9. Why Would He Say No?
THE EARECKSON HOME
MARYLAND
JUNE 1972
It has been three weeks now, and nothing has changed. My body still hasn’t got the message.
I give the mental command to my fingers and toes. Move! And there’s nothing. Nothing at all. Okay, so it will be a gradual change. I can handle that. I’ll wake up in the morning and feel the tiniest tingle, a feather-brush across my little finger. Or I’ll make a small, small movement of one of my toes—maybe just a thirty-second of an inch. Just a fraction of an inch would be the best thing in the whole world! It would mean a beginning … a baby’s step … an ant’s step … toward healing.
But for right now, it’s the hard work of believing that it’s already done. I’m trying so hard to believe. Trying so hard to hang onto faith with everything in me. But what if it’s not enough? What if I’m not believing hard enough? What if I’ve allowed the shadow of a doubt? Will that nullify everything?
I had such hopes! (There I go, talking in the past tense, as if healing won’t happen. Maybe I’ve lost faith already.)
A group of us went to an old, picturesque country church with a steeple, not far from home. Friends, family, church leaders, elders, pastors. I had asked them all to come to pray for my healing, and they did. Almost everyone.
We began by reading Scripture out loud—some reading from the New Testament, some reading from the Old. God honors His own Word, right? That’s what I’ve always heard.
Then, as the summer rain beat down on the church roof, some read specific promises from the Bible about healing. And they seem so clear!
Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well;the Lord will raise him up.
That’s right out of the book of James (5:14–15). Others read the stories of those who were healed—like the paralytic man in the book of Mark. Jesus said, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home” (2:11). And he did! Just like that.
After we read, they anointed my head with olive oil. Then how we prayed! Hands of many on my head, my shoulders. Such fervent prayer, with tears. Such faith in that room. We asked God to glorify Himself by allowing me to walk again. And I’m telling you, we believed it would happen.
So why can’t I move? Why am I still in this wheelchair? Oh Lord, didn’t You hear us? Did I do it all wrong? Don’t You care? I do believe—help my unbelief!
I didn’t get right up out of the wheelchair. But that was okay. The Bible says of the ten lepers, “As they went, they were cleansed”(Luke 17:14). So it didn’t have to be right then.
Leaving the little church with my prayer team, I felt humbled by it all. How wonderful that God had seen me in my distress and heard the cry of my heart. Exiting through the front door, it was as if heaven was giving us a glorious amen. The rain had stopped, the parking lot was flooded with golden light, the puddles molten gold, and a majestic rainbow burned across the sky in the misty distance.
As the car drove away, I kept saying, “Thank You, Lord! Thank You, Lord,” over and over. I knew it had already begun. The feeling would return. The strength would come. I would soar on wings of eagles. I would run and not grow weary, walk and not faint.
Even though nothing had happened (yet), I kept that secret little glow of joy and gratitude alive in my heart all through the evening. I woke up the next morning with strong expectation. This would be the day! Or then again … maybe tomorrow.
But now the days have come and gone. It’s been two weeks, and there’s nothing.
I keep fighting off this thought that tries to take over my emotions. There must be something wrong with me. There must be sin in my life. I must not be believing hard enough.
But I know I had faith. I even called some of my friends the week before the healing service and said, “Watch for me standing on your doorstep soon. I’m going to be healed!”
Still … it has to be me. It has to be something wrong with me.
FORTY YEARS LATER
I remember those days so well.
To be healed of suffering is to be happy.
This line of thinking is the path I took in those early weeks and months of dealing with my paralysis.
I tried to imagine what He was thinking. If God were God—I was convinced He was all powerful and loving—He had to be as anxious to relieve my pain as I was. A heavenly Father had to weep over me as my daddy often did, standing by my bedside, white-knuckling the guardrail. I was one of God’s children, and God would never do anything to harm one of His own. Would He?
Didn’t Jesus say, “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then … know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven?” (Luke 11:11–13)?
So I was asking Him for a fish. I was asking Him for an egg. I was begging Him for something good. Wouldn’t leaving me in paralysis for the rest of my life be like handing me a loathsome, lethal snake or scorpion? Would a loving Father treat His daughter like that? Of course not! He had to want me healed and whole again.
After a couple of years, I remember thinking to myself, Maybe I’ve learned the lessons God wanted to teach me. I’m doing okay in this wheel-chair. The suicidal thoughts are gone. Depression comes less frequently. My whole family is a lot closer to the Lord. I’m a bit more patient, and hey, I think I’m doing pretty well without the use of my hands. And didn’t the Lord say, “Ask and it will be given to you?” (Matthew 7:7)?
