When God's Sovereignty Scares You

Keri Seavey:

Scripture reveals God as the loving King who ordains and oversees all suffering. If he were only portrayed as sovereign, we might be tempted to shrink back from him in fear. But because he's also shown to be our suffering God, who willingly stepped into unthinkable affliction on our behalf, we can be assured of his goodness and move toward him in love. 

Our God understands suffering and loss. At great cost to himself, Jesus volunteered to empty himself of heavenly glory to become a humble servant (Phil. 2:6-8). Out of love for us he died the death we deserved. On the cross, Jesus lost his Father's tender intimacy in exchange for the fury of his fierce wrath. Jesus was afflicted and forsaken by his Father to ensure that we'd never be alone or forsaken in our afflictions. 

Likewise, the Father didn't spare his own Son but gave him up for us all (Rom. 8:32). He endured the ache of turning away from the Son he'd eternally loved so he'd never have to turn away from us. Though they both felt otherworldly grief, they chose this death and loss in order to ultimately defeat the suffering that comes from sin, death, and loss for us. What love! When we feel like God is distant, indifferent, or uncaring toward us in our suffering, the cross stands as compelling evidence that he's not. 

Yes, our sovereign God may wisely allow what we most fear, but our suffering God convinces us of his deep love as we face these things. The powerful hands that uphold all things are the hands that were pierced for us. Freshly seeing God as God—the suffering, sovereign One—is freeing me from fear to trust again.

Read the rest.  

A Powerful Testimony In The Midst of Deep Suffering

David Murray:

This is one of the most moving and instructive testimonies I’ve ever heard, with some great advice here too about how to minister to and counsel suffering people.

The Complexity of the Will of God

Radical.net:

If God always accomplishes His will, why is there so much sin in the world? How do we put these realities together? Pastor David Platt tackles this difficult subject in Secret Church 4: “Who is God.” To view this message in its entirety, visit the Secret Church page. 

Books by David Platt:

• Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream
• Radical Together: Unleashing the People of God for the Purpose of God
• Follow Me: A Call to Die. A Call to Live.

12 Myths About Calvinism

Michael Patton has a helpful article here.  Click over for the explanations.  His twelve points:

• Calvinism is not system of theology that denies God’s universal love.
• Calvinism is not a belief where God creates people in order to send them to hell.
• Calvinism is not belief that God is the author of evil.
• Calvinism is not a belief in fatalism.
• Calvinism is not a denial of freedom.
• Calvinism is not a belief that God forces people to become Christians against their will.
• Calvinism is not a belief that you should only evangelize the elect.
• Calvinism is not a belief that God arbitrarily chooses people to be saved.
• Calvinism is not a system of thought that follows a man, John Calvin.
• Calvinism is not a system that has to ignore or reinterpret passages of Scripture concerning human responsibility.
• Calvinists do not believe that no one can do any good thing at all.
• Calvinists do not necessarily believe that God predestines (wills) everything, including the color of socks I chose this morning.

God is Never Obligated to Redeem

However contrary it is our our Western cultural commitment to egalitarianism, to insist on a universal application of grace is to violate the character of grace. God’s redemptive grace is a gift, a completely unearned divine favor given out of love.

The giver is always sovereign in the giving of a gift. That is to say, the giver is free to give and free not to give, and he gives the gift to whomever he chooses. The words obligation and gift mutually exclude one another. The common rejection of the doctrine of election in favor of a universally dispensed grace not only denies God the divine prerogative to chose whom he will redemptively love but also makes God’s grace a necessary structure of the world. If grace is an obligation, a structure or an entitlement, it is no longer a gift, and no longer grace.

Redemptive grace is always unexpected, beyond the norm, and out of the ordinary. Grace can never be taken for granted, assumed, or presumed upon. God is never obligated to redeem.

— Michael D. Williams, Far as the Curse is Found, 105

A Powerful Reflection on the Moore, OK Tornado

Mike Horton:

No matter how many times it’s been asked–and answers offered–the perennial question is provoked by fresh wounds: “How could a good and all-powerful God allow such a tragedy?” The massive 2-mile-wide tornado that leveled much of Moore, Oklahoma, exposes the fragility of life—but also the apparent contradiction between a God who is good and all-powerful.

Receiving the news, my heart raced as I thought about my brother, sister-in-law, nieces, nephews, and cousins in Moore. My parents were from there. It was a place I’ve known well since childhood, visiting extended family. So I scanned the local OKC TV stations for updates. I knew by the description of the devastated area that the home of my brother and sister-in-law was in its path.

Finally, late at night I received an answer to my text-messages and talked to my brother by phone. “It’s all in God’s hands,” he said. It was from him that I first heard the doctrines of grace. He and Linda are enthralled with the God of grace and glory who has revealed himself in his Son. We don’t know why, but he does—and that’s enough. It’s one thing coming from me, and another thing hearing it from my brother just after he and his wife had lost every material treasure they had.

