Bible Bedrock
“In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of
His will.” – Ephesians 1:11 (King James Version)
Everything that comes to us comes from God–what we call evil as well as the good. God, of course, is not the cause of evil, but deliberately directs everything for good ends. The Bible uses strong terms of “God sending” the unpleasant as well as the pleasant, and sending is a positive word, not just a passive permission (for many talk of the ‘permissive will’ of God).
Peter in his first speech after Pentecost said that they had taken and crucified Jesus “through the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.” No mistaking that. God determined that wicked men should do what they purposed to do and it would really fulfill His purpose–which was to save the people doing it! Such is God.
Joseph said that by his brethren selling him into slavery, God “sent me before you to preserve life…you thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good.”
Whatever happens, we say, “All right, God, You sent this. It may tear me apart to say so, but I say so.” From there the next step is easier, “God, this has some purpose outside of me to meet the need of others. Just show me what.”
The important fact to recognize is that God has only one aim in his present dealings with our world–to get all of us who will respond to Him off the wrong road on to the right. It was said of Jesus “that the world through him might be saved.” It is a matter of eternal seriousness, for it concerns eternal destiny. It has to be through man to man. A savior must be where the people are who need to be saved. To save a drowning man, you get in the water beside him. So God became man to be the Savior.
To bring the given salvation to all people, God still has men. They are the saved who then become the saviors; not, of course, saviors in the sense of the one Savior Jesus Christ who completed our salvation, but in the sense in which the Spirit of God is still doing His saving work by Christ’s spiritual body, which is is we, as He did by His physical. In that sense we are co-saviors, co-redeemers. Indeed, Moses was bold and said he was going up Mount Sinai to “make an atonement” before God for the people, which he did. That means, then, that every situation we are in, God puts us in, and it has some saving purpose in it.”
