Proverbs 3:3. Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart.
Yesterday we talked about God’s hesed. His steadfast, loyal, covenant love.
Today we will talk about God’s faithfulness, his emet.
The Hebrew word emet can also be translated as truth. God’s faithfulness is his complete honesty with you. God will always tell you the truth. Most importantly God will always tell you the truth about yourself and your sin. God will faithfully wound you until you come to your senses about your own wicked ways. Because God faithfully tells the truth, we can always trust (he’emin) him.
Let me ask you, how do you see your trials and your suffering? What category do you put them in? Are they proof that God has given up on you, stopped caring about you, vindictive against you because of your sin? Or maybe they reveal that God is just too busy for you. He has forgotten you altogether?
Or are your trials, testings, sufferings, and even your temptations the faithful working of God in your heart and mind to tell you the truth? Are they God’s faithful wounds, the wounds of a friend, that are at work against your deadly self-reliance, and self-righteousness? Are they God’s way of revealing the truth about you to you?
Make no mistake, God is not letting you or anyone else get away with any level of sin. Rather he is faithfully confronting, convicting, and chastising us back into his loving arms. How? Through our union with Christ.
Jesus, talked about truth a lot. He said, “I am the truth,” and “The truth will set you free.” Jesus didn’t just know the truth, point to the truth, or teach the truth. He was and is the truth. He is all of God’s faithful truth telling personified. Everything we need to know about God and ourselves is revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. How sinful are we? How loved are we? Can we save ourselves? Will God save us? The life of Jesus, his very existence, answers all these questions and more.
Specifically, think about our union with the cross of Christ. The cross is brutally honest with us about how evil we actually are. We’re so evil that God had to die for us. We’re so helpless that only Jesus dying for us could save us. But out union with Christ’s cross is also brutally honest about how loved we are. Yes, God had to die for us, but also God DID die for us. Willingly. Without hesitation. Without regret.
When we know the truth about our sin but also God’s love, we can begin to allow God’s faithful discipline to do its work in our lives convicting of sin, but also carrying us back to the Father who loves us with a faithful, and true love that will never lie to us and never let us go.
You: How do you see your trials and testings? What category do you put them into?
You in Christ: Do you trust that everything God allows in your life is his faithfulness toward you?
Christ in you: How might you receive testing the way Christ did? In faith.
Pray: Father, you will always tell me the truth. The cross is my truth. The truth of my sin and the truth of your love for me in Christ. Help me to trust you even in the darkest of days. Amen.
To Live is Christ 