His wife was away for the afternoon, beyond the range of the tornado. Their children were just out of its path. Waiting it out at home, my brother—a veteran of “Tornado Alley”—changed his mind when he heard it was a Category 4 or 5. Climbing into his truck with debris already falling, he drove off for several miles until he saw the twister pass his neighborhood. Returning only 5 minutes later, he found only a heap of rubble. Yet there they are, extending a helping hand to neighbors. Why? Because life is meaningless and “sympathy” is just an expression of self-interest?

Without answers, we are faced with senseless tragedy. Arbitrary, meaningless, random. We search for answers—to make some sense of things—because our hearts and minds are not satisfied by this shrug. It’s not an easy thing to affirm faith in a good God who could have restrained this ferocious storm but didn’t. But it’s more offensive both to reason and to life itself to imagine that we live in a world where there is no ultimate meaning or purpose. The only thing worse than losing a loved one in such a tragedy is believing that their death—and their life—had no transcendent purpose.

I noticed that evangelists of atheism—mainly from other parts of the country—quickly appeared in chat rooms. “If a god who allowed this does exist, we would have to call him evil,” said one. It’s struck me that this person lives in a world as simplistic as any radical fundamentalist claiming to read God’s mind. For both, the answers are clear. For both, God is not hidden and he does everything directly and immediately. Both imagine a God who sends natural disasters like Zeus throwing thunderbolts from Olympus, either for sadistic pleasure or for specific judgments.

The nihilistic shrug is not an answer—even a partial one. It’s not a comfort at all. It has absolutely nothing to say in a situation like this. “Stuff happens” is the only response consistent with a naturalistic worldview. But the emptiness spreads. It’s not just the bad things, but the good ones, that are reduced to meaningless trivia. It also means that the love that has been overflowing in extravagant generosity shown not only to but even among victims of the tornado themselves is meaningless.

Out of darkness, light is already emerging. And instead of turning on God, like many of the faraway critics, they are turning to God for comfort, even as God sends his people to tend to their temporal needs.

This is in no way to treat lightly the tremendous loss incurred. The amazing spectacle of victims who have lost much extending a helping hand to neighbors who have lost more is a testament to the fact that there must be something more to life than making up meaning as we go along. Yet it doesn’t assuage the grief over losing a loved one.

The choice is between placing our confidence in a God who is both good and sovereign despite the moral and natural evils—even when we don’t have all the answers, and giving up on any transcendent meaning for love as well as suffering.

And that choice isn’t arbitrary. How can we be so sure? Perhaps it might have been, except for the fact that the Triune God revealed in Scripture has fulfilled every one of his promises in history. Most conclusively, he has sent his Son to rescue sinners by his life, death, and resurrection. Who knew what God was doing at the cross? Jesus’ disciples fled, the Romans jeered, and his own people judged him cursed by God. By the look of things, Good Friday yielded only one of two choices: a God who doesn’t care or a “Savior” who was a fraud. Because Christ has been raised in history, our lives are no longer “the show about nothing.” We have come from somewhere grand and although we have fallen from it, we are being taken far beyond that glorious beginning, in the train of the Conqueror who has defeated death and hell.

Read the rest.


Books by Michael Horton:

• The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way
• Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church
• Putting Amazing Back into Grace: Embracing the Heart of the Gospel
• For Calvinism
• The Gospel-Driven Life: Being Good News People in a Bad News World
• A Better Way: Rediscovering the Drama of God-Centered Worship
• The Law of Perfect Freedom

God’s Sovereignty and Personal Compassion in Public Tragedy

John Piper interacts with thoughts of God's sovereignty and calamitous events:

It says in Acts 4:27 that God predestined what Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Gentiles and the Jews brought to pass when Jesus was crucified. In other words, the worst sinning that has ever happened in the history of the world was planned and predestined by God, for the death of his Son, that we might be saved. The murder of the Son of God is the worst act in human history, and it was planned by God according to Acts 4:27.

Now God wills that evil for the sake of thousands of good responses. He wants us to be saved by it. He wants us to trust this Jesus. He wanted Mary to come to the tomb with compassion in her heart. He wanted to show that Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus were men of courage and godliness because they were willing to take the body and put it in their own tomb.

God had millions and millions of good and holy purposes in willing that this happened. And the same would be true of everything he wills in this world. So we should determine how we respond, not by any false, human, logical deduction that we are drawing from the sovereignty of God. We should determine it from what the Bible says should be our response, namely compassion, and outrage at sin, and efforts to be involved in bringing relief.

Read the rest.

