Sunday, October 5, 2014

When You're Spinning Out of Control

We all have weeks when it feels like everything that could go wrong does. You begin to think God has taken a break from watching over your life, and you’re on your own, spinning slow-motion like a hydroplaning car on a mountain road, heading for the cliff.

Maybe that’s overly dramatic, but you probably know what I mean.

Christ hasn't gone anywhere, of course, and what you have to do is ride it out. Keep praying, and ignore the sense of vertigo you feel when it seems like your circumstances are spiraling out of control. And, of course, continue to read your Bible.

You never know when a very familiar, or seemingly dull, portion of holy Scripture may be just the encouragement you need. This week, for example, the Lord helped me through a genealogy. Usually you think of long lists of names – So-and-So begat Such-and-Such – as the boring verses you skip to get to the action parts of the Bible.

But when I read Matthew 1, one of the two genealogies of our Lord Jesus, what caught my attention were the four women (not counting Mary):  Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and the wife of Uriah.

If God were ever intent on getting things right, it would be in planning the birth of His Son into the human family. If there is any place where there would no margin for error, it would be in designing the ancestral line of the Messiah.

But the stories of these four women don’t seem to bear that out at all.

Remember Tamar? The details are in Genesis 38, but here’s a summary. She married the patriarch Judah’s first-born son, a man so wicked that the Lord put him to death. Then she married Judah’s second son, and he also behaved in a way that God found reprehensible (you’ll have to look it up, eeyew!). The Lord dispatched him, too. Tamar, apparently worried she would never have a child, disguised herself as a prostitute and intercepted Judah when he took a short trip out of town. She became pregnant by her own father-in-law, and one of her twin sons, Perez, became part of the lineage of our Savior.

The second name is Rahab. Her behavior in Scripture is heroic and full of faith – read it in Joshua 2 and 6 – but the Bible is unflinching about her occupation when we first meet her: prostitution. She became a follower of the God of Israel, married a man named Salmon and their son Boaz became part of the Messianic line.

Boaz, of course, married the next name on the list, Ruth, a Moabite woman whose first husband died. (Her story is told in the Bible book that bears her name.) Ruth’s loyalty to her mother-in-law, Naomi, brought her to Israel where she met and married Boaz, and thus became the great-grandmother of King David.

David is linked to the last woman in the list – identified only as “the wife of Uriah.” We know her from the story in 2 Samuel 11 as Bathsheba. David abused his power as the king and initiated an affair with his married neighbor. When she became pregnant, he arranged the murder of her husband and then married her. The baby they conceived in adultery died, but their next son was King Solomon.

So my point is this. When you come to these stories, they don’t look like the Lord is in control at all. I have a hunch that, at the time, the participants felt out of control or abandoned or overcome with their own sin or defeated by circumstances. They probably did not feel the guiding hand of God.

But God’s grace and wisdom and power accomplished His plans without missing a beat. He is not the author of sin, but He certainly uses, overrules, and transforms sinners.

When you have a tough week, God is still in control, and He will still have His way in your life.