Theological Journal - May 1: Why God Is Not In Control - And It's a Good Thing Too! (3)

We’ve taken a look at the part of the biblical story line that tells us what God intended in creation (his sovereign kingship), humanity’s role in God’s intention (to manifest God’s sovereign kingship as his image-bearers over creation), how we defaulted and rejected that plan seeking to down things our own way, and how that rejection of God’s rule corrupted us, turning us into idolaters and marring and undoing God’s good creation.

Next we zoomed in a bit on idolatry to take a closer look at the nature and dynamics of that pervasive human affliction. We cannot avoid it since we are created to be dependent and draw life from a greater power nor can we fix by ourselves because we become enslaved to whatever surrogate we depend and rely in place of God. This is the fundamental knot at the heart of who we are that ties us up in dilemmas, conundrums, and enigmas we can neither fully explain or ourselves resolve.

Today I want to fill out the rest of the biblical picture looking at how God responded to this human betrayal and the mess we let in the wake of it.

So, God is king but his kingship is not being lived out by those God delegated to do just that – humanity. To restore us to our proper role as those who make evident God’s rule, God will have to reclaim us from the sin and slavery we have fallen into and restore and re-equip us to place our intended role.

And that’s just what God did. In Jesus Christ God came among us himself as one of us and did that reclaiming and restoring work in his birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension. He lived as the one human being who lived true to our calling and in him we see God’s gracious rule lived out by one of us for the benefit of all the rest of us. God works this out in us and in our world through the rest of time and history and in one final grand renovating act which cleanses and makes everything new in which we will live forever with him.

In this time where God is in the process of working out Christ’s victory in and through us there is an overlap between the old age of sin, idolatry, and death and the new age of life, light, and grace. This means we will continue to experience and struggle with bad things happenings till Christ returns. When we look around at the sufferings and hurts of our world we may even be tempted to believe that nothing has really changed and all Christian faith offers is assurance that our lives after death are assured to be with God. But our hope lies in God’s promise to one day fully restore and transform this creation currently beset with such struggles to be his home with us for the duration. And further, that work of renewal and transformation is already under way as the risen Christ reigns triumphant and through his Spirit and in and through his people carries out the work of establishing and extending the fruit of his victory throughout creation.

The writer of Hebrews sees this clearly and expounds it in an important passage in 2:5-9. The writer tells us that humanity was created with glory and honor (i.e his image-bearers or royal priests) and God subjected the creation to us. However, all things are not presently subjected to us (as we are acutely aware). Things are not yet going the way they should (that futility to which creation still groans under that we saw in Rom.8). Humanity is not yet fulfilling its mandate to subdue creation and lead it to its full flourishing - “at present,” as the writer of Hebrews puts it, “we do not see everything subject to him (i.e., Jesus, the true human)” (Heb 2:8).

But, and this is a huge “but” (yes, you can joke about that!), we can be sure that we will experience the full transformation of our world and even in partial and fragmentary ways participate in it because “we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor” (Heb 2:9). He is now ruling creation as that image-bearer and royal priest, that human who truly manifests God’s sovereign rule, that we will one day be in him. Trusting him, then, “seeing” him, enables us the grasp and base our hope in him.

The payoff for understanding our theme of why God is not in control lies in this.

-We do not have guarantees in this world, except that God will one day transform his creation. There are no guarantees that everything will work out as we want it to. We will experience suffering, pain and loss. As I like to put it, God does not give us insurance for our journey through life but rather assurance that we will not have borne these difficulties and struggles in vain but will have all God has promised us. After all, God himself lived under these conditions by faith in the incarnate Christ. He is not asking us to do anything he himself has not also done!

-Thus our hope is not that God is in such control that bad things will not befall, trouble, or even kill us, but that in Christ we are assured of and can even experience in part here and now God’s coming triumph. And that is what we call “the Christian life.” And on that day of complete fulfilment we will find our true rest and our enjoyment forever. But now, today, our call is to work at the slow, patient, and often painful job of living through both the sufferings that are the lot of a fallen humanity but also those that come through faithfulness to Christ, with courage and in hope.

Tomorrow we will look at further ways thinking that God is in control disables us from faithfully engaging our lives here and now. But God is not in control – and it’s a good thing too!