We cannot control God's hand

***
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***
(The following is an excerpt from Mark Tabb's book, Out of the Whirlwind. It is distributed to
you with the permission of the publisher.)

OUT OF THE WHIRLWIND by Mark Tabb
Broadman & Holman Publishers

Chapter One

We cannot control God's hand


"We have no control over God's hand." That's all the sheriff could say to explain why
Stan and Beth Jones and two of their three children died in a freak accident. "As powerful as we
are, we have no control over God's hand." Given the circumstances, what else could he say? The
odds against a ten ton, one hundred year old tree suddenly uprooting itself at the precise moment
a family of five drives by in their Lincoln are astronomical. And for the tree to strike neither the
hood nor the trunk, but to land squarely on top of the passenger compartment crushing four of the
five people inside, defies imagination, especially when the car was traveling forty miles an hour.
Standing on the scene, watching rescue workers struggle for over an hour just to move the tree
off the car, one could only say, "We have no control over the hand of God."
As I sit in the quiet of my study, typing out these words two weeks later, my mind still
struggles to believe Stan is gone. Attending the funeral didn't help. I keep expecting a chime to
sound on my computer, and I'll click the envelope on the corner of the screen to find some lame
joke in my email inbox. Stan was always forwarding some joke or inspirational thought to me.
Half the time I found it a little annoying. I don't like forwards. At least, I didn't.
I guess when I go out next week with the surviving members of our group of pastors who
eat lunch together on a regular basis to encourage each other, it will sink in because Stan won't be
there. He was always the steady member of the group. The highs and lows of life didn't knock
him off balance. Perhaps raising an autistic son kept things in perspective for him. He and Beth
worried about the day they would not be there for their son. But that day will never come. They
died together because they could not control God's hand.
The question of why they died reverberated through the funeral home last week. Why
would God take the life of a pastor and his wife and their ten year old son and six year old
daughter? And why would He leave a four year old girl to grow up with nothing but fading
memories of her family? Thankfully, no one offered any answers. Four caskets lined up across
the front of a room made any answer seem insignificant and foolish.
One of my friends told me the devil had to be pushing hard on that tree to make it fall as
Stan and Beth drove by. Holding Satan responsible when bad things happen is always a popular
option. Jesus called him a thief who comes to kill and steal and destroy (John 10:10). And it was
Satan himself who caused Job to lose all his flocks and his herds and his children and his health. If
the devil pushed the tree onto Stan's car that helps me understand why this all happened. Satan
must have been angry because of the good work Stan was doing in his church on the eastside of
Indianapolis, and he wanted it stopped.
But Stan's church was small. Why would Satan target him? Other people actively work
to extinguish the power of darkness in our world while holding up the light of Christ. Will trees
drop on them soon? A renowned pastor in Dallas passed away a few days after Stan at the age of
ninety-two. He never had to dodge any trees. Why didn't Satan take his life, if he is indeed in the
business of snuffing out the lives of anyone who poses a threat to his kingdom of darkness?
Even if Satan is to blame for Stan's death, something still troubles me. According to the first two
chapters of the book of Job, Satan had to receive God's permission before he could unleash his
nightmare on Job. Isn't the one who gives permission as culpable as the one who carries out the
deed? Insurance companies understand this better than most believers. They classify events like
trees dropping on cars as "acts of God." So did Job. "The Lord gave me everything I had, and
the Lord has taken it away," he cried out as he fell to the ground after hearing his ten children
died together in a tragic accident, "Praise the name of the Lord (Job 1:21)."
I keep thinking about Job because, during the funeral, the pastor in charge compared Stan
and Beth and Tyler and Lauren's deaths to the tragedy Job endured. In one day Job lost his
everything he owned. Raiding bands of thieves rode in from the desert, carried away all his oxen
and donkeys and camels, and killed his servants. Later that day fire fell from heaven and burned
up his flocks and his shepherds. At the same time a windstorm knocked down Job's oldest son's
house, killing everyone inside including Job's seven sons and three daughters. As the pastor
recounted the story of Job he added, "Sometimes bad things happen to good people and we
never know why. God doesn't offer any explanations. All we can do is continue to trust in God
and His goodness and grace."
But Job wasn't four and a half, I kept thinking. Job wasn't four and a half.
Emily is. Emily cried in the dark, pinned in the back seat of the car, unable to move because of
the tree. Sounds of rescue workers scrambling to do something surrounded her, while one
firefighter held her hand and reassured her that everything would be okay. Two days later she
was released from the hospital. She keeps asking where her mother and father are. "With Jesus
in heaven," her aunts, uncles and grandparents reply.
"Can I go home," she wants to know. The answer is always, "No, you're going to stay
here for a while."
"Why, is my house with Jesus, too?" she asks.
Emily's world will never be the same because she has no control over God's hand.

