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November 02, 2003
Does God Micro-Manage World History?
Does God Micro-Manage World History?
Psalm 135 / Daniel 7: 13-22
Ephesians 1: 1-6
November 2nd, 2003
In the 135th Psalm we read this morning, “Whatever the Lord pleases he does in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps.” I thought of these words as I mulled over the words from Paul’s letter that we just read. God’s plans stem not from yesterday, but from “before the foundation of the world.” What is the texture of God’s plans? The Lord does what he pleases in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps, and in the lives of people. God’s hand shapes our lives.
Oddly, it is when powerfully destructive outbursts of nature’s power come that we refer to them as “acts of God.” A tornado is an act of God. A destructive flood or a mudslide in California is an act of God. Why do we mostly call harsh outbreaks of nature “acts of God?”
Speaking with one of you this week I learned a little about the amazing digestive process that takes place in a cow. I quoted from William Blake’s admiring poem, “What immortal hand or eye can form thy fearful symmetry.” Blake wrote this of the tiger, but the lines came to me thinking of the extraordinary process that takes place in the four stomachs of every cow grazing in a pasture. Every cow is an act of God. God made the genetic process by which those four stomachs develop in every baby calf in its mother’s womb. When it is very young, its mother’s milk bypasses the three stages hay and grass will pass through later on. Four stomachs never develop in human beings—ever. Though we eat beef, human beings never imbibe the genetics of the cows they eat. God presides over nature. We assume that God micro-manages the details that work in the bodies of all creatures great and small in nature. God keeps all these details sorted out.
The Bible tells us that God rules over nations too.
Paul wrote in Romans, “There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” He wrote this even though he lived during the years when Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero were the emperors of Rome. Caligula was a madman, and Nero became a madman. Paul would be executed by Nero, who also was an “authority . . . instituted by God.”
Our Lord told Pontius Pilate, a minor but ruthless governor in “the Judean Province,” when Tiberius was the emperor, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above.” At the time Jesus stood there stripped, bloodied, and apparently helpless. But there was a reason why he was unbowed before Pilate.
God put that worst of the Roman procurators in his place in Judea. From our perspective, seeing that Jesus’ death-sentence by Pilate brought about the atoning death of Jesus, so that we could be saved from the penalty of our sin, we have a hunch how God presided over that period of time. As Joseph said to his brothers in the Old Testament story, Jesus might have said it to Pilate, “You meant it for evil but God meant it for good.” Was God micro-managing, “skillfully” tying together what we see as good and evil, to achieve a purpose for which we are glad?
The rise and fall of nations and empires is part of the “whole world” that God holds in His hands. St. Augustine saw the Roman Empire crumbling before the ruthless hordes of barbarians and thought the end was near. But it was just God moving pieces on his chessboard. It was time for the Roman Empire to give way for the next tool in the hands of the Sovereign Lord of time and eternity.
The 1930s and 1940s saw the rapid rise and then the precipitous fall of the Third Reich in Germany. Hitler thought he would be master of the world, but he died miserably in a Berlin bunker. God tossed this pretender to the side like a rag doll. He had done his worst to stamp out God’s people, the Jews. He did his worst to kill off other kinds of people he despised. But, as Luther wrote of the devil in his great hymn, “We tremble not for him, his rage we can endure, for lo his doom is sure.”
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-*This sermon reflects more than I spoke on Sunday morning, and I include this longer discussion with apologies for its length.
The second psalm speaks of his kind; “The Lord shall have them in derision.” At the time it seemed that God let things get out of control. “Where was God at Auschwitz?” Elie Wiesel asked very reasonably. When I see great evil being done like this, I come to see that no matter how massive the scale of evil, Hitler could only kill bodies. He could not kill the soul of any of those whom he tortured.
I believe there is a distinction between the permissive and the deliberate will of God, notwithstanding Calvin’s argument that God intends specifically all that happens. God allowed the evil of the Third Reich to continue for a time before He intervened and said, “Enough!” Looking back we presume to think we can see that even in that evil time God’s hand was sculpting history. God allowed evil to appear as evil before ending it.