But how should I ask for healing? I thought of my horse when I was a young girl, of how I had to learn to catch her to put the halter on. No horse wants to be caught. If they see you coming, they gallop away. So when I got within a few yards, I turned and sat with my back to her. Sure enough, within minutes I felt her muzzle on my back. I slowly turned, stroked her forehead, and gently slipped the halter over her head.
Maybe God is that way—maybe He’s waiting for me to turn my back on my wish for a healthy body. Or to turn my back on wanting to catch Him. I began to wonder if I should just release my angst, just let it go. Maybe that way, He would come up behind me and give me my wish.
My sister Jay and I heard that Kathryn Kuhlman, a famous faith healer, was coming to the Washington, D.C., Hilton ballroom. Stories had reached us about cancer-ridden people who’d been cured in Philadelphia at one of her crusades. I wondered if I should go to the healing service in Washington, D.C.
One morning, when Jay was putting my legs through my range-of-motion exercises, Ernest Angley came on television. He was an odd sort of man who wore a bad toupee and ill-fitting suits, and Jay and I enjoyed his antics. My sister and I stopped and watched as people dropped their crutches or got up out of their wheelchairs, many raising their hands and declaring they were free from pain.
“Do you think God could heal you?” Jay asked, staring at the screen.
“Maybe it is time,” I replied. And so, wondering if this might be an answer to the prayers of many, we found our way to Washington Hilton and the packed-out healing service.
I remember the night so well. Miss Kuhlman breezed onto the stage in her white gown, and my heart raced as I prayed, “Lord, the Bible says You heal all our diseases. I’m ready for You to get me out of this wheelchair. Please, would You?”
God answered. And again, His answer was no.
Wheeling away from the crusade that night, I was number fifteen in a line of thirty wheelchair-users waiting to exit at the stadium elevator, all of us trying to make a fast escape ahead of the people on crutches. I remember glancing around at all the disappointed and confused people and thinking, Something’s wrong with this picture. Is this the only way to deal with suffering? Trying desperately to remove it?
When I looked in the mirror after I got home, I saw their sullen expression staring back. I was just as perplexed as the people near the elevator.
Okay, let me get this straight: God is good. God is love. He is all powerful. Plus, when He walked on earth, He bent over backward to relieve the sufferings of people, everyone from the hemorrhaging woman to the centurion’s servant. So why does my five-year-old niece, Kelly, have brain cancer? Why did my brother-in-law abandon my sister and their family? Why does Daddy’s arthritis not respond to medication?
There had to be something I wasn’t seeing.
There had to be other reasons—good reasons beyond my understanding—for God to allow such suffering.
Looking for Answers
I remember reading all the books on healing I could get my hands on. Gleaning counsel from friends and pastors and Christian leaders. Everyone agreed that God could heal any person any time, no matter how serious the problem.
But it was frustrating. No one could agree whether God wills to heal everybody who comes to Him in faith. Some said one thing, some said something else. And everyone seemed to back their positions with Scripture.
For me, it all seemed to boil down into two extreme positions—with a plethora of opinions and positions in between. On the one hand, you have people who say healing was for “back then,” that the age of miracles is past, and you shouldn’t even ask for or expect healing today. After all, they will say, the book of Acts is just history … Luke’s account is of a transitional era and not a guide for faith and practice today.
On the other side, you have people teaching that we can appropriate healing just like we do forgiveness of sins. They say that miracles ought to be part of the everyday life of the believer and that healing from disease is part of our heritage as sons and daughters of God.
They quote Isaiah 53:5, where it says that Messiah
was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
Or they will go to the book of 1 Peter, where it says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteous ness; by his wounds you have been healed”(1 Peter 2:24).
And then, as I said, you encounter every combination of those teachings imaginable. You have this theory and that theory. This interpretation and that interpretation. This person’s experience and that person’s experience.
I had my doubts about both extremes, but right from the get-go, I just couldn’t go along with those who denied that God ever heals anyone miraculously today. In the first place, who is in a position to say this? Even if I didn’t know of anyone whom God had healed in a way that defied medical explanation, what would that prove? It’s a big wide world out there with people in every corner of it seeking the Lord with all their hearts.
