Title: The Sweet Surrender unto Sovereignty, Part One
And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.
-Kurt Vonnegaut
Slaughterhouse Five
Can anyone tell me who said this?
My “Lot’s wife” is Job. In the last few years I have fallen in love with the humanity and toil of Job. This was not always the case. I had read most of Job through a few times, but it was not a book that spoke to me in any particular way. Then, about two years ago I had the opportunity to take “Wisdom Literature” with Dr. Paul Overland at ATS.
Through the course of his class I came to love Job. Not the book, but the person of Job. I love his questions, his angst, and, more than anything, I love his final sweet surrender unto the sovereignty of God. One of the cruel ironies of Job is that his questions, his totally justified, faith testing questions are never answered in his lifetime, and yet, he surrenders still to the greatness of God.
I believe when Paul penned the passage that we are looking at today he was absolutely exhausted. Spiritually, he was drained from the understanding of the movement and choice of God’s spirit. And he closes this passage with some of the most emotional language we have of Paul on record. Gone here is the systematic outlining of Truth, gone are the numerous counter-arguments and persuasions. Here we see Paul, in some of the most draining of his words, quoting Job.
I. The Right Size for God
v 33 (read)
You ever gotten a nice shirt for Christmas or your birthday but it was too small? You really like the shirt, you’d surely put it to good use, if only it was a realistic option. But it’s not the right size, and therefore, it’s ultimately useless to you.
Far too many people, far too many professing believers make a tragic error here. They have the right ideas about God, but their God is far too small to be of any real use.
They believe God is powerful, but not really able to help them.
They believe God is gracious, but his son’s blood isn’t enough to cover over the sins they’ve committed.
They believe he is sovereign, but not so much so that he controls the destinies of men.
Some Christians come to a good understanding of the size and scope of our Lord early in their walks, and their walks are surely blessed for such and understanding.
For:
When they pray, they are praying to a God who can change things.
When they weep, they are weeping to a God who desires to give them rest.
And when they are angry and curse God, he gives pause, demonstrating the ultimate patience imaginable.
And, most of all, when they consider their own lives, and their own sin, and their salvation, they understand that salvation is a gift. A gift they did absolutely nothing to earn.
Other people live their entire lives with a God too small, a God useless to change anything. No God at all really.
Paul exclaims, in emphatic fashion, two things in this verse.
First, that the depth of God’s wisdom and knowledge are beyond measure. They are so infinite far stretching that it hurts the mind to think about these things.
And, because of that, Paul says secondly that God’s judgements and his ways are past finding out. Essentially, the decisions that God makes unto our planet, unto our world, unto even us we will never know in this lifetime.
I am more moved to emotion by the question, “Why did God chose me for His Kingdom?” Than I am, “Why did Katrina happen?”
We cannot know God’s reasons. But what we can know is God himself.
Think about that. What brings you more peace: knowing why someone does something, or knowing who that person is?
Knowing why God does something gives up but a glimpse into an instant of God’s decision making, it can bring you no peace whatsoever. Hospice patients ask me all the time, “Can you tell me why God is letting this happen to me?”
I want to just shake them and say, even if I knew and could tell you, it would bring you no peace! All it would do is lead to more questions! The real question you need to be asking is not “Who is God to do this to me?” But rather, “Who is God!”
Blackaby says something similar: The question is not “What is God’s will for my life?” But rather, “What is God’s will?”
Henry Blackaby gets it. He is focused on the eternal. He wants to know who God is, not merely why God does the things he does. His God is large.
Some Christians will therefore say: “Make God big. Make God big in your life!”
Garbage!
I say to you, as your pastor, “GOD IS BIG. KNOW HIM!”
Do not be like this man, who penned these heart stopping words here upon his deathbed:
I die before my time and my body shall be given back to the earth and devoured by worms.
What an abysmal gulf between my deep miseries and the eternal Kingdom of Christ.
I marvel that whereas the ambitious dreams of myself and of Alexander and of Caesar should have vanished into thin air, a Judean peasant–Jesus–should be able to stretch his hand across the centuries, and control the destinies of men and nations.
Napoleon, on his deathbed