Have you ever noticed the themes that seem to show up in your life sometimes? Like when you start looking at buying a new car, and you find one you like, you start to see that car everywhere; you hear a song that you enjoy, and suddenly you start hearing it every place you go.
I’ve had much the same experience over the last six months with the idea of God’s sovereignty and his providence – his complete and total rule over the entire universe, and the way that he sustains and directs all created things to accomplish his purposes. In every passage that I turn to, each book that I read, and in many of the conversations that I have, the power and authority of God over his creation is writ large, and if he is truly sovereign, and if he truly loves us, then we can trust him in every circumstance, no matter how difficult it is for us to understand.
This is a concept that some folks have been struggling with through the pandemic, wondering on one extreme how God could allow a virus like this to spread around the world, or on the other extreme, how he could let so many people be deceived; on either end of the spectrum people are scared and frustrated. The upcoming election gives us yet another possible source of discontent and distrust – no matter who wins, and what happens after the election, someone (most likely some of the people closest to you) will be disappointed, scared, frustrated, and wondering how God could allow this.
One of the best things that we can be reminding ourselves, and the people around us, that even in the face of tremendous human uncertainty, God remains on his throne – he is still in control, and he is still working all things together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. In Christ, we have the confidence and assurance to face any situation, any scare, any loss, any deprivation. We can have confidence not just in our hope of heaven (which can become escapism), but in the fact that God is using every one of these circumstances to drive us to faith and repentance, and to shape us and mold us into the image of Christ – he is using these things to make us more like Jesus.
If you are uncertain, if your friends and family are wavering, remember that God was the one who used the imprisonment of Joseph to save his family; the one who used the sin of David to accomplish the promise made to him; he is the one who used the single greatest evil the world has ever known to accomplish the single greatest good the world has ever known – the death of his son used to redeem his people from their sin and death.
If we can trust him to do those things, we can entrust ourselves to him in a pandemic, a chaotic election, and the potential of an undesirable outcome. We can entrust ourselves to him in the face of cancer, abandonment, sin and death. He has overcome, and our faith is in him, and not in any thing that this world has to offer.