He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands

Many of us learned this prayer as a kid: “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food.” Eventually, however, because of the way life works, something’s going to happen — there’s going to be a hiccup, a bump, a bad storm — and you’re going to begin asking, “Is God really that great?  Is God really good?”

At creation, God set the world in motion just the way God wanted it. Wrinkle-free. Everything was perfect. The weather cooperated, everything cooperated!  But the Bible teaches that when sin entered the world, in the wake of sin was death, and sorrow, and disease, and famine.  And when sin entered the world, God judged humankind and everything under man’s authority, which means (and this is new for some of us), that God judged the earth.  God judged the environment.  And since that day, the earth has not cooperated with us.

If you have a yard you know that.  The world isn’t how it ought to be!  The sun should rise, the sun should set, and when it rains, it should rain just enough to water the grass and water the plants, but it shouldn’t rain so much as to causea flood.  The beach should be beautiful, and the waves should allow us to surf safely, but waves shouldn’t come into towns and neighborhoods. We know intuitively that the weather does not cooperate with us.

When the apostle Paul was writing about sin and the consequences of sin in Romans 8, he said, “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the One who subjected it.”  Even the way the world works is a constant reminder that we live in a judged world.  And the reason is:  we underestimate the significance of sin — even our sin against the environment.

But here’s the incredible thing:  God is great, and God is good, and right after he judged sin, God immediately went to work to fix the problem that we created.

Once God came to a man named John, and gave him a vision of what would one day be; a world that was no longer a judged world, but a picture of what you and I have dreamed for all of our lives.  Here is how John described it in Revelation 21:  “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.  And there was no longer any sea.  And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.”

You see, God is great, and God is good, and God has the whole world in his hands.  Tragedy reminds us that things are not as they ought to be.  But the cross reminds us that one day they will be — because God is the great and good and trustworthy heavenly Father.

In the name of the One who can do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine,

Bruce Jones, Pastor and Co-Creator, Imagine Church of the Carolinas