more thoughts
Trisha your kids are really cute.
I don't know what my family thinks about predestination and stuff, but I have concluded that God's sovereignty is the most wonderful doctrine I know. It has become sweeter to me than any other truth. It makes everything in life make more sense. Charles Spurgeon, who dealt with a lot of hard things and lived a life of remarkable productivity in the Kingdom, said, "It would be a very sharp and trying experience to me to think I have an affliction which God never sent me; that the bitter cup was never filled by His hand, that my trials were never measured out by Him nor sent to me by His arrangement of their weight and quantity."
It is good to know that everything in life comes from God and that He is for us.
"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose. For those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those He predestined, He also called; those He called, He also justified; those He justified, He also glorified.
What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us?" Rom 8:28-31
May we see the glory of God in everything today.
Love,
Randy
posted by Mama Brown @ 8:33 AM
2 Comments:
Tod and I have spent a great deal of time discussing the sovereignty of God. It is a comforting thought, and yet perplexing at times. I like to think of God in control of everything, but I don't like to think of God bringing pain into my life or the lives of those I love. I would like you to expound a little further on the subject.
(Slow day at work again.)
I can find no better explanation for pain than to conclude that it has been caused by God as a means of accomplishing His purposes. I have not concluded this from someone else's teaching. (Though John Piper teaches it better than anyone I have ever heard.) I have read scripture and I can't come to any other conclusion. Nothing else makes sense to me. If the Devil is somehow undercutting God's purposes on earth, then I'm sure that my life is already a lost cause. If the Devil caused the tsunami, then we have no grounds for peace. If God caused it, then it was not a bad thing. It was good.
It gets harder when we get to things like rape or child abuse. What about the child who is abused and grows up to be an abuser, then dies to enter eternal punishment? Did God cause that? I would say that God is not to be robbed of His authority in even that situation. If we take away His authority there, then we have lost His power in our own lives. If He can keep the abuse from happening and He chooses not to, then He could be said to have decreed it.
I would love to hear Tod's thoughts on this, but here is my basic understanding of the whole thing. For those who are chosen by Him before the beginning of time to be His people, all things work for their benefit. There is no exception to this. Even our sinful choices are under His divine authority so that at any moment in time I can say, "God's perfect will for my life includes all that has happened in my life since the day of my birth. I am exactly where His predestining will decreed that I would be today." That gives me such hope. I haven't ruined things for Him. I haven't damaged my life beyond repair. Even though I chose the wrong job or dropped out of church for 10 years or committed a felony, today I am in the place God picked for me to be today. So His plans for me include all those mistakes. All of this is only for His chosen people.
For those who are not chosen to be His people, there is an eternity in Hell for them. I suspect that the evil things which happen to them in this life are not comparable to what awaits them in eternity. So God decrees it all.
It seems like God isn't fair, doesn't it? Every time I can think of that that accusation comes against God in scripture He answers not with a justification of His fairness, but with a question: "Who are you to question Me?" (Job 38-41, Romans 9:19-21, Ezekiel 18:29) So I stopped asking God to prove to me that He was sovereign. Now I just believe Him.
I would love to hear everyone else's thoughts. I will say that it has been about 10 years since I first heard anyone tell me God was absolutely sovereign. It made me mad at first. I rejected it completely. I don't really know when I started to believe it, but it was a gradual process for me. Just reading through the Bible over and over made it make sense. Now it is more precious to me than I could ever describe. It is like a rock so big and wide that I can never fall off of it.
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