I think of these things when I see how powerful America is now on the world stage. We’d better think better than Rome and Germany did. Though we too are part of the history God is shaping for His ends.
When we look back and know a little of what has taken place in history, we see it from a distance, not feeling the pain of particular moments. Seen from God’s perspective, it can seem that hard times were far away like turmoil that might take place in a molecule, such a minute fraction of the whole. Time and history comprise the “organism” God is shaping. Even “great” movers and shakers like Alexander the Great or the subsequent Roman Empire with its series of emperors were only minute particles in the organism of time over which God reigns.
I think of how bacteria and infections regularly wage war inside our bodies. But God has put in place within our bodies defenses to handle these enemies routinely. God has created in our bodies antibodies and white blood cells that defeat infections and bad bacteria. A fraction of the time what we call malignant cells gang up and hurt us. Sometimes they win. When they do and a loved one dies, it is painful. But far more often God wins the battle in our bodies with the defense mechanisms He has established. Furthermore what takes place in our bodies unfolds part of God’s overall good plan, even though particular moments are painful.
When we look back at the unfolding of history, we see a sculpting Hand. When we look inside our bodies at how things work at the elemental level to keep our outward health good, we see a sculpting Hand.
But when we look at our immediate lives, things can sure seem to happen at random, with no control whatsoever. This morning the news told of the destruction of a Chinook helicopter taking some of our troops to Rest and Recreation in Iraq. I thought of the parents that will receive that dreaded phone call, saying their beloved children were killed. I think of wives with little children who will get the phone call saying, “Your children’s father and your husband was killed.” And they will cry out, “Why God?” After praying for their safety, their loved ones were killed. Why pray at all?
Zacherias Ursinus, back in the 1560s, thought about this kind of question after his young friend drowned in a boating accident. His friend had been drinking, but did he deserve to die for this indiscretion? He wrote in our favorite catechism about God’s purpose: “Whatever evil he sends my way in this troubled life he will turn to my good, for He is able to do it, being Almighty God, and determined to do it, being a faithful Father.” He wrote this for the consolation of his friend’s father, the Elector of the Palatinate, Frederick III. He wrote it for the sake of others who would feel stunning blows to their confidence in the goodness of God.
But it is very hard for us to understand this at the moment we are overwhelmed. We assume that powers beyond us are beyond God too, When “tragedy” engulfs us, we ask where is God?
If Jesus could ask on the cross, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” how much more we, who haven’t his resources, wonder if God has turned His back when we feel ourselves spread out on a cross. If God rules on earth, why is He not ruling more kindly now? What good does it do to look back over time to see a beautiful aggregate picture when the immediate picture is so ugly?
When we see what is taking place in the Middle East today, we wonder where God’s hand is in the terror. If we lived in Baghdad, we might well be asking now, “Why does God let this keep on?” An Iraqi mother looks at the broken body of her child, shredded with bomb fragments, and finds it hard to see the loving hand of God at work.
When we see the famine or the tragic spread of STDs in the third world, where superstitions inhibit relief, we wonder why God doesn’t do something about it. Questions like this loom so large in some people’s minds that they think that either there is no God, or that God is not all-powerful, or that if He exists and is all-powerful, He is not good. They will not do God the honor of worshipping Him if He is not good. They’ll endure their fate at His hands rather than bow to Him.
It is this that Paul had in mind, I believe, in the passage from Ephesians that we read together moments ago. He wrote of God’s plan from before the foundation of the cosmos.
The best evidence is that this book of the New Testament was not a letter written to a single congregation in Ephesus. Instead it was a document Paul wanted every church to read. It was to circulate from one to another so that followers of Jesus could realize that in those very harsh times God had a good plan that was working. Perhaps Ephesus was the last congregation to read this letter before it came to be copied and re-copied, so “Ephesus” got permanently attached to this profound explanation of God’s purposes. God’s purposes extend fundamentally to us whom He “chose before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before Him.” He did this “in love.” Why doesn’t Paul address the big questions? He does. The big question has to do with what happens in the lives of people God shaped in His own image and likeness. This confusing thing called “time” warps what we see as the big picture. God sees at the more basic level of the individual for whose sake He sent His Son to this planet.
