There are no guarantees in this life. At least, not the kind that keep you healthy, wealthy, and wise. We are all in His hands—father, mother, sister, brother, missionary, or local church member. And He is so trustworthy! I can magnify His worth as I entrust to His care the children He has temporarily entrusted to my care. Fellow mothers, let’s surrender our fears and ambitions for our children and let the Lord write their stories according to His perfect wisdom.

I leaned over my bleeding daughter, adrenaline pumping through my own veins as I obeyed the instructions of my nurse friend and co-worker, Heidi. My sweet 7-year-old Savannah looked up into my eyes from the tile floor beneath the ladder-like stairs and asked, “Why did God let me fall? I was getting toys for the little kids!”
Savannah will always bear the scar in her forehead from the wound that bared bone that day, and my own soul would bleed and fester over the next weeks as I grappled with her question that cut deeply into my mother-heart. It was a wound that would eventually heal but leave its mark on me.
Our Stewardship
Our gracious Father had given three beautiful children to Forrest and me to shepherd and steward, and we had gladly accepted the responsibility. The Lord also made it clear that we would be raising them in a rural province of Cambodia, known among the developing world for its rugged poverty. Our response was always a resounding “God will take care of us!” But what did that mean now? My pain cried out, God, we have given up so much to come here and serve the Cambodian people. Can I not trust you to keep my children safe from harm? I wanted to require God to insulate my family from hurts in exchange for our sacrifice and service. This would not do. I would wrestle with Him, even until the break of day, but He would prevail with a single touch. He is Lord.
I loved to think of how the Lord had taught me to embrace risks for His Name’s sake, tamping down my fear and stepping out, then gasping at the wonder of what He can do with just a little faith. I talk about it to others. I write about it. But the glory takes on an uncertain hue when my risk-taking affects my little ones. Can I pursue activities that promote the Gospel, knowing sickness and danger will encroach on their young lives too?
I can be a good steward as I help my children experience how to invest in eternal things, counting cost according to God’s economic system, not the world’s.
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God wants us to wake up from our daydream and face reality. He wants us to cease our infatuation with the insubstantial trinkets of our fading lives and consider things of eternal value. He calls us to stop being so preoccupied with rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship and, instead, give serious attention to the lifeboat he has provided. In short, a healthy awareness of our own mortality should cause any reasonable person to consider what lies beyond the grave and to seek a relationship with their Creator.

A sincere Christian recently asked me, “What lesson is God trying to teach us through COVID?” Your own answer to that question depends on your ontological viewpoint. My own view is that God’s sovereignty does not mean that everything that happens in this world is a deliberate, intentional act of God flowing from his divine perfect will. Many things happen CONTRARY to his will (human sin, for example!) but he allows them to happen, he forbears them, as part of his PERMISSIVE will.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for COVID, don’t point your finger at God. The ontological antecedent of COVID, along with every other instance of suffering and misery in our world, is the rejection of God’s sovereign rule by mankind at the beginning of creation. It is a rebellion that has introduced a profound sickness to the natural world, the consequences of which we continue to experience to this present day.
But that is a side issue to the question that was asked. The questioner was not seeking an ontological explanation for the origin of COVID. Her concern was much less esoteric. “What lesson is God trying to teach us through COVID?” Regardless of one’s view of God’s sovereignty, Christians are unanimous in their belief that God uses “all things”, including suffering, to bring about his eternal purposes (Romans 8:28). So, what might God be trying to teach us in this pandemic?
That we are kites dancing in a hurricane.
If the current pandemic has done nothing else, it has confronted us with our own mortality and shone a spotlight on the extremely tenuous nature of life. The current death toll from COVID stands at over five million. That’s five million people who were going about life, many of them thinking that they had years left to live, but who were snuffed out by a tiny microbe that can’t be seen with the naked eye. I know of strong, healthy people who were in the prime of life who are now no longer with us, because of COVID.
Of course, there is nothing unusual about this state of affairs. Millions of people die of the flu every year. Millions die of malaria, pneumonia, cancer, heart disease and stroke. Millions more die from accidents, often involving weird and unlikely alignments of contributing factors. Yes, death is happening all around us, every day. About 60 million people die every year: that’s two people every second. The one thing that the universe is really good at, is killing us!
But the current pandemic has confronted us, afresh, with our own mortality. Even though it is just one more among a plethora of means by which the natural world is removing people from the gene pool, COVID has highlighted afresh the extremely tenuous nature of our existence. Even though we have lived our lives up to this point in “the valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4), we had somehow become complacent, inured to the myriad of ways in which the universe could suddenly, and without warning, call, “time’s up!”
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The following selection of definitions start in eternity past, move to eternity future, and cover a basic pattern of salvation that is true for all those whom God has saved, is saving, and will save…they will serve you as you study the Scriptures and work out your salvation with fear and trembling, grace, and knowledge.

