When Israel finally walked out of Egypt, God did not take them home the short way. Exodus 13:17 tells us, And it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God led them not through the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near. There was a road along the coast. It was the direct route, the efficient route, the route any reasonable person would have chosen. God turned the nation away from it and sent them down toward a sea they had no means of crossing, into a wilderness that would hold them for forty years. The short road was right there in front of them, and He would not let them take it.
That detail has stayed with me for years, because most of us have stood somewhere on the edge of a wilderness we did not choose, looking across at the road we were certain we would be travelling by now. Doors close without explanation. Prayers go up and nothing appears to come down. Circumstances contradict everything we believed God was doing. And before we can stop it, the question forms. Why?
The Question Is Not Forbidden
Asking God why is not sin. The question runs right through Scripture, and it is asked by the men who walked nearest to Him. Moses asked it in Egypt, before a single Israelite had been set free. David asked it in Psalm 10, and asked it again in Psalm 22. Jeremiah asked it while he was preaching faithfully and watching the wicked prosper. Habakkuk asked it, and then climbed his tower to wait for a reply.
Two things settle the matter. The first is what God did when they asked. He did not rebuke Moses, He answered him, Now shalt thou see what I will do to Pharaoh. He did not silence Habakkuk, He told him to write the vision and make it plain. The second is greater. The sinless Son of God asked it from the cross, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Whatever else that cry was, it was not sin. And the words were not new even then. He was quoting Psalm 22, a psalm God gave to His people to sing. The question was in the hymnbook of Israel long before it was on the lips of the Saviour.
The difference is never in the asking. It is in the attitude behind the asking. There is a why that is looking for a place to lay the blame, and there is a why that is looking for a place to lay its head. One is an accusation. The other is a child climbing into a lap. God can bear the second one all day long.
But we should be honest that the answer rarely comes when we want it. In Exodus 13 God tells us why He chose the long road, lest the people see war and lose heart and turn back toward Egypt. He knew exactly what that young nation could and could not carry, and He routed them around it. What we almost never get is that footnote in our own lives, at least not while we are still walking the road.
I was fifteen when my dad died. He was a godly man who loved the Lord, supported the ministry of the church, and gave himself to the Gospel. I could not make the arithmetic work. Here was a man doing exactly what God had asked of him, and God took him, and left a boy behind who did not understand any of it. Why would God allow that? Why would God lead me that way?
Years later our missionary Joel Michel died suddenly in his twenties. He was serving in the Netherlands alongside Stan Kamps, and he and his family were doing a tremendous work. He already had the language. He could preach to those people the day he arrived, which is the very thing that takes most missionaries years to reach. He went out for milk, was struck by a truck, and was gone. A whole family came off the field in an afternoon.
I did not understand why God led that way then, and I do not understand it now. I want to say that directly, because I am not writing this from the other side of an explanation.
Proverbs Does Not Say Understand
Into exactly that kind of silence, Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.‘
Notice what the verse does not say. It does not say, understand with all thine heart. It does not say, figure it out with all thine heart. It does not say, get control of it with all thine heart. Every one of those would be a promise we could never keep, and God does not ask us for them. He asks for trust.
Trust carries the idea of putting your full weight down on something. Think of the way you sit in a chair. You do not test it first. You do not check the joints or work out the load rating. You simply put your whole weight on it without a thought, because you have settled the question of whether it will hold before you ever reach it. That is the posture God is after. You are relying on His character, His promises and His wisdom, and you are doing it before you have any evidence in front of you.
David unfolds what that looks like in Psalm 37:1-5, “Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb. Trust in the Lord, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. Delight thyself also in the Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.“
He is writing to people watching the wrong men prosper, and he gives them three things to do with their hands rather than three things to feel. Trust in the Lord, and do good. That is a trust that keeps working. It is not waiting quietly in a corner for the situation to resolve itself, it is carrying on in righteousness while the situation is still unfair, because trust that produces no obedience was only ever an opinion. Delight thyself also in the Lord. That is a trust that has moved from duty to affection, from I trust Him because I have no other option to I trust Him because I love Him and He is my joy. And that is why the promise of the desires of your heart is no blank cheque. The delight comes first because God is reshaping the desires before He grants them. Then, commit thy way unto the Lord. The word means to roll, and the picture is of rolling a weight off your own back and onto the back of someone stronger. This path, this outcome, this future, I am putting it down over here, in His hands, because it was never mine to carry.
With All Thine Heart
The heart in Scripture is not the seat of the sentiment. It is the centre of the will, the emotions, the desires and the decisions. So when God asks for all of it, He is asking for the part of you that decides, not only the part of you that feels.
That rules out a good deal of what passes for trust. Partial trust, where He may have the areas that are going reasonably well. Backup plan trust, where I hand Him the situation while quietly keeping my own arrangements warm in case He is slow. Conditional trust, which says I will trust You if this works out, and is really just a wager with a religious vocabulary. What He asks for is surrender of the whole heart, the will and the emotions and the mind together.
Some years ago there were reports of drivers who ended up in Lake Michigan because they were following their GPS. It was winter. Snow had covered parts of a boat ramp and visibility was poor. The road ahead was not clear, but the calm voice on the dashboard kept saying to proceed forward. And they did, right into the water. What is remarkable is not the software failure, it is the human one. At some point common sense should have taken over. The headlights were reflecting off open water. The shoreline was in view. The road had obviously ended. And still they trusted the voice on the screen over the evidence of their own eyes.
We will hand that kind of confidence to a device that is wrong on a regular basis. The question is whether we will hand it to a God who has never been wrong once.
