Let’s Let God be God!
Meditation for the week of July 11, 2010
Romans 9:20 But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, "Why have you made me like this?"
The first commandment in Exodus 20 is "You shall have no other gods before Me.” The other nine of the commands would only be true of those who are worshiping the living God who created them and no other. They are the ways we please God when we have no other God but Him. This is the command that we are honoring when we “believe on the the Lord Jesus Christ (Acts 16:31).” This is the command that the Jews dishonored when they nailed the Lord to a cross.
Most of us would not believe in idols or in pagan mythical gods today. But most of us do believe in ourselves and I am convinced that the god that we put before the living God of the Bible is ourselves. It is the trinity called, “me, myself, and I.” We think that we know how God should act and what He should do and therefore we question God when things don’t go the way we think they should go. After all, in our minds we are the final authority, are we not?
Romans 9 deals with how God chooses His people. It is clear in the passage that God chooses without any help from us and that is why He could say that he loved Jacob and hated Esau. The Jews thought they were the chosen people, but in the new testament believers in Christ are the chosen people. This is what Ephesians 1:4 teaches us. Mos tof us fail to understand Romans 9 in the context of the whole book of Romans which says that even Abraham believed God and it was credited to him for righteousness (Romans 4:3). So while God could choose His people any way He wanted to, he tells us that in this dispensation He chooses believers in Christ to be His people. Romans 9:15 says, "I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion." Believers are the ones on whom He has chosen to have compassion and really that has always been true. So if Jews don’t like God’s plan, Paul says to them, “Who are you to reply against God?”
However we all tend to argue with God when we don’t like or understand His plan. Job even did that. Everyone in the book of Job including Job thought that God should bless those who did good and destroy those who were wicked (see chapters 21 and 27). The only problem was that Job was seemingly being destroyed and even God said He was good. But Job had to learn the lesson that none of us learn very well. He had to learn to let God be God. God said to Job, "Would you indeed annul My judgment? Would you condemn Me that you may be justified (Job 40:8)?” Job didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes. He didn’t know that He was being trusted with a trial to prove to Satan that there was at least one loyal worshiper of God on earth.
I marvel that many people who do not know where they came from or where they are going are so certain that God did not make them. I marvel that we who are convinced that there is a God in heaven who made us are still so prone to second guess Him and to think we know how He should operate. God’s ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8). When it comes to salvation, He saves lost sinners, not the righteous. As Christians, He wants us to trust Him, not second guess Him.
He wants us to let Him be God!
Bruce Collins