Myth Two - God is Predictable

If you’ll excuse the expression, the movie Titanic is making a great splash at the box office. I understand that many people, particularly teenaged girls, are going back 4, 5, and 6 times to see the movie. Everything that has anything to do with the Titanic is selling like hotcakes. Librarians report that every book in the library on the Titanic is in great demand.

Now for the teenaged girls, the attraction of the movie is the love story. But everyone else is fascinated by the story of the great tragedy that occurred on April , 1912. It’s a story that once you’ve heard it, you can never forget it. It’s like a 20th century legend.

There’s something strangely compelling about a ship that was supposed to be unsinkable plunging to the bottom of the Atlantic on its maiden voyage. How the boat wasn’t even designed to have enough lifeboats for its passengers and crew. How the captain was so overconfident that he proceeded full speed ahead into a field of ice and fog. How the band was supposed to have continued playing even while the great ship went down, as if to say “This can’t be happening”.

The story of the Titanic is a story of overconfidence. The overconfidence of the designers and builders. The overconfidence of the passengers. The overconfidence of the captain and the crew.

It’s about how people can think they know what’s going to happen, but they don’t. It’s about how the real world rudely and fatally shatters our carefully constructed illusions and expectations.

There is an important lesson in the Titanic for us as Christians. We often sail through life with a sort of overconfidence. We think we know what is going to happen. We build our expectations on faulty thinking. This is particularly true when it comes to our relationship with God.

We’ve been looking at some of the most popular misconceptions about the Christian life. Last week, we looked at Myth #1, in which we say to ourselves “Although other people are sinners, I myself am not really capable of great sin.”

Today, we want to look at Myth #2 in which we say to ourselves “I can figure God out. God is predictable. If I just pray hard enough, and believe the Bible firmly enough, and live righteously enough, I can have a pretty good idea of what God will or will not do in my life.”

And yet that view is a fallacy. It’s a fallacy because it goes against the Bible’s teaching. God, in the Bible, says “My ways are not your ways, and my thoughts are not your thoughts. My ways are past finding out. You will not always understand my dealings with you. There will be many times that you will not be able to fathom what God is doing in your life.”

And as you look at the people in the Bible, you can see that that is true. As they went through painful, terrible, frightening experiences, if you were to get them on Larry King Live and interview them and ask them why God was doing what he was doing in their lives, they wouldn’t have a clue.

Joseph, why is God allowing your brothers to throw you in the pit and sell you into slavery? Abraham, why has God commanded you to sacrifice your son Isaac? Moses, why is God making you tend these sheep out in the wilderness for 40 years? John the Baptist, why are you in jail? Why does Herod want to chop off your head? Daniel, why are you in that lion’s den? Paul, why is God allowing you to be so abused if you are his chosen instrument to take the Gospel to the Gentiles?

They wouldn’t know the answer to those things. And if you think that you will always know what God is going to do in your life, you will have believed a myth.

Let me tell you the story of Marshall and Susan Shelley. Marshall is the editor of Leadership magazine. I don’t know Marshall personally, but I know his father Bruce Shelley, the distinguished professor of church history at Denver Seminary.

Marshall writes… In March of 1990, our daughter Mandy was born. Amid the happiness surrounding her birth, the doctors told us some disquieting news. She had microcephaly, a small brain. We had never heard the term before. Little did we know how Mandy’s condition would affect our lives.

In Mandy’s case, the microcephaly produced severe and profound retardation. She was never able to crawl, to sit up, to utter any words, to use her hands to grasp. She suffered frequent seizures. We never knew if she could see or hear. The only communication we had with her was when we would give her a bath—occasionally she would visibly relax in the warm water. Eventually, she was unable to swallow effectively enough to sustain herself, so she had to be fed through a tube in her stomach.

As Susan and I cared for her, we wondered about God’s purposes. And many of our friends asked us the questions we were asking ourselves: Why? Why would God allow—no, assign—such a severe condition to a child? There was no known cause for Mandy’s microcephaly except for God’s design. What is her future? Where will the strength come from to care for her?

The only answers that came close to satisfying our confusion centered around God’s unexplainable will, the hope of the resurrection, and the fact that he had provided his body the church to embody his love and care.

Then, in November 1991, our son Toby was born. We learned during the pregnancy that he had a chromosomal abnormality called Trisomy 13, a condition the doctors described as “incompatible with life.” Toby lived two minutes. He spent his entire earthly life on Susan’s chest.

Along with the waves of grief, the questions again swept over us: What kind of God creates a child to live for two minutes? Genetic tests indicated no relationship between Mandy’s condition and Toby’s. Both cases were considered to be “flukes”, design flaws in nature.

We reeled under the sadness. Three months later, in February 1992, we were hit again when Mandy developed a pneumonia that her body didn’t have the strength to shake. After eight days in the hospital, she died.

