Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We're running today's lap of life's race asking this question, did the fall ruin God's plans? The answer has to be no, because nothing can ruin God's plans. What are the implications for you and for me?
Stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. We're in a series on 10 lies about God and why you might already be deceived. Pastor Lutzer, if God is the planner and creator of everything, where does human freedom come in?
Dave, one of the things that I like about your questions is that very seldom do you throw me a softball. You often ask very hard questions that are difficult to answer, especially in just a moment or two. But let me emphasize that we are not programmed like computers. We are not puppets. We do have wills. Now, what influences our will leads us into the depths of scripture and its relationship to God.
But I want to emphasize this. We need to be able to hang on to human responsibility clearly taught in the scriptures and the sovereignty of God. And we must believe both. But even as we contemplate that, it is a reminder of the fact that God is active in our lives. He brings us to salvation. He overcomes our darkness. We see the need for believing. And therefore, in the end, he gets all the glory.
Let's listen now. Your Bible is open to the book of Ephesians. So may I invite you to turn to chapter one again, and I'm picking it up at verse nine.
And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment, to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. Another translation talks about when times will have ceased to roll. You know, historians talk about different times. They say that there is the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Age of Aquarius.
Today, we have Generation X. And times will continue to roll. But there is a time coming when the scripture says God will sum up everything in Christ in one head, under Christ.
Not under some other religious leader, but under Christ. Now, you and I know that everything that is left to itself always goes toward randomness and disintegration. We look at the world today and we see all of these senseless things. We see all of these strands of history that are happening that really seem to be falling apart.
And sometimes we say this world is falling apart. But God's intention is that under Christ, everything is going to be brought together under one head. Everything is going to be unified. Everything is going to make sense. Everything is going to become part of God's intimate plan. If I had time, I'd read to you 1 Corinthians 15, where the Apostle Paul says that the day is coming when Jesus Christ is going to return and he's going to crush all authority and all power and all things will be brought under subjection to him. And then he shall commit himself to the Father, that the Father might be all and in all.
Sense is going to be made out of this senseless world. Do you remember that illustration of the man who was in a rug factory? And as he was looking at this huge rug that was being made, he was looking at it underneath. The rug was being made on the second story, as it were, on some rafters. And all that he could see is tangled webs of thread, different colors, different directions, different patterns, no pattern at all really, a senseless jumble.
But then he was invited to go up the ladder and to see the top of the rug. And as he looked at the top, he saw that very beautiful, beautiful design. That's what God is doing. If you look at the senseless things that are going on in today's world, how can we possibly even begin to fathom the senselessness of the suffering that humanity inflicts upon humanity?
The abuse and the shootings and the crimes and the wars and you begin to name the list and it goes on and on and it makes no sense to us. But someday when we look at it no longer from the bottom up, which is all we can do, and we begin to see it from God's point of view, we'll see this beautiful design and it will be the figure of a man. It will be the design of Christ. God is bringing all things together under him.
There's a consummation coming. The purpose of creation, redemption. The purpose of redemption, consummation. So that God will receive the glory and be all in all.
Now it's time for your questions. And question number one on your mind is, well, if that's really true, if this is plan A, if this is the way quote it was to be, if this is the way God ordained it, question number one is what about free will? Well, you know, there's a story about a group of theologians that were discussing this controversy, which has a very long history as you might understand. And finally they couldn't agree and so they broke into two groups. And over here you had the free willers and over here you had the predestinarians, two different groups.
One man seeing the two groups not quite knowing which one to belong to went over to the predestinarians and said, may I join your group? They said, now why are you joining? He said, well, he said, I just came here of my own free will. They said, you don't belong over here. You can't come into our group of your own free will.
So, okay. So he went over to the free willers and he joined them and they said, why are you here? And he said, I was sent here. They said, you can't be sent here. The only people here have to join of their own free will.
He of course was left out in the cold. Now folks, I need to tell you that if this were a seminary classroom, I would go into great detail, defining terms and helping us to understand. But I shall give you the real quick, the real quick answer here. It's interesting that the Bible does not experience this as a contradiction. We're the ones that struggle with it. It's interesting that in the book of Acts where Paul says, Christ was offered by the predetermined plan of God and you wicked men put him to death. God was offered, Christ was offered according to God's plan, but the men who did it were considered to be wicked and they will be punished for it. So what you have in the scripture is the will of man and the will of God going in what theologians call concurrence, going along together and yet us not being able to deny one or the other. So I'll simply say this. Any view of free will that denies the fact that history is God's story and that God rules in the affairs of men is a wrong view of free will. But any view of predestination that says that we are only robots on a string and our wills are totally controlled by alien forces and therefore we are like puppets, that is a wrong view of predestination. So what we must humbly do is to recognize that there's mystery here that we cannot put together, but that we must believe both and let us not deny either of them.
How do you like that for a quick explanation? Let's go on to your second question. Your second question is, but Pastor Lutzer, are you saying that this world with all of its evil is somehow God's will? I mean, is it not exactly contrary to God's will? I mean, if there's anything that is opposite to God's will, it's look at all the evil that's going around. And yet you're saying that this was all, quote, prearranged.
Another really quick explanation. The Bible distinguishes between two aspects of God's will. His revealed will, which is not done on earth, it is fought against.
Whatever God says, people do the opposite. That's his revealed will. But his hidden will is always accomplished. In fact, even in Ephesians, we just read a moment ago that he works all things after the counsel of his own will. That is his hidden will, which is always done.
Now let me give you an illustration. Here you have a nobleman who has a wonderful grove of trees. In fact, his whole farm is filled with trees and he loves his trees.
Maybe he even calls his trees by name. But he has a neighbor who's an evil man who hates this nobleman. He's full of envy.
He's full of anger. And so the neighbor whom we'll call Mr. Evil, he is scheming to try to find out how he can do his friend in. His neighbor, I should say.
So finally one night, Mr. Evil gets up enough nerve to climb over the fence. He goes over and he chooses a tree in a very spacious and special place. And he works all night to chop it down.
In fact, because he's so mad, he chops it right down from the roots and he works and he works. And then as the tree falls, unfortunately, Mr. Evil runs in the wrong direction and the tree falls on him and he is pinned lying there.
He's still alive, but he's in bad shape. But he has this, this evil perverse satisfaction of knowing that at least, at least he was able to chop down one of this man's, the nobleman's favorite trees. Well in the morning, the nobleman comes walking along with a friend and they are talking and this man who's lying there can hear them come in the distance. And when they get near this man, this Mr. Evil, he says in a choking voice, hardly able to talk, I know that you're going to get me, but I chopped your tree down. And the nobleman says, well, I want you to know that the gentleman that I have with me here today is a builder. He's a contractor. And the reason that we were taking this walk is I wanted to show him where I wanted a new house built and it was to be built right here.
And so I want you to know that you chopped down a tree that needed to come down and you have done a lot of the work already for me. That's the way it is. Does that mean that Mr. Evil gets by? No, he's punished. He had evil intentions and therefore he, he is going to be punished. Just like the devil, like mankind, they fight against God.
They rail against him. They do everything opposite to what God says, but he who sits in the heavens laughs and he has them in derision. And what they don't know is that the more evil they do, the more wicked they become. They always keep doing God's ultimate purpose anyway. And that's why the Bible says in the book of Proverbs, God has made all things for himself, even the wicked for the day of evil. God is still in control and his purposes are being done.
Wow. A third question. Can we trust a God like this? Can we trust a God whose plan apparently involves such things as Kosovo, the Holocaust, and we could name a number of other things. Is that feasible that a God like that can be trusted and loved?
Well, I'd like to say to you today that the sovereignty of God actually invites trust. Because what that means is that these senseless things that we have been talking about, the fact that there is not only human tragedy, but human tragedy upon tragedy and when there's an earthquake, it not only destroys villages and people, but then it rains for a week so that the survivors can't even find those who are buried under the rubble. What sense does all this make? What sense does it make to have a plane with some folks in it who want to help others suddenly crash so that that help is negated? What sense is it when children die of disease and starvation? Can you make sense of this?
I can't. But the thing that gives me hope is the fact that God has a plan and I have to believe that in the end, from the standpoint of eternity, once we see it from point A to point B and we look at it through His eyes, I am convinced that all of us will eventually say, He doeth all things well. One day I was mowing the lawn and I saw a piece of paper that had blown across the way and it was obviously, as I looked at it more carefully, a letter that someone sort of tore up and then threw I guess into some kind of a garbage bin and part of the letter was there and I read some of it because a paragraph or two were still legible and that was the part that came to me. But of course I couldn't understand the whole story. There was so much mystery because it talked about a relationship between two people and why this person did whatever and then it ended.
I mean and that was it. And I thought, I even looked around and said I wonder if there are other pieces here. That's what we have when we look at the Bible. God says I'm giving you a letter that is truthful and it makes sense but there's so much that you do not know. If you could see my hidden plans and what I'm working behind the scenes and if you could see from all of eternity and understand that evil men keep railing and doing this evil and they're always still accomplishing my purposes, if you would understand that then you would find that there is adequate reason to believe and to trust. And that's the thing that gives me hope is that because God is in charge, these things that are so senseless to him obviously must make some sense. Now if he wasn't in control, if this were only plan B, if he were trying to shore up something that kind of went out of whack and he was trying to come up with the best, then I would really wonder in my heart whether everything is really going to turn out okay. Yes, we can trust.
