Wrestling With God’s Plan

Wrestling With God’s Plan

While Jesus was here on earth, he offered prayers and pleadings, with a loud cry and tears, to the one who could deliver him out of death. And God heard his prayers because of his reverence for God. So even though Jesus was God’s Son, he learned obedience from the things he suffered. –Hebrews 5:7-8

One of the hardest parts of trusting God with my own experience has been reckoning with the fact that God had the power to make my children healthy, and yet he chose not to. How can I love him and believe he sorrows with me if he had the power to change it but chose not to?

I suppose it was the same faith struggle Rabbi Harold Kushner faced when his son died of premature aging. In his popular book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, which looks at the story of Job, he concludes that the following cannot all be true: (1) God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens. (2) God is just and fair, giving everyone what they deserve. (3) Job is a good person.

Kushner concludes that since it is clear that Job was righteous, God is not all-powerful. He suggests that God hates suffering but is limited in his power to eliminate it.

I understand his confusion, because it is hard to accept that our loving God has the power to eliminate suffering and yet chooses not to. It was Hebrews 5:7-8 that helped me in my wrestling with this. I have clung to these verses in the lowest days of grief. In it I see the fully human, fully God Jesus facing the Cross and crying out to his Father, who has the power to make another way, enact another plan . . . but chooses not to.

And I see his submission to that perfect plan of God, a plan that included suffering and death. It helps me to know that even as he submitted to it, Jesus wrestled with God’s plan to redeem the world through his death on the cross. It helps because I, too, have wrestled with God’s plan for my life even as I have sought to submit to it.

Have you cried out to God in frustration, with questions about how he could have the power to heal and yet choose not to heal the one you love? Have you agonized in an effort to reconcile your understanding of a loving God with One who allowed the accident, the atrocity, the abuse? I have. And we’re not alone.

All-powerful God, I believe by faith that your plans for my life are perfect and flow out of your love for me, but parts of this life have caused me such pain! Show me how to submit, teach me obedience, and allow me to see your glory.

DIGGING DEEPER