As Christians, we were convinced that Mandy was in heaven with Jesus. But we missed her deeply. For two years, our lives had revolved around her. Now our house, our arms, and our hearts seemed so empty.

One of the great fallacies we all hold to as human beings is that we assume that we know what is best for our lives. And so when something comes into our life that doesn’t fit our assumptions—when tragedy and pain come crashing in on us—when crazy, seemingly pointless, arbitrary things happen to us—our faith in God is rocked to the core.

We look to heaven and to the Bible for an answer; for a reason, but there doesn’t seem to be one. God doesn’t send an explanation, revealing how he is going to work all this out for our good. He doesn’t give us much to hang our faith on.

And so we begin to find ourselves disappointed with God. We begin to doubt his goodness. We begin to question his love. We wrestle with feelings of confusion, because God has allowed something into our lives that we never expected, that we never anticipated, and that we’re having a hard time dealing with.

What should we do at times like this? How should we process these terrifying moments when life seems out of control? I believe that there are three things we need to do.

1. We need to learn to let God be God.

In Isaiah ch. 45 and 46, the Lord says “I am God, and there is no other. My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.”

You see, our problem is that when we assume that we know what is best for our lives, we are trying to make ourselves equal to God. We are trying to climb up onto his level. And that’s somewhere we’re not supposed to be. Lucifer tried to do that, and that’s how he became the devil.

We are creatures. Our proper place is to be in submission to God, to be yielded to His will. We supposed to leave the business of being God to God, because he’s the only one who can handle it!

2. We need to learn to say “yes” to the unexpected, the unpleasant, and the unexplained things that come into our lives.

We need to remember something very important: Nothing comes into our lives that is not first filtered through the loving hands of our sovereign God. So what are we going to do when pain and heartache and tragedy touch us? Are we going to rail against it? Are we going to say “God, this is not under your control? Or if it is, why are you doing this to me?” Or are we going to accept it, and welcome it as coming from a Father who loves us and wants to mold us into His image?

Etty Hillesum was a woman who died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. As a prisoner, she did her best to help her fellow prisoners cope with the death and the horror that were all around them in that terrible place. Just two months before she died, she wrote this prayer to God:

“I now realize, God, how much you have given me. So much that was beautiful and so much that was hard to bear. Yet whenever I showed myself ready to bear it, the hard was directly transformed into the beautiful.”

Am I willing to say yes to the painful things that come into my life?

3. We need to learn to be confident in God’s goodness.

Romans 8:28 We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

The great preacher Charles Spurgeon once traveled to the countryside to visit a friend who was building a new barn. On the roof was a weathervane. Written on the weathervane was the text “God is love”. Spurgeon asked the farmer if that meant that God was as changeable as the weather.

“No!” the man exclaimed. “I mean it to say that God is love no matter which way the wind blows.”

Author Gail MacDonald tells the story of a friend of hers who was a pastor’s wife in New England. The woman’s name was Linda. One day, she was doing her laundry in the basement of her home when an intruder entered the cellar door and, without a word, began to stab her. Linda fell virtually lifeless to the floor. Her husband, Rich, was at a church meeting, and when he returned home, he found Linda alive, but unconscious. He rushed her to the hospital where for days, her life hung in the balance.

To this day, the assailant has never been identified. But Linda survived her wounds and returned to health. Whenever people hear her story and say to her “God was so good to have spared you,” Linda replies simply “God is good whether I had lived or died.”

We need to be confident in God’s goodness. Sometimes that goodness is hard to discern, but it is at times like those that we need to simply trust Him.

You know there are three phases of spiritual maturity. I believe that the Apostle John refers to them when he talks in 1 John about the children, the young men, and the fathers.

The first stage is the childhood stage. And at that stage, our faith is very weak. So we need God to reveal himself to us in remarkable ways. Have you ever wondered why new Christians seem to have their prayers answered in remarkable, even miraculous ways? It is because God is fortifying their fledgling faith.

Then there is the youthful stage. And at that stage, we have a little more faith, and so we’re able to go through a little more adversity without seeing God directly intervene. But as long as things seem to be on a relatively even keel, and circumstances seem to be fairly positive in our lives, we’ll be okay.

Then there is the mature stage. That is the stage at which God can entrust us with pain and suffering, heartache and sorrow, because He knows that our faith has become strong enough for us to go on trusting Him even in the absence of any positive indicators in our life that He cares about us.

This is when we keep trusting God even though our prayers are unanswered; even though nothing good seems to be happening.

What stage are you at this morning? How strong is your faith?

Oswald Chambers writes: There is only one thing God wants of us, and that is our unconditional surrender. Have simple perfect trust in God, such trust that we no longer want God’s blessings, but only want Himself. Have you come to the place where God can withdraw His blessings and it does not affect your trust in Him?

God is not predictable. But He is always good. And He always knows what is best.