By Jack Wyman

Sometimes I don’t get it. I just don’t.

It reminds me of what Winston Churchill said of Russia: “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

My definitions don’t fit. My reasoning is defied; my hopes and expectations unrealized, and my assumptions overturned.

It makes no sense.

How odd of God.

There are times when I don’t understand Him. I struggle with His sovereignty, question His will, even doubt His love and His mercy. Not all the time, but sometimes I doubt. I ask God to forgive me for ever questioning His purpose. I may not know what God’s doing, often I don’t, but I do know His plan is perfect, His will divine, and His way absolute.

I take this on faith. Not alone as a didactic theological precept, but as a matter of personal daily trust. In this trust, I find my reassurance and my comfort. I may not receive clarity. We’re all still looking in a cloudy mirror; our understanding limited by our frail mortality.

The apostle Paul says our knowledge is hedged in by our earth-bound nature. The promise is our hope: it will not always be like this (I Corinthians 13:12).

One day you and I will see clearly what is now but a shrouded mystery.

To doubt is not a sin. It’s a natural response. With the desperate dad whose son seemed beyond a cure, I have prayed more than once, “help my unbelief.” I admire those who never doubt and never question, though I suspect they are fewer in number. Most of us have had something—somewhere, sometime, somehow.

Something that made us question our sovereign, omniscient God.

Recently, I read about “deconversion.” This is the experience of giving up on faith, on God, on Jesus Christ, on the church—and walking away. To de-convert is to renounce Christianity. It’s to rejoice in being liberated from a “lie.”

Those who have deconversions have usually had an event in their lives that they could not rationally understand or explain in terms of their faith. It led to a crisis of belief. The disappointment was so great, the injustice so inexplicable, the hurt so grievous that the anguished believer no longer believes.

Job questioned God. In his misery, his unearned suffering, and his unbearable loss and pain, Job doubted. God replies to Job. “Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorant words?” (Job 38:1). God then asserts His glorious and unrivaled omnipotence for four long chapters.

As literature, Job 38-41 is beautifully masterful. As theology, it is awesomely majestic. As truth, it is virtually unassailable.

Job bows his head and confesses, “I know that you can do anything, and no one can stop you.” God had asked who it was who had questioned him.

“It is I,” Job whispered through his tears—and I was talking about things I knew nothing about . . . I take back everything I said and I sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance” (Job 42: 2-3,6).

Through it all, Job did not abandon his trust in the One who let the devil afflict Job mightily. This whole story itself is a mystery. God revealed His glory to Job—and then restored him, so that his end was greater than his beginning.

It’s not just in the Book of Job that God displays His sovereignty—nor in the delicate, perfectly-ordered, and breathless intricacies of His creation, by which you and I are surrounded by His beauty and majesty. Throughout the entire Bible, God also surprises us time and again with His mysterious ways and strange, unlikely choices.

God has worked through interesting and often flawed men and women to do great things.

Paul was an unlikely evangelist, Peter an unlikely disciple, Gideon an unlikely general, Moses an unlikely deliverer, Jeremiah an unlikely prophet, David an unlikely king, Rahab an unlikely protector, and Abraham and Sarah unlikely parents.

Israel? Why did God choose the smallest and least consequential nation on earth to be His special people by eternal covenant? Because He loved Israel. It was nothing more complicated than that. Nor could it have been any more mysterious or profound 

How odd of God to choose the Jews.

See Jesus born in a stable. See the cross upon which He died. See the disciples Jesus picked to launch His church. God revels in our limited understanding and delights in our surprise. 

God chose you! He chose me! What is more astounding or humbling than that? We flatter ourselves to think we had anything to do with our own salvation. We were lost and helpless—at enmity with God—until His love and grace plucked us from the miry pit of sin and despair and set us upon the rock of His redemption.

Why us? How can it be? Great is the mystery of godliness!

Paul spoke of the instruments of God’s grace—and of the divine modus operandi—in his first letter to the Corinthians.

Few of us were powerful or wealthy or wise when God chose us. “Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise.” God chose the powerless to shame the powerful; He chose the despised—things and people counted as nothing by worldly reckoning—to bring to nothing what the world thinks is important. (I Corinthians 1: 26-28).

Why?

To prevent the futile boasting of puny man. If we are apt to glory in ourselves, Paul says, let us glory in God. He alone is worthy of our praise and adoration. The greatest and most powerful human being on earth is less than nothing by comparison to the Creator of the universe 

Few have expressed the sovereignty of God more beautifully or powerfully than William Cowper did in 1773:

“God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform; He plants his footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm.”

In these perplexing and difficult stormy days, our sovereign God is the omnipotent Storm Rider.

To order Jack Wyman’s book, “Everything Else: Stories of LIfe, Faith and Our World”, go to amazon.com, Christian Book Distributors or barnesandnoble.com. It is also available on Kindle and eBooks.

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