When We Follow God’s Plan
When I was a child, the maps in my Bible got me through many a sermon. I was rarely interested in listening to the preacher, so I would flip to the back pages of the Bible to study the maps there. I would gaze at the contours of the lands of the Middle East. I would observe how Abraham had obeyed God and left his country and his kindred and his father’s house to journey to the land that God would show him. I would study the ancient world as the Patriarchs knew it. Best of all, I would see how God had miraculously delivered his people from their long captivity in Egypt.
Like just about every Bible, mine had a map that traced the route the Israelites followed after they escaped from Egypt and began to make their way toward the Promised Land. The map had a line in blue that began in Egypt and then traveled south for a time toward the bottom of the Sinai Peninsula. Eventually, it bulged north for a short while before dipping south again. Then finally it turned permanently northward and led the way to Jericho before it terminated on the banks of the Jordan.
The route the Israelites followed is far from straight and hardly looks efficient. Instead of taking a direct approach leading straight from Egypt to Canaan, the route appears to wander and meander, to turn this way and then that, to progress for a time and then bog down. It would be easy enough to look at a map like that and assume that it shows confusion or indecision, a lack of planning, and a lack of strong leadership.
Yet we know that all the while the people were following the Lord’s directives. He is the one who would tell them when to pick up and when to settle down, when to go straight, and when to turn to the left or the right. It was under his direction that they forded this river or turned away from that sea, in obedience to his command that they approached this mountain or avoided that plain. And if that’s the case, then the map does not truly wander and meander at all and does not truly show the least confusion or indecision. To the contrary, the map at the back of our Bibles shows the considered and well-thought-out plan of God, the route that existed in his mind long before he called his people to follow it. Their every step was deliberate and their every move was meaningful, for it was all the fulfillment of God’s good and perfect will.
There are times when it does us good to think back to our own lives and to picture them almost like a map—a map that traces our journey from birth to where we are today. And as we look at our lives so far, we can see how we passed through certain kinds of difficulties and avoided many more, how we scaled some mountains of joy but bypassed others. We can see how we turned this way toward success and that way toward failure. Our path through this life has been winding and twisting, rarely perfectly straight and rarely avoiding every hindrance and every stretch of wilderness.
And just like God was leading the Israelites on their journey, we can have every confidence that he has been leading us on ours. Just like every twist and every turn they took was within the wise providence of God, so too every step we’ve taken forward and every step we’ve taken back. He planned that we would approach mountains and valleys, rivers and seas, and he has used them all for his good purposes. And, just like he promised that his people would safely reach the end of their journey, he has promised we will reach ours. For like them, he is leading us to the Promised Land, the land of peace, the land of rest, the land where we most truly long to be.
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A La Carte (May 5)
Good morning from Copenhagen, Denmark. I’m spending a day here on my way to Norway where I’ll be preaching at a local church and enjoying some scenery over the next few days.
I recently enjoyed being a guest on the Spurgeon Maniacs podcast, which you can listen to here.
How to Have the Mind of Christ
“It is all very well to say that being ‘worthy of the gospel of Christ’ means being restored to the image of God so that we begin to reflect the character of the Lord Jesus. But what does that mean?” Who would you rather have explain this than Sinclair Ferguson?
The Problem with the Trilemma
“We’re an age that likes shortcuts. We want ‘three simple steps to get rich’ and ‘eating this one vegetable will make you lose weight.’ That goes for what passes as discourse in our society, too. We don’t want nuance or careful reasoning. What’s popular is ‘this one argument will own [the other party]’ and ‘watch this Christian/skeptic destroy skeptics/Christians.’”
Why the surge in LGBT identity deserves a closer look
A recent report proclaimed that around a quarter of Millennials identify as one of the letters in the omnipresent, ever-lengthening acronym that begins with LGBT. This article explains why that number should be taken with a grain of salt. I am inclined to agree with the main conclusion, though certainly not with some of the other applications and takeaways.