We can trust. There is such a thing as the providence of God which is both bitter and sweet, isn't there? The Old Testament, Naomi, you know her name I think was sweet and she said don't call me Naomi. She said call me Mara, call me bitter. She had lost a husband and two sons and she said the Almighty hath dealt bitterly with me because she understood that they died under his hand even though they died of quote natural causes. There is something but yet for the saint who goes on believing there is something sweet about knowing that God is bigger than these circumstances.
Listen to the words of Sarah Edwards, the wife of Jonathan Edwards. He was only 54 years old and going to become president of Princeton University when he got smallpox and they went to a doctor and the doctor gave him a shot way back in 1758 that caused him to die. It would have been better actually if he had just had the smallpox.
It was one of those cases where the cure was worse than the disease. Now how did she take that? Did she rail against the doctors and say well why did they do that? How does God expect me to do it?
That's the modern way, isn't it? But she had been instructed in the beauty of God's providence. She understood that these things do not happen without divine permission and they come to us from his hand.
She wrote to her oldest child and she had 10 of them. What shall I say she said after her husband died. A holy and good God has covered us with a dark cloud. Oh that we may kiss the rod and lay our hands on our mouths. The Lord, notice that, the Lord has done it. He has made me adore his goodness that we had him so long, speaking of her husband, but my God lives and he has my heart.
Oh what a legacy my husband, your father, has left us. We are all given to God and there I am and I love to be. Of course we don't understand it all, but providence means that we go on believing because our faith is precious to God.
It makes no sense to us. Let us admit that, but he knows all things and what is it that Cowper said, behind a frowning providence there is a smiling face. There is a purpose. Last question, can we worship? Oh can we worship. When the Apostle Paul discussed the promises of God and the eternal plan of God in the book of Romans, chapter 9 where he talked about Pharaoh and the potter and the clay and chapter 10 where he talks about Israel and chapter 11 where he continues to talk about Israel, remember he ends the benediction by saying, of him, that is creation, through him, that is redemption, and to him, that is consummation, those are the three links that we talked about, are all things. Let me conclude by worshiping, even as Paul worshiped. Oh the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.
How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out. For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor or who has given to him and he has to give back in return. For of him and through him and to him are all things, both now and forever.
Amen. Genesis 1 verse 1, in the beginning God created. Revelation chapter 19 verse 6, praise be unto God for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. And with that we bow to pray. Our Father, we pray that you will help us to be worshippers who do nothing but adore you and give you praise. For those Father who are going through trials through the bitter aspects of providence, that dark cloud about which we just mentioned, we ask today Father grant them sustaining grace and help them through that cloud to see your providence and your grace. Father for that which lies around us in ruins for a world that is so disintegrated, help us to rejoice that in the end it shall be brought together under a just and holy purposeful God.
Create great faith in our hearts we pray for the little irritations of life as well as the tragedies. Grant us oh Father a people who will know that in the end you shall triumph and therefore Father we can never, never be pessimistic for our hope is in you. For those who have never trusted Christ as Savior we ask that this vision of God may create with them and in them a desire to say yes I too believe in the Savior the Lord Jesus Christ. Do that for us Father for we are needy in Jesus name.
Amen. And as I frequently mention if you've never trusted Christ as Savior if you find within your heart a desire to believe follow that desire. Come to Jesus Christ in repentance and faith and receive what he has done for fallen humanity.
God is sovereign but he holds us accountable. There's much about God that we do not understand but we are so grateful that we can know him and prepare to meet him through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let me ask you a question have you been blessed as a result of the ministry of running to win? If you answer yes it's because people just like you have invested in this ministry.
Oftentimes I get the opportunity of traveling to different cities preaching in different churches and I am so blessed when I hear about the response of people some who have come to saving faith others who are strengthened in their faith and it is because of the investment that others have made. Here's how you can become what we like to call an endurance partner. Endurance partners are those who stand with us regularly with their prayers and their gifts and of course you need info. I hope that you have a pen or pencil handy because you can go to rtwoffer.com.
That's rtwoffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9336. In the last few days I have met a number of people who have told me that they pray for us regularly and I like to emphasize when they say that that they are doing that which is most important for the furtherance of this ministry but many of you also want to take it a step further I hope that you'll consider becoming an endurance partner. You can write to us at Running to Win 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard Chicago Illinois 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. We've all seen the cartoons the devil whispers in one ear and an angel whispers in the other. The implication is that choosing sin means happiness and saying no means a humdrum existence. Next time on Running to Win we'll combat another lie about God. Join us to hear about lie number nine that we must choose between God's will and our happiness. Thanks for listening for Pastor Erwin Lutzer this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
