My depression is a thing that exists. Therefore, God is using it to conform me more to the image of Christ, to conform believers around me more to the image of Christ, to potentially bring other elect members of the kingdom to the point of faith so that they become more like Jesus, and in some mad way to do something or other for people I have never met but who in God’s infinite and intricately weaved tapestry of history and circumstance, are somehow affected for their good too and they will become more like Jesus through it.

Somebody asked me yesterday whether I thought my getting depression was part of God’s plan. I thought that was a really interesting question and thought I would share my view on that here. If you can’t be bothered to read past this sentence, the short answer is, yes I do.
Here is the thing, I believe God is ultimately sovereign. He is sovereign over all things. There is not a single thing, in the whole of creation, that does not happen without God’s permission to do so. The Bible is unequivocal about God’s total and complete sovereignty.
If that is true, then simply the fact that I have depression means that it is, in some way, part of God’s plan. If God is sovereign over all things (and he is), then there isn’t anything that happens that is not part of his plan. Even his decision not to act, not to intervene, is a sovereign decision. If God chooses not to stop something that he could otherwise stop, he must be allowing it for his greater purposes. If God is sovereign over all things, there is nothing that happens that he could not stop and nothing that doesn’t happen that he could have chosen to make happen. Everything that does happen, happens because God either actively causes it or sovereignly permits it. It is as the Bible says, he is the one who ‘works all things according to the counsel of his will’.
The issue is, when it comes to stuff like depression, the inevitable question is: do you think God is happy that you’re ill? The short answer is, no. I don’t think God is any happier at the thought of me being ill than he is at the thought of people sinning. This inevitably leads to a follow up question, then why doesn’t he stop it?
The answer is that God orders his priorities. The Bible tells us, for example, that God does not wish for any to perish, but longs for all people to be saved. At the same time, we know that not everyone is saved. How do we account for this? Philosophers, at this point, like to posit the principle of sufficient reason. God wants all people to be saved, but he has a sufficient reason to allow them not to be. Depending on your particular theological bent, you will offer different answers as to what that sufficient reason is. But it is no different to us saying I would like to save £200 every month, but I would also like to buy a load of stuff too. One of those priorities tends to trump the other, meaning that though I would like both, I order my priorities, which is why my bank account is less full than I might otherwise like it to be. Similarly, God orders his priorities such that, though he may want all to be saved, he has higher priorities that mean all are not in actuality saved.
So, where does that leave us when it comes to my depression? It is certainly something that happened in actuality, so I consider it part of God’s plan. Does God want me to have depression? I don’t think he is pleased at the thought of me being sick. Nevertheless, that it has happened tells me he has some greater purpose in allowing it to happen. But, let’s be honest, we all want to know what that greater purpose is.
As a Reformed believer, I think God orders all things so that he will receive maximal glory. So, God’s highest priority is his own glory. What this means is that God has setup the world so that the world as it is – out of every possible world he might have created – brings him the greatest glory.
I cannot explain how each and every thing works ultimately to the praise and glory of God. I can have a guess at how some things – even some pretty heinous things – might ultimately work to his glory. But I am ultimately only guessing. I can highlight how some objectively terrible things definitely work to his glory because the Bible expressly tells us so. The cross of Jesus Christ – which was a gross injustice of the highest order and severe suffering of the very worst kind – was the very means by which God glorified himself most. It was his means of salvation for his people, the means of glorifying Christ, the means of becoming both just and justifier. Through something so heinous, God was ultimately glorified. But I must admit I can’t explain how every terrible thing that ever happens works to God’s glory that way. I trust what God’s word says, that such things will brings him more glory in the end than if it hadn’t happened at all, and I can have my guesses about what some of that might be, but that is all they are likely to be.

Related Posts:

Jesus will be the one who indeed obeys the covenant stipulations of Yahweh and, as Solomon prayed, would bless all the peoples on earth (1 Kings 8:60; 2 Chronicles 6:32-33). He is the one who delivered Hezekiah from Assyria and who will ensure the world will know who God is (2 Kings 19:15, 19). He is the one who, unlike the kings of Judah, will not lead His people into idolatry or fail in righteousness but will establish and uphold justice and righteousness from this time forth and forevermore (Isaiah 9:7).

