Dear friends, Less both sides Forget God Rules in this
Election!
“Sovereignty, God’s sovereignty, is one of the
most difficult things for people of faith to live out in everyday routines. But
we have no choice: God is Sovereign. God rules not only in our personal affairs
but in the cosmos. Not only in our times and places of worship but in office
buildings, political affairs, factories, universities, hospitals – yes, even
behind the scenes in saloons and rock concerts. It’s a wild and extravagant
notion, to be sure. But nothing in our Scriptures is attested
to more frequently or emphatically.
“Yet not much in our daily experience confirms it. Impersonal forces and
arrogant egos compete for the last word in power. Most of us are knocked around
much of the time by forces and wills that give no hint of God. Still,
generation after generation, men and women of sound mind continue to give sober
witness to God’s sovereign rule. One of the enduring titles given to Jesus is
“King”.
“So how do we
manage to live believingly and obediently in and under this revealed
sovereignty in a world that is mostly either ignorant or defiant of it?
“Worship shaped by
an obedient reading of Scripture is basic. We submit to having our imaginations
and behaviors conditioned by the reality of God rather than by what is handed
out in school curricula and media reporting. In the course of this worshipful
listening, the books of Kings turn out to provide essential data on what we can
expect as we live under God’s sovereign rule.
“The story of our
ancestors, the Hebrew kings, began in the books of Samuel. This story makes it
clear that it was not God’s idea that the Hebrews have a king, but since they
insisted, He let them have their way. But God never abdicated His sovereignty
to any of the Hebrew kings; the idea was that they would represent His sovereignty, not that He
would delegate His sovereignty to them.
“But it never
worked very well. After five hundred years and something over forty kings,
there was not much to show for it. Even the bright spots – David and Hezekiah
and Josiah – were not very bright.
Human beings, no matter how well intentioned or
gifted, don’t’ seem to be able to represent God’s rule anywhere close to
satisfactory. The books of Kings, in that light, are a five-hundred-year documentation
proving that the Hebrew demand of God to “have a king” was about the worst
thing they could have asked for.
“But through the centuries, readers of this text
have commonly realized something else: In the midst of the incredible mess
these kings are making of God’s purposes, God continues to work His purposes
and uses them in the work – doesn’t discard them,
doesn’t detour around them, He uses them. They are part of His sovereign rule,
whether they want to be or not, whether they know it or not. God’s purposes are worked out in confrontation and
revelation, in judgement and salvation, but they are worked out.
God’s rule is not imposed in the sense that He
forces each man and woman into absolute conformity to justice and truth and
righteousness. The rule is worked from within, much of the time invisible and
unnoticed but always patiently and resolutely there. The books of Kings provide a premier
witness to the sovereignty of God carried out among some of the most unlikely
and uncooperative people who have ever lived.
“The
benefit of reading these books is enormous. To being with, our understanding
and experience of God’s sovereignty develops counter to all power-based and
piety-based assumptions regarding God’s effective rule. We quit spinning our
wheels on utopian projects and dreams. Following that, we begin to realize that
if God’s sovereignty as it is being exercised (though often silently and
hiddenly) in all the circumstantial details of the actual present.”
This is Eugene Peterson
introduction to kings in the Message Bible.
Shalom to all of us, Jim
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