What strange and troubling times we live in! Recently I listened to a friend preaching from Genesis 22 on the account of Abraham’s testing on Mount Moriah. He summed up the confusion and questioning which was undoubtedly in Abraham’s mind with a question, just as relevant today as it was then: ‘What is God doing?’ It must have seemed utterly contradictory for God to ask for the life of Isaac, the one who had been given specifically in fulfilment of God’s promise to make of Abraham a great nation.
Whatever his inner turmoil, Abraham obeyed, believing that God could raise Isaac from death, in order to faithfully fulfil His covenant with Abraham.
As we survey the broken world around us, and the devastating circumstances which have overtaken us all in recent years, we may well ask the same question: ‘What is God doing?’
The unprecedented upheaval caused by the Covid pandemic universally, has been followed by unspeakable disruption, destruction, and death wrought upon the Ukrainian nation by invading Russian forces. This in turn has had a devastating impact on the world economy, which inevitably causes hardship to individuals and families, especially those who are already most vulnerable.
What is God doing? What is He saying to us in these difficult and challenging times? Tragically these questions do not even occur to the vast majority of men and women who are entirely earth-bound and material-centred in their worldview. They are deaf to, or dismissive of, the voice of God. They look for answers within the puny confines of their own wisdom and resources, and they are bound to fail.
Believers know that God is speaking loudly to a lost world. He is, we might say, ‘shouting in their ears’, calling sinners to humble themselves, to acknowledge their abysmal failure to live as God demands, and to repent.
With thankfulness to God, we are hearing reports from within Ukraine of a great hunger for God, at a depth according to denominational leaders, which they have not witnessed since the fall of Communism thirty years ago.
God is at work in all the confusion around us, and the Lord Christ is building His Church as He said He would. With reverence we say: ‘God knows what He is doing’, or as one paraphrase of ‘Jehovah-Jireh’ expresses it: ‘God will see to it!’