May 1

Day 48: I am Immortal

Here on another Friday, the continuing question among believers and non-believers alike seems to be: Where is God in all this?

Non-believers may have determined that God is no where to be found. If He can be found, He's not nice.

Believers may see the coronavirus as a cause and effect. Meaning, God allows bad things to happen in response to bad people's responses to Him.

Perhaps unintentionally, we could be saying that ultimately, sin and Satan are sovereign. God's only does what circumstances dictate Him to do.

Everybody has opinions about how God should be acting during this pandemic.

Matt Walsh said, "Parenting is the easiest thing in the world to have an opinion about, but the hardest thing in the world to do."

We're not good at being God. We're not good at telling God how to be God either.

It's easy to believe in the sovereignty of God. It's harder to understand how God exercises His sovereignty. I read a post this past week from a reputable and oft-quoted evangelical source, saying, "Don't talk about God's sovereignty these days. It's not helping."

If God is in fact sovereign, why is everything so crummy?

(Allow me to borrow a thought from John Piper, who is much smarter than me.)

Why should I see God's sovereignty as "good news?"

"The same sovereignty that could stop the coronavirus, but doesn't, is the very sovereignty that sustains the soul in it."

Also, and somehow, in this pandemic and the resultant hardships that are now real to us, God is 1) doing something we do not understand, and 2) It's something for our good. We can all see a glimmer of at least something good that has come about in the past 6 weeks, right?

Romans 8:32 says, "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?"

Our God is a good God. It's guaranteed by the blood of Jesus!

A few verses later it says, "For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered."

Still sounds like a neglectful if not mean god. But read on...

"No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us."

How possible? God's sovereignty includes bringing us safely through death, whenever and however that happens for each of us who believe.

What Satan means for evil, God means for good. Remember what Joseph said to his mean brothers years after they had sold him off to Egyptian slavery? Just that! You meant for bad; God meant it for good!

One more thought.

God's sovereignty over all things means that not a one of us will die...until God determines. And, while God has already determined that day for each of us, none of us will die until our work on this planet is done.

Henry Martyn was a young missionary to India and Persia. He died of a plague in 1812 at age 31. Seven years before his death, he wrote: "But whether life or death be mine, may Christ be magnified in me! If he has work for me to do, I cannot die."

So how to live in light of that? He continues...

"Were God not the sovereign of the universe, how miserable I should be! But the Lord reigns, let the earth be glad. And Christ's cause shall prevail. O my soul, be happy in the prospect."

You and I are immortal. Because God is sovereign.

And for now, there must still be more for us to do.

-Mike Rydman, Lead Pastor, Radiant Church | Juneau