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It Isn’t Over Until It’s Over

IT ISN’T OVER UNTIL IT’S OVER

MIKE CUNNINGHAM

JANUARY 22, 2006

Have you ever bumped into a former Christian coworker or neighbor that you hadn’t seen in a long time and were shocked to learn that he or she doesn’t attend church anymore? Now I don’t mean the kind of professed Christian who assures you that they haven’t given up on God, such as the ones that tell you that they still pray and read their Bible. It’s just that they don’t go to church anymore. In other words, they’re doing just fine thank you.

On the contrary, the kind of Christian I’m speaking about is the one you always knew as being a real solid committed follower of Christ. The person believed the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. He or she took their faith very seriously. In fact, you can recall those times when God used that particular person as His instrument to bestow some wonderful blessings upon you.

Nevertheless, he or she tells you they are really not all that interested in church anymore. They have become very disillusioned. Finally the person confides in you that are wavering as to whether or not they are going to write God off as well.

Whenever I hear something like that I become very concerned. I’m all ears. I listen very closely to what the person is sharing with me. Often it becomes apparent that this sensitive person is genuinely wrestling with a particular historic biblical doctrine referred to as the Sovereignty of God.

Simply put, the sovereignty of God is the belief that God governs and sustains all of His creation. Nothing either the good or the bad can happen apart from what God has already ordained before He created His world shall happen in the course of human history. God is almighty, all knowing, everywhere present and infinite in wisdom and perfect in love. In other words, God is God!

Usually you will find that either the person or someone they care about deeply has been grieving over a major loss in their life. Or it could be from having had the rug pulled out from under them and being on the verge of financial ruin. Perhaps the person or a loved one is experiencing a major health problem that is draining them physically, emotionally or spiritually and there doesn’t seem to be any let up in sight.

The doubting persons reasoning goes something like this. “If God is sovereign, and if He is in complete control, and if God is indeed perfect in love, then, why does He allow all this suffering to exist?” The wavering Christian may reluctantly acknowledge that God is making sure that good will somehow ultimately come out of all bad things happening as He did through the agonizing suffering and death of His Son on His Son Jesus Christ.

But the thought that God ordained everything that comes to pass as human history unfolds and that He chose to save some of His creatures and not others is something your doubtful Christian friend is hesitant to accept. If salvation is a totally free gift of God which He has chosen to bestow upon some of His creatures from before the creation of the world, and if no one can even come to Jesus to accept that gift unless God enables the person to do so, (John 6:65) then how then can a just God hold anyone responsible for not coming to Christ and then consign that poor person to eternal torment? Not only isn’t it fair but it just doesn’t make any sense.

In my experience, such confused reasoning is motivated, not out of concern for their own personal salvation, but rather for the salvation of someone he or she cares about deeply. In other words, your troubled Christian friend is apt to be burdened by the thought that a person they love dearly is either already suffering in Hell or headed there because he or she, in spite of knowing and understanding the Gospel, cannot come to Christ because they hadn’t been ordained to come.

This can be a difficult pill for a Christian to swallow and it ought to be. It’s especially so for a person that is also in the midst of enduring a very painful trial in their own life. Compound the weight of their present ordeal with that which the demons of hell are relentlessly attempting to pile on top of it and it’s easy to see how such a troubled Christian is apt to become very angry with God and eventually try to escape by jumping head first into a black hole of depression.

These folks have succumbed to either rationalizing or rejecting the truth of God’s Word. There is no way a loving God could possibly hold someone responsible for not doing something which the Bible says they can’t do. Furthermore, they can’t do this because they weren’t chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. In other words, these people were ordained to perish eternally. As I said a moment ago, this is confused thinking.

Please don’t misunderstand me on this point. The kind of person I have been speaking about is not some argumentative in your face know it all. On the contrary, he or she is a hurting person who truly cares about the eternal well being of some one they love. It’s just that they get angry at God for choosing to make it possible for some folks to come to Christ for salvation and not others. It simply isn’t fair.

