Does the Bible Really Say That? (eBook)

1

God may not have a plan for your life, and that’s OK

Around fifty years ago, in 1966, a terrible tragedy struck a Welsh valley town. It was a part of the world where death from accident or neglect, sometimes on a larger scale than we would ever tolerate today, was not uncommon: coal mines are dangerous places to work. This was different, though. A slag heap above the village of Aberfan, undermined by an underground spring, collapsed. Within a few minutes, 40,000 cubic metres of debris had flowed downhill and covered a farm, some terraced houses – and Pantglas Junior School, where the children had just left the assembly hall after morning prayers. Altogether, 116 children and twenty-eight adults died.

I’m too young to remember it, but I’ve seen the black-and-white footage of the aftermath: the crowds at the funeral, a long trench with its small coffins all in a line, the heaps of flowers. And there was a clergyman interviewed by a journalist. He’s clearly broken by what he’s seen, but he manages to choke out: “There must be a plan. I have to believe there’s a plan.”

That belief – that God has a plan; that everything happens for a reason; that, although we can’t see it, he’s shaping the events of our lives for good – has become a fundamental belief for a great many evangelical Christians. It survives disappointments, mistakes, wrong turns, and even tragedy, public or personal. God has a wonderful plan for your life.

It’s something that we tend not to question, any more than we question basic doctrines like the Trinity. Somehow, whatever happens to us is God’s will. There is a reason for the bad things, and ultimately it’s a good reason because God is a good God. Saying you don’t believe God has a plan for your life is like saying you don’t believe he cares about you at all.

I understand where people who think like this are coming from. They have a deep sense of the sovereignty of God. They want to affirm his power. They read texts in the Bible that speak of his ordering events and controlling history, and they want to be faithful Bible believers. They’re also dismayed by any idea that things just happen. We might not know why they happen, but God is working to his own agenda.

The Aberfan clergyman in the clip I watched just could not face believing that what had just taken place was a terrible, random catastrophe. Somehow it had to make sense, and he clung to the idea that God had a plan as a drowning man clings to a lifebelt. But here’s my problem. If God has a wonderful plan for my life, he had a wonderful plan for the lives of those children too. And I don’t believe it was to smother them under 40,000 cubic metres of slag.

I’m writing this after reading about an attack by Al-Shabaab militants in Kenya. They attacked a university near the border with Somalia. One hundred and forty-seven people died, most of them Christians, who were singled out and deliberately killed. I don’t believe that was God’s plan. Before that, I was reading about Andreas Lubitz, the Germanwings pilot who deliberately flew himself and his passengers into a mountainside in the Swiss Alps. I don’t believe that was God’s plan either.

When I preach in churches, I look out over the congregation and, whether I know the details or not, I’m aware there are people sitting there who’ve known grief and pain. Some have been divorced and they don’t see their children. Some are childless and it’s a continuing, unassuageable ache. Some are in physical pain. Some have lost parents, friends, or siblings, far too young. It is not God’s plan.

I know that very few people reading this are going to say outright, “Yes, it is.” We would rather talk about God’s preferential will – what he desires should happen – and his permissive will, what he allows to happen. Or we’ll talk about human freedom, and how so many of the bad things that happen to people are the fault of human beings in the first place, and if they’d made better choices they wouldn’t be in the mess they’re in. Or we’ll admit that we’ve made bad choices ourselves: that we’re partly responsible for that marriage breakdown, or that we failed at work because we were lazy and irresponsible.

All these things are true. So why do we still talk about God having a plan, if we need to do all these mental gymnastics before we can bring ourselves to believe it? How does it work, if his plan can so easily be buffeted around by other people’s choices or our own inclinations? Why are we so desperate to hang on to an idea that has so little going for it and which seems to force us to believe in a God who does really terrible things to us?

Is there a better, biblical way of understanding how he works in our lives? I believe there is. I think we’re more faithful to the totality of what God says in his word when we stop saying that he has a plan for our lives. In many ways, that’s a hard call. It’s something that evangelicals have grown up with. It was in the old hymns:

It’s hard to let go of it. But we should, because it does us no good.

Let’s acknowledge, first, that people have different accounts of God’s plan. One of them arises from a particular theology, which is generally called “Calvinist”. Let’s call this the “hard” version. In this one, God’s sovereignty is understood as meaning that he orders everything. In one of his sermons, based on Isaiah 46:10b (“My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose”[ESV]), John Piper puts it like this: “God has the rightful authority, the freedom, the wisdom, and the power to bring about everything that he intends to happen. And therefore, everything he intends to come about does come about. Which means, God plans and governs all things.”1

Behind this is a grand vision of the might and majesty of God, who has no equal, whose power and wisdom are unlimited, and who is not only the creator but the sustainer of life. There’s much in this to applaud. If God is not omnipotent and omniscient, he is not God. But there’s a huge jump from saying that God can intervene, shape, and direct everything that happens in the world to saying that he does. And if we claim that he does, we’re ultimately saying that God has deliberately chosen everything, the good and the bad.

In this view, we have to put up with bad things happening to us because it’s ultimately for our own good, just as a child has to put up with a measles vaccination. In some unspecified and incomprehensible way, we still have free will and moral agency. But, ultimately, the awesome power and majesty of God overrule and overwhelm: all we can do is resign ourselves to his will, trusting that it is good and perfect.

There’s an anonymous poem that sums it up, comparing life as we know it now to the reverse of a tapestry, in which the pattern is obscured and barely discernible. So:

In other words: the bad things that happen to you are God’s doing and part of the masterwork he’s making of your life.

Alexander Pope wasn’t a Calvinist, like John Piper, but he put it this way in his 1733–34 Essay on Man:

But, often, what is, is wrong. Some things that happen are just too terrible to justify by talk of dark threads or universal good. If we’re to believe that God plans the tsunami, the cancer, Islamic State, what’s required of us is not just a leap of faith, but a total suspension of our moral judgment. And “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter,” says Isaiah (5:20, NIV).

God does not plan evil. Yes, of course, he allows it. He’s created a world in which human beings have freedom to hurt as well as to help. He’s created a world in which fire burns as well as warms, water drowns as well as sustains, tectonic plates shift and cause earthquakes and tsunamis as well as lifting land masses out of the sea to provide a place for us to live. What else was he supposed to do?

But when we talk about God having a plan for our lives, we aren’t talking about what he allows to happen because the world is as it is. We’re talking about him having his hand on my life, directing it this way and that – to this job, this life partner, this church, this ministry. We’re talking about him choosing that one person should suffer pain and another should...