My Internet Is Reliably Unreliable. Is God the Same Way?

My internet is reliable. Reliable at going down at 7 p.m. every Monday night for years. That’s unfortunate given that I preach a livestreamed sermon every week at that time.

More often than not, at least part of my stream ends up being carried by my cell phone rather than through my home internet, which you would hope would be the more robust connection. If not for the handy “failover” connection support of Speedify, I’d be sunk.

I’ve talked to Spectrum a lot about this. I’ve called them up so many times, talked to them for so many hours, and they’ve sent someone out and looked at it multiple times. And it’s always fine when they do, because it’s not 7 p.m.

Spectrum assures me the signal’s great. There’s nothing wrong. Have you rebooted your router? Maybe it’s your computer? But come back to 7 p.m. and my perfectly functional computer and router are stuck behind that reliably unreliable connection again.

Sometimes, when we read God’s Word, we get the distinct impression we’re playing the same technical support game. It insists God is reliable and He’s faithful and He’s always there for us, but there sure seem to be some 7 p.m. moments in our lives.

When our lives feel like they pixelate and go out, we think, “I must need a backup plan for life.” Maybe I need to go and do something else because it seems like sometimes God’s service just goes out when we face evil.

I mentioned this on Monday night as I finished up a series on Psalm 12, because it addresses this very worry. Spectrum protests, “No, your internet connection is just fine, Tim!” But God doesn’t deny the pixelating presence of evil in the world.

He doesn’t say, “The signal’s great. There’s nothing wrong.” He says what the technician always resists: I know the problem is there, but let me tell you what I’m doing about it.

King David had reason to doubt in Psalm 12: vicious enemies were all about, speaking of their successes and his doom. Yet, in v. 6, the king writes, “The Lord’s words are absolutely reliable. They are untainted as silver, purified in a furnace on the ground where it is thoroughly refined.”

Now, saying it is good and pure is one thing, but is it? Spectrum insists my internet is good and pure, too, after all. The difference is God can point to the overarching story of history and not just a claim with a lot of small print exceptions.

Yes, there’s evil, but the alleged backup plans to deal with it right now all end up being solutions worse than the problem. In our own human failings we notice when God isn’t coming through exactly when we want Him to, but we go running to “backup plans” that actually have far worse reliability over the long haul.

Whatever backup plan you come up with, it doesn’t have thousands of years of track record for you to see if it really comes through over and over again. David knows this and that’s why he can be in a precarious predicament and still say, “look at how God’s Word is refined and pure. It’s utterly dependable.”

In the original Hebrew, David says God’s promises are purified seven times in a “furnace in the ground.” In the ground because that allowed the metal to heat up to extreme temperatures surrounded by something — dirt — that wouldn’t catch fire. Repeated seven times because that number symbolizes perfection in the Bible. That is, there is nothing better tested and more refined than what God says, even if — from the perspective of the present moment — we can’t see that.

Impurities that sometimes surround it, sometimes because those of us who believe in the Lord don’t always get things right and we obscure what God has said. Impurities because life also gets in the way of us hearing what the Bible says. But those things will melt away, while God’s promises remain. They always hold up.

They held up when the Egyptians opposed God before the Israelites escaped. They held up when the Assyrians opposed God in open defiance against the scrappy Kingdom of Judah years later. They held up when Roman authorities thought they could put down the nascent church a half millennium later.

When various empires have risen and said they aren’t just the backup plan, they are the plan, guess what? They always fall. Wherever we happen to be situated tonight, unless Jesus returns first, we can count on those places, including their governments and their proudest authorities, will also fall one day.

And when they do? God will still be in charge, just as He always has been.

It can feel disconcerting at first to say the stuff around us will fail. But when we really think about it, we already know this. Our own lives fail us. Certainly, our society fails us repeatedly over time. So isn’t it comforting, when you think about it, to say, all that stuff will fail, but God’s Word won’t?

I think sometimes we believe our hope is that there isn’t any evil, or, at least, we won’t encounter any evil or pain. Someday in God’s presence, so it shall be.

But in the right now, we all know evil and pain are palpably present. The hope Scripture provides us isn’t some illusory absence of trouble right now, but the confidence in the midst of it that evil will ultimately lose.

God doesn’t play the technician game with us. Our lives are pixelating. But He assures us — with a history-spanning track record to back it — that the pixelation isn’t the end of the transmission. Evil will be the one disconnected in the end.