In fact, I do know of such a person who was healed. A personal friend. A number of years ago, this mature Christian lady suffered from a severe bone-marrow disease. Every known medical procedure having failed, the doctors pronounced her “incurable” and advised her to get her affairs in order. There was no hope.
My friend, however, believes in the power of prayer. She and others simply took the matter before the Lord and placed it in His hands. When she returned to the doctor some time later for an examination, he dropped his jaw in amazement. This man was not a believer in Christ, but after taking repeated drug tests over a period of time, he told my friend. “There is no natural or medical explanation I can give. Your situation was beyond hope. All I can say is that this is a miracle.”
Fifteen years later, she was still healthy. I knew this woman well enough to feel confident she was not deceiving me into believing something that never really happened.
Having related this story, however (and you probably have stories of your own), I have to say here that I really agree with people who insist on judging experiences by the light of Scripture, and not the other way around. Contemporary Christians tend to put too much weight on their experience anyway. Then they set up their conclusions as some kind of absolute truth by which everything else is to be interpreted, putting those experiences on an equal level with Scripture.
But this doesn’t mean we should totally ignoreour experiences. There are far too many all over the world who claim to have experienced or witnessed miraculous healing for us to write them off (which I would never do anyway). Many of these testimonies come from people who are soundly grounded in the Scriptures and mature in the faith—and many more are from the field of medicine. All of this should flash a yellow caution light in our minds if we’re among those who feel the Bible totally rules out miracles for our day. It should make us go back and be sure we have understood God’s Word correctly.
Here is a ruby, hard-won. God deals H with His children as He wills. To one He gives a life of relative ease and comfort; to another He gives the privilege of suffering for Him in a concentration camp. For some, He rewards their faith in this life; for others, He waits until they step across the line into eternity. I can’t take my own experience from the hand of God and set it up as the absolute norm for His dealing with others.
No, experiences aren’t everything.
But they aren’t nothing either.
So I had to rule out that pole of the spectrum that says God never heals miraculously today. In my opinion, the Bible doesn’t teach it and experience doesn’t support it.
All of this makes a lively debate in a Starbuck’s over a cup of Caffé Verona. But it isn’t theory when you have a teenager stricken with leukemia or a little one burning with fever or a spouse going blind. When you find yourself in the talons of fear over a loved one’s medical report or submerged in an ocean of pain that won’t recede and no medicine can touch, you probably won’t be checking out an exhaustive theology book out of the library. You probably won’t be dusting off your Bible school notes on dispensations and predestinations.
You’ll probably be on your face before a living, loving God, crying out for His mercy. Suffering shrugs off academic arguments and sterile theological sub-points.
Suffering humbles us under the mighty hand of God.
So many of God’s purposes remain shrouded in mystery to me … and so they will until I begin a joyous “graduate study” in heaven. But I have learned some things … rubies of wisdom I wish I could share with my younger self. Maybe the conversation would go like this:
I Wish I Were Healed
I know.
We wish for a lot of things. What’s the old rhyme? If wishes were horses then beggars would ride. If wishes were reality, then the accident would have never happened, or if it had, I could get up out of my wheelchair and walk away from it forever. I could dance with my husband … run into the California surf … paint with my hands instead of my mouth … walk down an autumn lane with wind in my hair and leaves crunching under my feet … feel the strong body of a galloping horse beneath me … cradle a newborn baby in my arms.
I recently became aware of a website where people from all over the world—including many who only have a working familiarity with English—post their wishes. Many of the wishes are lightweight, silly, or seem totally random. Like the one that said:
My wish is to collect $2,250 by 11/7/07.
Isn’t that interesting? The wisher doesn’t want $10,000, or even $2,249.99. The desired amount isn’t a penny less or a penny more than $2,250. But as long as you’re wishing, why not wish for a million?
Then there’s the wisher who posted this modest desire:
I wish I become the most successful person in the world.
I’ve got to admire that one. He or she decided to push it to the max, to go for the biggest prize. But how will they know if their wish is ever granted? What is the criterion for worldly success? Money? Fame? Power? And would they really be happy if they “had it all”? Another anonymous wisher also longed for success—but with a touch more realism.
I wish to succeed in everything in my life, unfortunately I’m unsuccessful in everything.
One nameless woman who (for the moment) felt like a winner in the lottery of life, still felt compelled to wish that the happiness would never go away.
Now that I’ve finally found my one, I wish we’ll be together and love one another forever. I wish we’ll tie the knot soon and take care of each other for the rest of our lives. We belong to each other forever and will never fall apart.
