Horizons Bible Study 2018-2019
Think back through your life to the moments when you have known that God was with you. Usually in retrospect, we recognize where God was working in our lives. In officer training, we have asked people to write down the highs and lows of their relationship with God. Summer church camps, worship experiences, illnesses, marriages, the birth of children, divorces and the death of loved ones are often mentioned as times when people have felt that God was particularly with them.
In reflecting on the times when God seemed absent, illnesses, divorces and the death of loved ones were also mentioned. People also noted times when church members acted in hurtful and closed-minded ways, causing a crisis of faith. For some, a national tragedy like September 11, 2001, brought many to question the very existence of God.
It is difficult to remember that God is with us in the ordinary and tragic. Amy Poling Sutherlun, in this new Presbyterian Women/Horizons Bible study, surveys Old and New Testament texts that lift up the most frequent promise of God found in Scripture: “I will be with you.” She writes that this promise is often accompanied by another assurance from God: “I will never leave or forsake you.” Sutherlun writes: “If you’re anything like us, you battle with chronic, spiritual amnesia regarding God’s presence. We bury our amnesia inside questions, and God waits with the same answer. Are you with me, God, in a tumultuous career? Yes, I am with you. Are you with me, God, as I meander down the corridors of an unknown future? Yes, I am with you. Even as I struggle to parent a strong-willed child? Yes, I am with you. … But are you with me in my unlovable, dark moments? Yes child, especially then.”
Our promise-making and promise-keeping God travels throughout the ages with the promised child of laughter, Isaac, and with the swindler, Jacob, as he flees from his brother. God engages the reluctant and ill-equipped Moses with the task of confronting a brutal world power in the person of the Egyptian pharaoh. Moses goes armed with only God’s promise that God will be with him and will give him the words and the power needed. Gideon learns that God is with him in his weakness and Joshua, on the verge of the Promised Land, shoulders the leadership of the Hebrew people with God’s encouragement to be strong and courageous. Through prophets and kings, we are guided in this study to examine the Scripture and our own lives as we think about hard battles we are fighting and where we are tempted to rely on ourselves alone.
Sutherlun interweaves incidents from her own life as a parent with four children and uses stories from the media to help us enter the theme of each chapter. One of Sutherlun’s personal stories recounts her going on a raft on the Zambezi River headed toward Victoria Falls. She was 19 at the time and with all of a 20-minute training session, Sutherlun, a friend, three French fellows and an excellent guide set out on the turbulent river. They were told to not swim towards the banks of the river if the raft flipped the young people into the river. (They would have been lunch for the crocodiles!) The wild waters did flip the three Frenchmen out of the raft and the guide leapt into the river to retrieve them. Left alone without a guide, Sutherlun and her friend became frightened. Sutherlun links this vivid story to how the disciples felt after Jesus died: adrift, scared, anxious for their lives.
In each chapter, a person or the people of God face a real and anxiety-producing challenge of faith. Each time, God promises “I will be with you.” That promise can be deeply reassuring to us because difficult situations are made even worse when we are isolated or abandoned. To know that God is with us helps make grief and despair more bearable.
In the difficult stretches, God’s reassurance of presence and strength can keep us from going under in the turbulent currents in the river of life.
God speaks to the people in exile in Babylon:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
For I am the Lord your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
(Selections from Isaiah 43: 1-3)
In our chronic, spiritual amnesia, we do forget about the presence of God. This study helps us remember and see the blessing of God with us as we seek to be faithful.
Rosalind Banbury is the interim pastor of Tinkling Spring Presbyterian Church in Fishersville, Virginia.
You can purchase the PW/Horizons Bible study book through the PC(USA) Church Store.