And those whom he predestined he also called,and those whom he called he also justified,and those whom he justified he also glorified.—Romans 8:30
Last Sunday I preached a sermon with lots of big but important words. In two verses (Romans 3:24–25), Paul uses justification, redemption, and propitiation to speak of the saving work of God in Christ’s death and resurrection. Tomorrow, I will add to that list a number of other big words as our men’s group discusses John Murray’s Redemption Accomplished and Applied. In Part 2 of his book, Murray outlines the order of salvation (ordo salutis) starting with regeneration and ending with glorification. Added to this list we could describe God’s eternal plans for salvation in things like predestination, election, and adoption.
All in all, there are a lot of -ion words that Christians (at least English speaking Christian) need to grasp in order to understand their salvation. To be clear, salvation does not depend upon knowing how it works. We can fly on a plane without understanding aerodynamics. Just the same, we can be saved by faith in Christ, without understanding everything about it. There are many, indeed all of us, who possess wrong ideas about salvation who are still saved. So great is God’s grace.
Nevertheless, for those who delight in God and his salvation, we are urged (Ps. 111:2), even commanded (Matt. 28:19), to grow in a knowledge of our salvation (2 Pet. 3:18). And to that end, I share the following selection of definitions that start in eternity past, move to eternity future, and cover a basic pattern of salvation that is true for all those whom God has saved, is saving, and will save. I hope they will serve you as you study the Scriptures and work out your salvation with fear and trembling, grace and knowledge.
Sources

Twelve Salvation Words
1. Salvation
A broad term referring to God’s activity on behalf of creation and especially humans in bringing all things to God’s intended goal. More specifically, salvation entails God’s deliverance of humans from the power and effects of sin and the Fall through the work of Jesus Christ so that creation in general and humans in particular can enjoy the fullness of life intended for what God has made.  (Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms, 105)
The master theme of the Christian gospel is salvation. Salvation is a word-picture of wide application that expresses the idea of rescue from jeopardy and misery into a state of safety. (Concise Theology, 146)
(N.B. I would add that everything that follows in this list of terms is a part of salvation. While salvation is often thought and described synonymously with redemption, justification, or regeneration, salvation (theologically speaking) really is the umbrella term for all that the triune God does to save us. Moreover, this term must encompass the eternal grace of God and the work of God—past, present, and future. Anything short of that comprehensive view of salvation shrinks this glorious truth. Moreover, when we fail to consider the various “parts” of salvation, it may lead to a misunderstanding of the doctrine.)
2. Predestination and Election
Predestination is word often used to signify Gods foreordaining of all the events of world history, past, present, and future, and this usage is quite appropriate. In Scripture and mainstream theology, however, predestinaion means specifically God’s decision, made in eternity before the world and its inhabitants existed, regarding the final destiny of individual sinners. In fact, the New Testament uses the words predestination and election (the two are one), only of God’s choice of particular sinners for salvation and eternal life (Rom. 8:29; Eph. 1:4-5, 11). Many have pointed out, however, that Scripture also ascribes to God an advance decision about those who finally are not saved (Rom. 9:6-29; 1 Pet. 2:8; Jude 4), and so it has become usual in Protestant theology to define God’s predestination as including both his decision to save some from sin (election) and his decision to condemn the rest for their sin (reprobation), side by side. (Concise Theology, 38)
The verb elect means “to select, or choose out.” The biblical doctrine of election is that before creation God selected out of the human race, foreseen as fallen, those whom he would redeem, bring to faith, justify, and glorify in and through Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:28-39; Eph. 1:3-14; 2 Thess. 2:13-14; 2 Tim. 1:9-10). This divine choice is an expression of free and sovereign grace, for it is unconstrained and unconditional, not merited by anything in those who are its subjects. God owes sinners no mercy of any kind, only condemnation; so it 1S a wonder, and matter for endless praise, that he should choose to save any of us; and doubly so when his choice involved the giving of his own Son to suffer as sin-bearer for the elect (Rom. 8:32). (Concise Theology, 149)
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