Ephesians 1:11-23

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ephesians%201:11-23&version=NIV

The thought that always comes to mind when I read these is that they describe a Supreme deity;  a sovereign deity.  Is God sovereign? 

Verse 11 says “we have obtained an inheritance; we are predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to His will”.  These verses relate to salvation – inheritance, and we won’t go down the predestination path today.

I believe God certainly had a broad and definite plan for our salvation.  He willed it,  he brought it about .  So, if he had such a purpose and will in this regard, surely it would stand to reason, He does so too, in relation to what happens to us in other ways too.  The important words here are “purpose and His will”.  He works all things according to his will.  He doesn’t cause bad things to happen, but He manages it, allows it, and uses it to reveal himself to us.  Romans 8:28 declares this …. All things work together for good, for those who love him and are called to his purpose. So this passage paints a picture of a Supreme Loving Being. In these verses, we find the following:

·        Verse 11 describes God as having the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will.  Accomplishes all things;  he decides it and he does it.  All things, not just the nice stuff, but all things, according to his purpose and will.

·        immeasurable power,  verse 19;  immeasurable;  unable to be measured.  That’s the power of God.  These are dimensions which are off our scale

 

·        he raises from the dead, verse 20.  He used physical death for His purpose ie to raise us to a life far above anything we know here. And if he can raise from the dead, then he must have supreme power over everything.

·        He is seated in heaven, above every other authority;  above every other name or dominion.  Unassailable;  power over all below;  power over all that exists;  power over all that ever was and ever will be.

·        He is above every other name in this age and the next

·        He has all things under his feet.

·        Right at the end of the passage, Paul brings this picture of Supremacy full circle.  The One whose purpose is to save us, fills the earth and heaven, is also the One who can, as in Vs 22, be in His church, his body;  us;  not just in community, but dwells personally in us in all his fullness, through the HS.

So we have a picture of a supreme God, Father, son and HS.  And the hard question is “If he is supreme and loving, why does he allow awful terrible, unthinkable things to happen, especially to the very young, the innocent, the vulnerable.  Why does He allow people to be bullied, abused, oppressed;  why does he allow people to suffer?

It seems to me that the terrible things that can happen to us fall into two categories;  firstly, the things that just happen to us, out of the blue, from a seemingly random, unknown source, and secondly, the things that others do to us, which cause us pain or hurt. 

Last year, one of my daughter’s friends was killed in a car accident at.  She was a lovely young Christian woman, just 21;  married just over 12 months. A huge B-double rammed into her as she turned off the road.  On the same highway, there are people transporting drugs;  there are mafia bikie gangs;  there are crooks and pedophiles travelling on that road;  we can’t understand why this young life was taken in an instant.  Why not one of those others? This is one of those things which just seem to happen;  a freak accident that makes no sense.  We find it hard to believe in a Sovereign God who allows this sort of thing to happen.  I don’t think God causes this sort of tragedy, and  I can’t believe God deliberately sends us awful things, for our own good;  that would make him some kind of cosmic sadist.  And I guess, in the face of this type of suffering,  his sovereignty seems a fettered, beaten thing, just mopping up tragedy after the event, by bringing good out of it.  I have no answer for that, except to say that if God’s power was always used to prevent awful stuff, we would already be living in a sort of heaven.

 The second type of suffering is of the type done to us deliberately, by someone else.  Of the two, I’ve found this type harder to cope with.  The random stuff;  the stuff that seems to be nobody’s fault is less personal in a sense, and it’s easier to put it down to some mystery that God has under his care. But deliberate hurt and betrayal at the hands of someone else, is very hard to understand and come to terms with.

I’m sure, for instance, God could have made sure that one of the very many attempts to kill Hitler, succeeded. We could argue that killing him would be descending to the same level as he was.  But there’s also no denying that if one of these attempts had succeeded, especially early in the 1930’s, millions of innocent people would not have died;  war may have been avoided altogether. 

It was really uncanny how many times Hitler escaped assassination.  Perhaps the most concerted was in 1944, when a man named Claus von Stauffenberg made several attempts.  He was backed by a group of about 9000 Nazi resistance fighters.  All his attempts failed for one reason or the other;  there were other people who tried to kill Hitler too, but no-one succeeded.  Some escapes were really uncanny quirks of fate;  On one occasion, a bomb planted in a conference room went off minutes after Hitler had left the room, and he was unharmed.  On another, a bomb was placed in the lectern where he was speaking.  But he, uncharacteristically, cut his speech short and the bomb missed it’s mark.  Perhaps the quirkiest was when a bomb placed in a briefcase under the table where he was seated, went off, but Hitler was unhurt, because one of the people also seated at the table unwittingly pushed the briefcase behind a leg of the table.  The bomb went off, but the stoutness of the oak table protected him from the blast.  Others at the table were killed, but Hitler was unscathed.

