The Sovereignty of God

[OBW]

Originally Posted by John

Jane and I were reasonably happy, and so were the sisters who lived with us. After a year, however, the elders began working on me to move back to the main meeting hall area. Their reason was that we had only brought in one person to the Local Church from the campus, and bringing people in was, in their minds, the only legitimate reason for living by the campus. I put them off about it and was told that we could have three more months. Jane, not wanting to leave, prayed desperately; and, soon, the Lord began adding students. Jane and I were thankful for the Lord’s blessing, which He gave us in spite of the elders’ plans for us and directions to us.

Has anyone considered that our understanding of God's sovereignty and blessing might be misguided? This snippet from John's post provides an excellent example. All of the discussion displays gross problems with the so-called local church and especially its leadership, and yet we think that the adding of students to that environment is the Lord's blessing.

Do we really think that every event is somehow orchestrated by the Lord and need to attribute everything to Him? To be bluntly honest, the blessing of the Lord in this kind of case would have been to open eyes sufficiently to recognize that there is no way that He could be blessing such a corrupt place or taking actions to keep you in good standing with it. If He were in the business of intervening the way we credit Him, it would have been to make it look so entirely bankrupt that John and Jane left then, before all the nightmare of what was still to come.

Or are we stuck with the notion that the "glory" of the LRC's early days was really about teachings like the ground of the church and all the things about the "church." Or was it instead something about the people. Something that was slowly terminated as the leadership of the system, from the top to the bottom, got its hands on the people and strangled the joy from their lives?

To put it another way, are we still wearing glasses that convince us that whatever we did in what we thought was following God has to have been just that? Might we have been fooled from the very beginning? Might we simply be over-attributing to God what was merely our own analysis of things based on what we thought we wanted?

If this seems a little shotgun, it is because I don't have a clear answer to it all. But I am convinced that even in the middle of mainstream Evangelicalism there is a propensity for trying to attribute so much to the will of God. That is the reason that some preachers say stupid things like "God must have needed your 1 year-old child more than you did." Always trying to spin things are because God ordained it specifically rather than acknowledging that the world and all that is in it is corrupt and that we are fallen people, both physically and spiritually, and therefore things happen. Because of the frailty of our bodies. Because of the unrighteousness of people (including ourselves).

And just because things look good is not presumed to be because God is favoring us. We should give him thanks in all things. But it might not be from his hand. It might be from the hand of someone cloaked in the appearance of goodness and light. You always thank God. But don't presume that because it was good and you thanked God that it is actually something he overtly did for you. It might have been done by the enemy just to convince you to stay in that mess so that maybe you would be so embittered that you just left God altogether. Thankfully, for many of us he failed.