Isaiah 45:5-7 (NKJV) 5I am the LORD, and there is no other; There is no God besides Me. I will gird you, though you have not known Me, 6that they may know from the rising of the sun to its setting that there is none besides Me. I am the LORD, and there is no other; 7 I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create calamity; I, the LORD, do all these things.’
Early in life we begin to learn what will cause good things to happen to us, and what will cause bad things to happen to us. This will be a life long learning process, and hopefully somewhere in the process God enters the picture. When that happens, we draw one of several conclusions about God’s role in causing good and bad to happen to us.
The oldest conclusion is the belief that God causes the bad things that happen to us. Many of us were raised under the constant threat of the bad things God was going to do to us unless we walked the straight and narrow. The book of Job, however, was written to refute the superstition that all misfortune is punishment for sins. Likewise, Jesus said it rains and shines on the just and the unjust. (Matthew 5:45)
Another conclusion is that God does not cause bad things to happen to us because there is no God, or because such a belief is superstition. We might think that this emancipation proclamation of our freedom from God’s judgment might bring a great cry of relief. But, instead it brings more a cry of grief, a sense that we have been cut loose from our moorings, and are adrift in a sea where we are at the mercy of mass social forces, circumstances beyond our control, or even the power of our own desires.
The belief that God causes only good holds a measure of truth, but that has nurtured a propriety theology in which God is reduced to little more than a means to help us through the minefields of an upwardly mobile life.
There is still another conclusion, and that is that God causes both good and bad things to happen to us. Isaiah says, “I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create calamity; I, the LORD, do all these things.”
Whatever God may mete out to us, He was caring enough to accept the same from us in the Cross of Christ and wrath and punishment became expressed in a new way. We are always disciplined by a wounded hand. The Apostle Paul says God sent Christ Jesus to take all the punishment for our sins and to end all God’s anger against us (Colossians 2:9-15). In the Cross of Christ, in the body of God’s own Son, we see all the judgment and punishment that God plans to mete out to us. It is in the judgment of the Cross that God calls us to repentance and not any personal misfortune that might happen to us.
From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope
© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell
photo by RHM, Colosseum - Rome, Italy
The photo of the cross in this post is one I took when I noticed it carved in the wall of the Colosseum in Rome, Italy. It is somewhat hidden and may be often overlooked in the vastness of size and history of the Colosseum.
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