Hey Church!
“Since God is God, his purpose and activity have no ultimate cause outside his own being.”
F.F. Bruce
“God’s will has no ‘Why.’”
Martin Luther
My youngest son is four years old and has recently entered a “why?” phase. When I give him an instruction or answer he dislikes, the question he asks with thinly veiled impatience is, of course, “But why, daddy?” Like all kids his age, he struggles to understand that there are times when what he perceives is best in any given situation is, for reasons beyond him, not always best.
When we ask our heavenly Father “why?”, we would do well to manage our expectations. On the one hand, God loves it when we crawl up on His lap and ask Him to explain things to us. On the other hand, were we to expect satisfactory reasons from Him, why He ordained this instead of that, He would first have to make us infinite in all being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, truth, and love.
Or, in laymen’s terms:
Still, our Father knows our frame–that we are dust and yet prone to think we know better than Him. And so, out of an abundance of love for us, He has answered all of our whys:
All things are “according to the kind intentions of His will.” (see Eph. 1:3-12)
See? Didn’t I warn you not to expect a satisfactory answer? We would rather be our own god than to accept that there is a divine orchestrator of anything that might violate our sensibilities, or that we find disagreeable in any way. We have no patience for things beyond our scope of imagination, control, or comprehension.
I suppose one measure of our growth in the faith is our willingness, when things do not go our way, to quickly and joyfully accept that God is God, His reasons are KIND, and His ways are perfect. Always. Without exception. Then we will ask Him “why?” not to prove ourselves right but to learn from Him how we can better align our will with His.
Let it be so!
Your brother,
Ryan
* F. F. Bruce, The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1984), 257.
**“Gottes Wille hat kein Warumbe” (quoted by G. S. Hendry, God the Creator [London, 1937], p. 141).