Jesus said to Pilate, who asked if He was king of the Jews, “My kingdom is not of this world.” To His disciples He said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” Far from being a “pie in the sky by and by” kind of thing, Jesus meant that something right now is happening that is bigger than we know. The Kingdom of God is like the organism, and what takes place at particular moments of history, or in moments in your life and mine, is like the tiny molecules living inside the big organism.
When Paul wrote that God “elected us in Him, that is, in Christ, before the foundation of the cosmos” he was describing the big picture from God’s point of view and how we fit into it. The importance of the big picture is found in the minute individuals that God chose before the foundation of the world—for a purpose—to be holy and blameless like their Creator.
The One who created the dust from which you and I come, Who makes from that same dust the continents on which nations rise and fall on patches of geography, has a master plan. You and I fit into that master plan. How? By virtue of a fact that we underplay, that God does not underplay. What fact? That we exist as living images of the God who made us.
Every one of us is in some sense a replica of God. We are made in His image. Every baby conceived in the womb, no matter how the conception began, is a replica of its Creator. You and I should treat one another with dignity. It is hard for us to understand this. Paul tells us of God’s plan for each of us who is a replica of our Creator: “God chose us in Christ Jesus, before the foundation of the cosmos, that we would be holy and blameless before Him.” That is, we were created to be like God. Who but God is “holy and blameless?”
Paul tacks on to the end of this phrase two words I don’t know how to fit in with the preceding words. “In love.” Maybe Paul is telling us that God who IS love, unfolds this scheme in keeping with His character—which is to love.
Here Paul describes God’s plan for you. Not nations and empires, but you! Before there was a world. Before whatever took place by which Planet Earth found a place in our solar system, God “dreamed” about you.
I think of Michelangelo imagining his statue of David before he had seen the block of marble on which he’d apply his sculptor’s hammer and chisel. Michelangelo could see the finished product of that amazing statue in his mind’s eye while the marble was still in the quarry. And he was a mere mortal.
The immortal God, who created time, chose, to make you and me. It was His plan for you and me that we be holy and blameless. Unwittingly, when we see hints of these characteristics in people, they please us. They please us because they point toward our Creator. Fragments of holiness and blamelessness in people reflect their Creator. He made us like Himself in ways we cannot understand.
Or think of this in another way. Sometimes a masterpiece of art is produced that is so good that even prints of it are of high value. You can buy numbered prints of great paintings. In the corner of the print you’ll see that it is number 16 of 100 prints made of the masterpiece. The print itself will be valuable. In a way you and I are like numbered prints of the heavenly Masterpiece, who is uncreated.
Paul tells us that as numbered prints of the Masterpiece, our purpose is to reflect the Prototype. God is holy and blameless. God chose us before time itself to live before Him, before each other, and indeed, before the world holy and blameless. This was what God had in mind for our first parents. God has not forgotten that plan.
He goes on, “God decided beforehand sonship for us through Jesus Christ.” This tells us that it was not merely simple goodness that God plans for us, but a relationship with Him—sonship. Why sonship and not “childship?” Because Jesus was God’s Son, and God sees us in Him. Why? Simply out of his good pleasure, His will. This is a relationship to our Creator that is so intimate it is hard to speak of it within the range of ideas available to us.
Our ideas of good fortune are usually limited to matters of good health, financial well-being, and political security. We know these are passing pleasures, but these occupy our principle energies. What it might be to have a relationship to God as sons and daughters is beyond us. We’d be happy if God would just preside over tornadoes, sending them where there are no houses, and over infectious diseases, and over the hatred of the human heart, and over the stock market, so that we could live here the way we like to live.
