Or glaze over.
But the cool thing about Q&A’s is you can pick the ones you want to read. If you skip one, the next one still makes sense.
Maybe only one question asked about Everything Fits is for you, but since I don’t know which one, I’ll list seven and you pick. The first three are today. Four more come later.
1.
What do you mean when you say everything is engineered, permitted, or governed by God? Why use those words? Why not just say ‘control?’
To me, ‘control’ makes it sound like God has a big hand-held remote control and he’s toggling and steering all the details of his world. You could think that means we’re all puppets. So I use other words that show he’s in control but without blaming him for my pride or idiocy or slamming the car door too hard so my wife knows I’m peeved (that didn’t happen!)
2.
How could it make sense that God would allow a father to sexually abuse a daughter? And so she naturally ends up thinking ‘God where were you and how could you let my dad do that? What kind of God are you?’ You can talk all you want but that does not fit.
Lord have mercy. You’ll have to talk to Job. God allowed Job’s family to be killed and for Job to be thrown into suffering and poverty. Then God made sure he put it in the Bible.
The wages of sin is death and this world stinks with the smell of death. But it’s not going to stay this way. Until things change, there is comfort and help and victory in the middle of suffering and stink. I believe that but I can’t explain it.
My friend Dean said today that as he thinks of this world of confusion, waiting, regret, and hopelessness, he is comforted knowing that as a Christian this is the worst he’ll ever have it from now through eternity. He said he has Christ now, and Christ with a perfect world later. But for the person without Christ, this is as good as it will ever be–for them it gets worse.
Hero martyrs had opportunity for the same questions. God where are you to let this happen when I’m being faithful?
3.
The whole grace/law thing and God’s sovereign nature still puzzle me.
Well, grace doesn’t mean there’s no speed limit. But with grace I now am intimate with an indwelling Jesus and guess how fast he’s going? The speed limit. If I stick with him in trust, I go the speed limit without thinking about the speed limit–it’s just what I do.
When I break the speed limit I should feel something–not like a failure, but like “I must not be trusting Jesus because this guilt I feel is a sign.” My guilt should drive me back to intimacy with him and then the speed limit will take care of itself. That is very incomplete, but one way to look at it.
For God’s sovereign nature I picture two parallel train tracks going up into the sky. One train track is my free will and all my decisions. The other track is God’s sovereignty and control of everything.
I only see separate tracks that can’t both be the true at the same time But up in the clouds somewhere, those two tracks come together and make perfect sense, and I go, ohhhhhh I get it. And I worship. But that’s later. However if I believe it by faith I can go ahead and worship now in advance.
