Austin's Blog

God took something or someone from me I cannot live without. Only God is truly essential and necessary. He is the Creator and we are the creatures. He is independent and we are completely dependent. He is free and we are radically contingent. The reality is that He alone is necessary. Our very existence is derivative. Moreover, we are alive today, which is evidence that we can go on without our loved ones, however terribly painful that is. We must go on. Wendell Berry writes, “The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.”

God will never give you more than you can handle. Though it is an offence to anyone in the West who has been inundated with the constant assurance that we can be whatever we want, do whatever we want, and go wherever we want, it is not true that God will never give us more than we can handle. God gives us more than we can handle regularly so that we will rely on Him alone (2 Cor. 1:8-9). The first sin was rejecting God’s will and ways (dependence on Him) and relying on our own wisdom (Gen. 3:1-7). Why would God want that pattern repeated as you suffer? Dependency is a part of our very humanity. Paul David Tripp reminds us, “We were created to be dependent. Dependency is not therefore a sign of weakness. Rather it is a universal indicator of our humanity. Humans are dependent beings. Yet we do not like to be dependent. It is the legacy of our fallenness to do everything we can to conceptually and functionally repudiate the doctrine of human dependency.” It is our sense of unfettered autonomy and self-sufficiency which short-circuits our ability to thrive in suffering. We thrive when we rely on Him. God will never give us more than He can handle. “God works for those who wait for him” (Isa. 64:4).

God is sovereign so it does not matter what happened to someone. The sovereignty of God is less of a sledgehammer and more of a pillow for the sufferer. But, if ever the sovereignty of God is ever used to mute human responsibility and accountability, you can be sure that the doctrine is misunderstood and misapplied. The sovereignty of God establishes our responsibility—it does not neuter or remove it. We can never use the doctrine to deny human accountability, responsibility, volition, and culpability. To do so would be to deny fundamental realities of life. D.A. Carson notes, “Hundreds of passages could be explored to demonstrate that the Bible assumes both that God is sovereign and that people are responsible for their actions. As hard as it is for many people in the Western world to come to terms with both truths at the same time, it takes a great deal of interpretative ingenuity to argue that the Bible does not support them.” The sovereignty of God should be a comfort for the bereaved who are grieving; it should not be a haunt for anyone running from accountability and justice.