaker even when I’ve given my best Christian behaviour, I discovered that my answer lies in Isaiah 50:10:
Who among you fears the LORD? Who obeys the voice of His Servant? Who walks in darkness and has no light? Let him trust in the name of the LORD and rely upon his God. — Isaiah 50:10 (NKJV)
You have feared the Lord. You have obeyed God’s Word and His guidance to you as best and as sincerely as you can. Yet in all of this, you suddenly find yourself walking in darkness with no end of your suffering in sight. That’s when you should trust in the name of the Lord and rely upon Him — His names will tell you who He is, and all of these names show that God’s sovereignty reigns supreme amidst the suffering you face.
Knowing God’s names is the foundation of our faith. When you are stripped of everything, and you only have God left in your life, then you must know that He is your answer. You must not trust God just because of what He can do with the promises He has given us in various verses in the Bible; you must trust God because of who He say He is. He is your only answer because He, whose very character can be found in His names, is all that you need now, and all that you will ever need.
Knowing Who He is Amidst Suffering
Job is the very example whom we could apply Isaiah 50:10 to.
Before facing the worst trial of his life, Job was commended by God as a man who was blameless and upright, one who fears God and shuns evil, and there was none on earth like him (Job 1:8). When we examine his life, there was no reason for him to go through that much suffering. Job fulfilled the profile of the believer who feared the Lord and obeyed His voice, yet he suffered without cause.
In his suffering, Job maintained that his integrity was beyond reproach, despite getting inflicted by the accuses from his friends. He sought to find a reason for his plight, but while he was seeking for a reason for it, he somehow knew that the answer to his suffering was not a why but a who, because there was no other good explanation for his suffering. He knew that he could only find rest for his grieving soul if he could just meet God and obtain an answer from Him (Job 31:35), because anything else will fall short.
When God answered Job in a whirlwind (Job 38:1), God did not respond to him by giving him a reason to all the injustice he was facing. He responded to him by telling him who He is throughout chapters 38–41 of the Book of Job. God was essentially telling Job that all of this suffering is not a matter of why, and neither was it anything close to what Job’s three friends thought the answer could be, but a matter of who — who God is, and He is sovereign and unfathomable. In other words, God was teaching Job that the answer to unjust suffering is not “Why is this happening to me?” but “Who is the One amidst all this suffering?”.
And this, my friend, is my heartfelt advice to all my brothers and sisters-in-Christ who are now suffering without cause. Stop trying to find a reason for your pain and loss. Stop listening to the explanations that others give. These are all beside the point. The point now is to do what is commanded in Isaiah 50:10, which is to trust in the name of the Lord, and to focus on who God is.
Trusting His Name in the Dark
The crux of the Christian faith is not what you know, but who you know.
While I have the highest regard for Scripture and theology, and I myself am a stickler for doctrinal accuracy, at the end of my life, I know that all of this doesn’t matter. When you are walking in the dark, doctrine cannot save you, but Jesus can. When you are in the worst season of your life, verses cannot change your life, but Jesus can. Nothing in this world, absolutely nothing, not even religious rituals or the strength of the human flesh, is able to do anything that can make you see the light at the end of the tunnel, but Jesus, whom Himself is The Light of the World (John 8:12), can.
Remember: When our favourite heroes of the Bible faced some of the worst situations in history, they did not have the Bible. Job did not have the Book of the Law. The saints of the Old Testament, as well as the New Testament saints, did not have the New Testament in full. Yet, they all trusted in His name and who He is, and God used them to spread the gospel and bring the Bible to us. Therefore, in the same way, while we now have the Bible, the Bible is not some magical book that you can just use some of the words inside to will your way into a better life. The Bible is the very Word that testifies of who He is, and it is supposed to point you to who God is (John 5:39–40) so that you can trust in His name.
The heart of it all is for us to know who God is throughout our entire lifetime, and never ever lose sight of this when nothing in our lives seem to “prove” that God is who He says He is in the Bible. Since the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us (Romans 8:18), let us continue to hold onto Christ and who He says He is — who, in us, is the hope of our glory (Colossians 1:27).