An Analogy of Relationships
In human romantic relationships, progress is made through promise. When a man enjoys the company of a particular woman, and natural desires begin bubbling up in that man for her, well, he ought to be the one to ask her if she will become his woman. This is not an open-ended promise where he reserves the right to desire and spend affectionate time with a throng of women, but a personal pledge that she will be the lone object of his affection moving forward. His commitment and promise carries with it exclusivity.
When the relationship advances beyond the dating stages, progress is again precipitated by promise. Without new pledges of increased loyalty and commitment, the relationship will stagnate and usually wither into a relational bramble. But after a pledge of lifelong fidelity, the dating couple becomes engaged with a ring of promise, and the engaged couple standing at the altar with rings becomes lawfully wed.
This normative period is filled with promises that progress every relationship from strangers and acquaintances to friends, from pals to dating and betrothal, and eventually into marriage. This period is a finite allotment of time to establish interest, trustworthiness, and commitment before the era of promises is over. And I mean that the era of promises must end because no woman wants to marry a man who continually rattles off guarantees and assurances but never ends up keeping any of them. Once all the promises have been made, and the man and woman say I do, he does not need to go on making oaths and pledges and explaining his intentions. He must transition the relationship from being a promise maker to a promise keeper, or the only progress he will make will be toward separation and divorce. This movement from promise to fulfillment is the most natural step toward maturation for any marriage; it is how trust is baked in time and how marriages become iron-clad centers of love, life, and community for a clan of burgeoning people.
In some ways, we can apply this to what we spoke about last week. We transitioned away from the wrong views of eschatology to the correct view. And we saw how God Himself littered the book of Genesis with monumental promises. He promised to fill the world with worshippers through Adam. He repeated those promises to Noah. He kept those promises during the rocky era of Babel. He made those promises even more explicit and exclusive through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Judah. And like a young man making covenantal promises to the woman that He loves before their wedding day, God in those early years of Genesis was showering His people with all of His promises and was letting her know what He was going to do in covenant union with her and for her. And as we saw last week, the content of those promises was that God Himself would make His people into a fruitful, world-wide, people, who fill the earth with worshippers. Worshippers in the sciences, worshippers in local and national governments, worshippers in technology and engineering firms, worshippers in law practices, libraries, restaurants, public squares, plumbing and electrical businesses, and worshippers in faithful churches. God is going to fill the world, and every sector of this world, with His joyful human worshippers so that everything on this rebel planet will come under His dominion and will.
Yet, in just the same way a man shouldn’t keep making promises with no intention of fulfilling them, God does not go on speaking without a plan for doing. He transitions the relationship from promise maker to promise keeper as we turn the page from Genesis to the book of Exodus. He continues that posture through the conquests and the histories of the people of Israel and Judah. And while Israel and Judah will be unfaithful to her husband and maker (Isaiah 54:5; Hosea 2:2), provoking Him to jealous fury (Deuteronomy 32:21), playing the harlot with the nations instead of bringing them into God’s covenant family (Ezekiel 16:15), causing Him to issue a decree of divorce to the ten northern tribes of Israel (Jeremiah 3:8), God is never once unfaithful to His promises. He will fill the world with worshippers who worship Him in spirit and truth (John 4:23-24). And what we will see in the history of Judah and Israel is textual evidence that this is God’s plan and that God will accomplish it with Israel’s help or not!
In what follows, I would like to sketch out how all of the promises made in the book of Genesis, where the entire world will be filled with worshippers (Genesis 1:28), where all the families on earth will be blessed by the seed of Abraham (Genesis 12:1-3), all the nations on earth will come under God’s blessings through the seed of Jacob (Genesis 28:14) and will obey Yahweh their King through the promises to Shiloh as promised to Judah (Genesis 49:10), are now beginning to come true in the life of Israel. Like an acorn transitioning from seed to sapling, the Exodus, the conquests, and the Kingdom of Israel will show how God is committed to what He initially said and is delivering on those promises in the life of Israel. In the weeks ahead, we will see how those promises are fulfilled ultimately in Jesus, but for now, let’s trace the promises God made for a postmillennial and optimistic future out of the book of Genesis and see how they begin sprouting roots in the nation of Israel.
