Category Archives: God’s sovereignty

Apr18

Revenge Is God’s Job, Not Man’s.

Posted on by
Standard

I think I know why vigilante justice is wrong. It occurred to me that vigilante justice is man’s attempt to get revenge when God said specifically that vengeance was His responsibility. It says in the Book of Romans,

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” ~ Romans 12:19, ESV.

And Paul is quoting Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy when he says that (Deuteronomy 32:35).

That says to me that revenge is God’s job, not ours. I often wonder if the reason people practice vigilante justice is because they either don’t believe God exists, so they feel they have to get justice themselves, or they don’t trust that He’ll get the justice they want, or need, or think they deserve for that crime. Either way they’re wresting control of when justice is served out of God’s hands, and into their own hands.

When someone has a vested interest in seeing a particular person convicted for a crime, regardless of that person’s actual guilt or innocence, if the person is acquitted then the one with the personal stake in his conviction can be a prime candidate for vigilante justice because he didn’t get his desired outcome.

God knows the whole story. He can see the whole picture, whereas we only know what we can see and hear and feel. We will never know another person’s motivation for what they did, and we won’t usually know if that person is lying, unless they break down and confess that they lied.

What if the person we’re pursuing is actually innocent of the crime we’re accusing him/her of? Even though we think we know who committed the crime, we don’t know everything, and we might be wrong. There’s no such thing as a perfect murder where God is concerned because God knows everything, EVERYTHING, and even if the real killer is never apprehended here on earth, God still knows who did it. That person will still have to face God’s justice and judgment in the end, regardless of what happens here on earth.

I know it’s hard to trust God about something so personal and painful as when someone dear to you has been attacked and/or murdered. I’ve been a victim of serious crime myself, and I know how difficult it is to trust God when you’ve been deeply wounded.

You might be saying, “How can I trust God when He allowed me to be so savagely hurt?” But I’ve come to know that it was God who protected me from the worst of the abuse. If God hadn’t been there I wouldn’t have survived. I would be dead, because those who were abusing me would have killed me, or I would have succeeded in one of my suicide attempts. And you might respond, “But if God is as powerful and as good as everyone says He is, then why was I abused at all? Why didn’t He stop the abuse from happening altogether?”

Unfortunately, there are some questions for which there just isn’t a satisfactory answer this side of Heaven, and this is one of them. The problem of evil is one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith, and it’s also one of the main reasons people give for doubting God’s existence. The argument usually goes, if God is omnipotent then He could have stopped the evil from happening, and since He didn’t then He must not be omnipotent. And by the same token, if He’s completely good, then He wouldn’t have allowed the evil to happen in the first place, and since the evil did happen, then He must not be completely good.

My response to those arguments is that the people proposing them aren’t considering all the factors. There is the all-important detail of man’s free will. God created every single human being with a free will, and He cannot violate that will in any way at any time, otherwise it wouldn’t be free. God desires humans who will freely choose to fellowship with Him, and He can only get people who will make that choice by creating them with a completely free will. And that means a free will to reject Him just as much as to choose Him.

I can say that God is absolutely faithful, and He solved the problem of evil once for all at the cross. Colossians 2 says,

He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross. In this way, He disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by His victory over them on the cross. ~ Colossians 2:14-15, NLT.

In addition, it says in the Book of Revelation,

I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death. ~ Revelation 1:18, KJV.

Jesus triumphed over Satan at the cross, and took the keys of hell and death away from him at that time, and as a consequence, death has lost its sting, as it says so well in 1 Corinthians,

“O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. ~ 1 Corinthians 15:55-57, ESV.

Even though Christ dealt with Satan at the cross, making a show of him openly as it says in Colossians, we won’t see the complete outworking of that victory until Christ returns at His Second Coming.

I think I’ll stop now. I’ve covered a lot of ground here, and meandered around a bit. I probably could’ve made this into two posts, especially because it got kind of long, plus I ended up on a different topic than I started out on, but I’m not sure I want to. Maybe I can tie it all together.

When someone is seeking their own justice, which is basically what vigilante justice is, they’re committing murder because they don’t trust the criminal justice system. Trying to exact your own justice is the wrong way to go about it. Killing another human being is always wrong no matter what, except if it’s in self defense.

God must be the judge, not man, and He works through the criminal justice system, as flawed as it is because it’s run by human beings. We need to trust that the truth will come out in God’s timing. You can’t hide anything from God. It says in the Book of Numbers,

But if you fail to keep your word, then you will have sinned against the LORD, and you may be sure that your sin will find you out. ~ Numbers 32:23, NLT.

So that’s all, folks!

Mar10

I Hate When That Happens!

Posted on by
Standard

The other day I was on my way to a therapy appointment when I came to a huge traffic jam blocking my route. Traffic going the opposite direction was flowing smoothly, but on my side it was pretty much a parking lot. It became abundantly clear in fairly short order that I would be late for my appointment if I didn’t do something drastic.

This was an important appointment for me, because McT and I had scheduled a two hour time slot. I’d never had a two hour therapy appointment before, so I was really looking forward to this session.

I managed to stay calm for a while, until I realized for sure that I was going to be late. I called McT and left a message with that information, and told him that I was very frustrated about the fact that I wasn’t going to get my whole two hour session. In fact, I wasn’t just frustrated, I was yelling-out-loud pissed, and my anger was mostly at God.

