The Monthly Encourager:
Christ-Centered Encouragement for Wounded Hearts


All thy breakers and thy waves have rolled over me (Psalm 42:7, NASB)



Is God Really in Control?
July, 2006


When calamity strikes you personally, the idea that God is in control can be both threatening and consoling. If you are like me, it is at first threatening. When my son died suddenly, I had no doubt that God was in control. I believed that God either caused or permitted everything that happened. But the fact that God was in control did nothing to comfort me--at least not at first. Instead all the why questions came flooding in:

Certainly these were possibilities I needed to explore. However, I eventually realized that God could bring calamity into my life for many different reasons. So after a while, I gave up on getting answers to the why questions and took hold of a different kind of query--I began asking the who questions.

As I studied the scriptures, I realized that if God is truly in control, none of my afflictions are wasted. Rather, these afflictions are part of God's design for accomplishing His purposes, both in my life and in the lives of people around me. Once I realized this, the sovereignty of God in my afflictions went from being a threatening thought to a consoling thought. Surely if God knows the number of the hairs on my head, he knows every affliction. (see Luke 12:7) He controls its timing, its duration, and its extent. For this reason, I commit all the events in my life, from the most tragic to the most insignificant, to the wisdom and love of God, affirming that all He does is right and good and holy. With this in mind, I commend to you the following articles: