The Works of God

There are a lot of tired arguments out there.

I just finished watching another preacher try to explain why John 9 (which is about Jesus healing the man born blind) couldn’t possibly be about what it says, “that the works of God might be displayed in him (John 9:3).”   We know it couldn’t mean that, this preacher asserted, because we know that God is love and a loving God would never subject someone to years of blindness.

That would be a mean thing to do to that blind man, said this preacher.  So, rather than try to understand it, we’ll work really hard to turn that passage into a pretzel to mean something else.

It is so tiresome, this desire to turn passages into something else rather than consider God’s word.

Just for the sake of argument, I decided to give this one to him.  Let John 9 mean something else entirely.

But then what do we do with all the other places where God asserts his sovereignty over things we might consider to be ‘bad’?

I didn’t have to dig; I used my readings my One-Year Tract Reading Plan for July 4, from Psalm 135:5-12.  The emphases in bold are mine:

For I know that the Lord is great, and that our Lord is above all gods.
Whatever the Lord pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps.
He it is who makes the clouds rise at the end of the earth, who makes lightnings for the rain and brings forth the wind from his storehouses.

He it was who struck down the firstborn of Egypt, both of man and of beast;
who in your midst, O Egypt, sent signs and wonders against Pharaoh and all his servants;
who struck down many nations and killed mighty kings,
Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, king of Bashan, and all the kingdoms of Canaan,
and gave their land as a heritage, a heritage to his people Israel.

The Bible returns again and again to this theme:  God is sovereign and free to do whatever he pleases.  I’m glad that John 9:3 actually means what it says it means, without the need to make God into something that he is not.  If you want to hear a proper sermon on this passage, Born Blind for the Glory of God is a good place to start!

And I have this image in my head that this man born blind, rather than accusing God of being mean to him, has spent the last two millenia praising God for granting him spiritual eyes to see and enjoy Jesus forever!  And not only that, his story is part of the story of Jesus!

Then on Monday I started reading The Good News We Almost Forgot: Rediscovering  the Gospel in a 16th Century Catechism by Kevin DeYoung.  In the foreword, I was surprised and delighted to find that Jerry Bridges deals with several problems when we assert that God is simply a God of love:

The second error in “my God is a God of love” is that it ignores the fact that God is also a God of justice and righteousness.  It ignores the fact that the Bible says, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (Romans 1:18).  Because it ignores the bad news of God’s righteous judgment, it fails to tells us the really good news that the God of love did indeed love us so much that He sent His Son to die for our sins (1 John 4:10, 1 Corinthians 15:1-3).

This is just one illustration of the bad theology abroad among Christians today. . . pp. 9-10

God has been doing that a lot for me lately.  I’ll read something that is discouraging or hard, or, in this case, simply tired and wearying.  And then he’ll give me multiple gifts – something from his word, a reminder of a helpful sermon, and a phrase from a new book or author that is very encouraging.

And that God, who is both entirely free and entirely sovereign, has said specific things about disability and his intentionality.  I, for one, am grateful that God is so clear that he is the author of disability, for his glory and for my good.