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You know the doctrines. You could explain election and defend the sovereignty of God across a kitchen table. Yet when providence turned hard, the first thing that rose in you was not trust but suspicion, and that has unsettled you more than you have told anyone.

Two men stand before the same mystery. Abraham looks down on Sodom, knowing almost nothing of what God is about to do, and says, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25). Centuries later, someone in a Roman house church hears Paul read of Jacob loved and Esau hated, and says, “Is there unrighteousness with God?” (Romans 9:14). Neither man had more information than the other. In some ways Abraham had less. He had no completed Bible and no cross behind him. The difference was never what they knew about God’s plan. It was what each had already settled about God Himself. From Romans 9:14, Michael Durham shows that faith begins with a settled conviction that God is the Judge, that He is righteous by nature, and that He cannot act against His own character. God is not a man, that He should lie (Numbers 23:19).

So faith reasons forward. Unbelief says, “I don’t understand this, so God must be wrong.” Faith says, “I know God. I don’t understand this, so God must be right.” Joseph named his brothers’ evil for what it was and still read it through God’s goodness: “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). Michael tells of holding his five-year-old son’s head still in an emergency room while a doctor stitched a deep cut. The boy wept, but he never once asked why. He kept his eyes on his father’s face. Later, kneeling beside his wife after their newborn daughter was rushed away not breathing, Michael prayed the words of Abraham. We may ask God our questions. He welcomes them. But we must never put Him on trial. God is too good to be unkind and too wise to make a mistake.

In This Episode

• Why do I know so much about God and still meet hard providence with suspicion?
• Abraham and the Romans 9 objector faced the same mystery. Why did one respond with worship and the other with accusation?
• Faith is not blind. It rests on the best reason there is: God’s own revealed character.
• There is a difference between asking God a question and demanding that He give an account.
• If our theology doesn't lead us to “God will do right,” something is wrong with our theology.
• Is God real to me, or only a compendium of what I have studied?

Abraham had no cross behind him. We do, and the One who did not spare His own Son has already answered whether He can be trusted in the dark.