Proverbs 16:1 ESV
The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord.
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+16%3A10&version=ESV]
Tell me honestly: have you ever made a plan that went perfectly as you anticipated? Maybe, I guess; if I plan to have cereal and I have cereal, that’s a success. When we try to make plans, though, we never, ever quite anticipate everything. When it’s just eating cereal, the things we don’t anticipate are how many bites it takes to finish, how long it takes, and the size of the mess it leaves behind (always somehow bigger than expected). When it’s something bigger, a day or a week or a month or a relationship, we get to the point where the plan at the beginning can seem more comedic than effective, at best a bullet-point list half-right and half-wrong. We make big plans and small plans and medium plans and plans we don’t call plans. Then, when we try to put the plans into practice, we suddenly aren’t in charge. Who is?
The simple fact is that life’s too complicated to get a grip on. Let’s start from the outside and work on in. First, there’s geography and geology and meteorology and all the other ologies, the natural world; if the weatherman’s any indication, we’ve got no hope there. Second, we’ve got all the people around us. Well, we can understand them a little, but never all the way. Think of it this way: it took every person around you their whole life to reach the point they’re at. It’s not possible for you to reach the point you’re at and the point they’re at, with all your and their individual experiences and predilections and relationships. So at some point your understanding of the person you know best will go awry. As for everybody else? We can make educated guesses, accurate guesses, but there’s always uncertainty, always something different.
Third, we have ourselves, and perhaps we think we have some certainty here. We know ourselves, right? We know what we’ll do, how we’ll respond? The problem, though, is that even taking our self-knowledge as given, we simply don’t know what we’ll be responding to. I can plan and anticipate how I’ll respond to vanilla ice-cream, but if you hand it to me then spit in it my prediction will stop being accurate. The problem doesn’t stop there, though. See, Jeremiah 17:9 warns us, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” The answer, right now, is ‘not me, not you, not any man.’ Our own souls deceive us as to ourselves, and if our power of self-examination is a liar, its every finding must be in doubt.
Jeremiah 17:9, however, has an answer, an answer both to the first paragraph’s question and to the implicit question of how we deal with life’s fundamental unpredictability. The next verse gives us this answer in a few sentences: “I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds” (17:10). The shorter way to say it, though is only one word: God.
God not only knows all creation, from the smallest particle to the vastest astronomical phenomenon, and all men, you and me included, in every minutia of their soul, past present and future; God ordained all this (Is. 66:2). God takes the plans we make, and He decides what actually happens. The universe is a story told by God for His glory and (praise be to Him) the good of His people (Rom. 8:28). The Lord ordains our every step for our good, if we are His, and calls those who are His so deeply that they turn to Him, so deep their very nature changes to love Him.
The unpredictability of life isn’t something that’s going to go away. In some ways, of course, it’s a part of life’s beauty, to not know every part of the story before we live it, but in other ways it’s terrifying or distressing. We worry about war and rumors of war; we worry about how we may have hurt or been hurt by those we love; we worry about the pain which is to come, remembering the pain which has already come. We want to predict the world desperately. It’s this desperation which leads men to turn to the occult, to diviners, to false prophets, to prosperity preachers who are the heirs of Israel’s wolf-shepherds (Deut. 18:14; 1 Kings 22; Is. 56:9-12). This is a path to death (2 Pet. 2) and foolish besides, for we have a sure and certain word from one who does not lie.
This is the word we have: “Be strong and courageous. Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the Lord your God who goes with you. He will not leave you or forsake you” (Deut. 33:6). For the people of God, those who have by His grace repented of their sin and placed entire faith in His blood for salvation, this promise stands sure and inviolable, a foundation deeper than the pillars of the earth (Mtt. 7:24). This is certainty; this is surety. We cannot control the world. We cannot plan our way into utopia and into happiness, as modernity seems half-intent upon. He, however, is already Lord of all, commander of the wind and the tides and the thousand thoughts of man. His promise is then a solid place to stand when all the world has boiled up around us, a surety of final peace.
And having this, shall we not now rejoice entirely? “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25).
God bless
Written by Colson Potter
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.