Copyright 2014 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
God cannot be unfaithful.
A perfect, holy and loving God, by definition, is not capable of unfaithfulness any more than He is capable of lying. His character cannot allow unfaithfulness any more than it could allow any other moral flaw common to our self-centered, rebellious race. It is we who are chronically unfaithful to our Lord and our fellow creatures, which we then project onto Him. Attributing disloyalty to our Maker and Redeemer is, at its heart, self-deceptive … a “lie of the soul.” Our Creator is actually the only Being in the universe truly worthy of the title “Faithful One.”
Personally, I know that I have been guilty of this sin of projection … Why else would I not joyfully and trustfully submit myself fully to the perfectly faithful Lover of my soul? What might be called the “Unfaithfulness Projection” is one of the primary reasons I have trouble surrendering my life completely to God.
God’s perfection should not incite fear in His children but inspire confidence and a deep and abiding peace (one that seems to elude many professing Christians in this day and age.) Our sometimes pervasive lack of serenity stems mainly from our not understanding that every characteristic of God, including his faithfulness, embodies such flawlessness.
In a certain sense, divine faithfulness extends even to the ungodly. Every day, God steadfastly sustains the physical world, desiring that the physical life of human beings may come to embody spiritual life as well. For this reason, God continues to offer salvation to the human race until, in the fullness of time (to be perfectly determined by Him), He brings the existence of this planet as we know it today to an end. In the meantime the Lord is, as His word declares, faithful to all generations whom He has ordained to dwell upon the earth.
No, our God is never unfaithful; it is literally not “in Him” to be so. Unfaithfulness, like every other aspect of sinful and fallen humanity, is contrary to the innate, immovable, and immutable nature of divinity. Furthermore it is partially in this knowledge of the Lord’s true nature that human beings can obtain any real hope for the future, be it in either the temporal or eternal sense.
May God help us to learn about His character in such a way as to forever banish any projection of our imperfection onto Him and to trust in His inherent, unwavering, and eternal faithfulness.