It can break your heart as you take this all in. It’s especially so when you think of the very real possibility of the person soon concluding that the Bible will only make you crazy and then tossing it aside and forgetting about it and Christ.

What can you say to someone holding to such a view of the sovereignty of God and human responsibility? After all, if God is sovereign, everyone He has ordained to be saved will be saved. Conversely, in order for man to truly be held responsible to either accept or reject God’s free offer of salvation, man has to have the opportunity to do so. Man then becomes the so called captain of his own ship and master of his destiny. Man becomes sovereign. Man becomes God.

Let’s see how this plays out in the life of a remarkable hooker and the rest of her countryman. It occurred at the time the Jews were about enter and fight to take possession of the Promised Land.

Joshua 2:1-24 (NIV)
1 Then Joshua son of Nun secretly sent two spies from Shittim. “Go, look over the land,” he said, “especially Jericho.” So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there.
2 The king of Jericho was told, “Look! Some of the Israelites have come here tonight to spy out the land.” 3 So the king of Jericho sent this message to Rahab: “Bring out the men who came to you and entered your house, because they have come to spy out the whole land.”

4 But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them. She said, “Yes, the men came to me, but I did not know where they had come from.
5 At dusk, when it was time to close the city gate, the men left. I don’t know which way they went. Go after them quickly. You may catch up with them.”
6 (But she had taken them up to the roof and hidden them under the stalks of flax she had laid out on the roof.) 7 So the men set out in pursuit of the spies on the road that leads to the fords of the Jordan, and as soon as the pursuers had gone out, the gate was shut.

8 Before the spies lay down for the night, she went up on the roof 9 and said to them, “I know that the LORD has given this land to you and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you.
10 We have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Amorites east of the Jordan, whom you completely destroyed.

11 When we heard of it, our hearts melted and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the LORD your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below. 12 Now then, please swear to me by the LORD that you will show kindness to my family, because I have shown kindness to you. Give me a sure sign 13 that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and that you will save us from death.”

14 “Our lives for your lives!” the men assured her. “If you don’t tell what we are doing, we will treat you kindly and faithfully when the LORD gives us the land.” 15 So she let them down by a rope through the window, for the house she lived in was part of the city wall. 16 Now she had said to them, “Go to the hills so the pursuers will not find you. Hide yourselves there three days until they return, and then go on your way.”

17 The men said to her, “This oath you made us swear will not be binding on us 18 unless, when we enter the land, you have tied this scarlet cord in the window through which you let us down, and unless you have brought your father and mother, your brothers and all your family into your house.
19 If anyone goes outside your house into the street, his blood will be on his own head; we will not be responsible. As for anyone who is in the house with you, his blood will be on our head if a hand is laid on him. 20 But if you tell what we are doing, we will be released from the oath you made us swear.”

21 “Agreed,” she replied. “Let it be as you say.” So she sent them away and they departed. And she tied the scarlet cord in the window. 22 When they left, they went into the hills and stayed there three days, until the pursuers had searched all along the road and returned without finding them.
23 Then the two men started back. They went down out of the hills, forded the river and came to Joshua son of Nun and told him everything that had happened to them. 24 They said to Joshua, “The LORD has surely given the whole land into our hands; all the people are melting in fear because of us.”

What a beautiful illustration this account is of the absolute sovereignty of God in saving a poor lost sinner. Here we have a woman whom many today would refer to as being a low life hooker. She’s running an inn in a hole in the city wall in which she provides hospitality to men in a manner the Bible describes as being an abomination to God.

The Sovereign Spirit of God had been hovering over the stinking cesspool of this barbaric pagan culture in which she lived and plucked Rahab alone out of it. She now became another one of God’s treasured possessions exactly as He had ordained and planned from before the foundation of His world.

The same Sovereign Spirit of God who thousands of years later dispatched a man named Annanias who had been ordained to enter a street called “Straight” in order to deliver Paul from blindness now guided those two spies who had been ordained to knock on the door of Rahab’s home unknowing that they were about to be used by God to deliver her from the impending annihilation of her countrymen.