A few of the wishes betray deep longings or unimaginable distress. “Emmi” wrote (to no one in particular):
I wish I could have a baby. Ever since I was little I have always wanted to have a child, and it seems to be the hardest thing in the world for me to achieve …
Another woman sounded really desperate:
I wish I get well soon. I can’t go for an another operation. God, please help me from my mother-in-law. I know, whatever dissatisfaction I have in my life, all for her ONLY!!! She brought me in this condition, where I find myself ill, not happy with anything. Because of this illness I can’t have kids too and I know that was and is her wish. God, please help me, help me help me!!!
Was it a wish with God’s name attached or a prayer? God only knows. When I read these postings I thought to myself, How sad!People wish for things with no real belief that their wishing will make any difference at all. It’s an obvious exercise in futility, and yet they do it anyway, because … what are we to do with all those deep longings in our heart? A wish may be only a coin tossed in a fountain, a four-leaf clover, or a helium balloon released into the wind … but people want so much to be happy and don’t know what else to do or where else to turn.
I could wish for a lot of things. I have, I do, and I suppose I always will. But wishes are whipped cream, cotton candy, and a wisp of steam off your morning coffee. There’s nothing to them except a pleasant daydream that can occupy the imagination for a moment before dumping you back into an unhappy real world with nothing accomplished and no dreams fulfilled.
Children of God are all about reality, and don’t have to live on wishes.
Hope is better than a wish.
The apostle Paul writes:
Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. (Romans 5:3–5, emphasis added)
Wishes tie us to fantasies with wispy, spiderweb filaments. Hope ties us to the reality of the living God and the changeless truth of His Word with tugboat cable as thick as an old growth cedar.
As I’ve mentioned, there was a period in my life when I couldn’t face my true situation and wanted to stay in bed all day living in a fantasy world, pretending my accident had never happened. That path, as Solomon tells us so vividly, would eventually lead to death, not life.
There is a way that seems right to a man,
but in the end it leads to death.
(Proverbs 14:12)
Life is short enough without investing it on flights-of-fancy and wishing-upon-a-star. When we come before our God, worn down by our sorrows and disabilities as we may be, we come before a real and all-powerful Lord who loves us.
The book of Hebrews, addressed to a discouraged company of believers enduring the fires of persecution, is full of words of strong encouragement. Speaking of the promises God has given us as His children, the author reminds us that
we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where Jesus, who went before us, has entered on our behalf. (Hebrews 6:18–20)
The hope that God offers has nothing in common with “wishing upon a star.” The hope that ties us to Jesus and to heaven is the strongest hope in the universe. Biblical hope doesn’t say, “I wish,” it says, “I know.”
And even though our circumstances here on earth may be terribly difficult—or even overwhelming—God has given us something, Someone, to hang onto until He steps in to change our situation or take us home.
The bottom line? God wants us to live in reality, not fantasy-land. In the J. B. Phillips paraphrase, Paul says to the Romans: “As I think you have realized, the present time is of highest importance—it is time to wake up to reality. Every day brings God’s salvation nearer. The night is nearly over, the day has almost dawned” (Romans 13:11–12).
But Why Wasn’t I Healed?
Is it because God has changed?
A million times no.
Is God still the God of miracles and wonders in this present age?
A million times yes.
He operates in the natural and in the supernatural with equal ease. He is as powerful and as present and as attentive today as He has ever been.
Surely the arm of the LORD is not too short to save,
nor his ear too dull to hear. . . .
(Isaiah 59:1)
The LORD your God is with you,
he is mighty to save.
(Zephaniah 3:17)
Miracles of healing still happen. But they are not the everyday rule-of-thumb.
Many eyes will stay blind. Many babies will die at birth. Many cancers will not be eradicated until that ultimate healing of a new body and a new life in His presence. And many paraplegics and quadriplegics will never regain the use of unresponsive legs, arms, and hands.
As a ruby I would love to share with my younger self. I would gently say, “Joni, no matter how much we may wish it were otherwise, the Bible does not teach that He will always heal those who come to Him in faith. He sovereignly reserves the right to heal or not to heal as He sees fit. He sovereignly reserves the right to call His children home to heaven at the moment of His choosing.”
