On God as Refuge

What does it mean for God to be a ‘rock of refuge’? If I trust God to be this, does that mean that he will prevent bad things from happening in my life?

This is a question that myself and a friend were recently discussing. Perhaps you might have wondered the same thing. The idea of God being a ‘refuge’ is a common one in the psalms. But how does it square with bad things still happening in our lives?

A couple of weeks earlier, I met up with another friend to read the Bible and this topic had also come up. Having been recently bereaved I was not in the headspace to decide what to read, and so she suggested that we read Psalm 71. 

Something that I particularly appreciated about this psalm was how the psalmist both described God as a ‘rock of refuge’ and someone who was worthy of his trust, and yet he also acknowledged that God had brought ‘many troubles and calamities’ upon him.

From a biblical perspective then, for God to be a ‘rock of refuge’ is evidently compatible with bad things still happening in the lives of those who trust him. 

To return to the conversation with the first friend I mentioned, we discussed our options. 

For God to be a rock of refuge and for bad things still to happen in our lives meant that either…

1) Bad things wouldn’t happen if we trusted him (obviously not always true).

2) God was not trustworthy and would not look after us (not true in the experience of myself and my friend, and certainly not true in the testimony of the Bible). 

3) We could trust that God would be faithful to his promises to work good through everything (Romans 8:28) and also that he would be with us and give us the comfort and strength to endure hardship (2 Corinthians 1:3-4; Romans 5:3-5; Hebrews 13:5-6).

As much as we may not like the idea that we won’t necessarily be always protected from bad things happening to us, something that came out in the conversation was how we can often forget that God is good and kind and merciful. And yet he has proved this again and again in our own lives. We both had gone through things that were quite difficult, and yet God had been with us and comforted us and helped us. In the case of my friend he had provided a way of escape from a bad situation. In my own case he brought me through the valley of the shadow of death and yet showered me with his love and mercy all the way – and brought much more good out of it than I could ever have imagined. As I reflect upon other hard times in my life God truly has been a rock of refuge in the sense that he has been a constant, unchanging source of help and comfort and strength. In his mercy he has also delivered me from many difficult things – and even shortened a recent trial that my husband and I had to endure.

It occurs to me that one can hypothetically picture all sorts of bad things happening in the future and ask, ‘how can God allow that?’ And yet forget that when God has actually brought such things about in our own lives he has also cared for us every step of the way through them.  

As the psalmist writes,