The Sovereign Spirit of God had found a way to open and change this woman’s heart so that she alone out of all Jericho’s inhabitants was enabled to believe in the One True God. He didn’t do in a way that any of the Jews would have imagined. There were no synagogues in Jericho in which Rahab would have seen a reader stand up in front of the congregation and hear the man read the Sacred Scriptures. Nor were there any divinely ordained prophets roaming throughout the land communicating God’s Word to the city’s inhabitants.

This singular act of divine mercy saved Rahab and the rest of her family from being slaughtered in the ensuing battle. A woman whom many holier that thou people often refer to as being a self made slut was ordained and destined by the sovereign God of perfect love and compassion to be lauded thousands of years later as one of only two women singled out amongst the greatest hero’s and heroines of faith. Following in the footsteps of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses we read:

Hebrews 11:29-31 (ESV)
29 By faith the people crossed the Red Sea as if on dry land, but the Egyptians, when they attempted to do the same, were drowned.
30 By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled for seven days.
31 By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given a friendly welcome to the spies.

But that isn’t the end. There were more blessings the sovereign Lord had planned and ordained for her to experience. Not only didn’t Rahab perish with her disobedient countrymen but we read:

Joshua 6:22-23 (NIV)
22 Joshua said to the two men who had spied out the land, “Go into the prostitute’s house and bring her out and all who belong to her, in accordance with your oath to her.”
23 So the young men who had done the spying went in and brought out Rahab, her father and mother and brothers and all who belonged to her. They brought out her entire family and put them in a place outside the camp of Israel. Joshua 6:25 (NIV)
25 “…Joshua spared Rahab the prostitute, with her family and all who belonged to her, because she hid the men Joshua had sent as spies to Jericho–and she lives among the Israelites to this day.

We also find that Rahab had also been ordained and therefore predestined by the sovereign God later to meet and marry a man named Salmon the prince of Judah. The sovereign God had also planned and ordained that Rahab was to give birth to Boaz and one of the grandmothers of King David. Rahab had been ordained to be an ancestor of the King of all Kings, Jesus the Christ.

I hope I have just given a clear illustration of God’s sovereignty in salvation. It is all due to Him having mercy on those He has chosen to have mercy. There is absolutely nothing a person can do to save themselves. But how God can hold someone responsible to do something which they can’t possibly do and then allow that poor person to experience horrible eternal consequences?

I can only answer this question by asking some more questions. Were those pagans ignorant of the one true God and His coming judgment on Jericho? Allow Rahab to answer: “I know that the LORD has given this land to you and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you.

10 We have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Amorites east of the Jordan, whom you completely destroyed. 11 When we heard of it, our hearts melted and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the LORD your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.

Can anyone point to a shred of Biblical evidence suggesting that God compelled those people not to continue believing that He is the one true God and therefore worthy of their worship? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that despite all their knowledge of God and the approaching disaster, those people of their own free will chose not to come and beg Joshua for mercy and ask to be spared from the wrath to come and furthermore that the sovereign God had planned and ordained that He would allow them to freely choose not to do so?

As inadequate as my explanation is, that’s the best I can do in such as short period of time. God is sovereign and man is responsible are two indisputable truths standing side be side in the Bible. How can they both be true? I don’t know and neither does anyone else this side of eternity.

How many people have you known who were able to adequately explain to you how God can be three distinct persons and yet only one? They can’t do it any more than a modern physicist can explain the fact that, based on indisputable evidence, light consists of waves and there is also indisputable evidence that light consists of particles.

Instead of getting angry at God and throwing ourselves into a miserable depression it behooves Christian’s to believe both of those truths concerning God’s sovereignty and human responsibility and get on with living the life He has planned and ordained for us to live. We need to devote our lives struggling to live it in a way which the Scriptures tell us is pleasing to Him. And don’t forget to remember that it won’t be over until it’s over as we have seen in the life of a remarkable woman of faith named Rahab.

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