God's Goodness in the Deepest Pain

Ben Peays:

In this powerful video, Matthew and Sarah Harms recount their experience of learning to trust God's goodness through a deeply painful loss. Raising a daughter with disabilities and losing another have led them to treasure the promise that God is working all things together for their good and his glory (Rom. 8:28).

"Don’t mistake God’s patience for His indifference."

Michael Kelley:

It was 400 years between the close of Malachi and the opening of Matthew. Four hundred years of silence. Four hundred years of looking at the prophecies. Four hundred years of wondering if today was the day when God would act on behalf of His people in a dramatic way.

That 400 years mirrors another 400 years between the death of Joseph and the rise of Moses. Four hundred years of slavery. Four hundred years of oppression. Four hundred years of stories of a supposed deliverer.

In both instances, that’s one generation of fathers telling their sons to remain faithful and wait. And then that generation of fathers dying off, and another generation of fathers telling their sons the same thing. It’s a lot of waiting. A lot of hoping. And a lot of questions about the “when” of this God we’ve heard about. But we see, in hindsight, see that God was not inactive during that time, but instead knew the right “when.” We know this of course. Of course we do.

Except we don’t.

We think we do, but our impatience and frustration betrays us. In fact, I wonder today how much sin might be avoided in my life if I really believed in the perfect timing of God.

Read the rest.

No Such Thing as "Meaninglessness"

C. Michael Patton:

...the thing that must unite us as Christians is that there is no such thing as “meaningless.” That word does not need to be in our vocabulary. We should not have a dictionary which gives it any life. It is a word reserved for the atheist, the deist, and the pantheist, but not the Christian. I am not saying we don’t look it in the face from time to time (God knows I do), I am just saying that we cannot allow ourselves to camp there. That campground is off-limits for Christians. There are so many things out there that have webbed feet on dry land. There are so many sciatic nerves which cause us to cry “why?” There are so many mothers who are unable to walk or talk. There are so many children who die untimely deaths. There are so many times when our pain seem meaningless. But our faith is not dependent on finding immediate understanding and fulfillment for our pain. Sometimes we do punt to the eschaton knowing that there is meaning behind it, even if we don’t know what that meaning is today.

Read the rest.

“God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.”

A very encouraging post from John Piper as you head into the New Year.

Is God Aloof?

We can never take God by surprise. We can never anticipate him. He always makes the first move. He is always there ‘in the beginning’. Before we existed, God took action. Before we decided to look for God, God had already been looking for us. The Bible isn’t about people trying to discover God, but about God reaching out to find us.

Many people imagine God sitting comfortably on a distant throne, remote, aloof, uninterested, a God who doesn’t really care for our needs and has to be badgered into taking action on our behalf. Such a view is completely wrong. The Bible reveals a God who, long before it even occurs to men and women to turn to him, while they are still lost in darkness and sunk in sin, takes the initiative, rises from his throne, lays aside his glory, and stoops to seek until he finds them.

— John Stott, Basic Christianity, get this book as eBook for $3.60.

(HT:  OFI)

Why Was Jesus Unintimidated by Pilate?

Great meditation here by John Piper, for those, like me, who wrestle with fear.

Swimming Lessons: A Window into Our Faith

Michael Kelley:

You put a child in the water and they cling to you. HARD. They cling with a violent intensity because they are convinced, in that moment, that their strength is really what’s keeping them from drowning.

But us daddy’s have a secret – it’s not their strength keeping the kids afloat. It’s ours. The reason they aren’t going to drown is because we won’t let them.

But then there’s the wonderful moment when they realize that my grip is stronger than theirs. You can almost see the freedom flicker into their eyes. They suddenly come to the understanding, in a child like way, that their perseverance – their safety – isn’t dependent on their ability to hold on. Their arms are child’s arms. They get tired. But my arms are far stronger. And even when they let go of me because of exhaustion, I’m not going to let them go.

See, I’m their father. And I love them.

I suspect the gospel is lurking there, too, during daddy swim lessons.

Read the rest.

Get Michael's new book, Wednesdays were Pretty Normal: A Boy, Cancer, And God.

Worry Can Diagnose Our Idols

Craig Groeschel:

Someone said “Worry is distrusting the promises and power of God” and I think that is a good definition of it. One of the things I’m trying to help readers realize is that what we worry about or what we fear really reveals two things. First of all, it reveals what we value the most. For example if we’re worried about our kids’ safety, we value our kids. If we worry about financial stability, we value financial stability. But on a deeper level, what we fear reveals what we value the most and, too, it reveals where we trust God the least. If I’m always worried about my kids, I’m not trusting God with my kids. If I’m always worried about financial stability, I’m not trusting God to provide for me. And so what I try to do is get beyond the surface of “Hey, everybody worries” to say that worry is a sign of a deeper spiritual problem that we need to take to God and let Him cleanse.

