Trust and the Will of God (part 1)

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to
this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make
money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow.
What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while
and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s
will, we will live and do this or that.”
—James 4:13–15

Planning is something we do every day, a necessary effort to make the
most of our time here on earth. Without an intelligent plan, disorder and
chaos overwhelm us.

Yet James insists that planning can be “evil” (his word, not mine) if we
plan without making room for God. Why? Because it’s presumptuous to assume
that we have that much control over our lives. How can we presume to
mark our calendars one year hence when we don’t know what the next moment
will bring? How can we plan so confidently for tomorrow when we may
not be here when it comes?

You are a mist, says James, a vapor, a puff of smoke, a flitting cloud, a
breath (“breath and britches,” my mother used to say). Here today, gone tomorrow. A vagrant virus, an inadvertent stumble, a stray bullet, an errant motorist strikes us down or takes us out. We’re completely at the mercy of our circumstances.

Yet circumstance is not chance. There are no random happenings, no uncaused
events. The various fortunes of life are in God’s hands. That’s why we
ought to say, “If the Lord wills I will do this or that.” Anything else is playing
God.

Here James is concerned with what theologians call providence.
The term comes from two Latin words pro and videre, meaning “to look ahead” and thus “to plan in advance” and finally “to carry out the plan.” And since the agent of providence is an all-knowing, all-powerful God whom nothing and
no one can resist, literally everything is included in His plan.

There is no cause other than God. His wisdom is the reason for everything
and His power the means by which everything is carried out. There are no
accidents, no flukes, no fortuities, no maverick molecules, no loose ends.
“There is no neutral ground in the universe,” C. S. Lewis says. “Every square
inch, every split second is claimed by God.”

If you have trouble with this assertion, I suggest you simply read the
Scriptures and let them make their own impression on you. (Take, for example,
Psalm 139 and David’s insistence that everything about him had been
worked out in God’s mind long before it was worked into his DNA.) You’ll
find that the writers express the thought of God’s sovereignty repeatedly and
incisively, but the assurance with which they express it, or simply assume it,
should have an even more convincing effect.

The biblical writers were not fools. They saw the problem inherent in
God’s sovereignty and human free will. They understood they were dealing
with issues that appeared to be conflictive and inexplicable, yet they did not
stumble over apparent contradiction, nor did they try to reconcile what appear
to be disparate facts. They simply asserted our moral responsibility in
all things and God’s control over all things and moved on.

This is not the place to delve into this issue; it’s enough to say at this point
that there is no contradiction in God, only paradox and enigma. And the
closer we get to our Lord, the more paradoxical and enigmatic things begin
to appear. We should expect that to be so. “If I knew of a theory in which was
never an uncompleted arch or turret,” George MacDonald wrote, “in whose
circling wall was never a breach, that theory I should know but to avoid: such
gaps are the eternal windows through which the dawn shall look in.”

Join David tomorrow for part 2 of “Trust and the Will of God.”

Taken from Seeing God, © 2006 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566, Grand Rapids MI 4950l. All rights reserved.