The Exodus and a World Filled with Worshippers:
After God had given promises to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and eventually Jacob’s fourth-born son Judah, the family of a dozen men and their wives and children settled in the land of Goshen, a providence of Egypt. You will remember from the book of Genesis that a massive famine hit the entire region. Yet, God, through wonderful providence, allowed Joseph to be sold into slavery and imprisonment, only to be elevated to the second position in the kingdom of Egypt, perfectly positioned to rescue Jacob’s family (and the future nation that would come from his own body) from starvation and death. That family was reunited in Egypt and began growing in Egypt. For four hundred silent years, where the Bible does not speak, they continued being fruitful and multiplying in that foreign land.
In fact, this is precisely where the book of Exodus begins. God promised Adam and Noah in the earliest parts of Genesis that He would make them fruitful and multiply them. And now, in Egypt, in the earliest parts of the Exodus narrative, God keeps that promise on the ground and in their families. Here is what the text says:
“But the sons of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly, and multiplied, and became exceedingly mighty, so that the land was filled with them. – Exodus 1:7
Do you see how God is fulfilling His promises? Do not overlook the significance of this moment. God created a world in Eden where His covenant people were destined to thrive under His blessings, a key component of which was their call to be fruitful and multiply, to expand and populate all the lands, establishing dominion over them. These events unfold within this passage, though not yet on the universal scale envisioned for the future, but significantly on a local scale within Egypt. The people of Israel proliferated exceedingly, their numbers swelling to such an extent that they filled the land, indicating that God’s hand of blessing was upon them.
In typical fashion, the native occupants, the adversaries of God, perceive this divine favor and are seized by terror at the prospect of losing their sovereignty. Egypt’s apprehension, fearing that Israel’s expansion and dominion will continue to the point of usurping their own, highlights a profound understanding lost on many today. God has not devised a plan destined for His people’s failure but has laid a strategy where the foes of God will be stripped of their places, nations, and statuses. In this divine plan, God’s people are destined to dispossess their lands, thereby extending Yahweh’s dominion far beyond its current boundaries.
The Egyptian Pharoah and his advisors grasped the enormity of God’s plan with all the visceral clarity needed, filling their hearts with dread and spurring them into a dark, desperate strategy of Jewish genocide, which became a futile attempt to thwart God’s holy intentions (Exodus 1:9-10). Yet, as is the inevitable fate of all who dare to challenge the Almighty, their sinister schemes crumbled into dust flakes. Moses recounts with poetic justice that the harsher Egypt’s tyranny became, the more prolifically God’s favor was poured out, blessing His people with unimaginable success and growth (Exodus 1:12). In a twist of irony, when Egypt sought to drown the Hebrew legacy in the Nile, God orchestrated a covert resistance led by fearless midwives. These unsung heroines, under God’s watchful eye, not only safeguarded the lives of countless infants but became unwitting architects of Israel’s burgeoning population, further frustrating Pharaoh’s draconian decrees (Exodus 1:20).
As we saw last week, God will not give up on His plans. He made promises to Adam and Noah. He came and elected a sinner named Abraham. He gave that man children in his old age who would eventually settle down in Egypt. And now, under the mighty hand of God, who is pouring out His blessings and favor upon them, they are doing what Yahweh promised. They are being fruitful, multiplying, spreading out, and threatening the enemies of God’s security and dominion. Sounds a lot like postmillennialism. If you ask me, it sounds like God is ensuring He will extend His dominion globally until the world is filled with worshippers.
This plan, of course, ran afoul of the Egyptians, who whipped the Israelite’s backs a little harder each day, all the while increasing their miseries in labor, that is, until a breaking point occurred. At first, the strapping forty-year-old Moses, whom God miraculously orchestrated by divine providence to grow up in the palaces of Egypt, took matters into his own hands, killing an Egyptian and attempting to work for the freedom of his people by his own strength and Vigor. This was not God’s plan, so God exiled Moses into the wilderness for an entire generation so that he could cool his jets a bit and trust that the Lord would do precisely what he promised.
