by Kevin Burton
If you have no trials, no hard times today, enjoy it in the moment, and more power to you! But they are coming, book it.
Country singer Lynn Anderson said it this way: “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden!”
Now Anderson wasn’t necessarily a leading theologian, but the sentiment behind her 1970 number three crossover hit can be found all through the pages of the Bible.
And by the way, as you walk down your road of trials, you’re in good company.
We’ll hear about the inevitability of trials today from Alistair Begg, speaker on the Truth For Life radio ministry. But first, here’s a bit about the Kidron Valley, near Jerusalem, sometimes referred to as the brook Kidron.
By all accounts, it’s an unpleasant place to be.
“The Kidron Valley is a place just outside of Jerusalem, in between the city and the Mount of Olives,” reads a passage on the website www.gotquestions.org
“The name Kidron (or Cedron in the KJV) is either a reference to the “darkness” or “murkiness” of the water that periodically flows in that place or to the cedars that grow in that area. The Kidron Valley is technically a wadi, as a stream runs through it only after heavy rains.”
“This location is associated in the Bible with sorrow, judgment, and death,” the passage reads.
“King David passed that gloomy brook when fleeing with his sorry company from his traitorous son,” Begg wrote. “The man after God’s own heart was not exempt from trouble; in fact, his life was full of it. He was both the Lord’s Anointed and the Lord’s Afflicted.”
“Why then should we expect to escape? At sorrow’s gates the noblest of our race have waited with ashes on their heads. Why then should we complain as though some strange thing had happened unto us?”
“The King of kings Himself was not favored with a more cheerful or royal road. He passed over the filthy ditch of Kidron, through which the filth of Jerusalem flowed. God had one Son without sin, but not a single child without the rod. It is a great joy to believe that Jesus has been tempted in all points just as we are,” Begg wrote.
“Jesus must have crossed the Valley of Kidron many times in His travels,” reads the gotquestions passage. “On the night of His arrest, Jesus “went out with His disciples over the Brook Kidron, where there was a garden” (John 18:1).
Though most of us will not have to walk through the actual Kidron valley, we will all walk through trials of various sorts, as Begg writes. We walk that valley in a metaphorical sense.
“What is our Kidron this morning? Is it a faithless friend, a sad bereavement, a slanderous reproach, a dark foreboding? The King has passed over all these.”
“Is it bodily pain, poverty, persecution, or contempt? Over each of these Kidrons the King has gone before us. “In all their affliction he was afflicted.”
“The idea that trials are an unusual experience should be banished at once and forever, for He who is the Head of all saints knows by experience the grief that we consider so peculiar,” Begg writes. “
“Although David was abased, yet he returned in triumph to his city, and David’s Lord rose victorious from the grave; so let us then be of good courage, for we also shall win the day,” Begg writes.
”We will joyfully draw water out of the wells of salvation, even though we are presently faced with the harmful streams of sin and sorrow. Courage, soldiers of the Cross, the King himself triumphed after going over Kidron, and so will you.”
Page 7 