God is God (And I Am Not)

“God is God and I am not

I can only see a part of the picture He’s painting

God is God and I am man

So I’ll never understand it all

For only God is God”

—“God is God” by Steven Curtis Chapman

     I want you to picture yourself, standing on a hill called Golgotha, as a follower of Jesus. You’ve followed him for three years. You saw Him raise Lazarus from the dead. You saw Him feed the multitude. You saw Him heal the sick, give sight to the blind, cure the lepers. You heard Him preach parables, you heard Him say that He was the Son of God.
     And now, with the sweat and the sand in your mouth and across your brow, you look up and see that same man on the cross. He’s been brutally mutilated by the Romans, been cursed at, mocked, and a crown of thorns put upon His head. The whole crowd is ready for Him to die. They laugh at Him, scorn Him, and want nothing more than Jesus to die.
     That’s a pretty bad day, isn’t it?
     But we know the rest of the story, so it seems to take away the edge. We know Jesus died on Friday. We know that He was betrayed, that He wept, sweated tears of blood, was flogged, was marched through town, was hoisted up on a cross to die. We know that He was buried in a tomb, that a guard was placed in front of His tomb, and that all was silent on Saturday.
     Imagine living that Saturday.
     The sky went dark the day before. There was an earthquake. Dead people walked again. The veil was torn. Jesus is dead. You’re terrified.
     Is there any other emotion to feel besides sheer terror? Your life is upended. A person you’ve loved is dead. There is no “normal” now. This is not as it should be, but this is how your life is going to look. Jesus is dead, and you’ve spent the last 3 years following Him, so...what now? What can you possibly do with your life now?
     And where is God in all this?
     Now I want you to open your eyes. Quit imagining and look at the world around us.
     We see people dying. We see nurses and doctors trying to cope, families trying to hobble together to survive, to grow closer. We see people trying to combat loneliness. We see people dying of suicide because they’ve lost their jobs, because they’ve tested positive for a virus, because they can’t handle the isolation anymore. People are depressed. We don’t know anything about the economy. Our retirements are gone. Our jobs are gone. We’re trying to be positive, trying to find a silver lining, but...the world looks pretty dismal now.
     Is this the new normal? For how long? What do we do with our lives? We can’t go on like this forever, right? Our lives are upended. This is not how it should be.
     And where is God in all this?
     We’re in a pretty long Saturday right now, aren’t we?
     And the reason it hurts so much is because we don’t know what’s going on. When we read the Easter story, we have the ability to skip the page from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection in the blink of an eye, just by turning the page. It’s hard to be sad fully, to grasp the reality of it, when we skip from Friday to Sunday.
     But there was a Saturday in between.
     A Saturday filled with fear, with desperation, with depression, with millions of voices crying out to God: “Why are You doing this?”
     Because of Sunday.
     God had to have a Saturday because of Sunday. The picture that He painted, the prophecies He wanted fulfilled, they would not come true unless there was a Saturday.
     God was not less of God because there was a Saturday. He was not missing, He was not fretting, He did not turn to Gabriel and frantically yell, “Oh, shoot. Jesus is dead. What do we do now?!”
     God was God through it all. And He is still God through it all, because He does not change. He is permanent, He is good, and He is painting a picture that we are not privy to because we are not Him. He is not flummoxed by this coronavirus. He weeps with us, because He knows how much the world is hurting. He does not wish for any to die, but for us all to have repentance and eternal life (2 Peter 3:9).
     And, above all, God is not the root of the problem we are in. God is the solution to the problem of sin, to living in a broken world because of sin. But He is not unaware. He is not caught off guard. And He can redeem brokenness, spin it for good, use what is bad and turn it into good for His glory because He has not left us alone. He is creating art with broken pieces, and the end product will be good.
     The end product is Sunday.
     We can’t understand Sunday from Saturday. Even when we reach Sunday, we may not grasp it. In the Civil War, the North and the South couldn’t grasp why God would let such a bloody conflict happen. Faith was shattered because they tried to control God, because they couldn’t see the good in Saturday. Americans felt abandoned. They had prayed, they thought God was on their side, they thought they would be the victors.
     But bad things still happened. Saturday still came.
     One man, though, had the right idea. Lincoln delivered a statement that is so profound that it should never be forgotten, in his Second Inaugural Address: “The Almighty has His own purposes....if God wills that [the Civil War] continue...as was said three thousand years ago, so it still must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’” (Lincoln 1).
     Lincoln knew that we are not God, and trying to figure out His thoughts would be like asking an infant to explain quantum physics. It just can’t be done. We can’t comprehend His mind, and human language is too incomplete to express His thoughts (paraphrased from Isaiah 55:8...which I know I quote a lot, but come on. It’s a good verse). And the worst thing we can do is let the complexities of life, the complexities of God, drive us from our faith.
     Rather, when we are faced with excruciating circumstances, when we face our Saturday, when we have no clue what God is doing…it should drive us to our knees in prayer, draw us closer to our Creator, to know that there is someone who not only can see Sunday but created it. God is God. We are not. And that should give us joy. That should give us peace.
     Let me leave you with one more example.
     In World War II, there was a mission to take a flying ace named Colonel Eddie Rickenbacker on a secret mission. There were eight men that were on the mission, but something went wrong on the first leg. They were supposed to stop on the island of Canton and refuel, but something went wrong and they ended up getting lost in the Pacific Ocean. Their plane went down, and for over two weeks, the eight men crowded together on 3 tiny lifeboats without water or food except for what they could catch: opening their mouths in storms and collecting water in t-shirts to use for later, trying to catch fish and birds to eat...but they battled the sun, the saltwater, dehydration, and starvation.
     One of the men was named Lieutenant Jim Whittaker. Before the mission, he was not a Christian. In the book I read, it even said that he scoffed a bit when another of the men, Lieutenant John DeAngelis, wanted to pray. He did not participate when the other men in the lifeboat began to read the Bible that Private Johnny Bartek had on him.
     But over the course of two weeks, a few things happened.
     One, a man named Sergeant Alex Kaczmarczyk perished tragically at sea.
     Two, the rest of the seven men had their faith in God bolstered. Lt. Whittaker became a Christian and went on to write a book about his testimony: “We Thought We Heard the Angels Sing.”
     It was a tragedy that Sgt. Kaczmarczyk passed away.
     But through that tragedy, through the terrible, horrific circumstances those soldiers endured, more of the men found strength. Private Bartek hadn’t been firm in his faith before, but after, he wanted to be a preacher. Lt. DeAngelis had prayed through the entire ordeal. And Lt. Whittaker made a full conversion to Christianity because of it.
     These men had a gut-wrenching Saturday, but God was able to redeem their loss, their pain, and turn it into a beautiful Sunday.
     And the God that raised Jesus, that rescued these men, that created the world—He is still here, and He will stop the virus, our Saturday. He has always made Sundays from Saturdays.
     We just have to praise Him, and be grateful that He is God...and we are not.

Happy Easter 2020!

Song for this Devotion: God is God by Steven Curtis Chapman

Works Cited:

Lincoln, Abraham. https://www.battlefields.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/Lincoln Second Inagural Address.pdf.

(P.S.-- I didn’t misspell Inaugural in the link. That’s the link’s problem, not mine. 😂)

Olson, Tod. Lost in the Pacific, 1942. Scholastic, Incorporated, 2016.