Keep Looking Up!

“Are you kidding me?”  Or alternatively, “You gotta be kidding me.”  Add to that, “Unbelievable!” “Are you serious?” and “How about that?” and you are ready to enter the world of sportscasting.  Perhaps no other form of popular media utilizes the cliche more than sports.  Post-game interviews are predictably lame as players refer to “leaving it all on the field,” sharing the locker room with a “great bunch of guys” who gave it “110 percent.”

I love sports and I enjoy the cheesy interviews because they are, well, cheesy.  I’m not sure though, in the heat of the moment, I would do any better.  When your whole life is driven to win a championship, and that goal is finally attained, it is not surprising that one’s mind goes blank and all that comes out is what everyone else has already said.

I’m not trying to throw stones at athletes.  I’ve even pretended to be one.  But what do I have in common with true athletes? We are both vulnerable to reduce our life experiences, our sphere of reality, to a list of cliches.

It isn’t that cliches are dishonest.  They aren’t.  While they do contain truth (it probably IS a great bunch of guys in the locker room, all of whom worked hard), they have lost meaning.  Saying the same thing over and over again anesthetizes us from the significance of those words.

God is good.  All the time.  God will provide.  God has it under control.  All things work together for good.

All these statements are true.  They represent well the Creator God.  They are familiar.  They have become cliches.  They risk losing meaning.  What do each of these statements imply about God Himself?  How well do we know and remember the reality behind these summary truths?

If ever there was a time to renovate and update our list of cliches it is now.  Our expectations for 2020 disappeared like smoke.  The immediate and long-term future is frustratingly unpredictable.  We teeter on the edge of economic crisis.  Society is polarized over lockdowns, masks, and vaccines.  The only certain thing is uncertainty.

Welcome to God’s created order.

“Wait,” you may protest.  “God is not a God of chaos and disorder.”  And you are correct.  But sin has made God’s created order lopsided and dysfunctional.  It does not threaten His authority but it does put things out of kilter.  Solomon noted this and commented that even this is used by God to cause us to seek Him and fear Him (Eccl. 3:10-14; 11:5).

Is there any good thing about COVID-19?  Perhaps this:  that it has chipped away at the veneer of our perceptions of reality.  COVID-19 has exposed our vulnerabilities and the inadequacies we choose to ignore when times are good.

What can get lost in these cliches is our conviction about the truth of God’s sovereign authority.  Since we feel intimidated by circumstances, we may unconsciously assume that God does as well.  Thankfully, our sense of well-being does not define that of God’s.  He alone is God.  There is no other (Deut. 4:39).

Here are just a few examples which illustrate God’s intentional and present hand in our history (and still relevant for the present!):

But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons (Gal 4:4-5 NASB).

 He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth.  In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will, to the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ would be to the praise of His glory (Eph 1:9-12 NASB).

The “fullness of time,” and “the counsel of His will” point to specific moments of time in human history established by God to accomplish the divine purpose.  COVID-19 is no different.  These are moments in time defined by God before the creation of the world.  They contribute to God’s eternal plan.  Please don’t ask me to explain how.  

God is not intimidated by our circumstances.  Nor is He confused.  If all we see is what is happening on the horizontal plane, we will be overwhelmed.  But when we look up, and keep looking up, we are reminded of the faithfulness, goodness, and authority of God.  That’s not a cliche - it is resetting our faith perspective to that of truth.  God doesn’t intend for us to understand it.  He reassures us that He does.  

By the way, this is true for all of life, not just COVID-19.

Keep looking up!