Even when the God-Man walked the earth only a small number of people—those who happened to be in His immediate vicinity—were healed. He fed five thousand and He fed four thousand but many in Israel were still hungry. He drove out demons wherever He went, but He never went very far, and many demons remained entrenched, most likely to this very day in that tortured, blood-soaked land. He raised several from the dead, but only a few, who would live a few more years to die yet again.
Look at the first chapter of Mark’s gospel. After word spread throughout Capernaum about Jesus healing Simon’s mother-in-law, the whole town brought their sick and lame and gathered outside Simon’s home. Long after sunset, Jesus was still healing people with infirmities and illnesses. The next day, very early in the morning, the people returned, bringing more friends and relatives who needed healing.
But Jesus was nowhere around.
Simon and his companions went to look for Him, and when they found Him off in a solitary place praying, they exclaimed, “Everyone is looking for you!”
You would think Jesus would jump to His feet, gather up His robe and go running down the hill. Not so. Reading Mark 1:38, you can almost picture Him rising slowly to His feet, dusting off His robe, then replying after a moment’s thought, “Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.”
It’s not that He stopped caring about the cancer-ridden and the blind and the lame; it’s just that their illnesses weren’t His primary focus. The Gospel was. His main message was, sins kill, hell is real, but God is merciful. His kingdom will change you, and I am your passport. Whenever people missed this—whenever they started coming to Him to have their pains and problems removed—Jesus backed away.
No matter how great our faith or fervent our prayers, there will be times—perhaps many times—when our plea for health and healing will be answered with no.
But not everyone agrees with that.
A couple of years ago I agreed to a guest appearance with a well-known Christian television icon. After a number of minutes of carefully sharing my views on healing and God’s will, the host turned to the camera and said, “Brothers and sisters, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be duped by Satan in these matters. Healing is promised in God’s Word, and it really all boils down to a matter of your faith.”
By implication, he was telling a national television audience that the reason I sat there beside him in a wheelchair was because I didn’t have faith. Or at least not enough. Had he never read all the times God specifically tells His followers—even followers with great faith—to expect hardship? Second Corinthians 1:5 says, “The sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives,” and Acts 14:22 warns us we must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God. And that’s just scratching the surface!
Still, I was stung by those unexpected remarks, and I felt my face growing hot with hurt and indignation. It was all I could do to wait for a commercial break before tears flowed from my eyes.
The man may have a huge ministry and millions of viewers, but He is wrong. God is God, and it is He and He alone who decides who will be healed and who will not. Yes, faith is vital to everything, and “without faith it is impossible to please Him.” But faith’s focus must always be Jesus Christ—and nobody draws close to Christ who doesn’t first share in Christ’s sufferings. Besides, at the end of the day, it is not who has the most faith, but what God in His wisdom, love, and sovereignty chooses to do.
Who Causes My Trials? God or Satan?
The LORD said to Satan, “Very well, then, everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.”
Then Satan went out from the presence of the LORD. (Job 1:12)
The words were scarcely out of God’s mouth when Sabeans massacre Job’s servants, lightning kills sheep and shepherds, Chaldeans slaughter camels and herdsmen, and a desert wind collapses a house on Job’s children.
How tragic!
Yet in a nutshell, Job’s saga teaches us everything we need to know about God’s sovereignty. (And maybe a nutshell is about all we could really handle anyway.)
What caused Job’s trials? At the most basic level, natural forces did—natural low-pressure systems that could have been explained in scientific terms. At the same basic level, evil people caused Job’s trials—those greedy raiding parties needed no prompting; they devised their own wicked schemes. At a deeper level, Satan did—the Devil turned around after leaving God’s presence, and before we can blink, carnage is everywhere. Scripture leaves little doubt that Satan was behind instigating those roaming cutthroats and sponsoring those killer storms. (Although the storms were a natural phenomena and the pillagers acted in a way natural to violent men, the Bible says Satan engineered it all.)
So who or what caused Job’s trials? At the deepest level, the adversity in Job’s life came about through God’s rule and authority over everything. Yes, Satan had asked permission to stir things up, but ultimately, it was God who signed the authorization papers.
Satan, in his hatred for God and humanity, acted freely according to his nature.
The bloodthirsty Sabeans behaved like, well, bloodthirsty Sabeans.
The Chaldeans fell into their normal pattern of wickedness.
And the freak storms behaved according to natural laws. If Job’s kids would have had the Weather Channel in those days, they could have seen it coming on satellite images or Doppler radar.
God’s overarching plan made room for Job’s trials, but God didn’t cause them. God exploited the deliberate evil of some bad characters and the impersonal evil of some bad storms without forcing anyone’s hand.
