Uncomfortable providences have a way of awakening us to God’s kind providences, better yet even to God himself. Over the past five months my family of four has been contentedly yet eagerly anticipating escape from our small two bedroom apartment into a 2,100 square foot home. The last three days have been housecentric. Negotiating, Closing, Painting, Boxing, Cleaning, Moving, Unpacking, Settling…well we haven’t reached the last stage yet.
In the midst of the first-time thrill of purchasing a home, my son was diagnosed with bronchitis and my wife with a flu. Just before closing, our fence line was moved to a very awkward location, and our first day in the house, we had flooding that destroyed the flooring in a bathroom, study, and part of the living room. As i write this “Total Restoration” is downstairs ripping up our soppy carpet and pad and setting up an industrial dehumidifier and those big fans that look like a seashell.
Fortunately, we have a two year warranty on the home, so all repairs will be covered. Fortunately, we had generous family and friends help us in the move. Fortunately, we can afford good medicine to nurse our family to health. Fortunately, we have a home, at an outstanding interest rate. Fortunately, we ended up with a home much nicer than we could have afforded. With all this fortune amidst some unfortunate circumstances, shouldn’t we praise God? Well, yes and no.
Certainly, the super-intending God who ordains calamity (Isa 45.17) and orders our days (Ps 139; Prov 20.24) should be praised, but should I praise him simply because the good providences outweighed the bad ones? Is the way we glorify God in adversity analgous to tallying the plus and minus columns of life, and the praising him on the condition that there are more pluses than minuses, more dry carpet than wet carpet?
This kind of “praise” is conditional, relative to the terms of life’s pluses outnumbering life’s minuses. This puts me in the driver’s seat of praise, making me the determiner of when God should be praised. It hardly rings of Scripture. What if, like Job, my house gets flattened (along with my family) and no restoration is in sight, what will I do? I hope that I will praise the sovereign Creator, not just because I had a house and a family, but because my Creator is sovereign, wise, and good; because my Creator is also a repairing Redeemer; because my Redeemer is a cosmic Consummator, bringing all things to a purposeful, God-glorifying end.
I guess what I’m getting at is the idea of conditional praise–that we praise God on our terms, not his, which is rather backwards. It’s like a pilot telling air traffic control that he is going to land when he wants to. In so doing, he smugly tosses the authority and wisdom of air traffic control to the side, to his own and others’ detriment and danger. I am prone to be this pilot, to conditional praise.
Instead of making the story of my life the controlling narrative for God’s praise, I will be much happier if I locate my story within the wider providential story of the Creatior-Redeemer-Consummator. By acknowling his purposeful and good rights to my life, I can bank not on pluses outnumbering minuses in this life, but a God who will be with me in the minuses and will eventually redeem them to bring about soul-satisfying, glory and praise in the consummation of the creation project. Triune Total restoration will far exceed teh power of industrial blowers; it will redeem and renews, cleanse and create again, not just my life, but lives of all who hope in Jesus, agent of new creation.
Cultural Encounters Journal