You may well be familiar with a very popular piece of writing that speaks of life with the Lord as having, at the most difficult times, only one set of visible footprints. And they belong to the Lord who carries his children in his arms.1 Many have been comforted by those thoughts. In Psalm 77, Asaph speaks of a time when no footprints were to be seen, there was no identifiable pathway to trace. Can there be any comfort in that?
This psalm, as many others do, emerges from the womb of trouble and difficulty. Times have changed but not for the better. Nights have become moments of distress when untiring hands are raised in supplication to God, pleading for his help. Things used to be so different in “the former days, the years of long ago.” Now it feels like God’s promises have failed and amount to very little. The cupboard is very bare and the supplies so thin.
So where does Asaph go in his tortured thinking? He resolves to consider God’s ways, to reflect on what was so evidently true in the past and to appeal to the character revealed that now appears concealed, buried under the rubble of wrenching fears.
Central to that is the fact that “Your ways, O God, are holy.” The Lord of heaven and earth is not unpredictable, changing with the seasons. And his ways are not compromised and blighted. They are wholly other, unmixed and untainted. “What god is as great as our God?” is the most rhetorical of questions.
But that doesn’t mean the way of God, the path his holiness takes, is a static stereotype, readily accessible to human intuition and patent to the slenderest consideration. Asaph thinks back to the experience of the people of Israel as they were delivered from Egypt and expresses the almost elliptical reality that
Your path led through the sea,
your way through the mighty waters,
though your footprints were not seen.
God acted in unmistakable power, with an incontrovetible declaration of commitment to his people but his way, his holy way, was not seen. His footsteps left no imprint; they could not be traced. And that was not, in any sense, an oversight on his part.
He is no ordinary god, comprised from the best of human abilities, an amalgam of top tips sprinkled with a touch of divine stardust. His ways were not visible because human eyes are not capable of canvassing the whole of reality. The mightiest intellect among us cannot pierce to nor plumb the depths of divine wisdom and gain a grasp of the granite power that splits seas apart.
Job rightly says we see “but the outer fringes of his ways. How faint is the whisper we hear of him.”2 And nowhere is that more evident than when his Son laid down his life for us, the just for the unjust to bring us to God. The cross remains so mysterious. We join those who watched “from a distance” as our Lord Jesus bore our sins in his own body on the tree.3 Such a demonstration of his way leading through the mighty waters tutors us to expect that the ways of the Eternal would be as deep as his heart is so wonderfully kind.
Albeit looking into the past, Asaph is not asking God to do again what he did before in identical detail—in fact, he cannot make that request because no footprints were seen.4 Asaph cannot detail what wasn’t visible. Confidence in God is not based on certain specifics being accessible to our faith; it is entirely fixed upon his character, the character which is without variability, ever holy, unveiled in the Son and at his cross.
The same God whose footprints were not seen has promised to guide his people along his highway. I hope this song by Sandra McCracken will be an encouragement to you as you walk in his way, with the One who is The Way.
Isaiah 40:11
Job 26:14
Mark 15:40
“It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore. And how should the Infinite repeat Himself? All space and time are too little for Him to utter Himself in them once.” CS Lewis, Letters to Malcolm - Chiefly on Prayer, p.26
Thank you so much and that song is beautiful!