It’s been a tumultuous week for those of us living in the United States. Some are convinced that the world was just saved. Others believe it might well have just ended. One person told me, “Depending on the election results, I may have to change my theology.” Intriguing. What could an election prove or disapprove about God’s relationship with the world?
It’s certainly not my place to tell anyone how they should feel. But reflecting on conversations I’ve had this week, it has occurred to me that there are a few theological truths which, if overlooked, leave us vulnerable to misinterpreting many kinds of events, whether globally or in our own personal lives.
#1—God often teaches through choices and consequences.
Some believe that the outcome of events affirmatively demonstrates what God’s will always was. If something happens, it must be because God wills it. Others end up in a crisis of faith because they assumed there are things a loving God would never allow. Both assumptions reflect a misunderstanding of God’s relationship with history.
In 1 Samuel 8, the Israelites demand that God give them a king. God ultimately assents and gives them what they ask. But God states very plainly that this “answer to prayer” does not reflect God’s own judgment of what would be best. Rather, it reflects God’s willingness to let God’s people make a choice and learn from its consequences.
History is shaped by divine and human choices both. It is an ongoing conversation between the perfect wisdom of God and the fallibility of the rest of us. In any given moment, it is rarely obvious how the two forces are interacting. But that is kind of the point. From a biblical perspective, God’s larger investment is that we make choices, experience consequences, learn, repent, and grow up in the mind of Christ. No one grows up without choosing and experiencing the outcomes of their choices.
#2—It’s not all about you.
We know this. But we don’t know it, really. It’s easy to forget that others are praying different prayers and are learning different lessons. It’s easy to forget that in relating to history, God is managing hundred, thousands, millions of storylines all at once. The currents and corrections are running simultaneously in opposite directions. What God is doing in the world never neglects us, but it is also always bigger than us.
There was a period in my life when I was praying for a door to open that seemed stubbornly stuck shut. After a very long time of seemingly hearing nothing, one day out of the blue the door suddenly flew wide. I went to God and asked, “Why on earth did it take you this long?” To my surprise, I heard the Spirit whisper back, “You were ready. But this wasn’t about you. There was another person involved here who had work that he needed to finish.” That possibility frankly had not crossed my mind.
Some questions about where and how God is working cannot be answered from where we are standing. Because it isn’t about us. The answers lie in someone else’s (or some other group’s) story, the work God is doing in them. Because our lives are intertwined, we may experience a share of the effects, but the story being worked out in the moment may not chiefly be our own. It takes real humility to begin to understand and accept this.
#3—God’s kingdom generally advances from the margins rather than from power-centers.
I hear Christians say things like this all the time. But our emotional responses reveal how much we struggle to believe it. Our emotions rise and fall with the status of worldly power. Something within us cannot help believing that God’s kingdom must be winning or losing based on our personal assessment of what is occurring on the largest possible stages. We might say that God works in out-of-the-way places on the edges of the world, but if we’re honest, we prefer only to rely on such places as the last possible resort.
The truth is, Caesar’s wars and Herod’s edicts often have very little to do with the core project God is working. The headlines are about Rome and Jerusalem while God is starting a new world in Bethlehem and Capernaum. Our imaginations have by hijacked by false stories about where the kingdom’s center of action lies. It takes deliberate effort to start to challenge and deconstruct our own idolatries of power. The indicators of the actual state of God’s kingdom are always best read under open skies far away from the spotlight.
#4—God is patient and attends to the long-game.
The world is complicated. Actions produce reactions and counter-reactions that ripple across time. Sometimes an act intended for one purpose produces an opposite outcome. Sometimes when one person fails, it makes room for another to rise even stronger. Long-term results are notoriously hard to predict where many variables are involved.
As humans, we are short-term thinkers. Our opinions and emotions respond to a first order line of causes and effects that appear most immediately in view. We tend to judge God’s involvement from this short line of sight. But God is playing the long game, seeing the whole field from above, seeing the entire cascading chain of causes and effects in a detail we can hardly imagine. We perceive only a fraction, a shadow. This awareness can and should humble us and help us hold our judgments more loosely.
The apostle Paul says God works all things together for good. That doesn’t mean all things that happen are good. It’s means that God has a way in the long run of turning bad things inside out, of creating redemptive stories out of chaos and rubbish. God takes things meant for evil and subverts them for good. God takes Roman crosses and makes empty tombs. This is the perhaps the oldest truth we know about God, and it should ground us constantly in hope. Nothing is ever entirely as it appears, nor as evil alone would make it.
There’s a wonderful moment in the book of Romans where Paul bumps up against the mystery of the long arch of God’s purposes and bursts forth in a doxology of sheer wonder and unknowing. I am finding a great deal of hope in praying these words alongside him:
Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments,
and his paths beyond tracing out!
“Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?”
“Who has ever given to God,
that God should repay them?
For from him and through him and for him are all things.
To him be the glory forever! Amen.
(Romans 11:33-36)
