As Thou Hast Been, Thou Forever Wilt Be

Your love, O LORD, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies. How priceless is your unfailing love!

Psalm 36:5,7

The redemption story is as old as the hills. It began way back in Eden. When Adam and Eve took a bite of that apple, the lives of mankind intertwined themselves miserably with sin. They were not able, we are not able, to live eternally without a Savior.

And so God, in His love, provided what we could not do for ourselves. Yes, He started with the Old Testament Law; but that was merely a prelude to Jesus in us, “the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). However, through those Old Testament years He was faithful. In the story of Joseph this week we trace God’s faithfulness from start to finish.

It would not be unusual for the women of my generation to equate God’s faithfulness with our version of the “white picket fence” life. On my kitchen windowsill sits a picture that reminds me of my childhood days of utter joy and peace. There stands a little girl in her pretty pastel dress next to a white picket fence, flower in hand. At my grandmother’s house on Lake Huron, a white picket fence ran along one side of her property. On my summertime visits to her house, the first thing I would do was run outside to pick a bouquet of the flowers beside that fence.

But life in Jacob’s family was not the white picket fence scenario, as Kelly Minter writes in her study on faithfulness*. Jacob’s wife Rachel was favored, her first son (Joseph) the privileged one—to the chagrin of all the other boys. And as you know, the brothers ganged up on Joseph, threw him in a pit, and eventually sold him into slavery.

So I ask you, what did Joseph feel about God’s faithfulness from the depths of that pit and in slavery in Egypt? What do you feel when life has thrown you into a pit of your own?  With Thomas Chisolm can you say:       

“Great is thy faithfulness, O God, my Father;
 There is no shadow of turning with thee
 Thou changest not, thy compassions, they fail not;

 As thou hast been, thou forever wilt be.”

    —Thomas Chisolm, 1923

Nancy P

*Kelly Minter, Finding God Faithful, Lifeway Press, p.15

All Scripture quotations are from the NIV Translation 1973, 1978, 1984, unless otherwise noted