I find this baffling;  that this evil man escaped death so many times, yet this lovely young Christian woman, was killed in a freak accident on the highway. Where is God in these matters? 

Why is it that sometimes evil people can go on and on with their plans, seemingly unaffected by the sovereignty of God?  I have no answer except that God cannot make someone behave with compassion and peace if they have made up their minds not to.

During the reign of Hitler, there were two brothers.  One was Hitler’s right hand man, responsible for setting up the concentration camps;  responsible for killing millions of Jews.  His name was Herman Goering.  Herman had a brother called Albert,  and Albert was responsible for saving many Jewish people.  He hated what the Nazi’s were doing to his countrymen.  He and his brother were close, despite their differences in politics and ideals.  Herman liked to show of his power to Albert and so Albert was able to use his brother’s influence and name, to free many Jewish people.  One of these was Franz Lehar.  He wrote “The Merry Widow”(that lovely operetta)  Another was the wonderful singer Joseph Schmidt.  If you haven’t heard of Joseph Schmidt, he was the Austrian equivalent of Peter Dawson.

We are given the power to overcome evil with good.  We are given a choice as to how we will behave.  God will not interfere with that free will.  God is sovereign, but he would not intervene in Herman Goering’s life, or Hitler’s life, even though it would have saved much suffering by innocent people. 

It must seem to us at times, as though God isn’t supreme. And it seems sometimes that evil people always win.  But it’s not the case.  Seasons of evil always come to an end. Consider these words from Ps 73

³For I was envious of the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the wicked. ⁴For they have no pain; their bodies are sound and sleek. ⁵They are not in trouble as others are; they are not plagued like other people. ⁶Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them like a garment. ⁷Their eyes swell out with fatness; their hearts overflow with follies. ⁸They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. ⁹They set their mouths against heaven, and their tongues range over the earth. ¹⁰Therefore the people turn and praise them, and find no fault in them. ¹¹And they say, “How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?” ¹²Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. ¹³All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. ¹⁴For all day long I have been plagued, and am punished every morning. ¹⁵If I had said, “I will talk on in this way,” I would have been untrue to the circle of your children. ¹⁶But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, ¹⁷until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end. ¹⁸Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. ¹⁹How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors!

I’ll tell you what I believe.  I believe God is sovereign.  I believe that everything is ultimately under His control, even the freak accidents and the illnesses. I think that nothing happens to us, without his saying it’s OK, or not OK.  And if it’s not OK, it doesn’t happen to us. .  I think the world, spiritual and physical, is a broken place;  almost perfect, but subject to imperfection all the time;  full of good people and bad people;  flawed and faulty, who set up flawed and faulty systems and who are at the mercy of their ambitious human nature.   The world is full of people who chose to be evil or selfish or ignorant or uncaring.  The world is also full of people who chose to be a positive force;  who are willing to help and care for others.  There are extreme examples at both ends of the spectrum, and then there’s us common, ordinary folk, who are in the middle. And even the physical world is subject to this fallen state.  Accidents happen; illnesses strike us down seemingly willy-nilly.

This can seem a short, trite answer to this most anguished question..  It’s a fairly unsatisfactory answer when we are faced with our own personal tragedy. 

But for me at least, it is, after the strident, shrieking voice of grief has calmed a little, the answer which makes sense.  God, even through accident and illness knows how many days we have, before we’ve even lived one of them.  We don’t understand it, but then God is God and we are frail humanity.  Of course we don’t understand it.  Because it’s not for us to decide these things.  God judges our hearts and numbers our days. We, his creation, cannot rule over such matters. He is the Alpha and Omega;  he has control over life and death.  We can trust him with this purpose.

When people hurt or bully us, we want God to be an avenging force, stepping in to give us victory over those who seek to destroy us.  We want God to spare us from hurt and suffering.  We want God to cause them to fall into their own traps. 

But the reality is, He often doesn’t, in any tangible way.  The limitations of our earth-life are sometimes painful and perplexing and damaging to us. Life can be messy, illogical, difficult, challenging, scary, depressing, fragile, unpredictable.  The only way we can get through it with joy, is by inviting Jesus to walk the journey with us. God allows evil to touch us but He never leaves us to cope with it on our own.  God’s power is to be found amidst our suffering;  comforting, triumphant and restorative. He has his own purposes, but He always has our spiritual well-being in mind, despite the pain sometimes of our physical, mental and emotional circumstances

May God himself attend us, as we wrestle with the hard questions of life.  Amen