Skip to main content

Planned

                Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you and praise your name, for in perfect faithfulness you have done wonderful things, things planned long ago.   (Isaiah 25:1)

                One of the problems evolutionists have is that they can’t believe any being capable of creating all that is, in all its detail, with a few sentences. It’s all too complicated to plan and organize in so short a time. (One. I didn’t say they didn’t have other problems.) After all, it takes months or years to do an oil painting. An engineer takes time designing whatever he’s making and develops drawings and blueprints. He doesn’t do it off the top of his head. Were it possible for an engineer to design and build a living thing, it would probably take him years. Maybe decades..

                While we may claim we’re not evolutionists, I think we face something of the same difficulty when it comes to God having designed our lives. How could He have planned the second-by-second lives of billions of people and probably trillions or quadrillions of other things, both living and not, matter and energy, and thousands of years in advance? During an afternoon tea with the Trinity, and started it in motion after saying, “One last sip, and here we go”?

                I tend to think there is some wiggle room built into the dance He’s choreographed, that the color of the shirt we choose to wear today is a detail He doesn’t necessarily dictate. But as we look at our lives and at the things coming at us, we don’t tend to think in terms of God’s having planned all this out. We may know that the Bible say so, but we’re more like the disciples who fretted, worried, and finally accused Jesus of not caring whether they died in the storm. He may know. We say we believe He does know the plans He has for us…but when our stories become suspenseful, or difficult, or tedious, we get fussy instead of heroic. Or, maybe we get fussy so that we can become heroic. After all, heroism isn’t needed if there’s no problem and no risk.

                Today’s verse is one I should memorize and repeat as often as I feel fussy. It’s a step beyond God knowing the plans He has for us, it’s recognizing that whatever is happening is within God’s plans and thanking Him for it. It shifts the meditation from “Things are out of control, and God is asleep at the helm” to “God’s got this.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The List

              Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,   through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;   perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5)           Think about it. We have been justified. At least, we could be justified if we stopped insisting that our justification be based on our merits. We have peace with God, or could have peace if we stopped throwing temper tantrums. We have gained access into grace i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Meditations of the Heart

  May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. (Psalm19:14)           As I started writing this post, I noted that the meditations of my heart are all over the mental landscape, from a hub where eight superhighways come together to a lunar or nuclear landscape. Do you see my error? The moment I read the word meditation , I think about thoughts. But what’s described here is the meditations of our hearts ; our wills.           While the meditations of our minds may be all over the place, the meditations of our wills tend to be a little more stable by the time we are adults. We no longer tend to want to pursue the ten separate careers we did in any given day as children. Part of this is humble acceptance of reality. We come to understand that we can’t do it all. I think another part of it is disappointmen...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Way, The Truth, and The Life

              Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me . (John 14:6)           If “I am the gate of the sheep…I am the good shepherd” from chapter 10 is a double whammy, this verse is a triple whammy. And its first victim is the notion that any other so-called god was acceptable or the same as Jesus. He, and He alone is the way, the truth, and the life, and the only way to get to the Father. There is no other Savior, or Redeemer, according to Jesus. Now, to be fair, other religions will claim that their religion or god(s) are the only way. That is the nature of gods and of religions. If this and that are equally good and agree on what’s necessary, then this and that are the same thing, so there’s no need to from the other to one. If that’s the case, then why speak against the other or promote the one? There’s a song I’ve been listening to i...
Post a Comment
Read more