4 Jul 2015
The Lord does whatever he wills, even if to our eyes it doesn’t
always look right. John the Baptist
wondered why Jesus’ disciples didn’t fast like everybody else. Well, Jesus is the Son of God; he can do what
he wants—and what he wants is for people to enjoy his presence, like guests
feasting at a wedding banquet. Maybe it
looked strange to John and the Pharisees because they hadn’t yet realized that
Jesus is the divine Bridegroom they were waiting for.
And in the story of Jacob and Esau, it looks like Jacob and
his mother Rebekah are deceiving Isaac.
But Esau had already sold his birthright as the older son to Jacob; earlier,
he’d traded in his rights in exchange for a bowl of soup because he was
hungry. There wasn’t much of a deception
there in what Rebekah and Jacob were doing—Jacob was the rightful recipient of Isaac’s final blessing.
God had willed it to happen.
Esau’s apparent apathy over his birthright, Rebekah and Jacob’s ‘deception,’
and even Isaac’s blindness all played their part in making God’s will come to
be. Even so, it doesn’t look right to
us. How do apathy, deception, and
blindness contribute to God’s will being done?
Maybe we can’t know why they do.
But they do. As we hear in the
Psalm: “Praise the Lord, for he has chosen Jacob for himself.” God
chose Jacob, even though to our eyes, it looks like a set of unfortunate
circumstances led Jacob to be chosen.
The Lord does whatever he wills, even if to us it doesn’t
always look right. But, of course,
sometimes things don’t look right to us, they don’t feel right to us, because
God’s will is not being done. We experience that quite a bit in our country
and in our world today. But, in the
midst of all that, we pray that prayer God himself puts on our lips: “Thy will
be done on earth as it is in heaven."
No matter how it might look to us, we pray that God’s will be
done. And, in that, everything will turn
out the way it’s supposed to.
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