As an octogenarian, God summons Moses back to Egypt with a mandate to reassure His people that He had not left them to languish in the desert sands, He had not turned His back on them, and He would assuredly rescue them from the shackles of Egyptian servitude with a mighty hand (Exodus 3:7-10). This liberation was aimed not just about freeing them from bondage but at relocating them to a land reminiscent of Eden — a garden land brimming with milk and honey and other beautiful blessings. There, they were to flourish, tend the garden land, extending Yahweh’s sovereignty across its breadth, and transform it into a region where God’s will had come on earth as it always had in heaven (Exodus 3:8). This elaborate plan traces its way all the way back to the pages of Genesis. This was not merely for the benefit of the Israelites alone, but it was being enacted by a God who wanted the entire earth to hear about Him and worship Him because of His awe-inspiring deeds. God had appointed Israel as His emissary to bring His blessings to all the world. And He announced that purpose to the obstinate Pharaoh just before He crushed Him. God says to the Pharaoh in Exodus 9:16:

“But, indeed, for this reason, I have allowed you to remain, in order to show you My power and in order to proclaim My name through all the earth.” – Exodus 9:16

Why would God tell the egotistical Pharaoh that His intention was to fill the earth with His name, stories of His power, and glory if He had no desire to fulfill it? Would God boast in a plan He had no intention of completing? I think not.
God rained down a furious assortment of ten devastating plagues on Egypt, crushing their egotistical pride, crashing their agriculture, farming, shipping industries, and the entire economic system that kept them afloat as an empire, bankrupting them for generations. More importantly, God was laboring to set Israel free so that Yahweh’s name would echo in every hole, hollar, cave, plain, and hilltop on earth. This alone reminds us that God is still committed to His original plan and purpose. He will make His name great by multiplying His worshippers everywhere the sun shines, everywhere the shadow falls, and no one in hell or on earth will stop Him. If you doubt that, ask the Pharaoh of Egypt, who hardened his heart and got the unenviable opportunity to see all the wealth and power that remained within his empire flushed down the Red Sea toilet.
The Law and a World Filled with Worshippers:
From there, God brought this newly freed nation of Jews along with an assortment of Egyptians (Exodus 12:38), consisting of a couple of million people who walked out of Egypt (Exodus 12:37), to the base of Mount Sinai, where He would enter into a covenant relationship with them. Like all covenants, this one would have specific stipulations, rules, and precepts that the people of God were to follow in order to be in a relationship with this holy God. If they followed these stipulations, they would inherit the blessings of the covenant, which God describes in various sections of the Law. For instance, He promised to walk among them as God walked amid Adam and Eve in the garden (Leviticus 26:11-12). He promised they would be fruitful and prosperous in a garden land (Leviticus 26:9). He told them He would give them dominion and authority among the nations on earth (Deuteronomy 28:13). And He told them He would partner with them in filling the world with worshippers, as He had said to Adam before, reminding them: ‘I will be your God and you will be my people’ (Leviticus 26:12).
God also encouraged them that if they were holy (Leviticus 20:26), they would obey His voice (unlike their Father Adam). They would follow His decrees, and He would make them fruitful and multiply them (Leviticus 26:9). He would bless them in the land that He was giving them (Deuteronomy 6:3). He would use them to bring His covenant blessings and extend His royal dominion to all the nations (Exodus 19:5-6). In the Law, God promises to enter into a Genesis 1:28 relationship with Israel and allow them to assist Him in accomplishing His Genesis 1:28 outcome of filling the world with worshippers.
From the outset of national Israel, God invited them into a covenant whereby they could partner with Him – like Adam long before – to bring God’s glory into all the earth (Numbers 14:21). They were commissioned to live such holy and fruitful lives, aided by the Law and sacrificial system, that the nations would see the glories of God and would either stream into Israel to know this benevolent deity (Deuteronomy 4:5-6) or they would tremble in fear of Him and His people (Deuteronomy 28:9-10). Either way, the Lord was committed to His earth-filling promises. As long as Israel was faithful to Him, God would allow them to join Him in that work, using them as a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 42:6). But, as we know from the story, Israel was regularly unfaithful to the Lord, they refused to be obedient to the terms of the covenant, instead of reaching the nations and filling the nations with the knowledge of God they polluted the land with the idols of demons. Instead of inheriting the covenant blessings, they often languished under the torrent of covenantal cursings (Deuteronomy 28).
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Glenn A. Moots |
Wednesday, November 17, 2021
The Protestant ethos of “Ad Fontes” (“to the sources”) demonstrates their appreciation of the ancient faith. Protestants likewise cherished the social and intellectual roots of ordered liberty, and they opposed all efforts by radicals or revolutionaries to tear them up. 

If critics of Protestantism are to believed, Reformation Day is a day to lament: Patrick Deneen blames Protestantism for Enlightenment liberalism; Ralph Hancock charges Calvin with rationalism; Catholic intellectuals Hilaire Belloc and Brad Gregory blame the Reformation for destroying Western civilization. So serious and existential are these charges that going “home to Rome” is, for some converts, the ultimate act of resistance against modernity.
