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November 09, 2003
God’s Plan and Our Destiny
God’s Plan and Our Destiny
Psalm 89: 1-18 / Jeremiah 29: 5-14
Ephesians 1: 7-12
November 9th, 2003
Last Sunday and this we have tried to understand the plan of our Creator for this planet and for us who populate it. Not exactly a simple task. I can feel presumptuous and bold even to try. Some times I think I see more clearly than at others. Jeremiah told us God’s word to Israel, “I know the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future and a hope.” We cling to this promise too. The psalm we read told of God’s plan for King David’s Family.
The Bible tells us, “God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the cosmos that we should be holy and blameless before Him”—who sees it all. Paul tacks on two words at the end that I don’t know how to fit with this sentence—“in love.” It seems to mean that everything God did was in love, out of love, because He loves us, because the entire Divine life emits love.
But having read this we ask, “OK, what does that mean, and how does this work? The world looks pretty out of control, and life can seem catch as catch can. There must be something going on behind the scenes.
Usually we don’t think about what’s going on behind the scenes. We’re busy enough with everyday matters so we don’t think about the big picture. I think a lot of people, even Christians, live as though there isn’t a bigger picture. Work, our friends, family needs, the war in Iraq, local politics, and our favorite sports team’s fortunes are enough for us to think about. We leave to the preachers and philosophers to dither with unseen things. But when we come to the deep moments of life, many of us realize there are deep questions brewing deep inside us all. Beneath all the noise, there are quiet depths in us all.
I had a funeral Friday morning for a family that has endured more than one family’s share of misery. I felt them looking at me for an explanation as I spoke of the love of God. At the moment I was wrestling inside with my wife’s physical problems. Concern for her somehow provided me a funnel, a scope, to see their need better at that moment.
Though I could not fix their lives, I could understand a little. The hymn writer wrote, “Jesus knows our every weakness, take it to the Lord in prayer.” We don’t sing, “Jesus fixes our every problem,” but Jesus “knows our every weakness.” It helps just to think that Jesus knows. What is happening is not going on in utter, lonely, nothingness. I think of people locked in prison cells away from friends, family, away from all who care about them. They feel forgotten and that makes life unspeakably awful. It was this that Jesus lamented from the cross, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Is there something going on behind the scenes that might make sense of all the pain, all the sorrow?
It must have been this vacuum of understanding that the Apostle Paul tried to fill when he wrote the passage we read together just moments ago. He wasn’t writing in an air-conditioned library at a seminary. He was probably in prison in Rome when he wrote this letter.
He must have viewed his own life’s odd course with wonder. Here he was the principal spokesman for an outlook on life and a way of life he once hated passionately. The eleven remaining men who had been Jesus’ companions for three years deferred to him who was probably one of those in Jerusalem telling Pontius Pilate, “Crucify Him.” Why did God wait until he’d made a lot of Christians miserable, and may have presided at the beating and execution of a few, before calling him so dramatically to a right about face? The Holy Spirit whispered to him, “I chose you before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before me. And I don’t view time quite like you do. I created time. Even when you were cursing Christians, I saw a different man—Paul the Christian, not Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor of Christians.”
Perhaps Paul could see this on a personal level. Maybe he could recognize that there was logic to his life that only God could devise. But on a global scale, on the scale of history, why weren’t things coming together better? After the Light shined in the darkness, as the prophet Isaiah put Jesus’ coming, why had things become gloomier still? Well, God doesn’t rush things, that’s all. “Hurry” is not in God’s dictionary. Time for God isn’t what time is for you and me. Paul saw a great Plan at work, and God’s idea of a schedule saw time as only a blip on the screen of eternity.
The whole idea of God’s foreknowledge and predestination is an attempt to figure out how God, who created Time itself as well as all material things, presides over what happens. Some of John Calvin’s extreme ideas on God’s micro-management of all creation are a stab at trying to understand how the God who created Time and all things works in time with all things. We simply cannot understand this. What he wrote sometimes seems absurd. We will forever fight the battle of predestination versus free will because we do not understand God’s ways—who created time, cause and effect, and all of that.
And so the Apostle Paul wrote this circular letter for Christians of all time to read. The Holy Spirit carried Paul along, using his cultivated mind and heart to pour out these sublime hints of God’s ways. Here we find God explaining to us something of what is in His mind for this fallen creation.
Along the way in the Bible we come to passages where the glory shines through. When we come to matters like this that are so beyond us we must stop asking questions and listen intently. Listen: “In the economy of the fullness of times, all things are gathered up in Christ, things in heaven and on earth. In Him.” Economy? That means how things work out.
All things? What is included in “all things?” What comes to your mind when you hear the term, “all things?” What comes to the mind of a person in happy circumstances is different from what comes to mind for a person in misery. My young friend from Zambia, Mweemba Mwaanga, writes to me with excitement about learning to cultivate a banana plantation. He asks me to pray. His idea of “all things” that Jesus holds together is developing a banana farm to provide work and income for himself and others. Your idea of “all things” probably doesn’t include banana plantations.
All things—does that include the intricacies of nature? Does it include the deeds of evil people, Attila the Hun, Joseph Stalin, Gary Gilmore? Does it include yesterday’s football games, and tomorrow’s basketball games, and the quadriplegic that’ll never play any kind of ball game, but who is as valuable to God as Peyton Manning? All things gathered up in Christ?