At this point many of us feel compelled to defend God's honor. God's hand didn't cause
the tree to fall on Stan and Beth any more than God's hand caused calamity to fall upon Job, we
say in His defense. He didn't cause these tragedies, but in His providence He allowed them to
occur to accomplish His greater purposes. I grew up hearing a lot about the difference between
God's permissive will and His causal will. It makes tragedy more palatable while keeping our
image of a good God intact. A holy God will not, and cannot, do something evil.
But what if accidental deaths are not evil in the eyes of God? What if total financial ruin is
not tragic in His estimation? What if all of the calamities we dread, the nightmare scenarios that
keep me up at night worrying, what if all the worst case outcomes are not worst case but best
case to God? If somehow, and God forbid it be true, that which I fear is the very thing God not
only allows but causes, do I really want to follow a God like this?
I can (and I really wish we were in the same room so you could hear my best pastoral tone
of voice) because God has a purpose in all trials. This is our favorite defense of God's honor. The
Lord has a reason for everything that happens to those who love Him and call upon His name. To
paraphrase Albert Einstein, God isn't playing dice with the universe or with his children. All
things work together for His ultimate plan. Good will result from evil. It did for Joseph.
I love the story of Joseph, especially as images of a crushed Lincoln flash in my mind. Joseph was
his father's favorite son. Although he was the second youngest of twelve brothers, he was the
first son born to his father Jacob by Jacob's one true love, Rachel. Rachel later died giving birth
to Joseph's brother Benjamin. Grief made Jacob even more protective of his favorite son. But no
one could protect Joseph from his brother's jealousy. One day when they were all far from home
taking care of the family herds, the ten older brothers seized Joseph, threw him into a hole, and
sold him as a slave to the first caravan that happened by. His misfortune did not stop there. As if
being a slave wasn't bad enough, Joseph was unjustly accused of rape and thrown into an
Egyptian prison to rot away, forgotten.
A few years later the king of Egypt had two recurring dreams. No one in the kingdom had
a clue what they meant, no one but Joseph. His explanation of the dreams not only won his
release from prison, but secured for him the position of second in command over the entire nation.
Seven years of drought would soon descend upon the entire region, and Pharaoh entrusted the
nation's survival to the former slave ex-convict.
Drought also fell on the land of Canaan where Joseph's brothers and father lived. When
they heard Egypt had food, the brothers set out at once. In a great twist of fate, the ten who sold
Joseph as a slave now cowered before him, begging for enough food for their survival.
Eventually Joseph revealed himself to them. Like any thinking person, they immediately feared
for their lives. "Don't be afraid of me," Joseph told them, "as far as I am concerned, God turned
into good what you meant for evil (Genesis 50:19)."
God turned into good what you meant for evil. Surely the same principle applies to the
tragedies the rest of us endure. No matter how evil it may appear on the outside, God intends to
accomplish something good. Romans 8:28 turns the principle into a promise, "And we know that
God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called
according to his purpose for them." If not for this promise we could do nothing more than shiver
under the covers, afraid of whatever calamity will strike next.
I think I'll keep repeating Romans 8:28 over and over in my head until I feel better, until I
can drive down a deserted country road and not wonder if a tree will strike my car, killing four of
my five family members. But the more I repeat the verse, the more I am struck by what it does
not say. It does not say God has a purpose behind every event that happens in my life, at least not
a purpose I will ever see or understand. Nor does the verse tell me to look for the good in every
bad event. I cannot control God's hand, and when I try to force some good purpose onto tragic
events, that's exactly what I'm trying to do. God may work for the good of those who have been
called according to His purpose, but that doesn't mean you or I will ever see it.

And that's the dilemma I really do not want to face. I can accept tragedy when I see God
working through it. But will I when I cannot? Job posed this question to his wife: "Should we
accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?" Will I accept bad things
from the hand of God, without demanding an explanation, without seeing any tangible results, or
ever knowing why God would possibly want to inflict pain upon me? The question is not whether
I will try to understand it or rejoice in it in the hope that spiritual maturity runs through the valley
of the shadow. Will I accept bad things from the hand of God as readily as I accept the good?
Can I take the question a step further? I daily ask for God's guidance. I want His favor and His
mercy and His grace and His presence. One of the most popular Christian books of all time told
us how to ask God to bless our lives. That's what I want. That's what you want. We want God
to bless us and cause His face to shine on us. But am I willing to ask Him for hard times because
in those times I must exercise real faith? I want His presence, but am I willing to ask for feelings
of distance from God in order that I might walk by faith and not emotion? Am I willing to pray,
"God, send tragedy into my life, allow me to suffer, in order that I might share in the sufferings of
your Son"?
Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll save those questions for the last chapter of this
book, not the first. For now it is enough to ask, will I continue to believe in Him and follow His
Son even if doing so never resulted in any blessings in this life? Will I believe when believing only
makes life harder, not easier? Will I accept bad things from the hand of God and keep trusting in
Him, even if the bad so overwhelms the good as to make it invisible?
Do I want to explore such questions? Are you kidding? Believe me, this is one aspect of
the Christian life I would rather leave untouched. All of us would. Unfortunately, we can't ignore
it because it doesn't ignore us. We don't seek tragedy and heartache and tears and asking God
why. They seek us. It is not a question of if our lives will be turned over by grief, but when. And
when tragedy strikes, when everything around us screams "God has forgotten you," what will you
do?
Before we dive into these questions I need to warn you: the pages that follow do not
address the question of why trees fall on families traveling down country roads or why an eight
year old boy dies alone on a hill when his four-wheeler flips over on top of him or why a sixty-one
year old wife and mother has to suffer with cancer for three years only to lose her fight and die.
These things happen. In fact, they all happened in the span of six days to people I knew and
loved. Trees fall on the just and the unjust. The world in which we live teems with death and
despair. It has since the moment Adam and Eve chose sin over life and it will until Christ returns.
God could prevent suffering from hitting close to home, but He doesn't. We cannot control the
hand of God nor can we explain why He does everything He does. Since He is God, He never
feels compelled to explain Himself to creatures made of dust.
"'Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?' So in
all this, Job said nothing wrong (Job 2:10)." I want to be like Job. I pray for protection from the
trials that struck his life, but I long to be able to accept whatever God gives me, good or bad,
without pointing an accusing finger in the face of God.
Shall we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad? We
cannot control God's hand, but will we follow Him when His hand strikes rather than caresses?

For more information on Out of the Whirlwind, go to
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/080542721X/freshministry

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