Read the rest from an interview concerning Craig's new book, Soul Detox.

Seeing God in the Darkness

Randy Alcorn:

Howard Hendricks tells of visiting a leprosy center in India. The morning he arrived, the residents were gathered for a praise service. One of the women with leprosy hobbled to the platform. Hendricks said that even though she was partially blind and badly disfigured, she was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen.

Raising both of her nearly fingerless hands toward Heaven, she said in a clear voice, “I want to praise God that I am a leper because it was through my leprosy that I came to know Jesus Christ as my Savior. And I would rather be a leper who knows Christ than be completely whole and a stranger to His grace.”

Seeing God’s hand in our adversities comes in many different forms.

After serving in a ministry for fifteen years, a brother I know, named Dan, endured a ten-year spiritual drought. He told me, “I felt like God just wasn’t there. My spiritual life became pointless.”

Finally, Dan determined to draw near to God, hoping God would keep his promise to draw near to him (see James 4:8). Ten Saturdays in a row he took a chair into the woods and sat for hours at a time. He vowed he would keep coming until “God showed up.” He brought pen and paper to write reflections. For the first nine weeks he sensed no contact with God and so had little to write.

On the tenth Saturday, suddenly Dan started writing. He felt God’s presence like a gentle wave, for the first time in ten years. Beginning that day, his life changed. He told me, “As miserable as those years were, I would not trade it for anything, because God showed me that my earlier fifteen years of Christian life and ministry had really been about me, not him. I had lived on my terms, not his. At last I was seeing God.”

Dan said, “After it was all over, I thanked God for those ten years.” Yet during that dark time, Dan said he couldn’t have imagined ever being grateful for it.

Since detailed past, present, and future knowledge is unavailable to us, we sometimes see negative circumstances as random and pointless. We do not see that God has and will accomplish good purposes through them. Who but God is wise enough to know…or powerful enough to make it happen?

Read the rest.


Books by Randy Alcorn:

• Heaven
• If God Is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil
• Money, Possessions, and Eternity
• The Treasure Principle: Unlocking the Secret of Joyful Giving (LifeChange Books)
• Heaven for Kids
• Safely Home

Real Providence, Real Hope

We are almost finished reading The Hobbit to our kids for the first time. Can't wait to dive into the Lord of the Rings next! I appreciated this post from Dane Ortlund.

Dane Ortlund:

My favorite two passages in one of my favorite books, The Hobbit.

The first is as Bilbo Baggins goes down the tunnel in the Lonely Mountain, approaching the dragon Smaug.

It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait. (p. 193)

The second is at the end of the story, when Balin and Gandalf come and visit Bilbo. Bilbo remarks that the prophecies appear to be coming true.

“Of course!” said Gandalf. “And why should they not prove true? Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!” (last page of book)

I am reminded that there is a real battle, a real journey, a real Smaug, a real demise of Smaug, a real Home, a real prophecy, a real fulfillment of prophecy, a real role in that fulfillment. Real providence; real hope.

God Desires All to Be Saved, and Grants Repentance to Some

John Piper:

Put two texts together, and see what you see.

“God desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (eis epignōsin alētheias)” (1 Timothy 2:4).

“God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth (eis epignōsin alētheias)” (2 Timothy 2:25).

Here’s what I see...

Read the rest.

"Too many ‘pastors’ are selling God as little more than a robot programmed to respond to certain actions"

John Knight:

I had the pleasure of joining a group of people on Friday that included a Christian man from Ghana. He loves Jesus and he holds tightly to the promises of God in ways that are beautiful and humbling. He has been evangelizing, mentoring and teaching for years in Western Africa, including in some very dangerous places.

Last year he lost his daughter to an illness of some kind, a beautiful 21-year-old young woman about to finish college. He and his wife suffered greatly. The response from some of the Christian ‘leaders’ he knows made me sick: ‘confess your sins to me and she will be made well’ or ‘I have received a prophetic word that God has heard your prayers and she will leave the hospital.’ So little compassion, so much presumption, and so little Bible.

Yet, he knows that God is sovereign and good.

In fact, he spent most of the time talking about the dangerous advance of the health, wealth and prosperity gospel. Too many ‘pastors’ are selling God as little more than a robot programmed to respond to certain actions: if you need money, give the church more money and it will be returned to you in blessing; if you experience sickness, it is your fault because you don’t have enough faith, or you have unconfessed sin, or you have not been generous enough with your church.

No talk of the suffering Jesus told us to expect. No talk of Jesus being of greater treasure than all earthly goods. No mention of seeking God above all things. No hope in future grace.

Read the rest.

Suffering and Tornadoes

John Piper reflects on the recent disasters.