Natural Causes versus Spiritual Forces

I was driving a teen home recently, talking about whether to attribute our blessings/trials to natural consequences or to spiritual forces (demons/angels/God). As we were talking and driving south on the Guide, we hit the point where it split from 2 lanes to 4 and I navigated the cones wrong and ended up on the wrong side of the road, heading south in a north-bound lane. Immediately after the lane change, I suspected that something wasn’t right (but wasn’t sure), so I slammed the brakes and stopped the car in the median and waited. As a semi truck blared by on the right and two lanes of oncoming cars rushed by on the left, I thought about how disastrous that moment could have been.

I’ve never been a very superstitious guy, so normally I would attribute that moment to good luck or random chance. I don’t usually look under rocks for demons or say it was a “God-thing” every time I pass a test in school.

But a year or two ago, that started to change. As I got a handle on Paul’s prayer for the Christians in Ephesus, how he desperately wanted them to come to grips with Jesus’ unending love for them, I realized that everything good that happens to us is an expression of God’s love for us. They really are the “crimson roses” and “whispers in the dark” that Skillet sings of:

You feel so lonely and ragged
You lay here broken and naked
My Love is just waiting
to clothe you in crimson roses

No! You’ll never be alone
When darkness comes
I’ll light the night with stars
Hear My whispers in the dark

And recently, as I read about God’s discipline and training in Holiness by Grace, I began to see all the ways God uses pain and trials, how none of it is purposeless. Of course, God isn’t the author of pain and death. Peter makes it clear in his second letter that the death, disease and decay of our natural world is a result of the human race’s fall into sin. But it is all under His control and He uses it for greater purposes than we can dream.

It all comes down to understanding how big God is and how involved He is. Our founding fathers were wrong about God’s involvement, He didn’t just wind up the universe like a big watch and then leave it to the forces of chance and natural causes. Jesus makes it clear that God won’t even let a sparrow die apart from His involvement and He treasures us far more than birds.

Regarding God’s bigness, I was just refreshed again this morning by Isaiah 40 (which, incidentally, Trip Lee quotes extensively in the hip-hop song Who is Like Him).

Who can measure the ocean in the palm of His hand and mark off the galaxies with a yardstick? Check it out, the billions of people in all the countries of the world are a drop in the bucket to Him, they’re like dust on the bathroom scale.

Lift up your eyes at night and look: who created all these? God brings out the stars of the galaxies individually, by name and by number, through the extent of His strength and – because He’s strong in power – not one is missing.