But was the Reformation revolutionary at all? If one rightly confines it to the Magisterial Reformation: No. Magisterial reformers are called “magisterial” because they partnered with civil authorities (or “magistrates”) to preserve the corpus christianum and social order in Protestant polities against radicals on one side and Catholic powers on the other. Magisterial Protestantism included the Reformed, Lutheran, and Anglican traditions as well as some British nonconformists. Magisterial Protestants rejected the proliferation of radical sects and dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic and were, by liberal standards, quite severe with their opponents (e.g., Anabaptists or Quakers). According to Sidney Ahlstrom, three-quarters of eighteenth-century Americans were magisterial Protestants.
Progenitors of Individualism?
Even if magisterial Protestants opposed radicalism, didn’t they still seed it by asserting freedom of conscience? That would be true if Protestants had in fact freed the conscience in the way critics assert. Freeing the conscience was not directed at presumed “irrational religious and social norms” (as Deneen put it). Nor did Protestant theology necessitate a successive wave of freedoms, as David Corey has asserted.
Luther refers to the conscience over five hundred times, identifying it as the “coram deo”—that which puts us before the face of God—to distinguish it from the ethical and political rules of society. Luther never frees the conscience; he prioritizes its binding. The conscience of man is bound by ethical and moral rules of society as well as the Word of God—particularly Old Testament Law. Human bindings are conditional; the conscience is unconditionally freed only by the Gospel. Luther did not empower the individual to free his own conscience any more than Thomas Aquinas did. Luther opposed anyone who presumed the conscience to be autonomous and it is impossible to find a magisterial reformer who did not bind the conscience to the authority of scripture and church leaders. Ordered liberty of the conscience is not anarchistic spiritual individualism.
What we now call “Church-State Relations” (an ongoing debate in Christendom) entered a new phase during the Reformation, but “freedom of conscience” had little or no effect on the freedom of an individual. In fact, because a believer’s conscience is inwardly free (as Luther, Richard Hooker, and others argued) it is therefore untrammeled by outward impositions (e.g., conformity in vestments or liturgy) judged prudent by civil or ecclesiastical authorities for the unity of Church and Commonwealth. Nonconformists in England were counseled by continental reformers like Heinrich Bullinger to be prudent in their dissent. So-called “adiaphora” were not presumed to bind in the same way that the Word of God did, but they were imposed for the sake of unity and good order. John Locke’s defense of imposition of adiaphora or “things indifferent” in his unpublished Two Tracts (1660-62) is an inconvenient truth for any Whig history of toleration from Luther to Locke to Madison, for example.
If the Protestant Reformation led to what would eventually become religious liberty, then the path is indirect at best, and not landing there for at least a century or two. If anything, circumstance and pragmatism should get the credit. Arguments like those of Roger Williams were ridiculed, if not forgotten, for almost two centuries and Andrew Murphy makes a good case that principled arguments for toleration probably had little effect. More importantly, Williams, Anabaptists, Congregationalists, or Baptists desiring to separate believers, as wheat, from the tares of society (Matthew 13) were accused of secularizing the commonwealth and abandoning Christendom. Some were martyred. Most Protestants therefore fought against secularization and liberalization.
The Doctrine of Vocation vs. Egalitarianism
Protestants not only opposed an autonomous conscience, they opposed leveling the social institutions essential for civil society. Activities of daily life, freed from their implicit inferiority to holy orders like monasticism, were elevated almost to the level of worship. Daily life was directed by one’s vocations. Though Luther is most famously associated with the Protestant doctrine of vocation, its fullest presentation was in a remarkable work of 1626 by William Perkins, a Cambridge theologian of the Elizabethan settlement more popular at the time than Shakespeare or Richard Hooker. Perkins argued that every calling must be “fitted to the man, and every man be fitted to his calling.” And though Perkins argued that God is the author of each man’s separate calling through Creation and Providence, the application of that fact is neither individualistic nor egalitarian but instead deeply conservative. One learns one’s desires and gifts within a community, particularly the communities of family, the Church, and one’s neighbors. Our contribution to these communities invests our vocations with moral significance, not some modern individualistic and existential search for personal identity.
Read More