Trust In The Lord, Not In The Outcome
Here is where most of us actually come undone. We say we trust God, but what we mean, if we trace it honestly, is that we trust the outcome we are hoping He will produce. We trust the scan coming back clear. We trust the door opening. We trust the relationship mending. We trust the plan succeeding. So when the outcome shifts, our trust shakes, and we assume our faith has failed when in truth our faith was never resting where we thought it was.
Proverbs does not say trust in the result. It says trust in the Lord. Logic asks whether this makes sense. Sight asks whether there is any visible progress. Impatience asks why nothing has changed yet. All three are asking about the outcome, and none of them is asking about Him.
We should expect not to follow His reasoning, because He has told us we will not. Isaiah 55:8-9 says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” That passage is often quoted as a shrug, as though God were simply telling us to stop asking. Read it in its place and it is nothing of the kind. It sits in the chapters of consolation, spoken to a people under judgement for their own sin, and the verse immediately before it says, “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” The thoughts that are higher than ours are His thoughts of mercy. He is not saying, My ways are beyond you, so be quiet. He is saying, My way of forgiving is not like your way of forgiving, and you would never have thought of it.
So we may not be able to trace how He is working, or when, or why. But we can know exactly who is working. He is faithful. He is good. He cannot lie. He does not forget. He does not make mistakes. Joseph in the pit did not understand what God was doing. Moses at the edge of the sea did not understand what God was doing. The disciples straining at the oars against the wind did not understand what God was doing. In every case God was still God, and in every case that turned out to be enough.
Lean Not Unto Thine Own Understanding
This is the part that costs something. To lean is to put your weight on a thing for stability, to let it carry you. We lean on logic, on past experience, on emotion, on our own sense of what is fair, and we do it so instinctively that we rarely notice we have done it at all. It sounds like this. This does not make sense, so it must not be God. I have run the numbers and they do not work. I have seen this before and it never works out. In my experience people like that do not change. I feel afraid, so it must be wrong. I feel hurt, so I am entitled to protect myself. Every one of those sentences is a load bearing wall built out of a limited perspective.
God is not telling us to stop thinking. Gathering information and reasoning carefully toward a decision is wisdom, and the book of Proverbs commends it on nearly every page. Seek counsel. Weigh the options. Use the mind you were given, for He has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. The problem was never that we gather information. It is that we finish gathering and then act as though we now have all of it.
We have some of it. He has all of it. We read the paragraph, He wrote the book. We are concerned with this decade, He is working across generations. Isaiah 46:9-10 says, “Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.” Psalm 139:16 says, “Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.” He saw your life written out before a day of it was lived. We know yesterday and we guess at tomorrow, and Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us why the gap will not close, “He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.“
That is why the middle clause of Proverbs 3:6 is not a throwaway. In all thy ways acknowledge him. To acknowledge is to recognise, to keep in view, to refuse to proceed as though He were not in the room. We acknowledge His person, His power, His promises and His pathway, and we do it in all our ways, not only in the ways where we have run out of options.
He Shall Direct Thy Paths
Then comes the promise, and he shall direct thy paths. In the ancient world a traveller walking at night would fasten a small lamp at his feet. It threw enough light for one step. Not for the mile ahead, not for the turn in the road, not for the destination. One step, and then you walked, and then there was light for another. Psalm 119:105 is describing that lamp when it says, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.“
That is the guidance God has promised, and if we are honest it is not the guidance we asked for. We wanted the map. We wanted to see the whole route laid out so we could assess it, approve it and brace for the hard sections. What we are given is enough light to take the next step in the will of God, and the character of the One holding the lamp. The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and He orders them one at a time on purpose, because a map would make us navigators and a lamp keeps us followers.
Every name we admire in Scripture walked by that lamp. The disciples trusted God straight into persecution and never stopped preaching. Joseph trusted Him into the pit, into the dungeon and into being forgotten, and never once stopped doing right. Abraham trusted Him up a mountain with his own son and kept climbing. Job trusted Him through loss that would have broken most men, and would not curse Him. Ruth trusted Him in a foreign field and simply kept gleaning. Not one of them had the explanation. Every one of them had the next step.
And there is one thing more that we are given, which is not an explanation but is better than one. Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Notice what we are told to do with the things we do not know. We are told to set them beside the things we do know. We know that all things work together. Not that all things are good. That the threads, including the black ones, are being woven into something good by a God who has never dropped a stitch, for those whose position is in Christ.
What I Know
Trusting God when life makes no sense is not complicated to describe, only difficult to do. It means putting your whole weight down. It means refusing to lean on your own reasoning when your reasoning has run out. It means keeping Him in view in every one of your ways. And it means believing He is directing the very thing you cannot understand.
We all want answers. I wish I had them for you. I wish I could sit down across the table and tell you why God led you that way and not this way, and explain every pain you have carried, and account for every tear.
One pastor put those questions into verse, and the poem walks through a lifetime of them. A tiny crib. A young widow. A bride left holding a wedding gown she would never wear. A mother standing between two small graves. The same question in every stanza. Why. And when he takes that question timidly to his Father’s throne on their behalf, the answer he is given is not an explanation but a tenderness. Their tears will be dried. Today they must look through faith. Tomorrow they will know. And if the reasons were handed over now, they would lose the joy of one day hearing God tell them Himself. The poem ends where I have had to end, with the decision to trust God to do what is best and to wait to find out why.
I do not have the answers to my own turns in the road either, and I have stopped pretending that I will get them on this side.
But this I know. God wants trust. He wants it when it runs against our thinking, against our emotions and against our own best ideas. He wants us looking at Him and not at the road. And I know that every one of those events, the ones I understand and the ones I never will, He is weaving together by His grace, for your good and for His glory.
