It was time for a photo, and these shoes were conveniently arranged in a nice little pile on my floor:
Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.
– Psalm 115:3
It seems like everywhere I go these days, I overhear people talking about how this or that isn’t fair. Or about how God isn’t fair. “Hurricane Katrina wasn’t fair, God. September 11th wasn’t fair. This cancer isn’t fair, God.” Fair? God could do anything he wanted and it would be fair. God has never wronged any man.
See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.
– Deuteronomy 32:39
The LORD kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up.
– I Samuel 2:6
Job 12:10 says that in God’s hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind. If, in 30 seconds, I keel over in my chair and die, God will have done me no wrong whatsoever. He made me and he owns me, and he can do with me whatever he pleases. Job understood this. Even after his entire family was wiped out, he still manages to say in Job 1:21, “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.”
Look at Luke 13. Some people are telling Jesus about “the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.” Jesus’ answer to them was, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” Jesus goes on to talk about 18 people in Siloam who were killed when a tower fell on them, and he asks, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem?” Again he answers, “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
I think the point here is that what’s amazing is not that Pilate mixed some Galileans’ blood with their sacrifices or that a tower crushed 18 people. Rather, the amazing thing is that we have not yet perished. All of us are hanging by a thin strand of God’s grace, and he could wipe us out at any moment and be perfectly justified in doing so.
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”–yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
– James 4:13-16
Our time here is short. We need to be doing things that are going to last for eternity, and we need to start with a biblical view of who God is. God is not our heavenly genie who responds every time we snap our fingers. Instead, we belong to God, and every single thing we have is a gift from him–our lives, our health, our possessions, our friends–everything.
[Jesus told the crowd] a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”
– Luke 12:16-21