Can you look back over your life and see God’s hand in everything that has happened? And yes, I mean the good, the bad and the ugly. I don’t mean that God is responsible for the bad things that have happened to us. We are pretty good at getting bad things to happen all by ourselves. But if we are open enough to look at things objectively, even the things that were terrible when they happened, have sometimes led to a place we would not have been able to reach if they had not happened.
The church I grew up in taught me that everything was under God’s sovereign hand and everything that happened was God’s will. I cannot accept that a good and perfect God wills or even allows some things that happen in the world. That does not mean that He is not able to step in and change things but if I understand my bible correctly, He has placed limits on Himself in order to extend to us the gift of free will. It isn’t really free will if someone else steps in and changes something when it goes against their own will, is it?.
But what about the terrible things that happened in the Old Testament someone will ask? The way I understand it, all those wars and slaughters and terrible things that took place were the result of the atrocities and perversions that had been going on for ages and needed to be brought to justice. But that all happened before Jesus became the scapegoat and took the guilt and injustices on himself. It took place under a different covenant. So yes, God is good and merciful. He always was. But He is a God of justice and those things people use as examples of the atrocities that took place to satisfy God’s justice, happened before Jesus paid (in other words became a willing sacrifice) for all the injustices ever committed and ever to be committed.
We were not created to be marionettes, even if we sometimes behave like that. We always have a choice. Most times atrocities happen as the result of someone’s free choice. There are always victims when anyone chooses evil. And if our choice contradicts the will of our maker, He allows it. Our free choices can cause catastrophic results for people and places, and we sometimes have a high price to pay for our choices. But it is also true that we learn more from our mistakes and from adversity than we do when everything is perfect.
So, we can look at the good and bad in our lives and recognize that God's hand was, and always is, there to rescue us from the bad and guide us into the good if we allow Him. But that’s the point, we have to allow it.
James 1:17 says that ‘Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.’
