Many Are the Afflictions, But the Lord Delivers
I have stood in the rain more than once in my life, waiting on something that would not come any faster for my waiting.
There was a night, years back, when a storm caught me out on a stretch of road with nothing but a flashlight and a truck that would not turn over. Rain coming sideways. No houses in sight, no bars on the phone, just the kind of dark that makes a man feel small. I remember standing there thinking, this is not how tonight was supposed to go.
I did not pray a fancy prayer. I just said, “Lord, I could use some help out here.”
Trouble has a way of finding all of us on some back road or another. It does not check your calendar first. It does not ask if you have had enough sleep, enough money, or enough faith to handle what is coming. It just shows up, headlights cutting through the dark, and you are left standing there in the rain wondering how you got here.
The Bible never pretends otherwise. It does not sell us on a trouble-free life if we just believe hard enough. Scripture tells the truth, even when the truth is hard to hear.
“Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.” Psalm 34:19
Notice David does not say a few afflictions. He says many. Being right with God was never a guarantee against a hard road. Faith is not a detour around suffering. Sometimes it is the thing that walks you straight through the middle of it.
But there is a second word in that verse that outweighs the first. Trouble may be many. The Lord is more.
In Charles H. Spurgeon’s The Treasury of David, his notes on Psalm 34:19, “Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all,” include a line from Thomas Adams, an English clergyman and preacher of the early seventeenth century commonly associated with the Puritan tradition. Adams put it plainly. Our troubles may be many in number and heavy in measure, he said, but God’s mercies are more numerous still, His wisdom more wondrous, His power greater than anything we carry.
That is not a slogan. That is a man who had buried people and weathered his own storms, telling the truth about where the strength comes from.
Our troubles are many. His mercy is more.
Our understanding runs out. His wisdom does not.
Our strength has a bottom. His does not.
I think about that truck on that dark road sometimes. Help did not come the way I expected. It rarely does. Sometimes the Lord snatches the storm away before it touches us. More often, in my experience, He walks with us through it, and we come out the other side a little more worn, and a little more certain of who was carrying us the whole time.
Maybe you are standing in your own version of that rain tonight. A diagnosis. A marriage under strain. A bill you cannot see how to pay. A grief that will not lift no matter how many mornings pass.
Psalm 34:19 does not hand you a schedule. It hands you something sturdier than that. It hands you the character of God.
The Lord delivers. Not always on our timetable. Not always in the shape we asked for. But He delivers, and until He does, He does not leave.
You can say it plain, the way I have had to say it more than once.
“I do not understand this, but I trust You.”
“I do not like this, but I know You are here.”
“I do not know how this ends, but I know who is holding it.”
That is not naivety. That is faith with dust on its boots.
Three things worth remembering:
Trouble is not proof that God has walked away from you. Even the righteous get rained on.
Your strength has an end. His does not.
Deliverance belongs to the Lord. Your part is to trust, to pray, to keep walking, and to let Him decide the when and the how.
A Prayer
Heavenly Father,
Your word does not hide the truth from us. The afflictions of the righteous are many, and we feel every one of them. There are nights we would rather You just take the trouble away.
But we choose to trust You anyway.
Lord Jesus, thank You for standing with us in the rain, in the dark, on the roads we did not choose. When we run out of strength, be our strength. When fear gets loud, quiet it. When we cannot see the way, walk ahead of us.
Thank You that our troubles, many as they are, have never once been more than Your mercy.
Help us trust You not only when You lift the storm away, but when You choose to walk us through the middle of it.
We hand You what we are carrying tonight, and we rest in the promise that You are faithful.
In Jesus’ name,
Amen.
Whatever road you are standing on tonight, hear this. The Bible never promised you a life without storms. It promised you a Savior who will not leave you standing in the rain alone.
“Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.” Psalm 34:19
Written by Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Ed.D. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. You are welcome to share or adapt it provided proper credit is given to the author.