I hate it when I feel angry at God. When I get angry at God it never feels right or justified, but sometimes circumstances get all messed up, and everything goes contrary to my plans.

I know the saying that says, If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.

But I’m just not mature enough yet to be able to not get angry when something happens, especially if a lot of somethings happen, to mess up my plans. It always feels like God made it happen that way on purpose.

I know that probably sounds ridiculous, but it’s the way I feel.

Nov27

A Hope Deferred, and a Decision Made.

Posted on by
Standard

A long time ago, many, many years, in fact, I wanted to be a doctor. That’s all I ever wanted to do from the time I was ten years old. And my grandmother encouraged me in that desire because she bought me these marvelous books of medical illustrations by this guy named Frank Netter, who was a physician, but he was also an artist who specialized in doing beautiful and highly technical medical illustrations.

Frank Netter is dead right now. He died in 1991. But they’re still using his books of medical illustrations.

Unfortunately, the realities of my life, kept me from fulfilling that dream, (the abuse I suffered as a child made it so I’m not able to handle much in the way of stress, and medical school is very stressful), and I never even got accepted to medical school. I took the MCAT ~ and did poorly ~ and I applied to one school, but I wasn’t accepted, I’m sure because my MCAT scores were too low. My GPA from UCI was good, 3.46, but it probably wasn’t good enough.

It was a crushing blow, because, as I said, that’s the only thing I’d ever wanted to do with my life.

That was over thirty years ago, back in the mid-’80’s, and to this day, I still don’t know what God wants me to be when I grow up. Once I lost that dream I was never able to find another. I tried music for about a year, but couldn’t stomach the idea of having to practice for hours at a time. I thought about being a therapist, but at my age, graduate school ~ plus the years and years of collecting hours for licensure ~ feels impossible.

I still might consider it, however.

I’ve thought of art, but not as a career.

I just can’t seem to find anything that suits me enough that I’m willing to put forth the time and effort necessary to make a career out of it.

I guess, more than anything, that makes me feel like an extraordinarily lazy person.

Harrumph!!

I do like to write, and I think I’m fairly good at it, but I don’t know if I’m good enough to be able to make a living at it. I’ve been told that my poetry is publishable. I’ve also been told that I should write and publish my story, because God has worked miracles in my life, and He’s set me free from a lot of my abusive childhood, and He’s continuing to heal me from the rest of it. I thank God for that. I’m just not sure if I’d be able to do a proper job of putting it in written form so people would want to read it.

Publishing my poetry doesn’t feel too intimidating because it’s already written, so all that would be needed is to find someone to publish it. Writing my story is another matter. That feels completely daunting to me, because, not only would I have to write it, but I’d have find someone to publish it, and I don’t really know how to do either one.

Maybe I should just do it and let God worry about the rest. If I’m doing what He wants me to do, then how it gets done is really His problem, isn’t it?

Yup, it is!

Maybe I should take a creative writing class with an emphasis in writing a memoir. That might help get me started.

Now I just have to figure out where such a class might be located…

Jul3

God Is God, So He Doesn’t Have to Play God.

Posted on by
Standard

I had an interesting insight on the sovereignty of God recently.

I used to have big problems with God’s sovereignty in my life, because it seemed like it was God’s sovereignty that allowed me to be abused. And it used to make me SOOO ANGRY, because it felt like God wanted me to be abused, and it felt like cosmic child abuse.

I went through a whole seven-year period where I was enraged at God because of that, until I finally realized I was barking up the wrong tree ~ I was asking the wrong questions. I should have been asking who, what, and where questions instead of why questions. And once I started asking the right questions I actually got answers. God showed me where He was while I was being abused ~ which was all I really wanted to know in the first place.

But I realized recently that when someone is demanding that God explain Himself about something He’s done in that person’s life, what they’re really saying is, “How dare You play god with my life!” That made me laugh when I thought about it. How dare God play god with someone’s life? He IS God! He isn’t playing god, He’s BEING God! There’s a significant difference. The Apostle Paul says in Romans,

But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? ~ Romans 9: 20-21, ESV.

It seems to me Paul is saying here that God, because He is the Creator, has the right to do whatever He wants with the people He creates, and while those people can ask questions of Him, and pray for answers, they don’t have the right to demand explanations for His decisions.

You wouldn’t like it if your son demanded to know why you were taking him to the doctor’s office if his ear hurt, and then refused to go because he didn’t like the prick of needle from the shot. You would know why you were doing it ~ because the kid has an ear infection that needs to be healed, and if the doctor doesn’t give him an injection he could go deaf, or even die if it gets bad enough. You can see the big picture. You can see the end result, whereas the child can’t. The same holds true for God. The Bible says,

Only I can tell you the future before it even happens. Everything I plan will come to pass, for I do whatever I wish. ~ Isaiah 46:10, NLT.

I like the way the NIV says it as well,

I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, ‘My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.’ ~ Isaiah 46:10, NIV.

What that says to me is that God knew everything that would ever happen to me before I was ever a thought in anyone’s mind. He knew every decision I would make, and every thought I would think. He also knew every decision He would make about me. The Bible also says He knows the day I’m going to die, something I find quite comforting.

Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. ~ Psalm 139:16, NIV.

The reason I find that comforting is because now that I know that, it’s something I don’t have to worry about anymore. It’s God’s problem, not mine. All I have to do is go through my days doing my best to glorify God in all I do, basing my life on His Word, and God will take care of the rest.

Such a deal!