But the plans of God for us and for this world don’t stop where our shortsighted hopes and dreams begin and end. The faith we cling to, taught to us by example and precept by Jesus, leads us to trust God for this bigger purpose that we cannot see. We call it the “Providence of God.” Providence means foresight—what God can see that we cannot see.
Ursinus, still grieving over the loss of his dear friend, described the providence of God. “The almighty and everywhere present power of God, whereby, as it were by his hand, he still upholds heaven and earth, with all creatures, and so governs them that herbs and grass, rain and draught, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yes, all things, come not by chance, but by his fatherly hand.”
If you and I want to live with peace of mind in this troubled life, we have to train ourselves to see that there is more going on than we recognize. When people fly off the handle and do desperate things because of misfortune that comes to them, greater tragedy often follows. It is not only psychologically helpful, but also simply wise to trust that God not only sees the bigger picture, but also has already painted it.
I close with a story that some of you know. But it will not hurt to remind you of it. One of our beloved hymns says, “It is well with my soul.” The man who wrote these words experienced great tragedy just before. Horatio Spafford, a Chicago attorney who happened to be a Presbyterian, had just lost the bulk of his life’s investments in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The year before he’d lost his only son. To ease the pain he planned a trip to Europe with his wife and four daughters. But a business demand that came at the last moment kept him from joining his family on that trip.
So his wife and daughters left for Europe on the S.S. Ville du Havre in early November 1873. On the 22nd the ship was struck by another ship and sank in twelve minutes, claiming the lives of most people on board. His wife was one of the few survivors. She cabled her husband two words, “Saved alone.” Their four daughters drowned. Horatio Spafford caught the next ship for Europe. As he neared the place where the wreck took place that killed his daughters, he watched the high rolling waves and wrote in his journal, “When sorrows like sea billows roll.”
But rather than lingering on that crushing note of sorrow at his loss, he went on to write words that came to be a favorite hymn for many people who experienced the agony of loss,
When sorrows like sea billows roll,
Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say
It is well with my soul.
Often we have to be somewhat detached from immediate contact with what causes our pain to enjoy this expression of trust in God. What is the soul about which Spafford wrote, “It is well?” The soul is everything about us. The soul is larger than any moment. Tragedy doesn’t have the last word with “the soul.” The significance of your life is larger than anything that happens at one moment of joy or sorrow. We have to get beyond the moment to have any sense of our “soul.”
It is to this “soul” that Jesus speaks when He said, “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you.” Jesus offers you peace not by reminding you that you are only a tiny piece in the big puzzle of life, but by letting you know you are far more important to God than you imagine. You are a replica, indeed, a child of God. Even your momentary tragedy is a part of God’s good project with your soul.
The purpose and benefit of our faith is to appropriate this comforting fact, so much larger than any one moment’s significance. You can fortify yourself to meet tragedy by deliberately choosing to live out the truth that you belong to God. By choosing to live a “holy and blameless” life, however many times you may fail at particular moments, you put yourself into the orbit of God’s grace. We have a part to play in God’s purposes by the choices we make. God weaves together the good and the bad, caring for our souls—that is, the real “us,” in the long run. But the days and moments of life, which we think are so important, find us at peace when we accept God’s purpose, and choose to live it out—holy and blameless before Him.
This is God’s loving plan. Who could plan life better? His grace covering our sin in the long run. His plan for life providing a sure guide for our daily life. And as we follow God’s plan of holiness and blamelessness, we become instruments in His hand to execute His good will for others. I pray that you and I may be wise to accept our place in this gracious plan. I don’t presume to understand the mind of God, but these things seem to arise before me as I ponder the words of Scripture this morning, and look at the overall scheme of life. These things God is working out for our good, because He loves us, and has called us according to His purpose. His purposes are good.
Let us pray: O Lord, I have spoken of things beyond me. But we ask that your Holy Spirit may so direct us that we may take such as we can understand of your good ways, and be led to live out our days and moments in holiness and blamelessness, to the praise of your glorious grace. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at November 2, 2003 09:30 AM