The word for “gathered up,” (Ajnakefalaiwvsasqai) is a word picture. It begins with a small piece of word that can mean “again,” or “above,” or a number of other ideas. The word we translate as “born again” or “born from above,” uses this little piece of a word. The main part of the word derives from the word “head” (kefalhv). It suggests that everything finds its significance under the headship of Jesus. What does that mean?
We sometimes have to remind ourselves that there is a bigger picture in which particular events find their context. It takes a lot of snowflakes to make a snowstorm. One flake does not make a winter season. The moments in our lives are like snowflakes in a blizzard. Everything has a larger context. Jesus Christ is the big context, Paul tells us.
We speak of the “age of Napoleon,” or the “Age of Reason.” One personality or one idea gives its/his name to the whole. The name, “Jesus Christ” presides over time and the universe in a comparable way.
Elsewhere in a letter very much like Ephesians Paul wrote of Jesus, “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible . . . all things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
When things don’t seem to be holding together, God reminds us here that it is not as it seems. God offers us these glimpses of the larger view to comfort us in distress. But there’s more to it than this.
In the short run that appears as particular seasons of our lives we get caught up in fads of living. We who are older look at the passing fads of the younger generations. Tattoos and body piercing today are like the duck-tail haircuts and leather jackets of my teen-age years. Fads are passing fascinations. We compare fad clothing with classic clothing. Bell bottom jeans didn’t last long. Somehow the classic gray flannel suit keeps on showing up though generations come and go. Elvis Presley may be thought of as “classic” to some folk, but he’ll be forgotten while Beethoven’s symphonies are still selling CDs.
Perhaps the least recognizable fad is living as though the one who ends up with the most toys at the end wins the game of life. The consuming fad of every passing generation is that life consists of the abundance of things we possess. It’s as though the great symbol of life, the key to happiness is material. Jesus asked the rich fool “This night your soul is required of you. Then whose will these things be?” He was all caught up in the fad of apparent security and milking life for all money can buy. You and I are lured into this fad too. And Jesus says to us, surrounded by all we have and cling to, “This night your soul is required of you. Then whose will these things be?”
But we’re not stuck in this fad. Paul reminds us of a classic truth, that we live in the Age of Jesus. And in the way of Jesus we can find an alternate way of life. This is part of the hope found in the insight that in Christ all things hold together. Nowadays, folk who were licking their chops with their investment successes, allowed because of insider information they got at a good time, are running scared. What seemed like a windfall now feels like a tornado. But those whose eyes are fixed on Jesus, who look at their work, at their money, at their amusements, at their relationships through the lens of Jesus, are living a life that holds together.
Does your life fit in a framework larger than yourself?
But this is a truth we must hold very carefully. Because there is another fad that grabs at us: it’s the fad of religious triumphalism. Neither Jesus nor Paul ever intended that Christians should walk around with a smirk because they know it all. If we read that “in Christ all things hold together,” and use this confidence to make us feel superior to people who do not see this, we have missed the boat. Paul did not tell us these things to give us a feeling of superiority over other people.
Far from it. As Paul could be concerned that after preaching to others he might be a castaway, so you and I are wise to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling,” trusting that it is God who is at work in us to will and to do His good pleasure. When Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, “God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth,” He gave worship orders that remain in effect for us.
Calvin reminds us in his Institutes of the Christian Religion very often that one principal effect in us of trusting in God’s foreknowledge, is humility. God shows us glimpses of His plan not to make us proud that we have some inkling of what He is up to, but to make us realize how small we are. But humility is so soon forgotten as we are deluded by the fad of smugness in believing we are right and others are wrong.
God does not intend for us to grovel in this sense of smallness, because He tells us other things too—that we were made in His image, that He loved us so much that He gave us His Son to die to atone for our sins. That God should expend such effort and cost on us gives us dignity. But it is a dignity He gives, rather than a dignity we earn. We are a part of God’s plan. Bask in this, but humbly. You didn’t earn a bit of your good fortune.
What benefit is there in knowing there is such a thing as God’s providence and trusting it is true?
A good answer is found in our beloved Heidelberg Catechism, the answer to Question 28: “We may be patient in adversity, thankful in prosperity, and for what is future have good confidence in our faithful God and Father that no creature shall separate us from his love, since all creatures are so in his hand that without his will they can not so much as move.”
I have felt despair in days past, and find myself clinging to what is for sure—even if it is beyond me. In Jesus Christ all things hold together—no matter what is going on right at the moment. So, your life holds together. And my life holds together. And life in Zambia where poverty and AIDS are scourging the population is holding together. And life in Iraq in its present confusion will some day be recognized as a scramble that God is working together for good too.
The benefit of seeing some of these things comes in ordering your life accordingly. God does not command the details of your life explicitly. But He created the context in which you live –– in Jesus Christ who presides over all time, over all geography, and even over all space. And though often we cannot see ho w it is so, Jesus is presiding in love. And unlike your love and mine, nothing at all can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. He gave you a mind to apply trust in His goodness to the details of your own choices. I pray you are choosing well. I pray you’ll accept Jesus’ forgiveness for when you have chosen badly in the past. Commit your ways to the Lord for days to come, and He will surely lead you well.
Because God is leading you according to a plan. And life holds together when, trusting God, we work out the details of His plan.
O God, we thank you for such glimpses as you allow us of Your loving ways, of Your hand at work in what seems the confusion of our world. Help us to trust you, and so to live pleasing to you. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette
Posted by faithpres at November 9, 2003 09:30 AM