When a Good God Seems Far From Good
Sarah Walton: “Have you ever stood before a spiritual fork in the road? One where you know the ‘godly answer’ to your painful circumstances, but there seems to be an impenetrable wall that stands between your head and your heart? It’s the tension between knowing something to be true but struggling to believe it when the evidence seems stacked against it.”
Polygamy
Does the Bible condone polygamy (as some like to charge)? Obviously not, as Mitch explains in this article.
What does it mean to be winsomely Reformed? (Video)
Michael Kruger considers what it means to be winsomely Reformed.
Flashback: We Always Glean Among the Sheaves
We are not left to glean for hope in barren fields, not left trying to pick up the scraps of his mercy when others have already taken the best of it. Always we gather into our arms the abundance of his mercy, the overflow of his grace.Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, to all the souls you can, in every place you can, at all the times you can, with all the zeal you can, every time you can. —John Wesley
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It Begins and Ends with Speaking
Part of the joy of reading biography is having the opportunity to learn about a person who lived before us. An exceptional biography makes us feel as if we have actually come to know its subject, so that we rejoice in that person’s triumphs, grieve over his failures, and weep at his death.
There is a sense in which the Bible is a biography, in which it is the story of God. It reveals God by describing what he has done and what he has said, for if the living God is to be known, “He must make Himself known, and He has done this in the acts and words recorded in Scripture.”
The Bible begins with God speaking: “Let there be light.” And the Bible ends with God speaking: “He who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon’” (Revelation 22:20). Between those two declarations are 66 books; 1,189 chapters; and just over 31,000 verses, each of which exists to tell us who our God is and what our God has done.
If we are to know God, he must make himself known. Through Scripture he has done exactly that. What a blessing, what an honor, and what a privilege that God has spoken and made himself known, for this is his grace to us. -
The Soundtrack of Heaven
I once heard of a ship that was crossing the Atlantic from Europe to South America, and as it neared the end of its crossing, it escaped a close call that would have sent it to the depths and would have taken the lives of many of its passengers.
After departing Dover, the ship had cruised for many days without incident and without mishap. In fact, the crossing had been so smooth and so unremarkable that the crew began to grow lax in their duties. As the ship drew close to the South American coast, the man on lookout nodded off, and as he slept his ship began to approach a particularly rocky and ruinous spot.
But as it happened, there was a cricket aboard that ship. Until that point in the journey, no one had noticed its presence, but as the ship drew close to land, the cricket somehow smelled it or sensed it, and set up a shrill call. The lookout awoke, understood that land was quickly approaching, and stopped the vessel before it blundered into the rocks and was lost.
In this case, something as insignificant as the chirping of a cricket saved many lives. And I sometimes wonder what you and I may accomplish with what seems to be the simplest and least significant of sounds. I wonder what heaven will someday reveal—what we will hear in the soundtrack of heaven.
Maybe the scratching of a pen on a notecard will prove to be the means God used to encourage one of his downcast people and strengthen them for another day of love and service.
Maybe the tapping of a keyboard that sounds the writing of an article or email will be shown to have introduced a skeptic to the gospel and won a sinner to salvation.
Maybe the clank of a spoon stirring a pot will eventually be seen to have been used to feed one of God’s “angels unaware”—to have displayed a distinctly Christian commitment to love and hospitality.
God is the master of transforming the ordinary to the extraordinary, the mundane to the miraculous.Share
Maybe it’s the click of knitting needles as they create a sweater to clothe one who is cold, the crunch of footsteps in the snow as they approach a home for a time of prayer, the sound of a sob as one Christian weeps with another, sharing a heavy burden and so fulfilling the law of Christ. Maybe it’s even the sound of a bell ringing from a church steeple and calling people to turn to Christ that day, that hour, that minute.
God is the master of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, the mundane into the miraculous. God is the master of accepting little and multiplying it to much. God is the master of taking our little contributions and making them the great means through which he blesses his people and brings glory to his name. And I am convinced we will one day learn that the soundtrack of heaven is made up of the simplest of sounds that God has joined together into the most stirring of symphonies.