We’re faced with the same dilemma centuries later, when Moses stood in the presence of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. In the space of two chapters, the Bible tells us:
But this time also Pharaoh hardened his heart and would not let the people go. (Exodus 8:32)
And then we read …
But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go. (Exodus 10:20)
So which is it? Who did the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart? As God’s ambassador to the Egyptian king, Moses went before Pharaoh’s royal throne more than once to say, “Let my people go!”
Yet Pharaoh was immovable; his heart had been hardened against the Israelites. But when it comes to Pharaoh’s stony resolve and exactly who did the hardening, Scripture points to both Pharaoh and the Lord.
A collaboration leading to evil?
No, that cannot be. We know from James 1:13 that God does not inject the idea of evil into anyone’s heart. So how is it that “the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart”?
Through the common work of grace in our world, God is constantly staving off evil and restraining the fury of Satan so that harm and calamity do not overwhelm us. In the final analysis, the devil can only do what God allows. Every once in awhile, however—as in the case of Pharaoh—God lifts His hand of restraining grace to allow evil men to carry out their wicked plans, only as it serves God’s higher purposes.
God was as much as saying to Pharaoh, “So you want to sin? You’re determined to defy Me and close your mind and heart to My voice and to the miraculous evidence before your very eyes? Very well, then. You’ve chosen your course. You’ve made your bed, and now you will sleep in it. But I will make sure that when you do, your evil intentions suit My higher purposes and plan. You will defy Me for now, but soon—and too late—you will see My glory.”
I’m reminded of the much-quoted statement of C. S. Lewis:“There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right, then, have it your way.’ ”
Solomon tells us:
A man who remains stiff-necked
after many rebukes
will suddenly be destroyed
—without remedy.
(Proverbs 29:1)
And that certainly was the case with Pharaoh. He was allowed to go his evil, reckless way—but even in his wickedness, God would turn the evil the king intended into salvation for His people.
Even though humans have an intellect and a will of their own, God ultimately governs all they do—including evil intentions. And He does it all without impugning His righteous and holy character.
In other words, God doesn’t say, “Into each life a little rain must fall” and then aim a hose in earth’s general direction to see who gets the wettest. Rather He screens the trials that come to each of us, allowing only those that accomplish His good plans. He takes no joy in human agony. Nothing happens by accident, not even tragedy, not even sins committed against us. God is in control, and that’s what I love about Him.
True, God’s decrees allow suffering, but He doesn’t “do” the suffering. He’s not the one wielding the club.
These are deep waters, my friend.
Welcome to the world of finite humans trying to comprehend an infinite God. As we’ve said, God permits all sorts of things He doesn’t approve of. He allows others to do what He would never do.
He didn’t steal Job’s camels.
He didn’t entice the blood-thirsty Sabeans to wreak havoc.
He didn’t push the four pillars of the house down on a joyous family dining together.
And yet … He didn’t take His hand off the wheel for thirty seconds, either.
This idea doesn’t sit well with many people. But think of the alternative. What if God insisted on a hands-off policy toward the tragedies swimming your way? What if He removed all of the restraints from Satan? Left to his own, the Devil would make Jobs out of all of us.
But God curbs evil. Evil can only raise its head where God deliberately backs away—always for reasons that are specific, wise, and good—but often hidden during this present life.
So (and here’s the big question): Who caused my diving accident?
I could ask, “Was it God’s fault?” and be assured that although He is sovereign, no it was not His fault.
I might wonder … Was my accident a direct attack from the devil?
Well, yes, maybe it was. But I could press that still further and say that it was neither a direct assault from God or the devil, but simply the consequence of living in a fallen world fraught with dangers (like a shifting sandbar in the shallow water of Chesapeake Bay).
The point is, I never did rise up out of my wheelchair after the little prayer meeting in that country church. But God was there. He was listening with tender compassion. He was lovingly holding the entire moment in His powerful and sovereign hands.
Do your circumstances seem to be careening out of control? Remember that God is with you through it, loving you and caring … and allowing the details to play out exactly in accordance with His plan.
When life seems wild, crazy, and utterly out of control, it is not.
When it seems as though God has forgotten you or turned His back on you to tinker with some other universe, He has not.
When it seems like you have somehow fallen out of His favor, been edged outside the circle of His protection, or missed the bus on His love, you have not.
And that’s what it means to walk by faith.